Left to right – Donnie Nelson, Nancy
McLucas, Christine Wilson, Eric Wilson
Recently I was in Stranraer to meet up with members of the Stranraer and District Local History Trust to hand over hot-off-the-press copies of our first Regional Flashback, Stranraer and District Lives: Voices in Trust.
Christine and Eric Wilson had very kindly brought together a number of colleagues from the Trust and laid on a celebratory feast at their home. This included the delicious local tattie scones, which are coated in oatmeal. We also toasted the book, and our collaboration, with a celebratory glass of sherry.
Nancy, who had carried out most of the fieldwork recordings included in the Flashback, recounted some of the many interesting tales she had heard off-microphone during her time collecting, and before long everyone was sharing their own strange and wonderful Stranraer anecdotes. This left us contemplating the possibility of a complementary volume, but only for a short while as many of the stories were of a criminal nature, including an abandoned attempt at grave-robbing.
This first Regional Flashback from our Dumfries and Galloway Study will be joined by others and we are already looking forward to the next volume which is well underway. This will showcase the recordings made by one of our volunteer fieldworkers, Julia Muir-Watt. Julia has conducted 28 interviews of folk from Whithorn and the surrounding area. These interviews will be brought together in a Regional Flashback which touches on the themes of time, money, town and country in which the people of Whithorn and nearby give vivid accounts of the changes in a rural town in the twentieth century.
Caroline Milligan
September 2017
