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Methlick | People of Methlick | Buildings of Methlick
In September 2005 the Recording Your Heritage Online project officer visited the Methlick Heritage Society, to give a presentation on the work of RCAHMS, the Recording Your Heritage Online project, and to discuss how the Heritage Society could be involved in the project.
Over the years the Methlick Heritage Society members had collated a large amount of photographs, stories and other memorabilia relating to their local heritage. The Society was keen to show this material to a wider audience, so some was taken down to RCAHMS in Edinburgh to be digitised and made available on this online resource.
If you would like to find out more about the Methlick Heritage Society, or any of the other societies that the project visited, the contact details are shown below.
The People and Places of Methlick Parish
Methlick parish is a prime agricultural area but it is not a free gift of nature. Two hundred years ago it was boggy blasted heath. What you see today represents a Herculean effort by the peasants. The drains they dug, the stones they carried off, and the seaweed and the limestone they carted onto the land daunted the men of other areas and would have daunted lesser men here. The work was at the limits of human endurance. The farmers were inventive and innovative. And we are particularly proud of the farm grieves, the top hands, who organized the work, and drove it on. We like to say that they were a race of potential Prime Ministers with far more important things to do.
Collynie Farm, the home of William Duthie, known as "the Shorthorn King" whose Collynie herd was one of the foundations of the shorthorn cattle breed. "The Great Improvers" provided the beefy half of the cross Highland and cross Ayrshire cattle which between 1850 and 1950 revolutionised the female side of the Scottish beef herd. In 1912 Collynie sold a bull calf for £5300, enough at the time to buy a whole farm much bigger than Collynie. Bulls went all over the world especially to Canada and like Collynie Pink Lavender who went to California.
Gight Castle is a sixteenth century tower house, a lower wing of which was inhabited as a cottar house until the 1950's. It was the home of the Gordons of Gight one of whom, Catherine Gordon, in 1785 married the Honorable John Byron and gave birth to the iconic poet Lord Byron. The castle was sacked in 1644 by the Covenanters but according to legend, not before the family jewels were thrown into the river at the deep and mysterious Hagberry Pot from which they were never recovered. That was sad for the family. John Byron was mired in debt that led to the sale of Gight to the Gordons of Kelly, later Haddo House, the seat of the Earls of Aberdeen, including the fourth Earl who became Prime Minister in the middle of the nineteenth century.
Schivas House, the home of Lord Catto of Cairncatto. The first Lord Catto left the North-east in the early 1900's a relatively poor boy on his bicycle, to get a boat to join the Baltic Trade. He returned to Britain via India and Canada to become the Governor of the Bank of England. In the 1940's and 50's his signature was on every Bank of England note. This earned him the peerage for which he chose the title Cairncatto (near Peterhead) from which his ancestors had come, and Schivas House for the family seat.
Ernie Wilson was one of the many youngsters who throughout the 20th century left each year to find his fortune in the new world. This is the house where he lived with his parents at Balquhindachy farm where his father Jock was grieve. With only primary education behind him Wilson left on a cattle boat for Canada and from there to Detroit. He went to night school, got a degree in electronics and finished up sole owner of Wilson Automation that developed and installed all the electronics on Henry Ford's production lines. When Wilson returned to Methlick a multi-millionaire, it was on the Queen Elizabeth and he brought his own huge custom-built Ford.
Hillhead of Ardo is the birthplace of Evelyn Glennie the virtuoso percussionist. We also boast "The Fiddling Hardies of Methlick" a family of gifted traditional fiddlers the latest of whom is Johnny Hardie who leads the top folk group The Old Blind Dogs. And in June Gordon, Lady Aberdeen, we have a professionally trained musician who in the second half of the 20th century, brought most of the top oratorio singers to perform with the amateur Haddo House Choral Society. Methlick sits at the centre of the biggest concentration of balladry in the English-speaking world and in Charlie Allan we have a modern contributor to that tradition with songs about country life including "Lonely in the Bothy" and "The Blue Grey Coo".
Little Ardo is the eighteenth century home of John R. Allan, seminal writer about the North-east of Scotland. His works include the iconic "Farmer's Boy" about his upbringing, before the First War, on a small farm just outside Aberdeen.
Methlick itself, is described as 'very much the estate village of Haddo' with 'more than usual number of stimulating buildings' - see pp187-192 of Aberdeenshire: Donside and Strathbogie - An Illustrated Architectural Guide, by Ian Shepherd, 2006. Published by the Rutland Press.
Cathie Mackie, a former resident of Methlick who died in 1962, wrote this poem about her home village in 1961. It was printed in The People's Journal on February 29th 1964, and vividly recalls the people and places of this small Aberdeenshire village.
To find out more about the Methlick Heritage Society, you can contact the secretary, Margaret Middleton: rdbuchan@btinternet.com
