11/05/2026
A lovely read about our village from Finn Moray and the song named after it! 🎵
Foggie's the kinda place some people think no longer exists until they go there and realise it does.
It sits up in the north east of Scotland on the A97, with its straight lines and resilient dignity, a planned village born out of the Scottish Enlightenment when lairds believed geometry could improve humanity. And maybe it could. The streets are orderly. The old gardens stretch long behind them like the original business plan for survival. But the thing about Scotland is that people always have the final edit. They take whatever system was presented to them and often turn it into something warmer and more human.
That, for me, is Foggie.
Officially it is Aberchirder. But we rarely fall in love with “officially”. Officially, IMHO, is for headed paper and road signs. Foggie; pronounced (Foe-gie) is the name people carry in their voices. Foggie's memory. Foggie's identity. Foggie's what gets said when somebody asks a local where they're from and they answer with a big grin.
I write this song because villages like Foggie, for me, are becoming less and less in public conversation while still existing very loudly in real life. And there's a wee difference between existing and being seen.
Today's world's very interested in scale. Big cities. Big followings. Foggie doesn't care about any of that stuff. For me, Foggie understands something older and more valuable, which is that community is not measured by population. It is measured by recognition. Asking after somebody’s health and genuinely waiting for the answer. Turning up when things go wrong. Clapping harder for local success because it belongs, in part, to everybody.
When Adele sings Foggie, we see this in spades.
That's when you know music has worked. When it no longer belongs just to the writer, the singer or the producers. It belongs to the people hearing themselves inside it. It belongs to Foggie. The people of the village, true to form, have already renamed it. When I was at a coffee morning there a month ago, people kept coming up to say how much they loved “The Foggie Song”.
Adele has one of those voices that doesn't arrive with ego. There's no over-performance in it. No attempt to sound important. She's a true story telling singer. Which's what makes it important, I think.
And watching Foggie get behind her this weekend as her version launched has been extraordinary.
People share the song because it feels like theirs, their lives. In Adele’s voice, Foggie hears its own streets, its own pride, its own life.
Foggie hasn't tried to become anywhere else. It's kept its name, its nerve and its old soul. And now, through one of its own, the town is politely but firmly saying: "You can change the sign, or the name on the bus. They call it Aberchirder, but it's Foggie to us."
And we can all learn a wee bit from that kinda togetherness.
You can buy Adele's version by clicking the link in comments then the green button. Thanks as always for your support.
