by Maureen Laing Sunday 8th June saw a small group of DHS members gather in Leys Park Road car park, board a small coach and head south west to Garrion Bridges Garden and Antiques Centre for our first stop on this year’s summer trip. We were served hot drinks and scones before spending a pleasant hour perusing the garden centre, antiques, bric-a-brac and shopping outlets.  Next stop, New Lanark World Heritage Site and the Falls of Clyde. A brief history In the late 18th Century, David Dale, a Glasgow businessman, and Robert Arkwright, the inventor of the water-powered spinning frame, founded a cotton spinning village just downstream from the Falls of Clyde. Mill 1 was completed in 1785, Mills 2 and 3 followed. Accommodation for the factory workers and their families, many from the Highlands, was built over the next decade. Robert Owen, a young Manchester based mill manager, visited New Lanark, where met and married David Dale’s eldest daughter Caroline. Around 1800, in partnership with two others, he purchased New Lanark from his father-in-law and assumed management of the mills and village. He expanded the factory, adding mechanics workshops and dye works.    He then began to transform the lives of the mill workers and their families by introducing social, moral, educational and workplace reforms. He established a village shop that sold quality goods at fair prices, opened the centrepiece of his social experiment, The Institute for the Formation of Character,…
A Profusion Of Turrets
This article by Andreena MacDonald records the Society members’ visit to Thirlestane Castle on 6 June 2024
Carnegie Library Reading Room Visit
by Martin Tarr At the DHS meeting last November, our speaker, Sharron McCall, had offered to give interested members a tour of the historical resources available at the Carnegie Library, and we were duly privileged to visit, in two groups, on 16th and 17th March. Not only we were allowed to venture where the general public would fear to tread – in particular to the archive store that older members will remember as being the children’s library in the 1993 extension – but Sharron had taken considerable trouble to display, on tables in the Canmore Room, some of her favourites from the half-million items in the archive. There were gems from the Burns collection, some touching First World War memorabilia that even Jean Barclay(!) hadn’t seen – posters, maps, newspapers, photographs, and much more. We had to drag ourselves away with so much as yet unexamined in detail – seldom has two hours passed so quickly. Grateful thanks to Sharron for her time and for the enthusiasm she showed when talking about the treasures that belong to all of us. You just have to know what to ask for to be allowed to see them (and even handle most of them), and Sharron and one of her Reading Room colleagues will usually be at hand to help you explore.
April 2020 Outing
This post has been retained for historical reasons … not only did the trip have to be cancelled in January 2020, as there were not enough takers to justify running it, but the covid lockdown would in any case have prevented it taking place!
June Trip 2019
On a Wee Highland Daunder 16th-18th June, 2019 By Cherry Allan Day 1.  8.15am on this rather cool, dull summer morning found a group of DHS members, 26 in all, leave the Glen Car Park with driver Martin behind the wheel of our comfortable Bay Travel coach, and head for Pitlochry, where cream scones and jam were waiting for us at the Atholl Palace Hotel. Washed down with hot coffee and tea, those delicious scones set our group up for the ‘long and winding road’ to our main visit of the day – the famous, perhaps infamous, battlefield of Culloden. An extremely tasty lunch of thick soup, served with a selection of sandwiches, welcomed us on arrival at Culloden, this hearty meal fortifying us all for what was to be a bracing walk around Culloden’s battlefield, more because of the snell wind than the amount of ground to be covered!  The wonderful new Information Centre took most of us by surprise.  On opposite sides of the central exhibition hall details of opposing Jacobite and Hanoverian standpoints were clearly set out.  Pertinent exhibits and quotes from the main players of the time guided us through the story of the lead up to the battle, through which the Jacobite forces led by Bonnie Prince Charlie intended to put the Stuart dynasty back on the throne. An immersive experience awaited all who entered a room with no furnishings and only screens for walls. It soon became apparent that the purpose of this space was to provide the visitor with a sense of being present on the…