Celebrating Annie Shirer Collector's Legacy

Annie Shirer was a prolific collector of Scots lyrics, contributing significantly to the Rymour Club and the Greig-Duncan Collection, enriching our cultural heritage with her remarkable work.

A Remarkable Cultural Contributor

Preserving Scottish Literary Heritage

Her dedication to collecting Doric songs helped document and celebrate the rich tapestry of Scottish culture through her invaluable contributions to the arts.

ABOUT ANNIE SHIRER FROM VARIOUS SOURCES

RYMOUR CLUB VOL 3 - Inception and history of the Rymour Club
P197 Among the corresponding members elected at the opening of the 1910-1 session were the Duchess of Sutherland, who sent, as her first contribution, a voluminous collection of games and rhymes gathered from the schoolchildren of Helmsdale; and of still more significance for the work of the Club, Miss Annie Shirer of Mintlaw, the dweller in a “but-and-ben” cottage in Buchan, whose extraordinarily rich and varied collection of folklore, gleaned by herself, came afterwards with almost monthly regularity. Nothing was greeted with greater interest or afforded better pickings than the “budgets” of the “Marchioness of Mintlaw”.
P201 “Waefu’ news” came early in the year of the death of the Club’s most copious contributor, Annie Shirer of Mintlaw, of whom it is truly stated in the Minutes that during the eight years she had been a corresponding member she had sent “the largest and most varied collection of folklore, songs, and stories ever collected in this or any other period by any young Scotswoman”.

Scottish Life and Society Vol 10, Oral Literature and Performance Culture
Ian A Olsen, p400 "Greig and Duncan made maximum use of such ‘star’ resources as Bell Robertson or Annie Shirer."

Buchan Land Of Plenty by Robert Smith
Chapter Seven is about The Causeways Of Kininmonth and Loch Cottage where Annie Iived.
The Muckle and Little Causeways were built and paved over old tracks ‘by’ the Comyn Earls of Buchan to carry travellers inland to Buchan across the boggy acres of swamp and moss between Crimond and Old Deer, from the Comyn port at Rattray. The line passed ‘the gloomy loch’ of Kininmonth, but when Smith walked the path in the 1990s he said this.
‘The farms on the road to Crimond had names that were reminders of the old Causeway – Corsend and Corse Farm – and further on others seemed to point the way to the Loch of Kininmonth. Lochills was on my left, Loch Croft and Loch Cottage on my right, but there was no sign of the Loch itself.’
Smith learned from Bill Allan of Corse Farm that rushes from the loch had been harvested ‘to make thatch for thackit hoosies, but at the end of the last war a ditch was dug by POWs and the loch was drained’.

ANNIE SHIRER (1887-1915)
One doughty but little remembered champion of Doric language and tradition was Miss Annie Shirer of Kininmonth, who collected several hundred traditional rhymes and songs of the Mintlaw area, sharing 260 of them with collector Gavin Greig who dubbed her ‘a Kininmonth lassie’ when publishing her contributions in the ‘Buchan Observer’. She shared 130 more rhymes and riddles with the Rymour Club of Edinburgh, who published them 120 years ago as ‘Rhymes From Mintlaw District’, saying they were selecting only some of her ‘large and remarkable collection’. Annie died aged 38 in 1915, and her great treasury of Doric language and culture was lost in ‘two family clearouts’.