😀 High Life Highland Wellness Month Blog
By Jamie Gaukroger, Highland Archive Service
In a previous Wellness Month blog we heard about how music can evoke memories and bring joy to the listener. It’s the same with old photos – they bring back memories and spark up conversations, helping to promote social wellbeing. And that’s what the Inverness Football Memories project is all about.
The project was officially launched in 2022, led by Inverness Caledonian Thistle Community Trust, in partnership with Clachnacuddin FC and High Life Highland, particularly through its Am Baile website.
The aim is to preserve and celebrate the rich history of association football in Inverness from its origins in the 1880s right up to the present day and covering clubs like Citadel, Inverness Thistle, Caledonian, Clach, and later Inverness Caledonian Thistle.
One of the main strands of the projects is the monthly ‘memories sessions’ at the Caledonian Stadium where mostly older fans who stood on the terraces from the 1950s onwards share reminiscences and swap stories over a cup of tea, sparking recollections that lead to lively conversations. Leafing through a faded programme from the 1960s or spotting a familiar face in a team line-up can trigger recollections that might otherwise lie dormant.
Conversations flow about goals scored, famous wins, bitter defeats, and even the journey to and from the ground on match day. In some ways, it’s also a reunion of old friends. As one participant put it: “It’s not just about remembering the matches. It’s remembering the people we went with, the friends we met, the lives we lived.”
For participants, these sessions can be therapeutic. Memory work like this is known to have benefits for people living with dementia, but it’s also a way to combat social isolation. Football becomes the common language; a shared backdrop that connects different generations and life experiences. It’s not just about football, it’s about belonging. The game provides a starting point for helping people feel connected again and we know that’s essential for your wellbeing.
Many hundreds of photographs have been digitised, some from archival collections but many from the scrapbooks and private collections of supporters, former players and other people involved in the game.
The Am Baile website – which I look after – has become the project’s digital home and hosts much of the aforementioned content including photographs, film clips, audio interviews, newspaper clippings and memorabilia, as well as the ‘Can You Help?’ section where the public can help identify teams and players in historic images. This crowdsourced approach means that the archive is continually enriched by community knowledge.
By collating material across clubs and eras, the project fills gaps in the story of football in Inverness and making sure they’ll still be told in the future – by capturing these stories now, before they’re lost, Inverness Football Memories is doing more than preserving history; it’s nurturing the community’s sense of itself. In that sense, the project is as much about the present as it is about the past, and about making sure future generations understand the role football has played, and still plays, in the life of Inverness.
With millions of views online and a growing collection of memories, the Inverness Football Memories project continues to do something both simple and powerful: collecting and sharing the footballing heritage of Inverness and enhancing the social wellbeing of everyone involved.
