Folk who know, know that Caithness accents are just not like other Highland accents, nor even like Orkney ones. There’s a unique dialect up there, and dialect poetry which features large in the annual Caithness Music Festival (see Nucleus post).
There is also a lot of music – much reflecting the wider patterns of the Highlands (piping, fiddling, choirs, songs old and new).
A new website carries audio recordings collected over the past 10 years by the Wick Society’s Oral History Section. If you’ve visited Wick, you may have visited the Heritage Museum near the harbour. This wonderful treasure-trove of materials from the area is substantially curated with the support of the local community. Other highlights in their collections include the Johnston Collection of vintage photographs, and a wealth of material particularly about fishing and maritime history. Their website suggests (with a nod to a certain brand of continental lager) that they are ‘probably the best museum in Scotland’. And possibly, they might be…
But alongside physical stuff, these excellent folk have been looking after their oral history, and now they are making this resource available online.
“Wick Voices” is – as it says – a repository of audio tracks including stories about local work (especially fishing and agriculture), leisure (football and more), people, places, and all phases of life from education to carehomes. This is a really wonderful tool for inter-generational, no-borders, sharing.
The “Wick Voices” website has a series of discrete thematic areas, one of which is music. You can find there tracks on piping, teaching guitar, choirs, rock bands in the north, Caithness FM local radio, and even (from Karen Steven) how fiddling helped her recover from a significant illness. Most of the voices are richly Caithnessian – although there is room, too, for incomers to tell about their stories and contributions.
Please do go and have a look here.
Further Reading and Listening
- Many local schools also collect and post about dialect poetry For example, at the time of writing, see Castletown Primary School 2017 Caithness Dialect poems accessed at 8 June 2026.
- There are also many individual poetry sites e.g. Livejournal – Caithness Dialect Poetry blog accessed at 8 June 2026
- Nucleus Archive Facebook Site – post about Caithness Music Festival and dialect poetry, posted October 6 2025
- The Wick Society: Wick Heritage website
- Wick Voices website