Duthil Parish.

 

 

Duthil is the name of the parish that includes Carrbridge, Aviemore & Boat of Garten, there is not a village called Duthil. This causes much confusion to those unfamiliar with the area. The former Duthil Parish Church is about half way along the road that runs between Carrbridge and Dulnan Bridge, there are a couple of houses nearby and this is marked as Duthil on OS Maps. This is misleading and many expect to find a village there. The old Parish Church is now the Clan Grant Heritage Centre.

​

For much of its existence the parish of Duthil has been merged with that of Rothiemurchus.  This makes the combined parish of Duthil & Rothiemurchus a rather odd spread out shape but with a considerable area, especially when its extension right up Glenmore to Cairngorm Mountain itself is taken into consideration. This can cause some confusion when searching and it is as well to run a search for the combined name as well as just for Duthil.

​

Just in case this is all too simple further complications arise when one looks at the old counties. As you will know, Scotland abolished parishes as administrative units in 1974 and were grouped into seven Regions. The part of Strathspey relevant to this site is firmly in the "Highland" Region.  

 

Notwithstanding this, when it comes to archive material, just about everything is filed by the old counties, many postal addresses still include county names but most of all, people still regard themselves as being from Moray or from Inverness-shire etc.

 

Prior to 1974 several counties met near Aviemore and over the years boundaries had changed as Governments tinkered in the way that they like to. The end result of this is that somewhere like Chapelton in a border area has at various times been in Inverness-shire, Elgin-shire and Moray though fortunately so far as I am aware, only one at a time!

 

As you can see the possibility of a record getting lost between the ever changing boundaries is considerable. Even when not being lost, this variability of what place is in which county can cause problems for search engines as seemingly conflicting data is recovered, which does not fit into their algorithms. in such circumstances search engines have a nasty habit of defaulting to saying no records could be found