Duncan Harley

A year or so back a pal suggested that New Pitsligo, a village in Aberdeenshire, might be host to Scotland’s most northern vegan café. I was of course sceptical about the claim. I mean, the notion that a settlement in rural Aberdeenshire could even contemplate such a thing as veganism seemed at the very least misguided. New Pitsligo after all is a place famed mainly for its curtain twitchers. The vegan café claim led to quite a few visits to the place. An actor pal from Edinburgh once accompanied me and on subsequent visits both Janice and son Ben were suitably amazed. On another occasion Scottish film star Jake Williams was ensconced prior to a village hall performance of a RightLines play entitled something like ‘From These Parts’. Jake, as I recall, was then showing anyone who would look at it a cutting from the Telegraph regaling his starring performance in the Ben Rivers Bogancloth Treehouse arthouse production of the film ‘Two Years at sea’. Bogancloth is of course one o...

This is the tale of Garioch local-lad 'old Dod Mutch' and was first published in the May 2015 edition of Leopard Magazine. I recall that publication resulted in a payment of some £50 and that it made it into the Leopard's Tale spot near the back page. Quite why I chose to publish using the name of James L. Ramsay still escapes me. I may have been trying to hide my talent behind a bush - but I am unsure if that was a good strategy. In an effort to rectify the quirky 'nom de plume' e rror, here it is yet again. The names of the guilty parties have in the main been changed however, in the big scheme of things, much of what follows is completely true. I can reveal that 'Birtybogs' is near the village of Oyne however and that ' the Gairnie Inn' was situated in a former bank building  near the Garioch settlement of Durno. A one armed bandit -  By James L. Ramsay Old Dod Mutch was found dead in his chair. It was a stroke apparently and probably...