De Tha Dol
De Tha Dol — styled Dè tha dol?, a Scottish Gaelic question asking what is going on — is a monthly community newspaper serving the West Highland Peninsulas of Scotland: Ardnamurchan, Moidart, Morvern, Ardgour and Sunart, in the Lochaber area of the Highlands. Founded in 1981 and based around Acharacle, it has provided these scattered, remote communities with news, views, local history, features and what's-on information for more than forty years. It is stocked in shops and community venues across the peninsulas and reaches readers far beyond them through an annual subscription posted to subscribers across the United Kingdom and overseas.
A newspaper for five peninsulas
The West Highland Peninsulas are not a single town but a constellation of small villages and crofting townships spread between sea lochs, in the far west of the Highland mainland. The area the paper serves takes in Ardnamurchan — a peninsula of about fifty square miles noted for its remoteness and rural nature, whose main access route is a single-track road for much of its length, and which contains Corrachadh Mòr, the most westerly point of mainland Great Britain, near the 36-metre Ardnamurchan Lighthouse at Ardnamurchan Point — together with the neighbouring districts of Sunart, Ardgour, Morvern and Moidart, arranged around lochs such as Loch Sunart, Loch Shiel and Loch Linnhe.
In such a landscape there is no single centre. Acharacle, at the head of Loch Shiel, is one of the area's main villages, with a shop, post office and hotel serving a wide hinterland, but the paper's readers live in dozens of small settlements — places such as Strontian, Salen, Kilchoan, Glenuig, Lochaline and Ardgour — separated by long single-track journeys. A monthly newspaper is one of the few institutions that treats all five peninsulas as one community, which is why listings for the paper describe it simply as a paper for Moidart, Ardnamurchan and Morvern with the community's news, views and what's on.
Founding in 1981
Dè tha dol? was founded in 1981. The official visitor and community site for the West Highland Peninsulas records that, for over forty years since then, the paper has been providing the communities of the peninsulas with news, views, what's-on information, features, columns and more about the local area. Its survival from the early 1980s to the present day — through the depopulation pressures, service changes and digital transformation that have reshaped Highland life in those decades — makes it one of the enduring institutions of the area.
The paper's early life is visible in the local historical record. A collection of songs and poems from Moidart preserved by the Moidart Local History Group cites material from Dè tha dol? numbers 30 and 31, dated July and August 1983 — an issue numbering consistent with a monthly paper founded in 1981. Among the items reproduced was a song to Morvern composed in Australia by Donnachadh Mac a'Phearsain, an emigrant who never returned. That a community paper in its third year was publishing the verse of the Highland diaspora says much about its role: it carried the voices of a community that emigration had scattered across the world back into the townships they had left.
Content: news, history, features and listings
The peninsulas' own description of the paper sets out its contents: community news and updates, local history, features, and listings of local food and drink, businesses and services, together with what's-on information. In practice that means the paper functions simultaneously as a news bulletin, a local history magazine, a directory and an events diary for an area where such information cannot be gathered from any single other source.
The local history element is more than decoration. The peninsulas carry a dense and sometimes painful history — the Jacobite rising of 1745, which began nearby at Glenfinnan; the Clearances, during which townships such as Buarblaig in Ardnamurchan were cleared in 1828 and their people evicted or moved onto small crofts in new townships such as Sanna and Portuairk; and the service of local people in two world wars, commemorated on the area's war memorials. A community newspaper that publishes local history month by month helps keep that record in circulation among the people who live in the landscape where it happened.
Editing and production
The paper is edited by Nic Goddard, who is listed as its editor and contact on the West Highland Peninsulas site. Like most long-lived community newspapers in rural Scotland, De Tha Dol depends on contributions from the communities it serves — the news, views, columns and features it carries are supplied by and written for the people of the five peninsulas. Its monthly rhythm suits an area where the news that matters most is often announced in advance — ceilidhs, sales, meetings, church and school events, ferry and service changes — as much as reported after the fact.
Distribution: stockists and subscription
Dè tha dol? is available in stockists across the area — shops, community centres and other outlets throughout the peninsulas — and by annual subscription, delivered to the subscriber's home and posted out to subscribers across the United Kingdom and beyond. The peninsulas site describes the paper as beloved by locals and visitors alike, and as a great read for anyone local, visiting, or with an interest in or affection for the area.
The subscription readership is significant. The West Highlands have a large diaspora and a large population of former visitors and second-home owners with lasting attachments to the area, and a monthly paper posted out of Acharacle is a way of maintaining those connections. The emigrant song published in 1983 and the worldwide subscription list of the present day are two ends of the same relationship between the peninsulas and the people who have left them.
Accessibility through the talking newspaper
The paper's reach extends to listeners as well as readers. Talk Lochaber, a registered charity providing a talking newspaper for visually and reading-impaired people in the Lochaber area, prepares its weekly recorded broadcast from articles drawn from local publications — the Lochaber Times, Lochaber Life, West Word and De Tha Dol. The service, which began in 1999 and recorded its 1,000th edition in February 2022, relies on volunteers who prepare, record and distribute the broadcast from their homes. The inclusion of De Tha Dol in that selection means the peninsulas' community news reaches residents who cannot read print, in the company of the area's other established local titles.
Digital and visitor presence
The paper maintains its public presence through the West Highland Peninsulas website, the official site promoting the area to visitors and serving its communities, where Dè tha dol? has its own listing with its editor's contact details, its subscription and stockist information, and a description of its contents. In an area visited by large numbers of tourists travelling to Ardnamurchan Point, the Small Isles ferries and the Glenfinnan monument, the listing presents the community newspaper as part of the area's living culture — something visitors are invited to pick up in a local shop as a way into the real life of the peninsulas, rather than only their scenery.
Significance
Community newspapers survive where they perform a function nothing else performs. In the West Highland Peninsulas, distance performs that argument by itself: no daily or weekly paper published from Fort William or further afield can carry the township-level news, the local history, the business listings and the what's-on diary of five separate peninsulas in the detail their residents need. De Tha Dol has performed that function monthly since 1981, in a Gaelic-titled paper whose very name asks the question every community newspaper exists to answer — what is going on? More than forty years after its founding, stocked in the area's shops and posted to subscribers around the world, it remains the written conversation of one of the most remote communities on the British mainland.
