Woodcutting was in the blood

“I read with great interest the article ‘Delivered the Timber’ in a recent column as it mentioned my late father Jock Macdonald, sawmiller at Turretbank, and his brother Dunc, who worked at Langholm sawmill,” emails Duncan Macdonald.

“Jock worked/set up sawmills in many locations across Scotland including Comrie, Lumsden, Fochabers, Kinlochmoidart, Inverkip, Rottel (Glen Clova), Clunie (Kirkcaldy) and Langholm.

“As a child growing up in the 1940s and ’50s, we moved frequently, living in wooden huts that my father would dismantle, pack on the back of a lorry and rebuild at the next location wherever timber was needing sawn. Rooms were added as the family grew!

“The huts had glass windows, woodburning stoves for heat and cooking and proper (basic) furniture.

We got water from burns/wells nearby and had tilly lamps. My mother used a big tin bath and mangle to wash the clothes.

They were happy days. One of my sisters says she was at six schools before she came to her final year at primary in Perth.

“By the mid 1950s, life was more settled and my father worked at Morgan’s sawmill in Turretbank, Crieff, then Murray’s sawmill at Ladeside, Perth. Latterly, he worked at sawmills in Kinross and Sandyknowes at Bridge of Earn.

“Sawmilling/woodcutting was very much in the family blood – my grandfather John (Fye) Macdonald was a woodman and his sons Dunc, Tam, Jock and Barney all followed in his footsteps.

Even now, Dunc’s grandsons are still in woodcutting. In fact, Jock, Tam and Dunc

had all worked at Morgan’s at Turretbank at some point.”

Deep-rooted faults

“In correcting Fraser Elder’s Saturday Quiz mistake, J Head introduces a further error by describing the Battle of Culloden as: ‘The defeat of the Scots army by the English’,”

emails Roderick Stewart of Dronley. “It was, of course, much more complicated.

“The government side was widely supported in Scotland by lowland Protestant Scots, and the Jacobite side had support in England from Catholics and others seeking to overthrow Hanoverian rule.

“The armies of both sides were a mixture of both English and Scots, and Scotland’s most famous infantry regiment, The Black Watch, fought on the government side.

“My four-greats grandfather reputedly fought at the battle with the Stewarts of Appin, the only clan to break through the government line, so my primary and idealistic sympathies are clearly with the romantic Jacobite cause, but as a modern, logical Scot and a historian, I also see that it was a backward-looking cause riddled with its own deep-rooted faults.

“Perhaps the worst aspect of this civil war was the subsequent brutal repression of the Highlands which was encouraged by many lowland Scots and bears repercussions to this day.

“History is rarely black and white, but the bitter divisions within Scotland’s internal history are particularly complex.”

Station Road, Cardenden, in Fife, as it was on a 1910 postcard. “The Post Office may be the first building on the right with a woman in the doorway,” says the reader who sent in the photograph.

The ‘world’s largest tidal flow turbine, Orbital 02’. Read more about it on the right.