A man who has captured more than 600 hours of video footage featuring north-east traditions of days gone by claims it is the world’s largest community collection.
All of Don Carney’s films are in his “first language,” Doric, and show how people in the area lived from the early to the mid-1900s, doing everything from making butter to ploughing the fields with horses.
Clips are available to every school child in Scotland, and his films are sold in 14 countries.
Mr Carney, of Whinndale, Leylodge, near Kintore, said: “About 25 years ago it suddenly dawned on me that my ancestors were fantastic folk. I went to the library to see what had been written about them.
“There was about a paragraph, and just one sentence in Doric.
“I thought it was shocking that a whole group of society had just been wiped off the historical record.”
Mr Carney, a former hospitality and tourism lecturer at Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, hired a video camera and set about filming local people who had lived during the early to mid-1900s.
His first video, Fae Ploo T’ Plate, was the third top-selling in the north-east, behind Star Trek and Daniel O’Donnell, when it was released in 1994.
He has now recorded more than 600 hours of footage, which his research suggests is the “world’s largest collection of any community”, and is currently uploading it on to a searchable digital archive.
“Today when we see film of the past and photos from the likes of the Washington Wilson collection we marvel at the contents. The material is seen as significant.
“The people who made that film were people who did it for the social benefit of future generations and funded everything themselves also.
“As a social entrepreneur I find today’s business profit-driven culture is not willing to help fund projects like mine, because there is no money in it for them.
“I can’t do this all myself. I am looking for a philanthropist to say ‘Don Carney, I think you have done a fantastic job, what do you want?’
“People could give Learning and Teaching Scotland the cheque, which would buy the materials from me.
“But irrespective of whether I get funding or not I am still going to chav on and do it myself,” he added.