Crappit Heids for Tea

In this memoir, the daughter of one of the first keeper’s of Scotland’s Shinness Estate details life in the early 20th century Scottish Highlands.

Sutherland is one of the most ruggedly beautiful and sparsely populated parts of Scotland. In the nineteenth century, the Duke of Sutherland set about improving his landholdings to make them more productive by building lodges for sporting tenants who came to enjoy the summer fishing and shooting grouse and deer. In the 1870s some 3,000 acres of land were reclaimed at Shinness. A lodge was built there in 1882 and allocated some 2,500 acres of moorland for grouse and grazing, together with the fishings on Loch Shin and its rivers. One of the first keepers at the estate was John Fraser. His daughter, Iby, became a teacher at Lairg School. In the 1970s, long after the Fletcher family had taken on Shinness Estate, Iby wrote down some recollections of her early life for Mrs. Fletcher's interest.

This charming book offers insightful descriptions of everyday life—from cooking, framing, and game keeping to medicine, schooling, and childhood games—as well as of the events that had a profound effect on communities everywhere, including the emergence of the motor car and World War I. Several other local contemporaries also contribute their memories, including Ann Gray, the daughter of the farmer who took on the reclaimed land in the 1880s, and Jimmy Bain, a crofter born after the Great War.