Introduction

This notebook, 12 cm x 18 cm, with 68 pages completed, entitled 'Notes of conversations about the Old Rock'. ('The Old Rock' is a local phrase often used to describe Shetland.)

The author of the notes was Thomas Mathewson, a native of the island of Yell in Shetland who later became an episcopal church minister, first in Yell and later in Aberdeenshire. He seems to have prepared the notes around 1889-90.

The notes are about local antiquarian matters. They comprise anecdotes about local people and families, and archaeological matters, mainly about Yell, sometimes with a genealogical tinge. The notebook is an important corpus of inforfmation about local antiquarian matters not otherwise dealt with in documents. There is a strong oral tinge to the collections - something that was becoming popular among antiquarians in Shetland in the late nineteenth century.

Contents
This volume cover a short time period of around 1889-1890 and is only 68 pages long. The contents do not really follow a set pattern so we have not provided a table of contents. The best way to look at this therefore, is just to start at page 1 and then page through the whole volume. Please note that these images are large (between 150k and 220k) and could take some considerable time to download depending on the speed of your Internet connection. If printing any of these pages, please adjust your printer setup to 'landscape' rather than 'portrait' format to ensure that the entire image is printed.