SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Honesty boxes are a long and rich Scottish tradition. You'll find them along rural roads, at the end of driveways, next to farmhouses or out in the middle of nowhere. Sometimes they can be a rickety wooden cabinet stocked with homemade jam. Other times, an abandoned telephone full of cabbages or leaks or kale or maybe chicken.
What they all have is a price list and the implicit understanding that if you want a shortbread or a dozen eggs or anything else, you will leave money in the honesty box. No one is there to watch you. It's a trust thing. Today, the Kitchen Sisters, Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva, take us on a tour of the honesty boxes of Scotland.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: An honesty box is like a little magical thing that sits beside the road in rural Scotland. They're quite childlike. You sort of expect to see animals or something in them or easter eggs. And in them, they're stuffed to buy, and you leave money. There's nobody going to check you. Used to be eggs, mostly - then it just grew and grew. You get shortbread, traybakes, Scottish tablet - you know, that super sweet, teeth-destroying, delicious thing - a lot of knitted things, loads of apples. Anything that can be grown in the West of Scotland, you're going to get it unlocked in the honesty box.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: (Laughter).
ANNIE: You've got homemade apple chutney, a tray of shortbread for six pounds, Gigha (ph) homemade tablet - a local, traditional Scottish sweet - school cake. Yeah. My son's nodding. He's 5 years old, and he gets some of that at school. And a lemon drizzle - each good has a price. Just put some money in the tin 'cause it's an honesty box. So I put in 20 pounds, and I take my change of 10 pounds. There's quite a lot of money in there, so I'm assuming that others are doing the same.
My name is Annie, and I'm here visiting Gigha with my family. We're from Northumberland in the northeast of England. And there's quite a lot of honesty boxes there, actually. When you're in somewhere so rural as this in Scotland, there's a respect for the local community, to use the honesty box as the locals would want. There's a lot of people that want to remain with those kind of morals of trust.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
NICKY BROWN: I was just about to go and get the eggs from the hens to put in the box.
Here, girls. Who has laid this morning?
The older girls - you can see they just molted. That's why they haven't got many feathers on some of them. I'm Nicky Brown. My husband, Pete, has just left the island to take a bull to market. We're at Clachaig Farm on the Isle of Arran.
We don't have much to put in the box just now because we've only just planted the vegetables, leeks, kale, all the brassicas, and beetroot, peas, beans, pumpkins, courgettes.
My elder son's in-laws came to stay and said, you've got so many cabbages. Why don't you sell some? I went, oh, no, no one's going to want to buy our vegetables. And that's where it started. Just a wee box at the end there. It's an old plastic ice cream top. And people just put their money in there and take change if they need to.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
BROWN: I am sure things might go missing. Well, so what if it's the odd cabbage? I strongly believe that 99% of people are honest. If you trust people, then they are honest with you, mostly.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MARK COUSINS: Very seldom are people dishonest. I would think very seldom, I would guess. We can't be too romantic or sentimental about this. You know, in a city like Glasgow, the biggest city in Scotland, there's a lot of poverty, a lot of poverty, a lot of social deprivation (ph) You could not leave a box of money sitting there because people are going to take it 'cause they need money to feed their kids or to feed their drug habits or whatever.
My name's Mark Cousins. I'm a filmmaker. I live here in Edinburgh. When you go to the Western Isles where you saw these honesty boxes, there's a less extreme difference between rich and poor and that means that very few people are so desperate for five pounds that they're going to take it from your box. So I think that's one of the practical reasons why the money isn't nicked all the time.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: Honesty box - you rely on people's honesty. You come to Gigha, you put your 15 pounds in the wee wooden box, you sign in the book to say, my name's John, and I've paid 15 pounds, and then go and play your golf and play as much or as little golf as you want, from first light to last light.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: John Bannatyne.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: He's up in the wheelhouse. He's at the wheelhouse.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: He's the man that looks after the golf course - he cuts the grass, dyes the greens, tidies it all up. On his spare time, on his week off from the boat, that's what he does.
JOHN BANNATYNE: I'm John Bannatyne. I'm the secretary of Isle of Gigha Golf Club. I'm also the skipper of the ferry that goes from the Kintyre Peninsula. When I'm not driving the ferry and I have to get some time off, I volunteer on the wee nine-hole golf course on Gigha. We just carry on the tradition of volunteering so that the people of Gigha have the opportunity to play golf.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
JAMES: When you come to a place like this in Scotland, there's no clubhouse as such. As you can see, it's a shed, literally a garden shed. They don't have the funds to staff a clubhouse. And loads of them have honesty boxes, and it relies on people just putting their cash in. And everybody respects it, and it works.
Out here playing golf, as it should be - I'm James. I'm here on the island of Gigha.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SCOTT ELAND: Ah.
I'm Scott Eland from Portland, Oregon. My goal is to play every golf course in Scotland, and I don't think it's ever going to happen. We started at the farthest north that you could go. It was a one-way road for about an hour and a half, and nobody was up there. No staffing, nothing, just - it was almost like a old bus stop. We put five pounds in a mailbox, and it's an honor deal, and then you go walk nine holes, and you're done.
In Ireland, we went to the farthest north golf course in Ireland, and it was the exact same thing, the honor golf. Each family in town that plays golf is assigned a certain hole to mow and take care of. And you could tell because some holes were better than other ones. Some people had a knack.
CHARLES COLIN MACLEOD CURRIE: My name is Charles Colin Macleod Currie. My family have been in this area at Blackwaterfoot for over 300 years. My grandfather supplied eggs. He also had a milk run down here. He had a really battered old land rover. The doors didn't fit. And when I was a wee boy, we would load up with milk and drive to the golf course first and then come along here and deliver milk to each of the houses.
Farming was a very hard life. The honesty box would come about if you get surplus product and you can't set up a shop. People would think of stealing as totally against the way of life. And you're in a local community, so if stuff was being stolen, eventually, somebody would find out who was doing it, and you would be completely cut adrift.
CATHERINE ANNE MACPHEE: My younger sister, Holly (ph), just opened up her first box, so it's bright pink. It's at the end of my parents' drive, and it says Holly's box. She's got a QR code on the door, and there'll just be a tin there to put the money in. She's advertising it on Facebook. She's also created its own Instagram page, as many others do, so you can keep on top both, like, what's in that week. She's been making muffins, jams, sticky toffee pudding, millionaire shortbreads - always popular by Scottish.
My name's Catherine Anne MacPhee (ph). I am an archivist and activist in the Isle of Skye. Honesty boxes seem to have boomed in the last 10 years in places like Skye and other islands in the Hebrides. You see them everywhere. Well, it's really nice to see one at the end of the family home.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: Some people might think that honesty boxes are from the past, from a different age, a simpler age, a more honest age. But I would say they're a future thing, as well. Since the internet and COVID, a lot more people are able to live in rural communities, and these honesty boxes are little embroidered edges to their lives.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #6: Folk are honest. Most folk are honest. The fact that you're offering them something and trusting their honesty makes them even more honest. I think it's vital. Society will break down if you cannot trust the people that you're in it with.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
DETROW: "The Honesty Boxes Of Scotland" was produced by the Kitchen Sisters with Mark Buell and George Bull. It was mixed by Jim McKee. You can hear more Kitchen Sister stories on their podcast, "The Kitchen Sisters Present."
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.