Craigdarroch Cottage Eliock Sanquar

A Memory of Eliock.

We lived in Craigdarroch Cottage, near Eliock Bridge, Sanquar, in the early 1960s while my dad, Wullie Wilson, worked on the farm there. At that time the farm was owned by the Kerr family. A black London-style taxi used to collect us to take us all to school in Sanquar every morning. The driver was usually a man called Jack Laird. The gamekeeper for the farm estate was Bill? Smith. They had a red-haired daughter who ran around with us 5 Wilson kids. Another girl, Julia Maxwell, lived down the hill from us and we all had some great adventures, wandering up into the hills to lie in the burns in our swimsuits in summer, or sledging down the farm road in wintertime. I wonder why it felt like the summers were always sunny and hot and the winters wonderfully snowy?

A grocer's van came up the hill to the cottages once a week, but disaster struck during one of his visits. A boy who lived in the cottage next door to us (John McPate) slipped down off the embankment at the roadside and fell under the wheel of the grocers van! My mum helped guide the van back off of John's leg, but it was badly broken and he spent a while in hospital afterwards. I wonder what he's doing now? There was also a family called McNiven who moved into the house next door but my memory won't stretch to all of their names. I only know there were children, and we all ran around wild together, and at one time we kept an adopted hedgehog in their large, curved-roofed, corrugated iron shed.

Mrs Kerr from the farmhouse seemed to us kids to be a bit eccentric. She had lots of little dogs - chihuahuas, pekinese and others - and they all had funny little names like 'Sparky' and 'Tuppence', and she kept them all in a huge cupboard in the farmhouse .. or at least their beds were in there!

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