Two great books on Scottish customs

[kilted2000]

Recently I’ve been doing some rereading and I wanted to recommend two books that’s might be of interest for people here. One is Highland Folkways by I.F. Grant. It was published in the early 60s by the founder of the Highland Folk Museum and contains all sorts of information about people’s day to day life, what houses were like, food, the seasons, tools, clothes including kilts.


The other is Scottish Customs by folklorist Margaret Bennett. It has first hand accounts of birth, marriage, and funeral traditions from Martin Martin in the 17th century to transcriptions from a few years ago. It covers all of Scotland.


There is so much questionable ‘history’ out there so it’s nice to hear from more reliable sources of what people did and believed in. They’ve also given me the chance to test my Gaelic and Scots knowledge.

[BobF]

Recently I’ve been doing some rereading and I wanted to recommend two books that’s might be of interest for people here. One is Highland Folkways by I.F. Grant. It was published in the early 60s by the founder of the Highland Folk Museum and contains all sorts of information about people’s day to day life, what houses were like, food, the seasons, tools, clothes including kilts.


The other is Scottish Customs by folklorist Margaret Bennett. It has first hand accounts of birth, marriage, and funeral traditions from Martin Martin in the 17th century to transcriptions from a few years ago. It covers all of Scotland.


There is so much questionable ‘history’ out there so it’s nice to hear from more reliable sources of what people did and believed in. They’ve also given me the chance to test my Gaelic and Scots knowledge.

I have Margaret Bennett’s book, and while it wasn’t what I’d hoped it would be* it’s an excellent read. I’m maybe halfway through it.

*What I was hoping to find were clues to customs and mannerisms that might have filtered down from my Ayrshire-born great-grandparents to me without being aware of their source. Some were obvious, like the nursery rhyme that was always used to amuse infants (“Roon aboot, roon aboot, catch a wee moosie” (while drawing circles in the child’s palm), “up again, up again, in its wee hoosie!” (Walking your fingers up the child’s arm and tickling under the armpit)). My niece still does this to this day with her children. Another thing that I only recently realized might have origins back in Scotland was my grandmother’s practice of making a money cake for any of the grandchildren’s birthdays. I understand there was a custom of putting a coin into a cake or a clootie dumpling for a certain holiday. My grandmother expanded that a bit by putting enough coins in that everyone would get one. There were several pennies, fewer nickels, even fewer dimes, and a solitary quarter, each wrapped in a bit of waxed paper and inserted into the cake before it was frosted. Those are the sort of customs I was looking for, hoping to identify more things we still do that my great-grandmother brought over with her and possibly go back quite a few more generations.