TRIP DOWN MEMORY LANE: Redevelopment of popular corner spot in Aviemore
Here’s another trip down Memory Lane for Strathy readers - in this instance, Aviemore’s main lane.
It’s a dash through a ‘lifetime’: three score years and ten or so on the same corner, to see how the village has changed over the decades.
And how it has changed. From the remote, anonymous hamlet through the helter-skelter years of the tourist boom, with a tsunami of visitors for each season as the the village offered more and more for them the whole year round.
We’re grateful to Ray Sefton for the memories of how the road ‘grew up’ over that time.
The first snapshot was taken in the early 1950s and we can see how that rural timberland started to evolve within the next decade.
Local history oracle Mr Sefton recalled: “The area pictured is the one between the station and the BP filling station at Marks and Spencer’s Simply Food store.”
Ray recalls: “In the first photo the filling station was known as Hays Garage.”
It served the ever-growing tides of motorists for many years as the reputation of the village burgeoned.
Throughout the development of the village there was always a filling station at that site, he recalls, as the other properties came and went.
Hay’s eventually started changing hands as the time-honoured wooden structures yielded to the ‘resortification’ of Aviemore and its reputation drew hordes by road, rail and air.
“The buildings that start at the corner which is now Macdui’s bar were built in the 1960s the and the wooden shops were closed for a few days while they moved into the new shops.
“The filling station has always been at that location. However, for a period of time there were four filling stations in Aviemore…”
Alas, as any motorist soon finds out on arriving in the resort now, those days are long gone.
