Voices of Scotland's past keep talking

THEY hauled their bulky reel-to-reel tape recorders across bog and moor to capture Scotland's traditional culture before it disappeared.

Folklorists such as Hamish Henderson and Calum Maclean spent the 1950s and 1960s in crofters' kitchens, council flats and travellers' caravans, preserving the voices of herring gutters, berry pickers, pearl fishers and plough boys for future generations.

But the recordings for the School of Scottish Studies were deteriorating fast. Most were playable only on obsolete technology, public access was limited and it seemed a priceless resource would disappear.

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Now they have been saved and a new generation can enjoy a deep reservoir of culture using their iPhones. The 11,500 hours of recordings have been digitised by a project called Tobar an Dualchais/Kist o Riches. Around 5,000 hours will be accessible on a searchable website that goes live next month.

As well as the archive of the School of Scottish Studies and the BBC, the website has saved the Canna Collection, which dates back to the 1930s and is now owned by the National Trust for Scotland. It was gathered by the Gaelic scholar John Lorne Campbell and his American wife Margaret Fay Shaw, with many of their recordings made on fragile wax cylinders.

Donnie Munro, the Runrig singer and the project chairman, said: "It's probably the most ambitious cultural digital heritage project anywhere in Europe. When I was with Runrig, we went to the School of Scottish Studies in Edinburgh to find a song. You had to listen to it in situ, make notes and leave."

The website will allow musicians, as well as historians and writers and ordinary members of the public, to hear material that previously was locked away.

It includes Mary Brooksbank, the jute mill worker whose song Oh Dear Me was carved on to the Canongate wall of the Scottish Parliament last year to mark the tenth anniversary of devolution. She describes witnessing a clash between striking Dundonian carters around 1910, when she was a child of 11. On another track she remembers the Coronation of King George and Queen Mary in 1911 and how she skipped school to work as a bobbin shifter in the town's Baltic Mill.

There are accounts of working life such as that of the McPake sisters of Peebles, who were tweed darners. There are also hundreds of stories of the supernatural, and of distilling illicit whisky or following the hairst (harvest) down Scotland's east coast.

Many of those captured speak in a rich Scots that is rarely heard today. Dick Duncan from Angus, who died in the late 1980s, tells Henderson how single workers from different farms would gather for an evening in the bothy (workers' accommodation) with a box (melodeon), fiddles and "a big pot o chappit tatties an' bully beef".

The team employed dozens of cataloguers to decipher the tapes. Murdo MacDonald, a Gaelic-speaking cataloguer from Back, on Lewis, was struck by the varied vocabulary of previous generations: "People engaged with fishing, cutting peat or working with horses had words that have died a natural death."

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Relatives had to be tracked down for permission. "That's not easy when there are so many Donald MacDonalds. Some of us called ourselves the No 1 Ladies Detective Agency." said Mairead MacDonald, director of the project. Chris Wright, a Scots cataloguer, was a persistent sleuth. One of the tapes he worked on contained a song fragment about a mystery shipwreck on the Rhinns of Galloway but no other details. "I went raking around the internet and eventually found a posting on a genealogy site from an American who was a descendant of the only survivor of the shipwreck."

The American had visited the Stewartry Museum in Kirkcudbright in the 1980s and obtained a transcript of the song. But when Wright got in touch with the museum, there was a new curator and no trace of the original document. "So I got hold of the American, who sent me his photocopy from 20 odd years ago - now it's back in the museum."

Song sheets played an important part. The Poet's Box in Dundee's Overgate had a printing press that produced hundreds of "broadside ballads". Sometimes the printed songs would be traditional, but they included music hall numbers too - or a hybrid of both.

The project has cost 2.9 million to date, half of which came from the Heritage Lottery Fund. Though all the material has been saved, more money is needed to catalogue the remaining 6,500 hours and put it online.

Munro sees the project as a living library which will be constantly added to. He wants the website to link up with schools, local history societies, the curriculum and the wider community.

"This is a beginning. It's a fantastic resource and now we must be pro-active to help people connect with it."

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