Thanks for the link to this thread Rory,

As posted on another thread, I did my own research on this back in
2017 and published it on my folk blog.

An issue in the thread above that I would like to discuss is the statement that the 'Braes of Balquidder' tune, found in the Scotish Minstrel, 1821 and also The Songs of Scotland, 1854 'bears no resemblance' / 'is nothing like' the tune McPeake recorded Wild Mountain Thyme to.

As a songwriter, who spends many hours in Irish sessions, and also a piano player and composer, when I hear the Braes of Balquidder, I hear the bones of the McPeake melody. I don't have a degree in muso-etymology, so can't describe the process in the right terms, but I know what happens when you swap a dominant note for a 7th or a minor variation in a melody. Or when you switch the melody to a minor key, or make variations in the phrasing/time-signature.

When writing new melodies for my songs, I know I grab familiar note progressions from my mental library of tunes, and will often make slight modifications which, to the casual listener, could pass for a new song.

So when people above say they are still searching for the 'smoking gun' tune published before McPeake recorded his version, I am completely satisfied that the Braes of Balquidder tune is that gun.

If you get 5 folk singers to teach each other a tune and pass it on to the next person 4 years later, without writing it down, or listening to the original again. I am very confident that you would get a tune like McPeake's.

The other messy/difficult factor here is that there is real financial motivation for certain parties to want a particular variation of the truth to be the publicly accepted situation.