The Burn o' Vat

Amazing Giant's Kettle formation in Aberdeenshire

I hope you enjoyed your celebrations of the holidays and the turn of the year these past few weeks!

We’re about to wrap up our fourth music & walking tour to Scotland — links to the starting article for each tour are available in the last post of 2024 in case you’d like to review the stories, photos and music from our journeys to the Highlands and Skye, to the Borders and Burns territory, to the Outer Hebrides, and now to the northern mainland and islands.

You’ll recall that, sometimes in Huntly, sometimes in Findhorn, we got to hear from the great northeast Scottish fiddler Douglas Lawrence and talked about that unique style of music.

One time, we got to watch Lawrence judge a fiddle competition at a local Highland Games. There were not too many competitors that day, and most of them were connected in some way to another fine northeast fiddler, Paul Anderson, who was helping out with the event. It was interesting to hear the players, and there was a good crowd of interested listeners. One of them was Robbie Shepherd, the great radio presenter of Scottish dance music on BBC, who has since passed away. Next week, I’ll share a profile of Shepherd that I wrote for Scottish Life magazine. His radio shows inspired many throughout Scotland for a generation.

Highland Games are a little different in Scotland than in the U.S., where there is a great deal of emphasis on clans and heritage. In Scotland, the heritage was all around us, so there was much less emphasis on it. Some of the Games there even have quite a sense of humor. I remember one announcer at a Games cracking jokes at every turn as he gave a play-by-play of the races and athletic feats. I always recall the moment when he spoke of the amazing strength of one competitor, who, he said, could “crack walnuts with his eyelids”!

One Games we attended was near Aboyne, after which, Dorothy took us for a beautiful walk in the nearby Muir of Dinnet Nature Preserve. Our goal was to view an incredible geological feature of the area, called the Burn o’ Vat, where a small stream (a burn, in Scots) flows through what some call a “Giant’s Kettle,” or a Vat.

A Giant’s Kettle is a huge rock pothole that was formed some 14,000 years ago as the glaciers of the last Ice Age melted, and boulders and gravel swirled and spiraled around each other, over the centuries carving out a hole in the bedrock around and under a large boulder caught in the path of the meltwater. Several of these can be found in northern Europe and in America.

Once the pothole was formed and the glaciers receded, the flow of the rivers would deposit sediment and partially fill the pothole.

In the case of the Burn o’ Vat, the sediment is estimated to be about 20 feet deep beneath a rounded out rock structure about 50 feet in diameter and some 40 feet high.

We had to pass through a narrow passageway in a natural arch, stepping on stones to follow the small brown stream until the Vat opened up and we could explore the remarkable structure.

Our last musical stop will be about a half hour from the Burn o’ Vat, in Strathdon. “Strath” means valley in Scots, so Strathspey is the valley of the River Spey, and Strathclyde the valley of the River Clyde. Strathdon is the valley of the River Don, but it’s also the name of a village in that valley. The River Don is one of the rivers that flow to the ocean at Aberdeen.

But before our visit to the amazing and historic home of Jonny Hardie, the founder of the great northeast traditional band, Old Blind Dogs, we’ll learn a bit about the long-time hosts of BBC’s radio program, Take the Floor. He also was a well-known advocate for the Scots language.