Finlaggan

In 1995 I did not have the internet and I still watched TV! I remember seeing Time Team every weekend, was it Sunday early evenings? I was studying for my archaeology degree at that time, and the antics of the TV archaeologists was always an entertaining subject of discussion with my classmates. We had been out for week-long stints at Wroxeter and Bridgnorth and so had plenty of first-hand experience of what archaeology was like without film crews and national TV budgets…

I clearly remember the episode where the team visited Finlaggan, the medieval palace and administrative centre of the Lords of the Isles. I didn’t record it I don’t think, so I only saw it once live as it was broadcase, but I do clearly remember them showing a harp tuning pin from the excavations, and Alison Kinnaird playing her beautiful early clàrsach on site. I also remember the reproduction aketon that they made. I was actually inspired to make one myself – a very interesting exercise involving a lot of linen fabric and raw wool fleece!

I also recall sending off by post for the printed series brochure, which had a disappointingly small amount of background info on the programme. I don’t have this any more.

Anyway I suddenly thought, it must be possible to find info online about it, and sure enough there it is on Channel 4’s website. I haven’t watched the video yet but I listened to the audio and it brought back some memories!

Alison’s harp playing did make an impression on me; this was after I had got my first harp but before I had started seriously studying the playing technique and repertory. Listening again I recognised the English masque tune of the Battle of Harlaw.

I also found and downloaded the interim pre-publication versions of David Caldwell’s report on the NMS excavations at Finlaggan, from the NLS Repository.

All grist to the mill… one of my current projects is “music of the Lords of the Isles” (Ceol Rì Innse Gall perhaps?). Can I find / create enough medieval harp music to fill a programme of music that would have been heard played on the Queen Mary harp in the Great Hall at Finlaggan?

Irish harpist busking in London, c.1900


Ealasaid was looking through George Sims’s amazing books Living London, published around 1900-1903, searching for images to use in her artwork, when she found this lovely photograph in a section about street musicians. This gentleman is playing what looks like an Egan portable harp, or perhaps one of the late 19th century imitations made by Holderness, Morley or other London harpmakers.

He also appears to have a concertina under his arm and there is what I imagine is a collecting box strapped to the pillar of his harp.

The Egan Royal portable harps usually have a strap button at top and bottom of the soundbox, but I don’t recall ever seeing a picture of someone with the harp strapped to themselves before.

Henry George Farmer, in his paper ‘Some Notes on the Irish Harp’, in Music & Letters vol XXIV, April 1943, describes how he remembered seeing an Irish harper busking on the Old Kent Road in about 1900. Farmer said he did not have time to check out who the harper was or how his instrument was set up, leading to much speculation about whether this was the last of the blind students from the Dublin Harp Society, playing one of the big Society wire-strung early Irish harps. However this image suggests that Farmer might have seen this man or someone like him, playing a gut-strung neo-Irish harp.

Tentsmuir

I was out in Tentsmuir this afternoon and I saw the most beautiful tiny patches of birch wood. The land was very wet and the trees all had standing water at their toes. The path through Reres wood degenerated into a ditch filled with standing water too deep to pass through – not muddy, but beautifully clear and tawny.