Crossroads and Characters
24. PAULEY? POLLY?
There is a spot on Dunning Burn which attracts children who love to swim. This pool is,called locally The Polly, for reasons unfathomable. How it is spelled is also uncertain, one historian of the last century writing it as 'Pauley'.
Local names attach to many parts of the Burn. Far up the Den, alongside one of the district's finest nature walks, is a place called Willie Dun's Damhead. It was from here in 1872 that Dunning drew the water for its first piped system, which supplied a number of fountains and standpipes around the village.
Jenny's Gush is another local name for a small water-fall in the Den, and in the village itself is a pool called Bobbie's Linn, located below where the village gaol and police station was once housed, hence the Bobbie.
Nowadays the Burn no longer supplies water for the village which comes from a reservoir in Strathearn.
In the old days villagers were quite proud of the quality of the water drawn from the Burn. During the war Dunning, like many other places in Scotland, received a quota of refugees from the major cities, and one villager recalls helping out at the local school when a group of youngsters from Glasgow arrived. 'Can ye gi' me a glass o' water, mister' asked one, and the villager gladly offered a glassful. 'Och,' said the youngster with disgust, pushing it away, 'I'm not drinkin' that!' It was then, examining the rejected glassful, that the villager realized for the first time just how brown and how full of life was the water which he had been drinking all his life.
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