Image: Piper Street in Keith (author’s own photograph)
Summer holidays always throw up some musical curiosities, and this year’s highlight was encountered in the town of Keith, in Morayshire. As this post follows on from a previous post arising from a street sighting, it seems appropriate to build a little on that theme.
Keith (with apologies to residents therefrom) is not – at least in its weekday guise on a cloudy day in late July – one of Scotland’s more festive towns, despite its being home to several whisky distilleries. However, my eye was drawn to the street signs off the central town streets, which, rather than celebrating Victorian minor royalty or the members of past town councillors, bear witness to the occupations which have sustained this business-like place over the centuries. Mostly, these are work occupations, but a few – particularly, ‘Piper Lane’ – doff a cap to moments when Keith lets its hair down.
According to reports from the BBC and The Scotsman newspaper, the many small lanes that ran off Mid Street, Moss and Land Street were either “nameless” or “unofficially called after nearby shops and pubs” (Urquhart, Scotsman, 2013). This created challenges for emergency services trying to respond to calls, presumably accentuated as emergency service vehicle drivers are increasingly not necessarily local. The local council worked with the local community to choose names – in Doric as well as standard English – which reflected the town’s businesses and activities, including Pipers Lane. Other names – Sodgers Lane, Fairmers Lane, Distillers Land and Coopers Lane – suggest that although the weekday streets might be a tad quiet (at least on the day we went), a lot is going on behind the scenes, taking past as well as present occupations into account.
What a great idea!
Late July is perhaps not the best time to visit for musical buzz in Keith.
If I’d been there in June, I might have enjoyed the Keith Traditional Music & Song Association (TMSA) festival, which took place in June – the month before our Tesco trip, and which promotes traditional music through concerts, informal sessions, and competition classes for accordion, fiddle, tin whist, poetry recitation, recorder, and singing of Scots songs and Bothy Ballads.
And coming up in August would have been the annual county show in Seafield Park, which, according to its own website, is a major event for the farmers in the north east since “at least the 1700s” (Keith Show website). While the countdown in days/hours/minutes/seconds on that website do a good job in building the tension, on the day we visited to do the Big Holiday Shop in Tesco, the buzz was a bit more muted.
I did, however, wonder, which other places in Scotland might have names that wave to musical activity?
Here’s a snapshot of places with musical resonances, sorted by instrument. Findings suggest that musical street names are rather few and far between, although musical activity has found a foothold in a range of other topographical features, ancient and modern.
Pipers
Piper Streets are not as common in Scotland as one might wish – although possibly the neighbours of pipers might be happy with some distance between their house and the house of much piping. However, there is a Piper Street in Dundee (rather industrial), a Piper Road and Piper Avenue in Johnstone (modern residential housing estate), as well as places rather more isolated scattered around the countryside such as:
- Piperdam (Angus)
- Piperhall (Bute)
- Piperhill (Nairnshire)
- Piper Pool (near Alloa)
- Piperton (Angus, and West Tennessee…)
And there is at least one ‘Piper’s House’ – with a blue plaque – in Jedburgh, celebrating the piper’s importance to local burgh life.
Harp / Clarsach
The surname ‘Harper’ is common enough to leave Harpercrofts, Harperhall, Harpertoun, etc scattered across the landscape. In this case, the name alone may not be proof of harping activity, although it does suggest that Harpers became farmers reasonably often! With a different celebratory route into the landscape, ‘An Clarsach’ is the name of a sea arch in Eileach an Naoimh, one of the Garvellach Isles in the Firth of Lorn.
Fiddle
Fiddles are also found in rocks – as a visitor to Morayshire knows when they encounter the sea stack formation known as Bow Fiddle Rock off the nose of Portknockie. Fiddler’s also have Burns (near Culloden/Balloch, and another one near Blantyre in Lanarkshire); a Bay at Loch Tay), a Moss in Dumfrieshire, and a town (Fiddleton) off the A7 in Dumfries and Galloway.
Further Reading and Resources
- BBC Scotland ‘Alba’, ‘Keith: Where the streets have new names’, 8 March 2013
- Frank Urquhart, ‘Keith Streets are finally given names’, The Scotsman 9th March 2013
- Keith Show website
- Keith Festival website
- Piper’s House in Jedburgh – blue plaque information