Over an eighteen-month period up to the end of 2019, around 50 people who had origins and strong living connections with one Renfrewshire village were interviewed. Together with other sources, Listen Closely: an oral history of Kilbarchan 1900 – 2000 is the result.

Like many towns and villages Kilbarchan had a tradition as a centre of an independent weaving industry and this has been kept alive right up to the present day with an active Weaver’s Cottage museum.

People’s reminiscences about work in the twentieth century are a precious record, notably farming practices but also the drift from country to town and city as the modern world, for better or worse, is shaped.

Not only the worlds of work and trade but leisure, family life, community values, religion and belief are recounted as well as the watersheds of war and upheaval in shared memory.

Colin Campbell and Christine MacLeod have patiently listened, recorded and processed the words of their contacts into an engaging and readable history – the story that forms modern life and makes a village and a nation what we are in the present and the future to come.

Colin Campbell is a former Glasgow comprehensive headteacher. He sat as an MSP 1999-2003. He is the author of The 51st (Highland) Division in the Great War and co-author of Can’t Shoot a Man With a Cold, an appreciation of the life and work of First World War poet, Alan Mackintosh.

Christine MacLeod grew up in Kilbarchan. She is a former worker in Social Services, a former handloom weaver and manager at Weaver’s Cottage, Kilbarchan.