30th November 2023:

We had a lovely convivial afternoon to celebrate St Andrew’s Day with accordionist, Charlie Todd (Thankerton), & fiddler, Judith Linton (Muirkirk), to give us a flavour of Scottish Dance Music and to explain why it used to be so popular on the radio for many years after WW2.

Charlie is also one of the dance teachers at the weekly Thankerton Ceilidh Dance Class held in the Village Hall on Tuesday evenings 7 - 8.30pm. They presently have 35 dances in their repertoire and we all enjoyed a number of dance demonstrations from members of the class.

Ceilidh dancing is more straightforward than Scottish Country Dancing, which concentrates solely on reels, jigs and strathspeys, and for many years there was a close link between Scottish Country Dancing and the P.E. Department in most Scottish schools through the co-founder of the Royal Scottish Country Dance Society (R.S.C.D.S.) Miss Jean Milligan (1886-1978) a P.E. Instructor at Jordanhill Teacher Training College in Glasgow. Incidentally Miss Milligan stayed locally in the village of Coulter for a couple of years and 'Country Dancing' is a corruption of 'Contra Dancing' since it originated in the style of French Court dancing in the days of The Auld Alliance i.e. you stood opposite your partner.

Conversely ceilidh dancing encompasses a wide variety of musical tempos (4/4, 6/8 & 2/4 marches, 2-steps, polkas, schottisches ad well as reels & jigs) and includes many couple dances, a variety of figure waltzes and a small selection of reels and jigs (drawn from the vast R.S.C.D.S. repertoire).