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Scots Language Centre Centre for the Scots Leid

Jock Duncan - Guise o Tough

Part of the 'Sights and Sounds of Perthshire" series by Mad Ferret Records.

Jock Duncan is a link with a bygone age. Born in 1925, his conversations are peppered with tales of the fee'd men and 'chaumers' on the farms in his native Aberdeenshire. He was fourteen when he heard his first radio (his mother, having lost most of her male relatives in the First World War and thus being anxious to keep up with events of September 1939, bought one) and he grew up in a self-contained area around New Deer and Fyvie, where - it sounds like a cliche but it was a fact of a far from easy life - they made their own entertainment.

These days he bides in Pitlochry, where we caught up with him in his magnificent garden.