HERE’S a timely photo for this week, taken at Durness Highland Gathering shortly before the Second World War, writes Willie Morrison.
The young fellow looking directly into the camera is the late Donnie MacLeod, Lerin, as a teenager, with possibly "Jonah" Mackay beside him. The man at the far right looks as if he might be Willie Morrison from the Post Office, talking to a young man who could well be Andrew Stewart. I’m not absolutely certain of identities, but it seems likely, as they would have by then been in their early thirties.
I also think the tall man in the middle distance with the hat is Angus MacKenzie, whose byname was "Guilan Caol", translated from the bygone Durness patois as the Thin Little Boy. He was certainly thin, but little he was not, as the photo shows. I remember him as being rather tall and very erect, just like the fellow in the photo.
He was also a man of some substance, in those days one of the relatively few car owners in Durness. I believe he had spent some of his earlier years in South Africa, where he made enough money to build a fine home in Durine known as Transvaal.
Guilan is an odd word, a unique Mackay Country expression for wee boy, derived, of course, from the standard Gaelic gille.
Note the preponderance of best Sunday suits among the male spectators, a phenomenon you would never see at a gathering this century. The car in the photo, judging from the bonnet shape, is a Rover of around 1930 vintage.
