Turriff Academy Students' page

Turriff Academy produced four winners in the CD Design Competition:

Duncan Henderson

Sam Murdoch

Finlay Milne

Eilidh McInnes

Click on their names to see their entries!

Jill Delday & Sarah Clark

• Our two volunteers from the History dept started by doing a little digging into eachother's memories.
• Jill interviewed her great aunt, Annie Stephen, who started life as a hairdresser, but then had amazing experiences as an auxiliary nurse during World War 2, when she was posted to Fyvie Castle and the Burn House in Edzell, two great houses that had been commandeered as convalescent hospitals, and then finished her war service at Stracathro Hospital near Forfar in Angus.  She then came back up to Turriff to carry on with hairdressing.

(Go to PodCasts to hear the recordings)

• Thanks to Head of History, George Baird, for getting involved in the project!

Jill's ghostly guest:

SC: This is recorded in Turriff Academy’s Modern Studies Department, and today I’m interviewing Jill Deldie from … New Deer, and a ghost story she’d like to tell us, so when did you first hear about this ghost story?

JD: When I was about ten, and we were all downstairs, in the kitchen, and the door mysteriously banged! My dad says ‘Oh, that’ll be Bella,’ which is the name of the ghost. Em… she used to stay in the house, then my granddad bought it, and came round to see it, and she was ousted out into the cottage that’s just across the road from the farm, and when she died she said that she would always come back, that she would never leave the farm! She’s buried in a churchyard about a mile and a half, two miles away from the house. And… she was born in our farmhouse, and she lived there til she was ousted out, so it was really her home.

SC: So how did you first learn about the ghost? Was it your granddad telling you stories, or…?

JD: Well, it’s just been everybody, it’s just been… ‘oh, it’s just Bella, again’, if doors slam, and it would just be brought up in conversation. But we really learned more about her as a ghost when my mum went to see a psychic. And she told her it was genuine, it wasn’t like she was making it up or anything, she told Mum that she had three children and two of them were twins and all this kind of stuff that there’s no way she would have known, and she said some really strange things, but she said that Bella was… well she wasn’t going to harm us or anything, and that was all going to be ok.

SC: Have ye ever had any encounters yourself?

JD: Yes! I remember seeing her a couple of years ago, just like… I was lying in my bed with the lights on and everything, and I just kinda saw like a figure in the mirror and I was … it was really creepy, but, a couple’a weeks ago, I’m sure, there was no other explanation for it, but, we were all sitting through in the living room, and I went through to the kitchen for a drink. I felt a draught, and so the door was open between the kitchen and the lobby, so I went through and the outside door was open by about a foot, by maybe a couple of feet? There was no wind, and the dogs were nowhere to be seen and it’s a heavy door, so it doesn’t just open, so it must’ve been her!

SC: So you definitely believe in her then?

JD: Most definitely!

SC: Can ye remember anything about how she looked when you saw her?

JD: I know … I just saw a figure in the mirror, I canna tell you much more than that!

SC: Have ye ever been to her gravestone or anything?

JD: No! I’m too scared! I’m too much of a wuss! No, but I’ll probably go at some point, really it’s a derelict church that’s next to it, so… it’s … it’s not all that pleasant to go past, to be perfectly honest!

Sarah's German Jamboree!

JD: This is Jill Deldie, and we’re in Turriff Academy, on the nineteenth of January, 2007, and I’m interviewing Sarah Clark, who’s going to talk to us about her Guide Trip to Germany. Sarah, tell us a bit about your Guide Trip.

SC: Well it was not last summer, but the summer before that, when I got selected from all the Guides in Scotland to go away on a big, international camp to Germany with ten other girls from all over Scotland in… em, it was two summers ago, but I can still remember it like it was yesterday. It was like… it lasted for about two weeks and it was like, the best two weeks of my life! It was just amazing! The camp had about ten thousand other Guides and Scouts from all over the world. It was… it was held in Germany, em… so it was quite a journey down, cos, well, we flew from Glasgow to London and then from London down to Berlin, and the group of girls that I was staying with was like the … kinda… Scotland group. We spent a couple of days in Berlin first, and like, we had a look at all the tourist attractions, em… that was really good, we stayed in a Youth Hostel and then it took us like about a morning to get to the actual camp after we’d stayed there for a few days. Em… yeah, it was like really, really busy when we got out of the train station, we took the train down from Berlin to Wolfsberg where the camp was. And like, when we stepped out of the train there was thousands of Guides were like everywhere, and I think that’s when it first hit us that it was so huge and stuff like that. And then like it was another five hour walk to get to the camp with a huge rucksack on our backs, and we were all absolutely knackered by the time we got there!

JD: How did you get selected?

SC: Eh, there’s a selection process, it kinda starts from when, like in your little … in your unit you can send a couple of folk of tae … och, I’ve forgotten what… the County, and there’ll be like an evening… I went to an evening … there was only like about four of us there, and I was the only … em, this is a couple of years ago, I was the only one in the younger section, so they kinda had to put me through anyway! Em…so, after the County, ye get put through down to ‘Nethers’, it’s like a weekend down there, Netherurd’s near Edinburgh, and it’s kinda like the big Guide Headquarters in Scotland. And as we went down to Netherurd, there’s like, about fifty-two girls there… there’ll probably be a lot more than that, this is like all the girls that have come from all the different areas over Scotland, then ye do like a weekend there, and you do lots of kinda… trials, and all the Guiders test ye, and see how ye are, ye do lots of kinda team-building activities to see how well ye work. And then, a couple of weeks later, cos that was like, October holiday time, and then I remember the day I got my letter back, …cos we’d just got back from Dundee after Christmas, and the letter was sitting there, and I was like…’Ohhh!’ I was so excited, I thought I was just getting a letter saying ‘sorry, you didn’t get in,’ but then, when I found out that I’d got in, I was just ecstatic, and that told me I was going to Germany from there.

JD: So apart from the whole excitement of getting the letter saying ye were going, what was the best part of the trip?

SC: Just… meeting everyone. Mealtimes were just amazing like, … when you’re there, you got partnered up with a German partner group and they were with Stam Baracuda[?] which are like amazing, they’re like all… they had something like three girls in their group, cos it’s still quite male-orientated and stuff, cos it’s more Scouts than Guides, and stuff, I loved the atmosphere, I just loved everything about it. It was jist a completely different experience to anything I’ve experienced before.

JD: So were there Guides from other countries with you?

SC: Yeah, all over the world.

JD: So, do you keep up with any of them, or …?

SC: There’s… well, it was kinda hard, I still keep in good contact with all the other girls, that I went with from Scotland, and we met some folk from Wales, and there’s a… em, and there was a Scout Group from Kintore as well. And we do have some of the addresses for our partner group, Baracudas. It is quite hard to keep in touch with folk, but, what ye do, is like, when you’re there, ye make lots of swaps, and stuff that ye swap with all the other different things, and so ye get stuff from different countries, like ye get the different ‘neckies’ and stuff. I got my Swedish neckie which is my favourite neckie which I got from a little blonde-haired girl, who was like, gorgeous, and that’s probably like, my best thing that I took back from the camp, cos I love it. It’s all chewed and mangled and stuff but, I just thought their Swedish neckies were amazing … they’re beautiful colours, I thought ‘ohh!’ when I first saw one, I though ‘oh my goodness, I want it!’, it took me ages til I found someone who was willing to swap and it was this really disgusting one, but I didn’t care, cos it was just beautiful!