Duncan Harley

During the scorching hot summer of 1930, T.E. Lawrence - of Arabia fame - rented a harbour-side cottage over at Collieston . Seemingly, well after his Arabian adventures and his RAF sojourn he had become friendly with a fellow soldier, Jock Bruce from Aberdeen, whom he had met during a brief but relatively unknown period of service with the Royal Tank Regiment. Jock was from local farming stock and the adventurous pair apparently shared a healthy interest in sadomasochistic floggings.  A 1984 article in Leopard Magazine co-written by Diane Morgan and David Ross reveals the pairs craving for sexual gratification via punishment. “Jock Bruce himself seems to have no qualms about giving Lawrence his scuds” writes Diane. “Young and impressionable when they met, he saw himself as Lawrence’s bodyguard and valued what he regarded as their friendship – and by no means only for the extra cash it produced.” In her book ‘Six Buchan Villages’ local author Margaret Aitken relates that th...

Agricultural prosperity in Aberdeenshire owes much to the improvements in communication and transport brought about both by the Aberdeenshire Canal in the early 19th Century and the arrival of the railways in around 1850. For the first time, key agricultural inputs such as guano and the euphemistically named ‘night soil’ or inner city dung collected from population centres could be ploughed into the land. Movement of goods was key. And i n 1793 a survey was commissioned to map a route for a proposed Don and Urie-side Canal. The original thought had been to follow the courses of the rivers Don and Urie to link Insch and Monymusk with Inverurie and Aberdeen Harbour. There was even a suggestion that the water-network might include the settlements of Aboyne and Banchory. However, due to cost implications, a less ambitious route linking Inverurie to Aberdeen roughly along the line of the River Don was adopted. Officially opened in June 1805, the waterway featured 17 canal locks. Ther...

Scattered across the Aberdeenshire hill-tops are a series of vitrified forts dating back to the Iron Age. While archaeologists struggle to understand the method of construction many oddball theories as to their origins abound. Supporters of the Ancient Astronauts theory believe that the vitrified ruins provide irrefutable evidence that death-rays created by superior outer space beings were used in ancient times to melt granite to form the defensive structures. Others believe that the fusion of solid rock was caused by bonfires lit as part of a religious ceremony or alternatively that fierce attacks by enemy tribes resulted in huge fires which caused the very rocks to melt. Detractors view the probability of the hill-top forts at Dunnideer or Tap o’ Noth remaining on fire long enough melt rock as unlikely commenting that this would have been “as near as the European Iron Age got to Las Vegas lit against the Nevada desert”. In an effort to solve the mystery, a full scale combu...

The flight path into Aberdeen’s Dyce Airport offers spectacular aerial views of the Aberdeenshire landscape. Hills and lochs appear quite different when viewed from ten thousand feet and even familiar features, such as Bennachie, can take on a completely new and unexpected form. One such landscape feature is Place of Origin in the village of Kemnay. Conceived as a piece of landscape art and officially opened by HRH the Duke of Kent in 2006, the sculpture addresses the long and important history of granite quarrying in Aberdeenshire. In its heyday, the quarry at Paradise Hill employed 400 men with much of the quarried stone going to make iconic structures such as Sydney Harbour Bridge and Marischal College in Aberdeen. Ten years in the making, the Place of Origin artwork takes the form of a series of woodland walks and stone built features culminating in a high vantage point where visitors can appreciate the sheer scale of the old quarry workings within the surrounding ...

Local history writer with two best-selling books under his belt, author Duncan Harley reveals all. Q: What inspired you to write about the history of north-east Scotland? A: A chance encounter with an employee of a publishing firm led to book one. As in so many things in life, it’s the little things that matter. I had been asked to review a couple of books for a glossy magazine and as a follow-on, sent some recent articles to test the waters. The articles ended up on an editor’s desk and two books were subsequently commissioned. Q: What inspired you to write your most recent book? A: The A-Z of Curious Aberdeenshire had a somewhat random structure and I felt that for book two, a historical timeline was really needed. Hence – The Little History of Aberdeenshire. I had attended a conference organised by Aberdeen Library Service in 2017 at which a local archaeologist had delivered a lecture about the Roman occupation of the north east and felt that Picts and Romans ...

George Square in Inverurie was built over several years by a town council intent on improving the local housing stock. Slum clearance was an issue and an enlightened group of councillors financed construction in the years prior to the Hitler war. The conflict of course intervened and it was not until the late 1940’s that the housing scheme was completed and fully occupied. Meantime Polish troops had occupied, and vandalised, some of the new-builds and a general rent-review had been agreed with slum-tenants from Constitution Street who had refused to move to the new-build properties on cost grounds. Oddly perhaps, the newly built housing scheme became a local icon for wartime self-sufficiency. Rationing during the early years of WW2 led to a dramatic increase in demand for agricultural land throughout the county of Aberdeenshire. Marginal land, parkland and golf courses, including the old course at Turriff, were sacrificed to the plough and fallow land was brought into use....

There were many, up and down the land, who objected to serving in the 1914 -1918 war. Some protesters were ardent socialists, who adhering to the principle that the working classes of the world should unite instead of setting out to kill each other, refused point blank to fight. And of course, members of some religious groups were firmly against any taking of human life. Other objectors simply thought that the new war was a capitalist enterprise engineered for the sole purpose of enriching the industrial barons who, having made a fortune from previous wars, were now greedy for further profit on the backs of the ‘capitalist dominated masses. Demonstrations were held around the country, including at London's Trafalgar Square. But in the big scheme of things war fever, backed by acts of parliament, meant that those who refused to fight due to conscientious objections were liable to be rounded up and imprisoned for the duration. By the second year of the war the flow of patriotic vo...

Months ago, at least it seems like it, I was sent a copy of  ‘Hotels of the Stars’ by Tessa Williams. Described in glowing terms as featuring ‘A-list Haunts and Hideaways’ the book, amongst several others sat amongst my pile of promised reviews.  Inevitably some never make it to the top of that pile and kindness occasionally precludes that promised review. In the case of Tessa’s tome, a bit of illness got in the way and now that I am much better, I thought it timely to pen a few words. A journalist by trade, Tessa is no stranger to the content having spent a portion of her life penning for the likes of Marie Claire, Elle and Vogue. There are no Holiday Inn’s or Travelodge’s here and nor should there be. With an introduction by Albert Roux this book reveals the inner workings of that cosseted world of the super-rich and those super-famous-folk who inhabit the likes of London’s Dorchester, Fort William’s Inverlochy Castle and L’Hotel Paris. Raffles, The Chelsea Hote...

The last Scottish witch met a fiery end at Dornoch in 1727 ending what some saw as the domination of the devil in local affairs. Smeared with tar following a short trial, Janet Horne was burned alive in a barrel following an accusation of consorting with the forces of darkness.   In 1950’s America however, the devil-incarnate took the form of McCarthyism  – perhaps best defined as the practice of making accusations of subversion or treason without proper regard for evidence. Many intellectuals, artistic folk and politicians fell foul of the new inquisition. And Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible took an allegorical stab at that modern-day witch hunt against those accused of the crime of ‘Un-American activities’ using the medium of the Salem Witch Trials of the 17 th century. And now, this no-holds barred portrayal of the righteous paranoia that was McCarthyism is subject to fresh interpretation by Scottish Ballet. Shocking in its intensity, this exquisite take on ...