To house militia

“I agree with Lorna Baillie’s comments on the photograph that appeared in last Tuesday’s Craigie as cottages in Lunanhead, as I can’t see it as Lunanhead,” emails Norman Atkinson of Kingsmuir, who sent in the photograph below.

“James Campbell, my great-greatgreat-grandfather and his family moved to Carsebarracks in the 1830s and their family lived in ‘The Berrecks’, as it was known, and also in Lunanhead on the south side of the road for some decades.

“Charles Gray, laird of the Carsegray estate, had built about a dozen cottages as barracks in which to house a militia towards the end of the Napoleonic wars when another French war was threatened. They were then occupied by estate workers, including my family who were stone quarriers. I’ve attached a photograph of a row of the Carsebarracks cottages before they were demolished in 1959 to make way for the new council housing.

“These were the easternmost of the cottages, next to where Laird’s sand and gravel quarries are now.”

“There were no masks or much dust filtration equipment, so sawdust filled the air. He used to bring home tiny pieces of balsa wood and later on would make little model planes. The adhesives they used were lethal, too, and my father suffered breathing problems for years.

“Apart from all this, there was rationing and my mother used to push us girls in a big pram to the shops to queue for food at the local shops. All her relatives were in Nottingham so there was no one to help.

“My father died when he was only 56 years old and never saw my children. The planes were remarkable but so were the men who built them.”

A row of Carsebarrack cottages. Read more about them in the column above.