Buchan Heritage Society
Doric Writing Competition Results 2023
We had 178 entries all told this year, 114 Poetry and 64 Prose. We had 5 schools enter – Cairney, Strichen, Buchanhaven, Kininmonth and Macduff. Strichen has claimed two trophies while one goes to Macduff and one to Buchanhaven – same as last year and, I think, the year before. Mearns Academy entered Prose and Poetry for the first time with a super collection of both. Judges were Colin and Anne Simpson, (Prose,) and Jackie Ross, (Poetry.)
Strichen won both Junior 1 Prose and Junior 2 Poetry. Buchanhaven won Junior 1 Poetry and Macduff won Junior 2 Prose. Eve Whitehead from Mearns Academy won Intermediate Poetry with Ah Miss Mah Hame (see over,) and Prose was won by Beth McCulloch from Banchory Academy with Winjing. Robbie’s Quaich went to Bob Mitchell from Edinburgh, for his poem, The Shoppie Mannie – it is very good. Bob also won Morven’s Ploo with his story Tint Te The Sea – another well, deserved win.
It wasn’t all plain sailing – there’s always something. One school entered 4 classes – 3 classes came with no names only numbers and the fourth with initials only. Thankfully no other primaries sent me in a list of 20 odd bairns numbered 1-whatever – that’s likely a problem for another year. In the meantime, I decided I wasn’t going to do the back and fore effort that I did last year simply because there were so many and it is very time consuming to notify the school, wait for the school to get permission from the parents and then feed it back to me to make up certificates. I’m so glad I did that because one set of results only came in at the end of last week and there wouldn’t have been time to go through all that palaver. Nameless entries are a challenge and fingers crossed I’ve got it all right – now it’s up to the school. For the certificates I left the name space blank for the teacher to fill in and on the winner’s sheet I’ve listed the school rather than use any names- I think for the press etc we just use the school name against the trophy won and leave it at that. If anyone has any better ideas on how to tackle this then please let me know.
And just to give you a chuckle, my printer found the new 160grms certificate paper indigestible but …. all was not lost – Mr. T to the rescue. He popped the whole pack into the hydraulic press for a day and hey presto it worked – calm was restored.
Otherwise, I think we had a really good entry overall with some really well-crafted works of poetry and prose so that is encouraging and it gives us some great material for Heirskip next year.
Moira Taylor
18th May 2023