The Deeside Field Club was established in 1920 with the primary purpose of visiting local sites of importance and interest. Its aims included the study of Topography, Geology, Natural History, Archaeology, Folklore History and Literature for all of Deeside in particular, as well as the North East of Scotland, in general.  Like AGS, the DFC ran a winter programme of talks and field excursions were organised in the summer months.

Sadly, the Deeside Field Club was dissolved in 2004 but during its 84 years, it published some 20 volumes of the Deeside Field, each containing some 30 to 40 articles covering a wide range of subject matters on the topics just mentioned.  These volumes of the Deeside Field were in danger of becoming “unturned pages of the past” and a forgotten history. It would have been a great shame if the authoritative, quality content was lost forever.

AGS have been instrumental in collecting all 20 of the Deeside Field volumes, having their 645 articles digitised and made available on this website. We are very grateful for the grant / financial support provided by the Strathmartine Trust of St Andrews who contributed towards the costs of digitisation.

Each Deeside Field article is now kept for posterity as a digital file stored on our OneDrive / SharePoint archive. We staggered the release of the 20 volume folders over 9 months with the final volumes being released in September.

Click this link to read a note by Alan Homes, AGS President, regarding the Deeside Field Club.

Background Info regarding Deeside Field Club and their publications

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The Deeside Field

Volume 1 of first appeared in 1922 with 7 more volumes being published to 1937. No volumes were produced during WWII or in the immediate post war period. 

From 1953, twelve further volumes were produced right up to 1988 when the final volume 20 appeared.  All 20 volumes are accessible on our SharePoint archive . The folders from 1920 to 1988 comprise 645 articles, each stored as a pdf file.

We hope readers enjoy exploring all of these folders containing such a wide variety of learned papers, stories, poems, local history and characters.

Note that files are arranged in alphabetical order within the archive; the file name is taken from the title of each article. Thus each of the Table of Contents also lists the articles in alphabetical order and is consequently different from the order of the articles as they appeared in the original, published volume. 

To access the current catalogue of DF articles, select a Year volume by hovering your pointer over, then clicking on, the relevant button towards the foot of this page. You will then see all files contained in the selected year’s folder. Click on the file icon to download the article’s pdf file for viewing or printing, if required. 

Deeside Field Contents

Click on a Table of Contents link below to see the list of articles for that year:

Deeside Field 1922 ToC

Deeside Field 1925 ToC

Deeside Field 1927 ToC

Deeside Field 1929 ToC

Deeside Field 1931 ToC

Deeside Field 1933 ToC

Deeside Field 1935 ToC

Deeside Field 1937 ToC

Deeside Field 1953 ToC

Deeside Field 1957 ToC

Deeside Field 1959 ToC

Click on a link below to select either the 1962 folder or 1966 folder Table of Contents list:
Deeside Field 1962 ToC
Deeside Field 1966 ToC

Here are the links to the 70, 74 and 78 folders’ ToCs.
Deeside Field 1970 ToC
Deeside Field 1974 ToC
Deeside Field 1978 ToC

ToCs for the 1980’s volumes.
Deeside Field 1981 ToC
Deeside Field 1984 ToC
Deeside Field 1987 ToC
Deeside Field 1988 ToC

Select the Deeside Field year folder from the buttons below to reveal all the articles in that particular volume. Please be patient when downloading a folder – some of them are quite large.

Recommended Reading

In this paragraph, we identify Deeside Field articles which may be of particular relevance to current AGS activities.

Following the September Cairngorms field excursion, members may find an article by Alex Bremner in the 1929 folder of the Deeside Field of great interest – “The Glaciation of the Cairngorms”  it is item 32 in the contents list.

Was anyone lucky enough to find a piece of the smoky quartz called “Cairngorm”? You may read about such rarities in an article by Prof A. Gibb in the 1925 folder (item 5) – “Cairngorms and Other Local Gemstones”.

Members who attended the recent evening excursion regarding glaciation around Ballater may find 4 other relevant Deeside Field articles, also all by Alex Bremner.

  • Folder 1922 item 04: “Deeside as a Field for the Study of Geology”
  • Folder 1927 item 16: “Surface Geology of the Stachan Basin“
  • Folder 1931 item 42: “The Valley Glaciation in the District around Dinnet, Cambus o’May and Ballater.”
  • Folder 1937 item 26: “The Glacial Epoch in North East Scotland“.

Alex Bremner appears to have been a regular contributor to these journals. Also see

  • Folder 1953 item 18 ” Geological Notes“.

There are 4 other interesting features on general local and North Sea geology:

  • Folder 1935 item 40: “The Seaboard of the Mearns: a Geological Sketch”  by Robert Campbell
  • Folder 1966 item 19: “The Changing Coast-line of North-east Scotland” by Kenneth Walton.
  • Folder 1981 item 22: “Observation on the Soils and Soil Parent Materials of Deeside” by R. Glenworth.
  • Folder 1984 item 09: “Fossil Plant remains and North Sea Oil and Gas” by D. Batten.

Also, with the country having recently experienced a heatwave, members may find an article in the 1970 Deeside Field interesting; Deeside’s Changing Climate by J.C. Stone provides an interesting comparison of temperature and rainfall for Braemar and Balmoral over 2 periods between 1921 to 1966.