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Rosemary Collins finds out how volunteers are recording the dialect and heritage of the Northumbrian valley of Coquetdale
Preserving the dialect and heritage of Northumberland
Coquetdale in Northumberland has a rich and unique history, including a rural dialect that’s found nowhere else. But as the population ages, this heritage risks being lost. In 2018, volunteers at the Bailiffgate Museum and Gallery in Alnwick decided to step in – before it was too late.
Volunteers from the museum toured parish council meetings, and met with local groups. “It is the older people who have that distinctive way of speaking,” project manager Sally Brewis explains. “What we wanted to do was to capture their stories and memories before they disappear forever.”
The result was the Out of Town Museum. Funded with a £285,600 grant from the National Lottery Heritage Fund, volunteers travel to local residents, recording their reminiscences and collecting photographs as well as other artefacts.
Sally reveals that the project attracted a lot of interest from the beginning: “We started with a launch event in April 2019, and I had no idea how many people were going to turn up – I would have been really happy if we had 50 or so people who were interested. In fact, we had about 350. We had a vintage bus that took people on a memory-jogging journey up the valley. We also had an opportunity for people to look at dialect words and try to match them up with their definitions.”
Through their interviews, Out of Town Museum volunteers have learned words specific to the unusual language of Coquetdale.
“Apparently snalugs are when you cut the toes off your socks and you pull them up over your wellies to stop the sna – the snow – from getting into them. We’re discovering all sorts of things like that – words that have been used for generations. These are the terms that are going to disappear.”
The interviewees’ stories also illustrate how much society has changed in only a few generations. Children used to get the bus to school, or walk up to five miles each way, but now they frequently travel by taxi instead. “We heard a lovely story about a bus driver who used to do the school run in the area, and he normally went in a single-decker bus because of the winding country roads. However, one day he was given a double-decker for some reason. Of course, all of the kids piled onto the top deck, and made it top-heavy. So he had to drive slowly around all the corners, and his passengers were all late for school.”
Sally says that some of the interviews are now available online. “We’re editing the interviews down to a small selection, and putting them on our website so that people can get a flavour of what the project’s about. The rest will be archived at Northumberland Archives, based at Woodhorn Museum in Ashington. The Out of Town Museum is in effect a ‘virtual museum’ at the minute. We don’t have an exhibition to show people, other than our website and our recordings.”
However, the project is due to be completed in March 2022. There will then be an exhibition at Bailiffgate Museum that will later tour the villages where volunteers gathered their information.
“We intend to leave a legacy in each of those places for the future,” Sally adds.
‘We wanted to capture older people’s stories and memories before they disappear forever’