The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #170253 Message #4117016
Posted By: Chris Wright
18-Aug-21 - 07:44 PM
Thread Name: Origins: The Bonnie Woods o Hatton/Hatton Woods
Subject: Origins: The Bonnie Woods o Hatton
The origin of this song (Roud 5531) is fairly well established as a late-19th century broadside ballad from the Dundee Poet's Box, but there's often confusion about the placenames given in the song, obscuring its setting.
I recently had cause to pin down the locations mentioned however and thought it'd be worth identifying them here for posterity.
Verse 4 of the broadside reads:
There's Cadum and there's Cadum Mills and Luther Mills likewise There woods and waters many more pleasant to mine eyes, But the bonnie woods O' Hatton, they a' grow green in May, It was there about the lassie lived that stole my heart away.
At the time the broadside was printed, all the locations were to be found within a square kilometre centred on decimal degrees 56.80 -2.54, which was in historic Kincardineshire, but is now southern Aberdeenshire. The song is set near modern Luthermuir, just north of the border with Angus (see 1900 OS map here).