He started life among “The Rolling Hills of the Borders”, in the words of the late great Glasgow folk singer Matt McGinn.
But home for Dougie Scott now could not be more different – a stone’s throw from the sea at Carsethorn and its popular pub, the Steamboat Inn.
It’s an idyllic spot for the 73-year-old former agricultural engineer and tanker driver to spend his autumn years with wife Maureen, and a handful of grandchildren never far away.
One common thread – farming, farm machinery and farm vehicles – has run through his life, he recalls in the couple’s spacious upstairs flat, which boasts a view over the Nith estuary to Dumfriesshire that has inspired many a watercolour.
“I was born in 1950 in the Western General in Edinburgh, and my folks were farming folks,” he tells me.
“We were at Hallmanor near Peebles, a hill farm rented off a fellow called Ballantyne, who I think was one of the Ballantyne’s whisky lot.
“It was just a sheep farm with no main steading, just the faulds and dippers on the hill.
“It was a typical hill place and I went to Manor School for a year. It’s not there now and long gone. We left Hallmanor in 1955.”
Scott is one of the famous Borders names – and it turns out Dougie is the product of a once dangerous union.
“My dad Ed – his proper name was Elliot Scott but was always called Ed – married Margaret Elliot,” Dougie chuckles.
“Going back to the Border Reivers times it was frowned upon for an Elliot to marry a Scott because of all the battles they had – unless it was against the Armstrongs or Johnstons, when they’s join forces!”
“My mother’s father, David Elliot, built the war memorial at Spion Kop in South Africa for the British soldiers killed there in the Boer War.”
Across the Solway, somewhere behind the historic Burnswark hill on the skyline lies Waterbeck, to where Dougie and his family moved next.
“When they gave up the Hallmanor tenancy, my parents bought Albiehill,” he said.
“We were a mixed farm – a bit of dairy, beef and sheep and quite a lot of hens.
“We had deep litter sheds which produced eggs we would sell on to Fairbairns for hatching.
The eggs had to be dry washed – they could not be allowed to get wet because that interfered with the hatching process somehow.
“That was my job if I was caught doing nothing – cleaning the eggs with a wee block of wood attached to a sponge with an abrasive bit on it.”
“The eggs also had to be a certain weight and I would scrub them in the porch on a big kitchen table with a white painted top, rubber stamp them and pack them in trays in wee slatted fruit boxes.
“We had Ayrshire cows, a few beef cattle and Cheviot and Border Leicester sheep.
“And if the weather had been bad and then a good spell came I’d be kept off school for a couple of days to help with the hay.
“I would drive the tractor with my father sitting on the reaper behind.
“When you got to the end of the swathe he would simultaneously push the pedal and pull the lever which would lift the cutter so you could turn, then go back into the swathe.
“A lot of these drag reapers had been converted from being horse drawn to tractor drawn.
“I did rolling and harrowing as well when 1 was 10 or 11 years old.”
The self-sufficiency and low inputs of 1960 were a far cry from the general trend today of bigger and bigger units, machines and silage clamps, I suggest.
“Well,” says Dougie,” back then we grew turnips and kale and if we has cereals it was usually oats we would grow. That would get mixed in with other stuff and fed to the coos.
“The oats would be up in the loft in bags, which would be emptied into a hopper on the bruiser.
“That was belt driven with an electric motor and two rollers, and you would set the tension on those to break down and soften the oats to the size you wanted.
“That was to make it digestible for the coos otherwise it would go right through them.
“Some of the oats we fed to our free range hens as well.”
Was there ever an egg surplus at Albiehill, I ask Dougie.
“Aye, my mother would sell a few to the grocer Joseph Maxwell from Lockerbie,” he smiles.
“He had a van which came round every Thursday.
“Fawcett’s the butchers would come on a Friday and I would go in the van with him.
“My job was to open farm gates at the road-end and he would pick me up when he came back down again.
“My pay was a packet of Smith’s crisps – I would only be eight or nine.”
After Hottsbridge Primary School, Dougie recalls, he attended Lockerbie Academy.
“I hated it with an absolute passion,” he chuckles.
“And there’s nothing more to be said about that.
“But when I was 14 they came round recruiting for the Barony Agricultural College at Parkgate.
“And I thought ‘that’s for me!’
“It was everything that I liked – you were doing practical farming as well as machinery.
“And I was keen to learn about machinery.
“So I only did two years at Lockerbie and went to the Barony in the summer of 1964 for a two-year residential course.
“You did get maths and English and geography – that was farming-related on the import and export of farm produce.
“The course was half practical and half in the classroom – for science you’d be going round farms taking soil samples testing for things like alkalinity.
“You got a general education as you would in a normal school but with a strong agricultural bias.
“On the farm, you’d work in rotation, one week calves, one week dairy, one week pigs.
“You’d start the milking at 5am – the Barony had its own farm dairy.
“I sat exams for my stage one City and Guilds in animal husbandry and crop husbandry and passed them all.
“But my favourite place was the agricultural machinery workshop, where I got on very well with Bob Stewart, the agricultural engineering lecturer.
“He really knew the ropes – I would spend evenings in the workshop as well doing up old ploughs and farm implements.
“You learned everything about all the different parts of machinery and how they worked.”
Dougie’s enthusiasm for engineering, he tells me, stood him in good stead when he left the Barony aged 16.
“Bob would recommend students to companies who were looking for apprentices,” he recalls.
“I went for an interview at Tweedie’s agricultural engineers at Dumfries and got the apprenticeship.
“They had a huge frontage along the Whitesands but moved to Rosefield Mills in 1967, but kept the petrol station at the ‘Sands.
“I started in 1966 just before Dumfries Show – tractors were all polished up and their tyres blackened ready for display.
“I was 11 years at Tweedie’s and left to be the estate engineer at Arbigland, at Kirkbean.
“By then Maureen Stitt from Airdrie Farm, Kirkbean, was my fiancee and I thought it would be a good move because a house went with it and it was better money – I was on a grieve’s [farm manager] wages, not a farm worker’s.
“There was a lot of machinery on the estate – which was 2,000 acres – two combines, maybe 10 tractors plus various cars and vans.
“But I got made redundant one year, 1978 or 1979, due to a change in EEC farming policy.
“They were giving out huge grants to reduce dairy production because there was an over supply of milk.
“Arbigland had two dairies, at Nethermill and Tallowquhairn, and 600 or 700 cows.
“They were all sent to be slaughtered, the estate got the golden handshake and nine folk were made redundant – four dairymen, four tractormen and myself.
“Everybody got jobs though – there was work to be had in those days.
“The dairymen had big families so that was a lot of children away.”
Dougie’s skills, he recollects, meant he had a choice of jobs but when Tweedie’s approached him he decided to return.
“I got a phone call from Harold Tweedie who’d heard a rumour I’d been made redundant.
“‘I’d like to come and see you,’ he says,‘tonight!’ He came down and it was agreed that I would go back.
“I had been offered other jobs as well so I took the easy road and went back to where I had been – but on better terms.
“Maureen and I had the house at Arbigland for as long as we needed it and moved to Carsethorn in November 1979.”
Going round the farms to repair or maintain assorted farm vehicles and machinery, Dougie noticed differences in their condition – depending who was in charge of them.
“I found that if you had two tractors on a farm, the stockman’s was there because it had to be there but the proper tractorman’s was properly appreciated,” he smiles.
“It used to be that the tractormen would come out on Saturday morning and wash their tractors and do maintenance, exactly the same as the ploo’men did with the horses.
“That tradition carried on for years even after mechanisation – it was the same routine at the Barony, every Saturday morning – clean the air filters, pressure wash the tractor, give it a good polish, check the oils and top them up if required.
“Woe betide anybody that bashed one of the tractors – you would get a right slagging!”
Taking Tweedie’s agricultural plant to local shows was also a big fixture, Dougie recalls.
“One of your jobs was to drive the combine from Dumfries to Stewartry Show the evening before.
“In those days it was held at Kirkcudbright then it moved to Castle Douglas, to the Market Field, next to where Tesco is now.
“You’d bring the combine or tractor home back the next day – Tweedie’s were the main local agents for Massey Ferguson then.
“Then I did my stage two City and Guilds with Tweedie’s over three years, with day releases at the Barony and the George Street technical college.
“Three of us got picked through our work to go to Elmwood College at Cupar in Fife, where you specialised in welding, fabrication, and building diesel engines.”
While at Tweedie’s, Dougie tells me, he became more involved with Guid Nychburris, sometimes entering floats in the parade and symbolically erecting the town gates, which in centuries past would be opened to the King of Scots’ messenger at arms when the royal entourage arrived at the burgh.
“I did that job for 26 years,” Dougie says.
“I drive the Queen of the South and her attendants around these days – a much easier job!
“We go round the primary schools, the old folks homes and DGRI then have an afternoon tea at the Cairndale for the auld yins, attended by the queen.
“We also built a rally car out of a Daihatsu four-track which Harold drove in the national section at the Scottish Rally.
“It had a 2.8 litre diesel engine and a turbo the size of a bucket.
“It was more for fun and advertising, but he took it seriously.
“It was annual holiday for us – I got time off work and got paid for going!”
Dougie was 39 years at Tweedie’s until its closure in 2005, after which he got an HGV class licence and drove tankers and low-loaders, with long-distance loads including cream, milk, soya milk and giant silos.
One trip to Llandyrnog creamery at Denbigh, north Wales, sticks in Dougie’s mind.
“I was to take milk down from Lockerbie and fetch cream back up,” he recalls.
“I had parked up overnight and went to the pub for a pint.
“I went in the front door and the barman noticed I had a Rangers FC polo shirt on.
“‘You’re in the wrong bar,’ he said and when I went into the other one here’s all this Rangers memorabilia and football shirts on the walls.
“And that’s when I learned that a lot of families from Wigtownshire had come to Wales when Sorbie and Bladnoch creameries shut years before.
“They were always pleased to see somebody from the south-west coming down.
“I didn’t know all those folk were down there.”
Dougie and Maureen have a son and daughter, David and Angie, and these days enjoy life by the sea with their two dogs and a handful of grandchildren.
“We take her to pony club every Wednesday night at Garroch Loaning near the hospital and all the ride-oots for Guid Nychburris round Tinwald, Lochfoot and Dumfries. Lexi loves that.
“I used to be travelling steward and would take the trailer round.
“And if a horse lost a shoe or was seriously misbehaving I would take it back to its horse-box.”
