Duncan Harley

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...

I first encountered Gordon Duthie a few years back when an editor flagged his music and I interviewed the man in the course of some black coffee in a backstreet café in darkest Kintore. We added cake as I recall and split the bill. When Gordon first came to my attention he had just released his third album A Thran Backwoods Poet . The Westhill singer/composer/musician had re-visited a family event in which the young men of the Luftwaffe had bombed and sunk his grandad’s fishing boat in Montrose harbour.      A year in the making, Thran represented a significant shift from the themes of sadness and isolation expressed in Gordon’s previous albums and, alongside titles such as Whisky Disco and Feel Loon did a Wildpoepen , Indeed, Gordon’s tribute to his grandad’s Sandhaven built FR106 Duthies featured ten quite provocative numbers. Then came Dunt, Dunt, Dunt - his fourth album and again a full year in the making. Dunt looked deeply into the soulless existe...