Cameron of Errach
You heard me. Plaid telephone poles.
Cameron
Near Yamba, where we are currently staying, is a town called MacLean. It has been decided that to put the town on the map they should focus on their Scottish roots. I really would like to have been at the town meeting where the idea to paint the telephone poles in different tartan plaids was first presented. I can imagine the response, “Have another beer, Bruce!”
It turned out to be quite a tourist attractor. Many people, like ourselves, have at least a few Scots in our ancestry and will leap at the chance to search the town for their own personal tartan.
As we slowly drove the streets, I called out the names written on each pole, my accent taking on more and more of a (bad) Scottish brogue as we went. McPherson,
Ross
Stuart, McConical, the names just roll off the tongue. It is hard not to roll your rrrrs.
Yes, I found many of the tartans from our dim, distant
MacDonald
past. Even if I did have to backtrack several times to locate the correct ones.
Oh, and another interesting Scottish tradition in MacLean is that many of the men actually wear kilts! They do, I saw them! Because of Aussie heat, the design has been modified somewhat. They are not “full nine yards” but are
lighter and shorter than the traditional. In fact, the first one I saw I thought was a pair of roomy plaid boxers. I never got close enough to find out if they follow other kilt traditions.
Di Wanderer 