In 2019-20, the last season, albeit incomplete, before COVID struck, Brora Rangers won the Highland League and at something at a canter. The gap between it and the runner-up, Inverurie Locos, was thirteen points. In the same season its neighbouring club, Golspie Sutherland, finished third in the North Caledonian League and would go on to be current champions the still more truncated next. But this piece is not about the modern iterations of these teams but their beginnings. The Highland League was founded only in 1893. Yet Brora was by then already fourteen years old, founded in 1879, as what are now major clubs and the best part of two hundred miles nearer Edinburgh and still more Glasgow were just seeing first light. The two teams that would merge in 1893 to become Dundee were both formed in 1877. The birth of Aberdeen would not be until 1903 with even the earliest of its three elemental clubs not taking the field until 1881.   

But then Brora was a unique, Highland town. It was industrial with its own woolen mill, a distillery and above all what was the most northerly coal-mine in the country. It stood to reason that the game had arrived in Sutherland by-passing a host of cities and towns to the south in the feet and enthusiasms of labour that had been brought in, notably from the mining areas of Central Belt. Was it not the case, even if the country's woolen mills were in the rugby-playing Borders, that the major Scottish teams, indeed Scotland itself, just had "tae drap a stane doon ay mine" to hit a future on-field, round-ball hero, hopefully not killing him in the process? But once more there was a quandary. Just as by 1879 football had barely arrived on the Tay and the Dee it was much the same even in Ayrshire. The birth of Ayr F.C., the earlier half of what in 1910 would become Ayr United, was in precisely the same year as Brora. In North Lanarkshire Motherwell was not formed until 1885, whilst in West Lothian it was Linlithgow Rose in 1889 and only Falkirk, founded 1876, predated. So perhaps the source of Brora's miners was Stirlingshire.

And there was one way to prove it. Look at the 1881 census.  And that is precisely what was done for the 1800 or so men in the Brora area, also known as Clyne between fifteen and thirty-five years old and therefore of footballing age. Each was looked at and the truth is that the theory fell apart. The young men born never mind in Stirlingshire but in the Central Belt could be counted on one-hand. Indeed the vast, vast bulk of  the town's younger male population men was born in Brora itself or further north still in Sutherland or Caithness. In fact there was only one place south of Brora that provided enough men to be counted in double figures. It was Golspie.   

It might have been that at that point I gave up but instead I took a re-look at the detail for the village all of six miles down the coast and two previously unremarked facts struck me. The North Caledonian Football Association and the North Caledonian Cup and hence the league of the same name in 1897 had been founded in 1888, fully five years earlier than the Highland League. And the club, Golspie Sutherland, is said to have been formed in 1877 so a decade before the league it is now part of and two years even before Brora. It was thus far more likely that instead of Brora bringing football to the Highlands it was Golspie and, indeed, it was quite probable that Golpie took it to Brora rather than the other way round.

But why? And there the answer seems to be Birmingham and Aston Villa. The club had been founded in 1874 as an off-shoot from a church cricket team. The fuller story can be read by clicking here. And it was taught football by a Scot, who would remain more or less permanently, and two more Scots, who would it seems move on at the end of the 1876-77 season. The Scot was George Ramsay with a family background in brass-finishing and from Glasgow and the Scots, brothers, William and James Lindsay, with a background as smiths and ironmongers, were born in none other than Golspie. In fact it is known that, whilst Billy returned north to live out his life in Wick, Jimmy went back to the home-village. He was certainly there in 1881. The census says so, which gave him four years before he in the next decade simply disappears to found or be the inspiration for the foundation without fear of what is to this day Golpie's village team and even to transfer or see transferred the football contagion to and its embedding, again to this day, in Brora also. Of course, not forgetting Birmingham too.