Duncan Harley

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 ...

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...