Crieff : its traditions and characters
Macara, Duncan2024
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This volume provides approaching one hundred stories and anecdotes from a now vanished world of 18th-19th century Crieff and Strathearn. When the day’s work, or dusk descended upon Victorian-era Strathearn those 150-or-so years ago the picture we get from Macara’s volumes is of friends and family members gathering, fires being lit and a vast store of stories, songs and poems being tapped to provide entertainment and to reinforce the residents’ bonds to the community they were embedded within. Macara works depends upon, and allows us to overhear these “evenings with the village story-tellers” all those years ago. The stories that Macara’s volumes records are, as he himself notes in the preface to his 1881 work, usually the types of narratives that people at the time believe are too mundane, too lacking in any great import to preserve or transcribe. Their value though, of course, increases dramatically over time, with them offering subsequent generations an alluring glimpse into a now vanished world. Crieff is fortunate that it, unlike thousands of other Victorian communities whose “evening story-tellers” tales will have become unrecoverable, had one of its sons who saw the value in transferring these oral stories to pen. Arrestingly many of the anecdotes take place in still recognizable buildings or locations in Crieff and its environs, e.g. St James’ Square, Weaver’s Hall, the Hosh. In the pages of his work we meet people who built up their lives stories, their anecdotes of love, adventure, humour, and friendship in the spaces we now call home. Macara’s work has the beguiling effect of making the distance of time from then to us flatten, indeed for a precious moment to vanish.
Main title:
Crieff : its traditions and characters / Duncan Macara ; edited by Erlend MacGillivray.
Author:
Macara, Duncan, authorMacGillivray, Erlend D., editor
Imprint:
Independently published, 2024.
Collation:
vi, 198 pages : black and white illustrations ; 23 cm.
Notes:
A selection of texts from the original volumes, with editorial notes, pictures, and appendices.A selection of texts taken from: Duncan Macara. "Crieff: its traditions and characters, with anecdotes of Strathearn". Printed by James Denholm and Company. Edinburgh, 1881.A selection of texts taken from: Duncan Macara. "Crieff: its traditions and characters, with anecdotes of Strathearn". Printed by Lorimer and Gillies. Edinburgh, 1896.
ISBN:
9798326110688
Dewey class:
941.32
Local class:
941.32
Language:
English
BRN:
4290762