Whitehills

30/08/2026

20/07/2026

Key beside harbour

17/07/2026

Scottish schools still close for two weeks every October. The reason has nothing to do with rest, and everything to do with a crop that used to need thousands of small hands to bring it in.

Starting in the 1930s, Scottish schools began releasing children in October specifically so they could help gather the potato harvest by hand, before mechanical harvesters existed. Farmers needed the extra labor badly enough that some children simply stopped showing up to class during harvest season regardless of whether the holiday had been officially granted.

The work was called "tattie howking" — digging potatoes, from the Scots verb "howk." Squads of children, often accompanied by their mothers, were collected by lorry or trailer at dawn, dropped in a field, and assigned a stretch of ground called a "bit" to clear as a tractor-drawn digger turned up the rows ahead of them. A good picker in the 1980s could gather up to two tonnes of potatoes in a single shift, earning around £10 for the day.

The money mattered. Families used tattie earnings to buy winter boots, coats, and Christmas provisions — for many households it was the difference between a hard winter and a slightly easier one. By the 1980s, mechanical harvesters capable of clearing 200 tonnes a day made hand-picking obsolete almost overnight. The children stopped going to the fields. The holiday, and its name, never left the calendar.

23/06/2026

Shambles

23/06/2026

Fine night in Whitehills