YOUR VIEWS: Rhetorical questions aside, of course classic Dingwall history book was worth writing!
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Thank you for your piece (Ross-shire Journal, January 12) on our efforts to promote discussion of the long history of Dingwall, this time through our new Dingwall Museum Book Group that meets in the Dingwall Community Library.
Our first meeting was just before Christmas and discussed the pre-historic times, the Pictish period, and of course the Norse period that gave the burgh its name.
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Our January meeting will look at the post-Viking period and the centuries of the powerful Earls of Ross operating from their stronghold of Dingwall Castle.
Norman Macrae’s book The Romance of a Royal Burgh: Dingwall’s Thousand Years came out one hundred years ago, and much has been studied, learnt and published in the century since. I have heard disquiet from some quarters that we thought the book not worth the writing because we had posed that rhetorical question you headlined. My own opinion is that of course it should have been! And few were better placed than Norman Macrae, a professional journalist, to gather the stories and make them accessible.
That’s why we chose this book as our first to read and discuss. It was a book of its time when the wounds of the Great War were still fresh but we could start seeing a perspective of history.
The seeds we are planting in the Library now could lead naturally to a new history one day perhaps in roughly the same format, but bringing the older periods into modern focus and adding the entire Twentieth Century!
Jonathan McColl
Chair, Dingwall Museum Trust
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