Last weekend was the Huntly Hairst, an annual harvest/halloween festival held in the town Huntly, the seat of Lord Gordon, Earl of Huntly from the 14th to 17th centuries. The town itself is rather small, housing about 4500 people but we really only saw a tiny portion of it, mainly from the square to the castle. The trip was considered a workshop, coordinating with Deveron Arts, the local arts organization, to provide assistance with the Hairst in the form of games and activities, and assisting with food and drink.
We left on Friday morning, a group of fourteen of us plus Neil as our driver, in a minivan with fifteen seats and no actual storage space. Bags and such were crammed in the aisle and under seats wherever they would fit. We were crammed into the seats. Dosed with Kwells (UK Dramamine), I loaded myself in and prepared for a long trip.


The trip there followed the Whiskey Trail, through the Cairngorms then down into Huntly. The weather was changeable; by the time we hd arrived, Neil had driven through sun, rain, fog, hail, and snow. The scenery was amazing, all the autumn colors were out, with the trees clad in gold, red, bronze, yellow and every color in between.
We stopped once, for lunch, along the way, in Pitlochry in Perthshire. Pitlochry is the home to Heathergems, a company whose jewelry is very popular at Celtic Shoppes in the US. The town itself is a very nice, quaint Scottish town which clearly caters to travelers and tourists. It was a very welcome relief from the travel and a nice place to visit.
We arrived in Huntly in the early evening amidst a light snow and settled into our accommodations at the Highlander Bunkhouse. Since the snow had stopped, a group of us went out to scout Huntly Castle, the location where Saturday’s events began.



Later in the evening, we went to the Freaky Folk Night at the Crown Arms Pub, heard some music from locals, Eoin and Allysson Velez a Brazilian musician here at Deveron Arts’ behest, and drank some beer.

Saturday we went to a talk and tour by Deveron Arts leader Claudia Zeiske. She spoke about the concept for Deveron Arts, their theme The Town is the Venue and the artists and projects they’ve hosted. Deveron Arts uses what they call a 50/50 approach. Their website explains it as “50 per cent community/locality and 50 per cent artistic criticality/globality is [the] paradigm that needs to be met through a variety of ways of working.” This means that they try to engage the community in a number of ways, and try to create artworks or events that help the community in some manner.
Deveron Arts has published a book, ARTocracy, explaining this approach and how it can be utilized in towns throughout the world. I can easily see this working in towns and villages in Alaska, as well as other places in the US.
After the talk, she took us on a tour of the town as a venue. Although some of the artwork on display were finished pieces, some were more like memorabilia of an event that did not have an actual product to display. The shops in the town displayed these pieces with pride, though and the shop owners clearly had some fond memories of the time the artists spent with them.

We’d been told that during the weekend, there would be an European Market being held in the square. I’m afraid I had rather grand visions of this, thinking of something at least like the farmer’s market near my home in Edinburgh, with produce stalls and breads and meats and such. No, the European Market was a small number of stalls, which consisted of Coffee, hot food (Potatoes Provencal, Paella, Asian Noodles, and maybe one or two other things. There were some other foods, pastries, olives and dry sausages, but that’s all I can recall. Not much you would really want to buy and bring home, just some stuff you might eat during the festivities, which were really only Saturday evening, although I expect the coffee vendor did well.


Some of us grabbed lunch at the European Market and then headed back to the bunkhouse until later that afternoon when we would need to set up. During this lull, Rima made a delicious pumpkin soup for dinner later, while we assisted by chopping onions and hollowing the pumpkins and making Jack-O-Lanterns. Afternoon came and one group went down to the castle to help Simon with the food (if you feel like I’m not being complete, review this previous Hairst post), serve the cider and help Darren with his performance, while the group I was with started setting up in the square.

We were provided with a gazebo (pop-up awning) which we set up at one end of the Market (in fact, right where the previous photo was taken). Unfortunately, two of the legs were mildly broken, so setting up became a bit of a kludge; in order to keep two of the legs from collapsing, we inserted a pen in one and a nail in the other where there were supposed to be pins to hold them. Then we arranged the tables and began decorating and setting up games. By the time things were supposed to start, we were all set and headed down to the castle to watch the beginning of the festivities.

Down at the castle,  we watched the events unfold. Simon had a table where he was serving the first of his Huntly Signature Dishes, a Steak and Ale Pie sourced from local ingredients and served in a sort of Nouveau Cuisine style. In a paper cup/bowl, were (as near as I could tell) mashed potatoes, a gravy with steak bits in it, all topped with a tiny biscuit representing the crust. It was tasty, but I found the biscuit dry since it was the first thing I ate, in the dark, without it having time to soak up any gravy. Perhaps this dish will work better in less al fresco setting.
Georgia, Tim, Brian, Mike and Eoin were here serving the cider, Thistly Cross‘ Bloody Good Brew, developed by Brian, Mike and Eoin, from a heated tureen, and generally helping out Simon and Darren. Soon enough, Darren’s performance art piece began, with spooky music and bizarre imagery.

Although it was interesting to us art students, the crowd, which mainly consisted of small children and their parents, seemed to find it a bit perplexing and drawn out.
We were then presented with a drum solo by Deveron Arts’ guest artist from Brazil, Allysson Velez, wearing a stag mask while spotlighted with his shadow thrown up on the castle wall. Around 7:00, when he had finished, it was time for masked members of the pipe band to begin their annual march from the castle to the square.


We raced ahead in order to get back to our stall before the crowds, and so we could fetch the last of the supplies from the bunkhouse. So, when we were finished setting up, we realized two things: first that it was starting to rain and second that we were the only new booth in the square. Since they had previously told us that they were going to get the European Market packed up and gone by six (fortunately, they decided to let them stay until after the parade) we were a bit surprised, to say the least. There was a performance by Ceilidhamba, the samba band that Allysson had assembled, Dudendance (which I did not see), and by the local Chimera Belly Dancers, in the rain by our stall.
Meanwhile, the rain had put a damper (ha!) on some of our activities, specifically gathering recipes or “last meal” details from locals, since no one wanted to sit in the rain long enough to participate. We had also planned on drawing or having locals draw their last meals on paper plates, but the rain made the markers useless.
On the other hand, before the rain got too bad, we had some interest in our two games, The Unlucky Dip and The Hanging Baker, as well as the face painting. The Unlucky Dip was two small bins filled with different muck. One held cooked spaghetti and the other semi-solidified jello (or jelly as they say here). There were also a number of tokens (plastic spiders and such) in each. The goal was to reach in and pull out a token in order to win a piece of candy. It was really quite popular, simply, I think, because kids like to stick their hands in goop.
The Hanging Baker was a variation on the apple-on-a-string game. Originally we conceived it to be donuts hanging on strings, but after consultation with Simon, it was decided that he would find a more appropriately local pastry. Trying to name it without knowing specifically what pastry would be used was difficult and we ended up with the rather generic sounding Hanging Baker. 
We ended up using Butteries, which are flat, salty, mildly flaky rolls. Since our vision was to make this not only difficult, but messy, Erin made up a frosting using confectioner’s sugar, golden syrup and raspberry jam which looked vile but tasted ok. Since we were unable to set up a pole or line to hang the butteries from, we used a broomstick, making it look like we were Child Catchers fishing for little children. The kids seemed to enjoy the game, but actually preferred to eat the butteries without frosting.
The face-painters did a brief but booming business, but we were rained out by 7:30 and the square was empty.

Fashion by Phil, Make-Up by Tonia.
 After that short flurry of activity, it was time to take everything down. We cleaned up and put the gazebo and tables back where we got them and took the rest back to the bunkhouse. At 8:00 the Ceilidh began, but we decided dinner was more important. We ate the pumpkin soup Rima had prepared and ate it with leftover butteries. Delicious.
After dinner, we went to the meeting hall and joined the ceilidh. There were traditional ceilidh activities, a raffle, drinking, and of course, dancing. The music was provided intermittently, by different arrangements of local musicians. There were performances by Allysson, a performance by Ceilidhama, and a duet between Allysson on drums and a piper, as well as performances by the local ceilidh band of fiddlers and such.


The next morning, a handful of us were up early and decided to take a walk up to the castle. We followed the trail a little beyond the castle, crossed the river Deveron and wandered along the river briefly before turning back. On the way back, we passed an empty playground and determined it should not remain so.



When we returned, everyone was up and getting ready to go. We cleaned up, packed, loaded the van and were on our way again. This time our route took use south to Dundee where we stopped for lunch and art.
Generator had a really interesting show up, called LOLCATS — I IZ EXHIBISHUN BY RACHEL MACLEANZZZ!!! which was not simply a gallery filled with lolcat images, but something totally different.
The artist, Rachel Maclean, had made a film which, although a little difficult for me to follow in my travel and Kwells addled brain, reminded me of silent films, specifically of the fantastic stylings of Georges Méliés. Although all her illusions were digitally created, it seemed to me that there was an element of homage in her work.
‘LolCats’ is set in a mutable space, at once a mysterious lost civilization and a modern day touristic fun park, referencing an amalgam of past and present manifestations of cat worship. The video centres on a female character, presenting her in moments of fear, intrigue, mutation and decay as she journeys through this erratic environment. Constantly shifting genres, the film depicts her at one moment as a tourist or adventurer, next as a musical performer and then shifting context to become a motionless object, doll or product.
-from Rachel Maclean’s website
I wish there had been more time for me to watch the video from start to finish, and look forward to being able to see it on her website in the future.
We finally returned to ECA near to 5:00PM on Sunday, and everyone was so excited to be home that we all unloaded and disappeared within a matter of minutes.
Here are a all my photos of the trip. Since we did not know the security of the Bunkhouse, I decided not to take my camera with, so all the photos are from my iPhone. If you want some better images, see Mike’s Tumblr page.