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Taught/practised on:
SCHIEHALLION
(S64+R64) Sq.Set
Hugh Thurston
Strathspey: -
1-16
All dance Chorus: - Grand Chain ½ way, set HS, Grand Chain ½ way &
set HS & Men end BtoB in the middle facing partners
17-24
Men set (rocking step) as Ladies petronella turn & set, petronella
turn & set to move ½ way round set
25-32
Ladies change places RH with opposite Man, Ladies dance LH across
½ way & turn partners RH
33-48
Repeat bars 1-16 (Chorus)
49-56
All dance RH across ½ way (Men on outside), all change places with
partners advancing 1 place & change places again advancing 1 more
place
57-64
All repeat bars 49-56 back to places
Reel: -
1-16
All dance Chorus: - Grand Chain ½ way, turn partner R arms twice,
Grand Chain ½ way & turn other partner 2H twice
17-32
1s+3s set advancing, turn opposite dancer & circle 4H round to left,
2s+4s repeat
33-48
Repeat bars 1-16 (Chorus)
49-64
All dance Schiehallion Reels of 8 (Men start by crossing to the right,
Ladies cast & cross (following partner))
Hugh Ansfrid Thurston cared passionately about dancing from many cultures, was extremely interested in the
history of dance, taught and demonstrated with perfect clarity, and insisted on precise phrasing.
An Englishman (born 1922), during the war he worked as a cryptographer deciphering the messages of the Italian
navy and later the Japanese armed forces. Meeting Hugh Foss, a lead codebreaker at Bletchley Park, sparked his
interest in Scottish dancing and they remained life-long friends. He took his PhD at Cambridge and lived for some
years in Bristol before moving to Boston in 1956 and then Vancouver in 1958, where he was a Professor of
Mathematics, and eventually died in 2006.
He had great interest in tradition and often verbally crossed swords with Miss Milligan and the RSCDS over dances
which they ‘revised’. He only had one dance published by the RSCDS, “The Last of the Lairds” and the RSCDS
chose to alter the ending. He certainly would not have agreed with the Committee that ‘the ending shown above
is more satisfactory’ as the note in Book 22 says.
About Schiehallion he said:
The idea was to create a new reel. The Scottish reel has a very definite structure - a verse-and-chorus
pattern. There did seem to be a place for a reel with a definite chorus and a choice of figures (rather
than setting steps) for the verses.
And this is the way Schiehallion was first presented: the chorus as we know it (half a grand chain and Highland
schottische, and repeat) and a repertoire of a dozen or so figures for the dancers to choose from. It turned out,
however, that dancers did not want to choose their own figures, but preferred to be told what to do. So, Hugh
writes:
I therefore noted the four figures that seemed most popular (two strathspey and two reel seemed to
give the dance about the right length), put them in what seemed a good order, and began to teach (and
eventually publish) the dance in this form.
The name “Schiehallion” must have been inspired by the beautiful symmetry of the mountain and perhaps also
its association with the history of science. Dr. Nevil Maskelyne, 18
th
C Astronomer Royal, attempted to calculate
the mass of the earth by determining the mass of Schiehallion itself and observing the degree to which it caused
a pendulum to deflect. Such experiments would have appealed to Hugh Thurston’s mathematical mind.
The term “Schiehallion” is now best known to dancers as applied to the “Schiehallion reels” which end the
dance. Hugh preferred to call this figure a “reel of eight”, and stressed that it was not really his original figure,
but essentially the same as the reels in the traditional Axum Reel.