I’ve been going through dad’s slides again and came across a batch of photos of the ‘dancing on the green’. The local dancers in Ballater, including myself, participated in a dancing display on Sunday afternoons in the summer to entertain tourists and to raise funds for the Mountain Rescue Team. Here you see me and Maureen dancing the Highland Fling. I’m the wee one. I didn’t have the velvet waistcoat and heavy woolen socks in those days. I did get them later on though - they were expensive additions to the kilt!
This type of display doesn’t happen any more, primarily because there are not enough local dancers.
High stepping Issi….can you still do it I wonder! What a lot of fantastic treasures you’re finding. Funny how a quick snap on the camera & a quick look at the photo then put away can give so much interest year later.
Brilliant! Totally love traditional Scottish dancing. I used to live in Dublin and loved watching Irish dancers too. Here's hoping for a revival of such lovely traditions!
Ah, this brings back memories, not from Scotland but from Brunei where the Scottish expats living there had a thriving community and organised a yearly Highlander games day ; with Scottish dancing, off course 👍
@momamo Excellent. We had that in Balikpapan too - I always remember the American head of Unocal at the time turned up in a kilt outfit, but his kilt was on back to front!!!!! I discreetly took him aside. He took it very well!
@sarah19 I still remember most of the steps - especially of the first dances I learned. I'm not sure how my body would cope though, a lot of the highland dances are quite hard on the joints! Country dancing is so much more gentle. I do a class on Wednesdays though, which I love, called Highland Hustle. It is a fitness class with modern Scottish music which uses basic highland dance movements. Simple, but it allows me to dream of being a dancer once again! ;-)
January 11th, 2022
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