Tobar an Dualchais – Kist o Riches
Tobar an Dualchais/Kist o Riches is Scotland’s online resource dedicated to the presentation and promotion of audio recordings of Scotland’s cultural heritage. Its primary content is songs, traditions and stories, music, history, and poetry, recorded from the 1930s onwards. The recordings were made all over Scotland and its diaspora and, as a result, contain a diverse range of dialect and accents in Gaelic, Scots and English.
Tobar an Dualchais/Kist o Riches’ principal aim is to ensure that Scotland’s rich oral heritage is safeguarded and made widely available for present and future generations.
The website contains material from three archives: The School of Scottish Studies; The National Trust for Scotland’s Canna Collection and BBC Radio nan Gàidheal.
Examples of recordings on the website include:
- Angus MacLellan from Frobost in South Uist reciting ‘Duan na Ceardaich’, an Ossianic ballad which tells how Fionn MacCumhail and his men took Fionn’s magic sword, ‘Mac an Luinn’, to an enchanted smithy to be tempered. It was recorded by Dr John Lorne Campbell in 1949.
- The bothy ballad ‘Drumdelgie’ sung by Jimmy MacBeath from Portsoy in a recording made in 1952 at the People’s Festival Cèilidh. He is introduced by Hamish Henderson.
- Màiri Munro from Lochboisdale in South Uist singing the waulking song ‘Hò Fàil O-ho Ghràidh’ in a recording made by Donald Archie MacDonald of the School of Scottish Studies in 1962.
- Stanley Robertson from Aberdeen telling the story of an elderly couple and a magic bannock in this School of Scottish Studies recording from 1982.
- Lachlan MacDonald is interviewed by Katie Anne MacKenzie about his young days in St Kilda, in an episode of BBC Radio nan Gàidheal’s ‘Dealan-dè’ from 1985.