faithandculture
Page 28
Light of the North
when I can have the pleasure to accept with my friend Dr Olaf your Lordships kind hospitality’.. It would seem likely that the Mass celebrated on th September took place in the Zetland Hotel with the O’Brien family and maybe one or two others as congregation. The building is still standing today in the middle of Lerwick’s busy Commercial Street and is now occupied by the Shetland Times Bookshop. It was almost certainly the first Mass celebrated in Shetland since the Scottish Reformation of just years earlier. The Apostolic Prefecture of the North Pole was wound up in and the resident priest left by Fr Djunkovsky seems to have transferred seamlessly to the authority of the last Northern District Vicar, Bishop John MacDonald who in turn became the first Bishop of Aberdeen in the restored Catholic Hierarchy of . What is today certain
ALittle Food For Thought
is that there is neither archival record nor oral tradition of any Catholic Priest setting foot on Shetland from until th September . Although this is negative evidence it seems quite plausible in the light of conditions at that time and the recorded comments of the few who reached Caithness and Orkney. What is also certain is that following the untimely death of the first resident priest in , there has been a more or less continuous provision of visiting or resident priests. . Text from a letter written by J.W. Spence from Lerwick reproduced with kind permission of Shetland Museum & Archives . Letter from Dr. Paul Marie Stephan Djunkovsky to Bishop Kyle reproduced with kind permission of the Scottish Catholic Archives.
chain drives and cogs, engages with five pairs of millstones inside the mill.
In the production of the oatmeal, the fresh oats are raked over the floor of the kiln, using a long-handled wooden ‘sheeler’, where perforated cast iron plates allow heat from the furnace below to rise up and dry them. The furnace is built of stone, with a vaulted brick lining and iron hearth doors: a couple of electric fans provide the extra draught which once came from a set of bellows. The revolving ridge ventilator on top of the kiln assists Margaret Bradley the drying process, and gives the mill its distinctive silhouette. The oats dry in the kiln over the course of four The Montgarrie Mill near Alford, about twenty miles west hours. They are then cooled before being husked, of Aberdeen, is one of the last operating 19th century winnowed, then ground by the mill stones into four cuts: water powered meal mills in Scotland. The mill has fine, medium, rough and pinhead (which is a kernel cut produced Alford Oatmeal in more or less the same way in half) and then bagged, in polythene bags today rather using the same machinery and methods since it was than hessian sacks . The whole process takes around 20 built in the 1880s. It is called the Oatmeal of Alford rather days. The mill produces about 200 tons of oatmeal per than Montgarrie because Alford was the closest railway year compared with 1,000 tons in the 1940’s when 25 station and hence a better-known departure point. Visit people worked at the mill. Today only a couple of people the Mill and you will feel you have taken a step back in operate the mill. time. Meal mills, characteristically a Scots tradition, were an I often visit the mill. It thrills me to watch the huge mill essential part of 18th and 19th century life. Porridge wheelturningandto listen to its thundering accompanied made from ground oats, barley, peas and beans was by the rushing and splashing of the water from the lade until the beginning of the 18th century, the staple diet of as it falls over the wheel and then into the underground the vast majority of the population of Scotland. By the culvert which takes it to the River Don. The sound is so 19th century a farm labourer could expect to be paid a deafening that it blots out all other thoughts, time stands yearly ration of oatmeal and a daily pint of milk. Each still and all my worries instantly vanish. farm worker in the “bothy” or lodgings had his own “Kists” (chests), one for his few clothes and other The mill wheel, is an iron overshot bucket wheel 24feet in possessions and one for his oatmeal. Oatmeal was diameter and four feet broad. It has 10 spokes, weighs 21 cooked in different ways: as porridge, oatcakes and tons and was made by Messrs. James Abernethy & Co.of bannocks, but most commonly as brose, which was the Ferryhill Foundry, Aberdeen in 1882. It revolves at six made in a wooden bowl by mixing oatmeal, a little salt revolutions per minute and drives through a 15 foot and boiling water to a paste, then adding milk to taste. sprocket on the wheel axle, which through a series of