Barbaraville My Childhood Home

A Memory of Barbaraville.

I was born and brought up in Barbaraville, spending the first 27 years of my life there before moving to Inverness.

I will always remember it as an idyllic place to grow up in.. Many a happy hour was spent excavating the little sandbank just down from Sutor View in search of 'buried treasure' and fishing for sticklebacks in the burn at Delny.     

I remember the Jackdaw Hotel, with its own real live Jackdaw in a cage by the reception desk. The hotel is no more as it’s now Mull Hall Residential Home.  

I went to school at nearby Kilmuir Easter Primary which closed when I was in Primary 6. It’s now a furniture workshop and store. The late Miss Pirie was the formidable headmistress back then ... a brilliant teacher who drummed the importance of respect and decency into us ... I remember her wrath was something to behold, especially if, during a rounders game, we inadvertantly batted the ball into the nearby Kilmuir Easter Cemetery.  The late Rhoda Ross taught the younger children back then.

Although I've been away for years, I guess I will always think of Barbaraville as 'home' and remember my childhood years growing up there ... years when it was safe for kids to go out alone. We never got up to any real mischief. There was only half a dozen village kids and we were all well known by the village residents. As sure as God made little green apples, our parents would have a full report about anything we'd been up to even before we got home!  

The only mischief we ever made was dismantling Mr Nicolson's straw bale stacks so we could use the bales to build castles, trains etc!  Great fun, but, looking back, a lot of work for him ... we always scarpered whenever we saw him running across the field towards us! Occasionally, we'd nick apples from the late Lolly Mackay's trees., or ring Alice Macleod's shop bell and run away. No one would bat an eyelid now but back then such behaviour was a very risky business for naive (and instantly recognisable) village kids. The village shop is long closed and has been converted into a dwelling house.

Despite all the changes, whenever I drive through the village, it seems like only yesterday that I was bombing down Station Road it on my pink scooter (or bouncing about the village on my blue Space Hopper.