One particularly interesting and unique item in New College Library’s Gaelic Collections is an instruction book on the bagpipe (in Gaelic Pibroch, or, Ceol mor, or, literally, Big music). Entitled “A collection of piobaireachd, or pipe tunes” it includes ” Canntaireachd notation” which was a way of teaching pibroch using verbal sounds.
At first sight this looks like a collection of texts, but is actually music in the traditional ‘verbal notation’ that pipers used. It was published by Captain Niel MacLeod of Gesto, in Skye and it has a handwritten dedication to Hugh MacQueen, a Writer to the Signet.
With thanks to Patrick Murray, our Gaelic Cataloguer, for supplying details of this item.