Pipes,Drums and tartan

[doonunda]

ft

[loafy]

cool tents

[Alex Glass]

Doonunda

The photos are fantastic and the subject matter really interesting. Hopefully others will follow your lead and post similar photos from other parts of the World.

[HollowHorn]

New Years Day??? Hahahahahahahah, where'se the snaw baws?

[ozneil]

New Years Day??? Hahahahahahahah, where'se the snaw baws?

In the fridge with the macaroon bars & the mars bars ... where do you think they would be?

[doonunda]

ft

[Dugald]

Reading all this interesting stuff about piping, brings to mind my own experience with the pipes. Oh no, my experience was not as a player of the pipes, simply as the father of a player of the pipes... my daughter. In 1980 she had learned to play a chanter at school and wanted to join a band, so we had to get a set of pipes. The price of pipes in Canada was very high, and since we were going to Scotland on a cycling holiday, we'd see what we could do over there. We spent a lot of time searching around Glasgow, but the price for a new set was very high, just as high as in Canada, so we decided to put an ad for a second-hand set in shop windows in the town where my father lived, Campbeltown...now any real highland town was sure to have a set of pipes for sale!

We left Campbeltown to go on a bicycle tour. We were away for four weeks, and when we returned to Campbletown we found that there hadn't been any replies to our ads. We had given up hope of being able to buy a second hand set of pipes. While eating our dinner on the last night before leaving to return to Glasgow, there was a knock at our door, and there was a young fellow who said he had a set of pipes for sale. He had the set with him and showed it to us. None of us had ever seen a dismantled set of pipes, and here was this fellow with a paper bag filled with little pieces of black and white wooden tubes and asking £100 for them

The £100 was a lot less than what new pipes cost, and all this fellow had to do was convince us that this bag of wooden tubes really was a set of pipes. He assured us this was a real set and all we had to do was get a new chanter to go with the wooden tubes. To substantiate his claim, he told us he had used this very same set of pipes while playing in the Campbeltown Pipe Band for the recording of Paul McCartney 's "Mull 'o Kintyre". Well, that was enough to convince us that we did in fact have a set of pipes.

We set about next day in Glasgow looking for a chanter for the pipes. We had the address of a bagpipe 'factory' called "Campbell and Granger", somewhere on Dumbarton Road. We hunted high and low for a 'factory', but eventually found out that we had to go through a close in a tenement building to find this place. The 'factory' was simply the lower flat in the tenement, and employed about six people in making the sets of pipes.

The chanters they had for sale were very expensive, but one of the young employees, noticing how taken aback we were at the price, and realizing it was for a young girl whose parents were clueless about bagpipes, said he'd sell her his own chanter, which was almost brand new, for a mere £ 20. We bought it along with some other odds and ends which we were informed would be required to assemble the pipes.

We had a long chat in the factory with a gent who had been a pipe-major for the City of Glasgow Police Pipe band, and when we showed him the 'stocks' we had bought for £ 100, he told us we'd got a real bargain, as the stocks were made of ebony and ivory! My daughter still has the set of pipes.