The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
Breabach’s Dundee Rep collaboration
The last resident of Pitmiddle left more than 80 years ago, abandoning a community inhabited for centuries, and today it lies in ruins. Blair Dingwall explores the lost village in Tayside
In the ruins of an old croft, four walls of rock gradually crumble into the earth. Nettles sprout from a thick carpet of fallen leaves. The remnants of an old fireplace can still be made out. A birch tree sprouts through the spectre of an old doorway. Branches claw at the moss-covered stones. The void of an old window looks out on to wild shrubbery and weeds. Outside this ruin – the most intact of the homes in the lost village of Pitmiddle – neighbouring buildings have deteriorated to little more than mounds of earth and piles of stones. Some have vanished completely. The modest stream which once proved this community’s lifeblood courses across a muddy plain between the trees.
Where children once played and farmers toiled, a woodland is thriving and nature is reclaiming a lost community.
“You’d have thought the devil or some ghost had stepped this way, and that the inhabitants had dropped everything and fled – never to return,” wrote Colin Gibson in his Nature Diary in The Courier on February 5 1955, after visiting this very spot.
Another feature on Pitmiddle, in the Evening Telegraph on June 1 1962, ran with a more eye-catching headline: “The Village that Died”.
It has been more than 80 years since the last resident of Pitmiddle was forced to leave, abandoning a hilltop community believed to have been inhabited for hundreds of years.
The loss of the village has fascinated locals in the Carse of Gowrie and further afield for decades; but behind this story of ghostly desolation lies a very Scottish tale of rural life suffering steady and inevitable decline, as relevant today as it was in the 19th Century.
Pitmiddle first appears on written records around 1172, but its origins are “almost certainly” Pictish, according to historian Gordon Nicoll, of Aberntye.
The hilltop settlement fits the criteria for the Iron Age Scots race, who preferred to live at about 600ft above sea level – safe and away from marshlands.
“Pitmiddle is very old. Certainly Pictish. They had water, they had light, they had a good south-facing slope,” said Mr Nicoll.
“It was a pretty precarious existence. Bad years meant famine and famine meant death. So it was a hard life, but that was across the whole of Scotland.”
Typical of communities across the east of Scotland at the time, Pitmiddle would have been an agrarian society, with its inhabitants living off the land often under fear of starvation and famine.
At its peak there could have been between 300 and 400 people living in the village across a scattering of houses.
Mr Nicoll, who describes himself as an “enthusiastic amateur” historian, has a clear
passion for the local area, and channels this through his work running the Abernyte Digital Archive.
He said that early living conditions at Pitmiddle would have been “horrifying to us”.
In the early days, the homes were singleroomed and shared with farm animals, with one section of the building screened off to split families from their livestock.
These properties were either wattle and daub or constructed out of rock, with thatched or turfed roofs.
Rubbish was thrown on to a midden-heap outside.
Up until the 1600s, the main crops grown were bere and oats. Flax was also produced there. Life was tough for the crofters, with poor access roads meaning work was mostly done via sledge.
After the 1700s, vegetables such as neeps, tatties, peas and beans would have been grown at Pitmiddle.
“It wasn’t until you get into late middle 1700s that the roads were improved to the point where wheeled carts were possible,” said Mr Nicoll.
The decline of Pitmiddle began as early as the 17th Century.
With the onset of the Industrial Revolution, more and more country folk left their rural lives seeking better fortunes in the cities.
Pitmiddle residents were among those departing to seek new lives in Dundee, Perth and further afield.
By the 1800s, the decline was so bad that all of the homes in the village were rebuilt in roughly-hewn stone in an attempt to
improve life for the residents. By 1861, all of the buildings had two rooms with windows. One property even had three rooms.
Ultimately, the regeneration of Pitmiddle failed and by 1891 there were only 32 people left.
An article was printed in The Courier on Saturday December 26 1896. Its headline read: “Decay of a Perthshire village: Weeding out the crofters”.
It contained a detailed account of a journalist’s time with the remaining residents of Pitmiddle as part of an investigation into reports they were being evicted from their homes.
The writer did not find clearances of the scale which had taken place in the Highlands. Instead, he found a tiny settlement “gradually going to decay from inherent causes”.
The journalist painted a colourful but sad portrait of a community reduced to just seven families, almost all elderly, living in the ruins of a once happy and prosperous place.
“Not a soul was to be seen,” was how the writer described the arrival in Pitmiddle.
“Silence and desolation reigned around. Many of the cottages were dilapidated and tenantless.”
The residents spoken to by the author were named as the “Widow Gray”, James Gillies, and “Old Maisie Mitchell and her sister”.
While these villagers were not being evicted, they harboured ill feelings towards their new landlord, who they claimed had given up on Pitmiddle. They felt residents were being phased out of their homes so that the buildings could be cleared for farmland.
According to the interviewees, Pitmiddle had prospered for a time in the 1800s before its demise.
The Mitchell sisters, the article said, recalled “the time when Pitmiddle was a busy, happy place”.
Mr Gillies remembered the Pitmiddle of his youth: Home to 40 crofts and with work to be found in handloom weaving.
He said the village centre had been home to a blacksmiths, two joiners, a shoemaker, a tailor, a butcher and even a pub.
Though there was no church, schooling had been provided by the shoemaker, who taught the local youngsters how to read.
It was the Great War that ultimately sealed Pitmiddle’s fate. Once surrounded by a thriving woodland, the war effort called for these trees to be clear-felled.
The damage to the village’s access roads and its watercourses – once noted by Victorian tourists as being exceptionally clear and pure – was irreversible.
The last inhabitant of Pitmiddle was another James Gillies, the son of the man quoted in the 1896 Courier article.
Many of his family members had migrated to Canada at the turn of the century, but he remained, clinging to his home and his way of life on the hilltop.
Eventually, his isolated existence could no longer continue.
James took one last glimpse of his home before leaving it forever.
“This village is about deserted… the school at Kinnaird is almost deserted and so is the kirk,” Pitmiddle resident James Gillies Sr told The Courier in 1896.
“The smith had to leave for want of work, and our grocer is nearly starved out.”
His words, it would seem, remain eerily prescient in a modern context.
Some 48.7% of the country falls under what is known as the Sparsely Populated Areas of Scotland (SPA), which covers rural regions and small towns within the Northern Isles, Western Isles, the Highlands, Argyll and Bute, and the Southern Uplands.
Only 2.6% of the country’s population live within this SPA, which in recent years has been the subject of Scottish Governmentfunded studies by the James Hutton Institute in Invergowrie.
Research published by the institute in March 2018 claimed the SPA was at risk of losing more than a quarter of its population by 2046.
The report projected a decrease in population within the SPA from 137,540 in 2011 to 132,000 by 2021 and 99,350 by 2046.
Publishing the data in March 2018, lead author of the report Dr Andrew Copus said: “Scotland’s sparsely populated areas have a demographic legacy which, in the absence of intervention, will result in decades of population decline and shrinkage of its working age population... If no action is taken, this may have serious implications for the workforce, the economy and the capacity for demographic regeneration.”
Mr Nicoll agrees, saying: “The draw of the big city on small communities is always there. The young leave and don’t return.
“Fortunately, in western Scotland that is being addressed. People are beginning to think about how we keep the local communities, how we keep smaller communities viable.”
Guardswell Farm, nestled a short walk down the hill from Pitmiddle, is one of the closest dwellings to its ruins.
Boasting better access and stunning views across the Carse, Guardswell survived the abandonment which claimed the neighbouring crofts.
However, the villagers of Pitmiddle are never far from the thoughts of the Lamotte family.
“It is amazing how nature takes something back so quickly,” said Anna Lamotte, who runs Guardswell Farm with her parents Fiona and Richard and sister, Kirsten.
“We have been here since 2011. My parents bought Guardswell when I was in my late teens.”
Ms Lamotte says a “handful” of people stop by Guardswell every year seeking Pitmiddle, and many of them have ties to the community.
“You tend to get people going up that had some sort of connection to it,” she said.
“Maybe a handful a year. We had one group come, a walking group, they did a walking tour up there. There is a wee bit of interest.”
The family farm has in recent years been transformed into a venue used for weddings, rural events and workshops.
Guardswell also offers accommodation for visitors in hillside huts near Pitmiddle which carry names such as The Pendicle and The Kailyard – titles inspired by historical documents on the village.
Viewed from a distance, Pitmiddle looks no more than a scattering of trees.
It feels remote, isolated, but those who know where to look can glimpse the treetops from the laybys of the A90.
Pitmiddle’s remarkable views across the Carse of Gowrie, to Dundee, the Sidlaws and the hills of Fife, are a stark reminder of how close this village was to the outside world.
So how is it that Pitmiddle died while neighbouring villages and hamlets, where residents surely faced similar hardships, survived?
“Change”, answers Mr Nicoll. “Change that comes too quickly and swamps the very reason that you have a community there.”
THIS VILLAGE IS ABOUT DESERTED. THE SCHOOL AT KINNAIRD IS ALMOST DESERTED AND SO IS THE KIRK. THE SMITH HAD TO LEAVE FOR WANT OF WORK AND OUR GROCER IS NEARLY STARVED OUT