Black & white photograph of Neil MacLaine and his wife Catherine MacFadyen in their Highland finery. The ‘Bard’, as Neil MacLaine was familiarly known, was at the forefront of the Celtic movement in Glasgow from the late 1890s until his death in 1925.

Courtesy of Mrs Mairi Campbell

The Bard had a gift for telling humerous Gaelic stories and reciting his own compositions. He regularly attended meetings of the Clan MacLean, Tiree Association and Ceilidh nan Gaidheal and was a vice-president in each of these societies.

Born in Caoles in 1851, he went to Glasgow at an early age to become apprenticed to the joinery trade. Apart from four years spent in the Kimberley Diamond Fields in South Africa, he remained in the city until his death in 1919.