Helensburgh-based childrens’ publisher, AnElephantCant, has been touched by our coverage of the work of Mary’s Meals, Continue reading
Category Archives: Arts & Culture
Being in Wick
Being in Wick is constantly being conscious of the elements, of the stern and uncompromising beauty of this part of the world.
The town is an old one, dating back to the time when Norway ruled Caithness, a situation brought to an end in the Treaty of Perth of 1266.
With a population of 7,350, around 1,000 fewer than Dunoon, Wick takes its name from its Norwegian history, with the word ‘vik’ meaning a bay. It straddles the Wick River (above, with Wick Parish Church on the far side) and wraps itself around the inner reaches of the unusual equilateral triangle of Wick Bay.
Its sturdy and magnificent stone harbour (above, under attack by natural forces) has seen a flourishing fishing industry and a history in support of naval operations as the port of transit of high ranking officers and politicians visiting the British Grand Fleet based at Scapa Flow in Orkney.
It used to be the county town, now ceded to Thurso, It is on the A9-A99 linking the rest of Scotland to the UK’s most northerly point at John of Groats.
Some of its road names are Norse – like Sandigoe road – the route Dr Ewen Pearson’s children take, now for the time being, to get to Hillhead School.
Near the town are some of the great Caithess ruined castles, most of them Sinclair fortresses, like the once impregnable medieval-to-renaissance stronghold of Girnigoe (with Sean and Tomas Pearson visiting, left). This is the most spectacular ruin in the North of Scotland, currently undergoing preservation by the Clan Sinclair Trust. Continue reading
Why it’s ‘Hillhead’ school
This is not hard to guess.
But let’s make Hillhead school real by following the route many of its pupils walk to the school at the head of the hill, in the rain we’ve all seen too much of lately.
We start at the bottom of Scalesburn Road, below – and walk up. ‘Scalesburn’ simply has to be telling us about what went on in the burn at the time when Wick’s then burgeoning fishing industry will have provided a naming convention as well as fuelling new housebuilding.
The we get to the middle of Scalesburn Road, below – still climbing.
At the top of Scalesburn, below, we turn to look back down to Wick Harbour far below.
Then we turn along Willowbank, below, the road the school is on at Hillhead.
And there it is, below. Home. But not for long.
These photographs capture the sense of the community in which the pupils at Hillhead instinctively look out for each other.
They can be proud of that and of what they have achieved in a school that has looked after them well.
Note: we have parental permission to use the photographs we have been given by Hillhead school campaigners.
Hillhead pupils’ images for its 81% capacity
The pupils of Hillhead Primary School in Wick, a demonstrably successful school whose parents and children want it to continue, created these inventive images as part of the campaign save their school.
One of these images – above – has already been used to introduce our article on the Education Secretary’s indecipherable decision to permit the closure of this school.
The pupils took the fact that their school runs at a very healthy 81% capacity.
The images they have made and the material they have used to make them also say a lot about Wick and the lives they live there – above and below.
Some of the images show a developing sense of symbolism – like the one below, drawn on the sand with the tide about to obliterate it. The author of this image can now put a name on that tide - Michael Russell. Perhaps it’s an ebb tide?
Some images work hard to tell the whole mathematical story – as below …
… as well as saying, as does the one below, something about the dietary preference of children everywhere.
There are images fed by sharp observation, finding readymades they can turn to their advantage – as with the two below and the third from the top:
… a galvanic option above;
… and, above, proving the cost of living in a place like Wick.
This (above) and the one below use familiar toys to put the case.
And a final two, below, are having all kinds of fun using what comes to hand:
… from the idyllic when they still had hope of surviving;
… to a conundrum of multiple identical identities that their school, Hillhead, now shares with Muirfield and Timmergreens schools in Arbroath – via the dark art of bureaucratic cloning of educational benefit statements.
Thank you Hillhead pupils, for your playful creativity. It reminds all of us just where the careless decisions taken in faraway places by those adrift from consequences, really make their presence felt.
‘Live Long and prosper’, as in the Vulcan salute from Spock in Startrek. You are about ‘to boldly go where no man has gone before’ – to a brand new school. Enjoy it.
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