The top two rather bleary photographs were taken by the then cutting edge camera, the Instamatic. But all credit to the camera, I see from a scribbled note on the back of the photos they were taken at 4pm in February 1978 between Carrbridge and Inverness, so the light was fading pretty much by then and there was no flash.
We were living near Nethybridge, in the Highlands, at that time and awoke one morning to about 3 feet of snow. We and everyone else were marooned for 3 weeks with eventually bread and vital supplies being dropped by helicopter at the nearby village. No milk could be collected from the neighbouring dairy farm so they were "stockpiled" and so long as you could make your way there you could have as much as you liked---we did have to remember that it had to be carried the 2 miles home!
Snowploughs became stuck fast in the massive drifts which had formed when a high wind got up and the photos were taken when we finally were joined up to the rest of the world when a huge cutting and blowing machine cleared the A9, the main road to Inverness from the south. I think we just ventured out in the car because we could!
The bottom photo was taken sometime in the 1980s when we were living on a farm in the Lammermuir hills to the south east of Edinburgh. It was another snowy region and it was always windy there. Since the roads in the hills were a bit like Cornish lanes they very quickly filled in with snow and again this year we had to wait for the blowers to rescue us. The power lines ALWAYS came down but luckily we used log fires and although it took longer we managed to balance the pans in the small fireplace and food was cooked eventually. We also had a small battery powered TV so what else did we need?
Those were the days, but we are much older now and have to be a bit more careful when we venture out on to icy, snowy pavements and roads. We don't want to end up another statistic at Perth Royal Infirmary!
For more memories from other folk around the world look here.
5 comments:
A good time of year for remembering snow! Those old cameras left a lot to be desired. Isn't great to now have digital?? Your memories were interesting and triggered things in my own mind.
I remember some winters like that here, but thankfully we were able to dig out. We did have a bad ice storm about 6 yers ago that blackened everything for 2 weeks. The local general store had to empty their freezers of ice cream, and the neighbors all got plenty of treats!
Thank goodness we have a generator.
Happy New Year, and thanks for your memories. Hip, hip hooray for digital cameras!
B.
I like the photo with the Tower near the end of the street...gaurding the Winter sky and beautiful clouds.
Have a Great New Year.
We must have had a spate of Global Warming back then as well!!!!
I enjoyed reading your memories of being snowbound and without electricity back in the day. We live in a rural mountainous forested area where the power goes off whenever there's a severe wind, rain or snowstorm. One year in the 1980s it was out for 5.5 days. This December it was out for 4.5 days. We used to have a wood burning stove so that kept us warm and we could cook some things on it, but we replaced it with a propane stove that keeps us warm but takes a long time to boil water.
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