Interviews with Jelka Plate: A. Mairi, resident of Huntly

My first memories of the Battlehill are going up as a child to play with my pals and my brothers and sisters. That would have been in the fifties and at that time not all of the trees were planted up on the Battlehill. There was quite a lot of grass in the area. Once you went into the Battlehill, there was trees, but if you went further into the Battlehill there weren´t all the spruce trees that are there now. There were broad leafed trees, chestnut trees, trees you could climb on. I can´t find the place anymore where we used to go to, because there are all these spruce trees now and you can´t get up through it. We would go up and there would be about ten of us, my brothers, sisters and our pals. The parents didn´t go with us. There were not all the stories you have these days and none of the restrictions imposed on many kids nowadays. So we would go off for the whole afternoon. We went off after lunch, some of our pocket money was pooled to buy little things like broken biscuits from the baker. We made our lemonade and juice, cause we always had a picnic. This was in the summer time. We would go up to the top of the hill where there was this big stone what we called the table stone and the picnic bag was laid out. We had great fun, we played and ran around and hide and seek and tic and tac and we would run around or go down the hill to climb the trees. We loved climbing in trees. Actually I liked it better then, before all the trees were up, it was such a nice place to play in and run around. It is too dense now, there are too many trees. There was also the quarry, where at times there were old scrapped cars and busses and sometimes we played in them and pretended to be driving cars, the boys loved that!

On other days myself and my pal would go off with buckets to pick blaeberries. You don´t find them anymore now, because you don´t have the grass area anymore. We would pick a good lot of blaeberries and sit and eat them there. Usually we would still have enough to make a couple of jars of jam afterwards.

I am not one for trees just being knocked down for no reason, but I think, it was so much better then. Well, it seems to be sunshine all the time when you are a child and it was so much lighter then it is now. I find it very dark now. In fact when I went back, because I stopped to go when I was a teen, but when my own kids grew older we went up, so that would have been in the late 70’s, the trees were already quite tall by then, just after twenty years. I just thought it was eerie, because the grass wasn´t there because of the spruce trees, and the ground seemed bare, so it seemed dark to me. Not bright and light and airy like it was when I went to Battlehill.
It was like your secret little place. There were a lot of hidy places and you could run through there and find little flowers and berries. It was such a magical place to go.

You know what kids are like with their imagination, you imagine your little house there. You just found some bushes, went into it and you get sticks for seats. If it was just girls, you had little houses, you make a little village, you run around and pretend you are shopping. We did not take anything down to make it, we just used our imagination, stones were tables, sticks were seats, we would just break some branches. And that is exactly what my granddaughters did last week when I took them up: „This is your tree, this is mine, a house here and there, just come here, this is our little civilization.“ They did that and I thought, well that’s what I did when I was a kid. We never got lost in the woods, but as I said, there weren´t all the trees then. I could just imagine little sweety cake houses in the middle of the wood at the time I was there. I would never have associated the Battlehill with wolfs or anything sinister.

I found one photo taken on one of our picnics in the Battlehill. It was taken in 1958 when I would have been 12 and that probably would have been the last year we went the picnics as we were all growing older. In the photo there are two of my brothers and the others are from 5 other families in our street. I am not in the photo, and neither are my girl pals. My sister who was 17 and took the photo thought as I did, that we were probably making houses amoung the bushes when the photo was taken. The girl in the photo was her pal. They are sitting on the stone I spoke about where we had our picnics and my sister says there were other stones we used to jump on, from stone to stone. As you can see there are no spruce trees in sight, as if there were, they would be plainly visible all around. There is the one small tree, but it would have been native to this area and not planted. The other trees were all further down the hill.
My sister also reminded me that some of the days we went to the Battlehill after we had been to the children's film matinee (we had a cinema in Huntly at that time) and when we got to the Battlehill whatever film we had been watching that day was re-enacted all over.