On Friday, 17th September 2021, Dr. David Summers, the Fisheries Director of the Tay District Salmon Fisheries Board presented his talk which encompassed the life cycle of the salmon, the drastic reduction in salmon numbers and current scientific research studies. He provided an overview of the status of the River Tay’s salmon population and fisheries, with an emphasis on how things compare with the past and what the future might hold.
On Friday, 19th November, 2021, Dr Liz Auty, East Schiehallion Property Manager for the John Muir Trust, presented a talk to our Society on the subject: “Schiehallion: The attraction of mountains, ‘weighing the world’ and contour lines”. Liz discussed Neville Maskelyne’s 1774 expedition to Schiehallion, the people, the experiment and the mountain.
The Schiehallion experiment was set up to determine the mass and mean density of the Earth and involved measuring the tiny deflection of a pendulum due to the gravitational attraction of a nearby mountain. After a search for candidate mountains, Schiehallion was considered the ideal location thanks to its isolation and almost symmetrical shape.
Towards the end of her presentation, Liz talked about the work that she does at East Schiehallion as Property Manager for the John Muir Trust and, in particular, to the collaborative work that the John Muir Trust carries out in the area with the Heart of Scotland Forest Partnership.
You can view Liz’s talk to our Society here:
If you wish to view this video at a larger size, click on the ‘full screen’ button at the bottom right-hand corner of the image above:
In what may be the Society’s first-ever offshore excursion, fourteen members visited the tiny island of Iona for three nights at the beginning of September last year. This long-awaited trip had been booked for September 2020 but had to be postponed due to Covid lock-down.
Based on our three-night stay there and on photographs taken at the time, we have compiled a short video of many of the places that we visited. If you have never been to Iona, hopefully this may encourage you to visit this beautiful, spiritual island.
Due to the Covid restrictions in place at the time, we were not able to hold any of our 2020-21 winter season of talks ‘in person’ at our normal venue in the Breadalbane Community Campus. Consequently, in order to offer a programme of talks to our membership, we ventured into the unknown world for us of online Zoom presentations.
From the October talk onwards, we recorded these talks to make them available to a wider audience, but we were not sufficiently prepared to do this for Colin Liddell’s talk on ‘Pitlochry in Threes’ which opened our winter season in September 2020. However, we are delighted that Colin subsequently was keen to present his talk once again, but without an audience in this instance, and have it recorded.
Colin is a local solicitor and historian who in recent years has presented four talks to the Society on Pitlochry and General Wade’s roads. This current talk is an eclectic dip into the assortment box of Pitlochry’s local history, by looking at lots of groupings of three things to show how Pitlochry has been shaped over the years. Topics and artefacts included the Lude Harp, Black Spout toggle and the Clach na Brataich.
The video is approximately 27 minutes long and can be viewed below:
If you wish to view this video at a larger size, click on the ‘full screen’ button at the bottom right-hand corner of the images above:
Last month, Tommy Pringle, a life-long resident of Aberfeldy, gave an entertaining and informative talk on ‘Aberfeldy Past and Present’, presenting a series of photographs and postcards taken over the last 150 years showing changes to buildings in Aberfeldy starting in Kenmore Street and working eastwards along to the Dewar’s Aberfeldy Distillery.
By coupling archive images with current photographs, Tommy illustrated the range of shops and garages and other buildings that once graced the streets of Aberfeldy and have now been replaced or had a change of use.
His talk was very popular with over 100 requests for joining information, and Tommy’s personal knowledge and stories of the characters, buildings and events brought Aberfeldy to life.
Two versions of the recording of the talk are available to view. The first is approximately one hour long and contains just the talk. The second includes an additional subsequent 30-minute Q&A session providing further supplementary information. Both of these videos can be viewed below:
If you wish to view these videos at a larger size, click on the ‘full screen’ button at the bottom right-hand corner of the images above:
We have now released the videos of the first two recordings of the winter season talks which were held in October and November of last year. Following on from Lesley Whitwood’s talk last month on ‘Where have all the Churches gone?’, Helen Stewart presented a talk on the 20th November 2020, entitled ‘Researching your Family History in Scotland’.
Research has shown that every family has skeletons in their cupboard and black sheep in their family tree. Helen showed how to find yours by illustrating the many resources available and discovering stories that may arise.
Helen showed you how to use “Ancestry” and “ScotlandsPeople” to search births, marriages, deaths, censuses and other records, indicating the range of information that is available and what to expect when you start to search. She touched on the rest of the UK and Ireland and take a brief look at the rest of the world as so many of us have ancestors who emigrated. Her talk included some suggestions for searching newspapers, gravestones and other useful websites, such as searching armed forces’ websites, and she gave some tips and advice.
Under an initiative launched by the Archives, Local & Family History section of Perth and Kinross Council, the Breadalbane Heritage Society in conjunction with the local Library Service in the Breadalbane Campus has been providing a service to assist and support those interested in researching their families.
If you wish to know more about this service, or if you have specific family history queries, please contact us using the form on the Contact page.
If you wish to view this video at a larger size, click on the ‘full screen’ button at the bottom right-hand corner of the screen above:
Video recordings of the first two talks of our Winter 2020 – 21 season which we recorded are now available to view.
The first one, ‘Where have all the Churches gone?’ was presented by Lesley Whitwood on Friday, 16th October, and takes a look at the history of many churches in the local upper Tay area from Dull to Strathtay which have been ‘lost’ and those which have survived, to discover what has happened to them and why.
If you wish to view this video at a larger size, click on the ‘full screen’ button at the bottom right-hand corner of the screen above:
The report and video of the second talk which we recorded can be found here: ‘Researching your Family History in Scotland‘
Breadalbane Heritage Society 
You must be logged in to post a comment.