Wirds An' Wark 'E Seasons Roon: On an Aberdeenshire Farm

History

Fenton, Alexander

Europe

Aberdeen Univ Pr

The various themes of Scottish country life, particularly from the 17th to the early 20th centuries.

Scottish Country Life

Travel

John Donald

The Northern Isles: Orkney and Shetland

This volume is designed as a contribution to European ethnology. The Northern Isles, Orkney and Shetland, were and are a crossroad of North-Atlantic Europe, and that is the context in which they are placed in this book. The common factors and differences between Orkney and Shetland are charted against the competing influences of Scandinavia and Scotland. This study of the material culture is combined with thorough linguistic analysis. It is a synthesis rather than a survey, illuminating the complexity of numerous interlocking factors, and draws a picture not of the simple life, but of a varied existence. The past is revealed not as a static tableau, but as a process of continual change, with subtle elisions of time scale. Much of the material is based on field research by the author, on manuscript sources and on the knowledge freely imparted by many people from the islands. As a result, there is much reappraisal of existing works, and conventional viewpoints have often been amended. The book recreates the physical environment in which the people lived, their work with crops and beasts, the harvest of the sea, their houses and the food they ate. These things dominated their lives and form the background which is a key to the understanding of the character of the islands. Alexander Fenton is the author of "Scottish Country Life".

Donald

Loads and Roads in Scotland and Beyond: Land Transport over Six Thousand Years

<p>Food, like procreation, is one of the major concerns of the human race. It affects every aspect of life, at all social levels. In Scotland, as elsewhere, the farther back in time we go the more the daily diet is related to the local environment. This book explores the nature of food in the past, including game and wild plants, cereals and dairy products, flesh and drink, whether home-brewed ale or wines from abroad. Through extensive research and examination of long-held customs, the author provides a detailed appraisal of the realities and complexities of the Scottish diet. Food such as the everyday oatcakes and cheese, prepared in a special way for seasonal or work (especially harvest) occasions, and for the personal occasions of birth, baptism, marriage and death, is discussed in a major section of the book. <br>The adoption of hot drinks – chocolate, coffee and tea – from the end of the seventeenth century marked an economic upswing, at first at high social levels. The resulting change in the composition and timing of meals was reinforced by the industrial age a century later. Dependence on rural products was gradually reduced by imports and by preservation techniques, – canning, refrigerations, etc, – which have facilitated the consumption of foods from any part of the world, at any season. The apparent monotony of the past diet is now replaced by an embarrassment of choices, in which health considerations play a considerable role.</p>

The Food of the Scots (Scottish Life and Society, A Compendium of Scottish Ethnology series)

Cookbooks, Food & Wine

Cooking Education & Reference

Tuckwell Press, Ltd.

Concerned with historical change, this book is seen through the eyes of the people themselves, through the tools they used, through the food they ate, through the buildings in which they lived and worked. It provides an awareness of the past that has shaped our countryside.

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