People like the personal touch...our role is to serve community
Christmas was a busy time for the Post Office within MacGregor’s Market in the beautiful Stirlingshire village of Killin.
Along with all the usual business of pensions, driving licence application forms and cash (for those days when the village’s banking facilities are closed), they made sure villagers could send their parcels.
When the last Post Office closed it became clear that life for many people in the village was very difficult without one, so Killin and Ardeonaig Community Development Trust applied for a grant to the Scottish Land Fund and were awarded £110,213 towards the £166,657 of buying a former newsagent’s in the village.
The Trust then invited local social enterprise company MacGregor’s Market to move their grocery business into the new site and to reopen a village Post Office.
Fiona Davidson, who was in at the very start of the campaign to reopen Killin Post Office now works behind the counter and is recovering from the pre-Christmas rush that saw customers with parcels to post queuing out the door.
“The Post Office is at the heart of village life and those years that we were without it, were so hard in so many ways,” she says.
“For pensioners coming in to pick up their pensions, we might be the only person they see that day and for the many visitors who come to the area we are like a tourist information centre, telling them where to go and what to see.
“The Post Office and shop are buzzing every day and because my family goes back hundreds of years in Killin, I know 90% of the people who come through the door and can help them with what they need.
“People like the personal touch and our role here is to serve the community.”
And it’s a similar story at Furnace in Argyll where, earlier this year a grant of £164,065 from the Scottish Land Fund helped villagers, who had formed themselves into an SCIO (Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisation), to buy the local shop, Post Office and attached bungalow.
Andrea Henderson, one of the residents involved, says: “It is eight miles from here to our nearest shops and Post Office in Inverary, and although we get five buses a day, anyone who took the bus to Inverary would have to wait three hours to get another back again.”