So far

Christmas and soon the New Year. I've had meetings in the Stewartry, Nithsdale and Wigtownshire with various people and groups. The best is just having a hingin ear as you go through your life though, listening to folk talk. Since I've had my head adjusted to this task, every time I enter into any conversation at all ideas jump out.

I'm going to approach it as an encyclopaedia, same as the McTaggart original, part as an homage, partly because it gives me a chance to indulge flights of fancy, very much like he did. I'm including definitions of words, phrases, idioms, and looking at places, people, themes.

Recent entries I've drafted have been under A: Anthony Hopkins bench; Away with the Fairies, under H: Hollow; Hingin Ee, under F: Feisty; Funerals.

It's not going to be a work of ethnology though it will include what people have said to me. The object is to show how rich I feel Galloway is, it's history and legacy, its people. The object is mostly to entertain. Me. You, also. And maybe those that come after.

The Yule Boys

 

In the 19th century, groups of boys in Galloway would reenact a pageant or play for pennies at Christmas. The play took the form of two knights competing for the hand of a lady. 

They lads would argue, fight, then one would throw the other on his back, and take his prize into the moonlight.

The Boys of Yule, Thornhill December 2013

In a frosty road, the three of them,

cans ablaze like corselets:

the blood red heraldry of Tennents 

stark in pub light. It's an old play:

'a pantomime', she sighs,

and walks off before the words

or blows. 'I'm bored',she says,

'and moving on'.

Sectarian Fairies

In the old stories the fairies were a mixed bag. Some worked well with humans, responded well to favours and kindnesses. When the Knight of Myrton Sir Godfrey McCulloch received a visit from the King of the Fairies complaining that a sewer he was having built was causing major subsidence in the fairy kingdom he immediately diverted it. This was a good move because the King of the Fairies turned up at Godfrey’s execution in Edinburgh and spirited him away just before the axe.

 

The Castle at Myrton

However many other sources show the fairies’ dark side, and even that they mirrored human prejudices.  The beautiful fairy girl of Cairnywellan Head near Port Logan, for instance, was a rose complexioned 12 year old who could be seen dancing and singing wildly when fugitives of the Irish rebellion of 1798 were found in the Rhinns and summarily shot or hung by the militia. She disappeared for 50 years but couldn’t contain her glee when the Potato Famine broke out and was soon out in the hills, again, dancing to celebrate the mounting body count.



The Church at Borgue

 

The story of the fairy boy of Borgue can be found in the records of the Kirk Session there. This boy would disappear for days or weeks on end, saying he had been with his ‘ people’. His grandfather sought help from a priest who banished the fairies. Thereafter the boy was shunned in the community, not because he’s been away with the fairies but because he’d got the help of a catholic. 

 

Trust Galloway to have Scotland's sectarian fairies!

Theo and the Siller Gun

 

The Siller Guns of Kirkcudbright and Dumfries were trophies presented by King James V1 of Scotland to try and encourage skill and marksmanship using the new technology of musketry, at ‘Wappenshaws’. The idea, as ever,  was to have the locals able to defend themselves properly against the English when they attacked. The Dumfries Siller Gun was presented at a banquet by the King himself to the Trades of Dumfries in Queensberry Square, not that it was called that then, on 3^rd August 1617.

"And may this day, whate'er befa',
The King's birthday, our Waponshaw
Be hailed wi' joy by great and sma',
And through the land
May Concord, Liberty and Law
Gae hand in hand."

 

From 'The Siller Gun' a poem of 1780 by Dumfries poet John Mayne

 The Kirkcudbright gun is a model of an early firearm called a hagbut, and has the date 1587, and the initials T Mc for Thomas MacLellan, Provost of Kirkcudbright. It is the oldest surviving sporting trophy in Britain

The Siller Gun of Kirkcudbright

.
The Dumfries gun was originally a miniature cannon mounted on a wheeled carriage, but in the early 19th century it was vandalised and remade by the silversmith David Gray  as a flintlock musket.

The Dumfries Siller Gun

 The Kirkudbright gun was older than the Dumfries one, but the contest for the Siller Gun in Dumfries is the one still regularly held, annually on or before the town’s Guid Neighbours Celebrations in June. The shoot was held at Kingholm in the old days, but for health and safety reasons moved to the gun club in the old aerodrome at Heathall. Competing either as individuals or as teams, the participants are often from the gun club itself or from various of the cadet forces, or the TA. The competition is intense, and the punch bowl which is awarded these days is a much coveted prize.

 In 2004, an ex-Chef well known around Dumfries, let’s call him Theo, having heard some talk of the contest in a pub, decided for a laugh to enter the siller gun with his mate, an ex-cabinet maker. It would be fair to say that the pair at that time had drifted from life’s mainstream and were full-time ageing hippies and  herbalists.  Having signed up when under the influence, and never  fired a gun in his life, Theo sought advice from his drinking cronies, some of whom had past military experience. “Breathe the bullet out” intoned the artist Hugh MacIntyre, mysteriously, “breathe it to the target.”  

 

Having completely disregarded or forgotten any advice, the pair spent the morning of the competition relaxing in their usual fashion then reeled up to shoot, among the last of more than three hundred competitors. “We were like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” said Theo later,

 “……..was blazing away in the booth next door and giggling like a madman, his cartridges kept falling onto my back, burning me”. Later on in the Hole in the Wa, a bemused Theo was sought out by one of the contest officials and told he’d scored ten perfect bulls-eyes, the best pattern since 1932 and had, much to his own and everyone else’s astonishment, romped the siller gun.

 

 

 

Some Journeys

Crossmichael and New Galloway in the last two days. The Mickle is an old place, no less than 16 different ancient sites, forts and stone circles, are scattered round about. It looks old, too. The Church tower is 17th century but the site is more ancient than that. The village was rain swept and deserted. Like all these communities- I know, I live in one- they flare episodically into life but not that afternoon. 

Sir Robert Gordon who donated the bell in the Church Tower in the 1620s was one of the very first to obtain a charter to establish a colony of emigrants in Nova Scotia and thus begin Scotland's most consistently successful export to date, its own people. He and his son called the colony Galloway.

Crossmichael Church

There wasn't a soul in the Thistle Inn, until a couple from Blackpool arrived with their soulful spaniel. The last time I was in Crossmichael I was at the makar Willie Neill's funeral. Willie lived in a house adjoining the pub then later at another at the entrance to the village. He wrote in all the languages of Scotland, and was a terrific poet who, while not neglected in Scotland, didn't get accorded the status he deserved, the status he would probably have been given if he'd lived and worked elswhere.

Oscar and his Novel

Later at New Galloway, two buses missed and in the pitch dark, the Cross Keys Inn was packed, but everyone was from Cirencester apart from Oscar the dog, who owns his own book and piano and is from London.  It was a very big shooting party. Someone made the usual joke about hunting peasants. As they chattered. a weather beaten and worldly old man was scooping their fifty pound notes into a huge wad and I was reminded of Wille;s poem, The Marksman'.

I never saw him waste a single shot.

He wouldn’t fire unless he knew a kill,
Marksmanship guaranteed to fill the pot.
In memory I see him standing still
over the autumn moor. The swollen bags
of bowed-and-scraped-to gentry on a shoot,
wounding or blowing driven game to rags
or wasting cartridges without a hit
he sneered at, although sometimes paid to beat
their fostered game-birds on an autumn day.
‘There goes some London glutton’s annual treat….
and mostly killed by accident,’ he’d say.

Anthony Hopkins' Bench

 There are always rumours about celebrities having secret hideaways in Dumfries and Galloway. You'll be on one of these wee buses that circle the region relentlessly and some auld heid will jerk a nicotined thumb in the direction of a farm track and say something like 'yon Claudia Schiffer lives doon there'. It's a type of wishful thinking, I suppose, as well as a kind of pride in our insular and highly remote landscape, as though folk with all the world to choose from couldn't see past sitting in the drizzle at the top of Auchengibbert Hill when they weren't partying in Monte Carlo or Cannes. Maybe it's a folk memory of past glories, as well. After all when the area was a frontier, strategically important for centuries saints, sinners and soldiers did indeed stride the hills and glens. Everybody who was anybody from Agricola to Walter Scott.

Of course some A listers do live here. Joanna Lumley has a house in Tynron, Alex Kapranos does yoga in Moniaive, but then he's Scottish so that maybe doesn't count. And for everyone who does or has lived here there are plenty who have visited and hated the place. Didn't Britt Ekland, while filming The Wickerman, describe Newton Stewart as "the most dismal place in creation... one of the bleakest places I've been to in my life. Gloom and misery oozed out of the furniture."? Scarlett Johansson's feelings about being filmed in the moors round Wanlockhead in the middle of November pretending to be an alien harvesting hitchikers body parts are not recorded, but might be imagined.

Britt watching misery ooze from some furniture in Newton Stewart

Nevertheless some parts of the region attract fleeting visits from famous actors. One bench in particular in Douglas Hall near Sandyhills seems to be a magnet. A local was sitting on it when Brian Cox came ashore to join him on a break from filming 'Master of Ballantrae'. Another spotted Anthony Hopkins sitting on it, while holidaying in the area. Since then it's become known as the Anthony Hopkins bench and is a celebrity in itself.

The Anthony Hopkins Bench, Douglas Hall

The Landscape and Drink

I'm not claiming that in Dumfries and Galloway more drink is taken than in any other part of Scotland because in truth we are a nation that likes it's drink and our region just forms part of the great liquid heritage that is Scotland's history. However, as befits a frontier area,  we've done more than our bit. After all wasn't it at the Mull of Galloway that the last Pict with the secret of heather ale jumped into the sea rather than give the secret to the Romans? And what resulted from that? Drinking heather ale the Roman Legions would surely have been able to gub the Goths and the Vandals and all these other tribes over the Danube and perhaps we would all still be Romans, eating quail and rubbing our chins with pumice stones. Would that be good? Let me have another pint and think about it.

Carting booze around the region especially without paying duty was a popular and life threatening pastime for many years, and the proliferation of unlicensed drinking establishments gave a ready market. When Burns was an exciseman he visited Penpont which now doesn't even have a single pub but then had 9. He was beaten up for his snooping, quite rightly. In 1716 there were no less than 91 brewers in Dumfries. An early 19th century street plan of Dumfries shows more than 30 pubs or premises selling booze in Queensberry St alone.

Though the number of pubs declined the regions love affair with alcohol continued. Even after the Defence of the Realm Act in 1915 when pub opening hours were restricted to stop munitions workers falling steaming in the cordite, folk found a way round it. England's more relaxed licensing laws, at least until the 1970s, meant that people in some parts of the region were well placed to slip across the border for that vital last half hour's boozing. And not in small numbers. The Gretna munitionettes, there in huge numbers to save the nation during World War One, took to the train to Carlisle for a drink on a Friday or Saturday night. Trouble was the train arrived 5 minutes before closing time.  Sometimes the  train drivers were bribed to leave early but the barmen of Bousted's Bar in Carlisle knew to start    pouring and lining up a thousand whiskies on the bar before all these thirsty women arrived.

Where the workers boarded the train at Eastriggs

Others were prepared to risk their lives. After the giant Solway viaduct was shut to rail traffic, a guardhouse and gates had to be constructed to stop folk running the mile and a half across the Firth to more liberal drinking hours. People dying for a drink.

Although the pubs are fewer the thirst remains. Of course alcohol abuse is a terrible curse and drain on the NHS but human beings and drink are involved in a historical romance which continues to this day. Last night in Thornhill we were drinking our way through some of the gantry in the historic Farmers Arms, and swapping some drinking anecdotes but most were either litigious or not very savoury.

 My favourite story involves a visitor to Dumfries who was staying at the house of a resident and who set off on his own one October evening to explore. The next morning when he surfaced he told a story of the pub he ended the night in. He couldn't recall the name he said but there was a horse on the sign, there was a folk band, a beautiful girl, a roaring fire and he'd won £30 worth of tokens all of which he'd spent on drink and his new friend. He couldn't wait to go back and meet her. Of course, he couldn't find it because no such pub existed. Was it drink conflating three separate pubs together? Or was it a supernatural experience? Or was he just raving drunk? The friend and resident, from whom I gathered this tale, said he had persisted stubbornly in this delusion, even sending in an envelope a small silver fruit machine token he'd found at the bottom of his pocket. Needless to say it didn't fit any of the fruit machines his friend could find in the town.

Nomads and Travellers

 I want to look at the beats: nomads, travellers and vagrants. In 1597 the Act for the Repression of Vagrancy defined these people as:

1. wandering scholars seeking alms
2. shipwrecked seamen
3. idle persons using subtle craft in games or in fortune-telling
4. pretended proctors, procurers or gatherers of alms for institutions
5. fencers, bearwards, common players or minstrels
6. jugglers, tinkers, pedlars and petty chapmen
7. able-bodied wandering persons and labourers without means refusing to work for current rates of wages
8. discharged prisoners
9. wanderers pretending losses by fire
10. Egyptians or gypsies

Galloway was one of the great centres for tinkers or travelling people. Billy Marshall for instance, born in 1672 and died at the supposed age of 120 sometime near 1792. Billy claimed to be the King of the Gypsies in Galloway, and was:

a bare knuckle boxer
a smuggler
a soldier who deserted 7 times at the time of the Horse Fairs
a sailor who deserted 3 times at the times of the Horse Fairs
married 17 times
the father of 68 children, 4 reputedly after his hundredth birthday

Billy Marshall's grave at Kirkcudbright

He led a band of gypsies or 'randies' but also was an early radical at the time of the levellers. With his military training and expertise he was able to organise the country people and demolish the tyrannical dykes the landowners were building to parcel up the land.

The Workhouse at Gatelawbridge Thornhill

The coming of the workhouses in the 19th century with their special blocks for vagrants led to a decline in the numbers and easier communications meant a fall in the number of folk on the roads selling and trading though salesmen like the Petitjeans or Onion Johnnies were a common sight for close to a century from the 1860s. One, a M Quemener,  is still working in the eastern borders but none as far as I know still trade in Dumfries and Galloway.
Small numbers of travellers still can be seen in Dumfries and Galloway which has 2 permanent facilities for travellers in Glenluce and in Collin, though the numbers using these are extremely small.

Where's the modern equivalent of the wandering scholars, jugglers and fortune tellers? Are they dark sky watching or practising reiki therapy from rustic cottages in Moniaive or New Galloway or Wanlockhead? Do they just come out for Knockengorroch or the Wickerman then go home? Or are there any still on the road living out of a backpack?

I was talking to some auld heids the other night and they talked of another type of nomad. Thanks  to free travel concessions there are wee old men and women just jumping on buses and criss crossing the region, the nation, just for the hell of it. Must invent a name for them.

Word of the day- Pruch. To filter through for things of value.

The Mystic Landscape

 Back from Menorca to high winds and driving rain. Easy to grasp the change of seasons when you do that. Summers gone, winter's here. The kids are less depressed because they always enjoy Halloween though they are beaten soundly if they mention Trick or Treat, that linguistic atrocity which has effectively replaced guising. First its our squirrels now its our Halloween.

Parties and bonfires though, are reflections from our past. Halloween's got antecedents in Samhain the Celtic festival to celebrate the end of summer and prepare for the onset of the dark months and maybe too Pomona the Roman Festival celebrating fruits and seeds, or Parentalia, the Roman Festival of the Dead. Samhain was a time to feast on the meat you couldn't keep through the winter and sacrifice to ensure your crops and livestock thrived next year. It was a time when the barriers between the real world and the spiritual world were down. Bonfires were burned in imitation of the sun. People dressed as the dead, daubed their faces with ashes from the fires. So my weans will go to the party dressed as little ghosts and dook for apples. Apples were symbols of the soul. Every roman meal mimicked the journey from life to death: ab ovo usque mala, from the egg to the apple.

Just a look about the countryside should give you evidence of the Region's historical interaction with the spirit world. From the Scottish mainland's biggest stone circle, near Holywood, two references for the price of one, to Cairn Holy, we are constantly in the presence of monuments constructed to interpret the spirit world or ease the passage of the dead to an afterlife.

There's more than archaeology to the spirit world though. Just as Dumfries and Galloway is the home of the fairy story it is also the home of the ghost story. I remember talking to a 6th year pupil who'd turned chalk white because in an airless school library she swore her book had just opened and the pages had fanned through from beginning to end as if someone had flicked them with a finger.

My favourite historical ghost story concerns one of the region's great villains, Grierson of Lag, persecutor of the Covenanters. Sailors in the Solway one stormy night in the winter of 1733 saw a light astern of them which seemed to be gaining at an unnatural pace. As it passed it revealed itself to be a great state coach drawn by six black horses, with driver, footmen, coachman, torchbearers and so on. The skipper had hailed it. "Where bound, where from?" The answer had come "To tryst wi Lagg! Dumfries! Frae Hell!"

Frae Hell

 

Dumfries has its own ghost hunters now, http://www.mostlyghostly.org/ who've had the great idea of running a bus tour down the most haunted road in Britain, the A75. Its famous, particularly in a stretch near Kinmount close to Annan, for a whole range of well documented close encounters with the spirit world which date from the 1950s to the present day. Here's one: In 1962 Derek and Norman Ferguson were driving along that stretch of road around midnight, when a large hen flew towards their windscreen then vanished. The hen was followed by an old lady who ran towards the car waving her outstretched arms then a man with long hair and further animals, including 'great cats, wild dogs, goats, more hens and other fowl, and stranger creatures', which all disappeared. When the brothers stopped the car, it began to sway violently back and forth. Derek got out of the car and the movement stopped. He climbed back in and then, finally, a vision of a furniture van came towards them before disappearing.

I'm hoping to get some more supernatural encounters. If you know any contact steamboatsmcmillan@hotmail.com


Word of the day Coup, to fall over or spill, as in "Oh no , Lumsden's couped again" The despairing cry of the quiz team in the Globe in Market Square in Dumfries, when their star player collapsed drunk upon the floor.

The Language Landscape

English wi a Scottish accent. That's how I would define my way of speaking. It's not how I would have wished it: my mother was a native gaelic speaker and my father's family were all from Auchinleck, broad scots speakers. They felt, definitely my mother felt, that English was the way forward. So I didn't inherit either of the languages of Scotland. It's a real regret.  I would love my language to be definitively and singularly Scottish, but it isnt.

Galloway's seen some tongues. Place names range from Gaelic to Norse, from Welsh to Latin. Welsh place names were still being originated in the 10th century, showing that Brythonic languages were still vibrant in Scotland then. The weans at school were always fascinated to know Criffel is norse, Dumfries is gaelic, Caerlaverock is welsh.

Criffel:Crow Mountain in Norse

Galloway was the last mainland part of Scotland to surrender gaelic. Margaret McMurray (died 1760) is one of the last speakers we know of by name, although its possible that Alexander Murray the linguist, may have learnt it from his aged father who was a local upland shepherd.
However, a lot of us are
 near enough stuck with English wi a Scottish accent now. In Dumfries last night we were discussing whether swearing is most effective in a Scottish accent, and then whether jokes are. Certainly there are some good jokes to be had out of the way we speak. This is less of a joke and more of a true story, though. A woman was wheeling her newly born son through the high st in Sanquhar when an old lady came up, keeked in at the child and crooned "Oh whit a bonny babbie, whit dye ca him?" "Nathan" the woman answered. "Nathan?" said the other aghast, "ye'll need tae ca him somethin!"

Phrase of the week, overheard in the Farmers Arms Thornhill last night.  "Aye if ye fly wi the craws ye get shot wi the craws".

Gap in the blog now, for ten days. See you soon.

Dykers and Levellers

When I was but a beardless youth and beginning my teaching career I worked in Newton Stewart for three months, lodging at a boarding house run by a matronly lady in the town. My intention was of course to become a competent teacher. It was appalling luck therefore to fall, within the first half hour of arriving, under the influence of Galloway's greatest drystane dyker, raconteur and drunkard of modern times, Willie McMeekin. McMeekin, originally of New Luce, ranged through Dumfries and Galloway in the 80s and 90s, sometimes building dykes but often engaged in a range of other activities of the sort that generally gets you recognised as a character by people, and sometimes by the police.

I had wandered into the bar of the Black Horse, a pub I was very pleased to see still in rollicking good shape last weekend, and there he was, drinking whisky. I don't think it was that day he told me of his theory about olive oil and whisky, or the supernatural story of his grandfather's pipe, or his drunken weekend out with the Earl of Stair, or his adventures in the 8th army when, as a Scots Guard and 'D-Day Dodger' he'd fought his way through Italy, Monte Cassino and all. I think, excellent story teller that he was, he drip fed me these stories over the next 20 years just to keep me interested, and of course to keep the whisky coming. Just one story here: Willie was an excellent fisherman though notoriously poor at having permits for it. One day a friend of mine came into a pub in Dumfries and we got talking to Willie, who was obviously a bit depleted of funds, and my friend said he could do with a really good, big salmon and would be prepared to pay for it. He was expecting it the following weekend or something like that. Willie rubbed his  grizzled chin and replied in his Galloway Irish lilt that it was a distinct possibility and could we just wait there? Within ten minutes he was back with a giant salmon in a bin bag, headless and gutted. My friend paid him the money and Willie scarpered to one of his other haunts, leaving us to deal, ten minutes afterwards with the chef of a nearby hotel who had been about to cook it when it had vanished from the kitchen table.

Willie said his dykes would last 200 years and in fact there are dykes out there which survive from the first time the land was enclosed in the 18th Century. I saw some of them in the walk last week along the cliffs to Whithorn. Hard to imagine these beautiful things, strung out across the landscape, as agents of repression but such they were of course.

"The Lords and lairds they drive us out
from mailings where we dwell;
The poor man says where shall we go?
The rich says go to hell"

The enclosures put labourers out of work, caused villages to be deserted, spurred a set of clearances from the south which are less well known but just as destructive as those in the Highlands, caused by change of land-use, change of land ownership and the desire for profit. The men who set out to destroy the dykes, the Levellers, fought with sticks and poles against Dragoons sent into Galloway to suppress them. After a battle at Balmaghie, near Castle Douglas, 200 levellers were taken prisoner. There was obviously some sympathy for them among the soldiers because on the way to Kirkcudbright to be tried, many were allowed to escape but the leaders were tried, some fined, some imprisoned and some transported to the West Indies.

Though Willie was a dyker, and proud of it.  I can't see him lining up with the oppressors. "The land is ours" Willie would always shout when in his cups, "the land is ours". And somehow it was just possible when he said it, to believe it was true.

Lobsters, rum and teachers

Well the Wigtown Book Festival ends in a flurry of wine and lobster, a marvellous reading by Robin Robertson, a pop-up poetry shop and a small downpour of beer and malt.

In the Ploughman I'm talking to a regular who asks if I'm the man who wrote the letter to the Galloway Gazette asking for tales and he regales me with a few. This is the way this most democratic of projects is supposed to work!

Driving back we are chatting about the area at war. There have always been historic stories about that, of course- didn't the gypsy King Billy Marshall desert his regiment every year to go back to the  Horse Fair at Rhonehouse?- but the total wars of the 20th Century have brought some different experiences including the settlement of European refugees and ex-POWs, the Ukrainian community near Lockerbie for instance.

 I received an e-mail from Mike Craig from Kirkcudbright last week talking about a tale of the volunteers who were supposed, in the event of a German invasion, to operate a campaign of sabotage behind enemy lines. There was a group of 6 men in the Stewartry who were given responsibility for a secret bunker with ammunition and other equipment including a sealed barrel labelled “Navy Rum – NOT To Be Opened before the Invasion”.  The group apparently spent the first months of the war  plotting how to remove and drink the contents of the barrel without breaking the seals. When the invasion didn't transpire, the bunker was emptied and the equipment given back to the regular army, including the barrel of rum, seal unbroken but needless to say completely empty. It is hard to imagine Hitler's paratroopers prevailing against men of such ingenuity.

Many servicemen came back from the war mentally damaged, of course, my father being one of these. It's only recently I've realised that the generation of teachers I hated at school were probably the same, and that it may not have been completely their fault they were psychopaths who felt the compulsion to hit children over the head with bits of wood or large French dictionaries. After all it must have been a bit of a change, one moment garrotting German soldiers with cheesewire and the next teaching irregular verbs. JZ Graham comes to mind, a man who apparently fought on every side during World War 2, Hairy Nell, Jake Hendry and so on. Their tales must be told. Also the heroic efforts by their charges to defy and subvert them, no less ingenious than the Stewartry Six, they too must be told.

There is a photograph hanging outside the staffroom of Dumfries Academy showing a group of teachers sitting with their mortarboards one summer's day just before World War One. I know nothing about them beyond their names inscribed below the picture. What did I say in the very first post of this series? Where history fails, the gap is filled by myth. Or in this case, a poem:

Hugelshofer, Jackson, Gilruth, Chinnock and Bain

 

A black and white photograph:
It would be a brave colour
that would infiltrate this group,
sat gowned and booted
outside the school in1913.
They stare at the camera
their mortar boards in unbroken line.
I see it’s sunny, from shadow
and the light like a mortar bomb
bursting through trees behind,
perhaps the end of summer term.
Chinnock is the headmaster
by virtue of his moustache which is bigger
than the sum of the square
of the other two moustaches.
It is a comical moustache though you sense
you would not say this near Chinnock.
Bain does not have a moustache,
she is a woman, and has caused
a small seismic stir in the seating,
you can see it rippling away still.
Jackson to her left
has pulled some distance away
back towards the Paleozoic era
when women knew they were fish.
Gilruth is the joker of the group,
hat askew, he wears a quizzical look.
His hand is on a chain that dangles
from the deep folds of his jacket.
Perhaps he is thinking if he pulls it,
Chinnock will be ejected into the undergrowth,
then he could sit next at last to Bain,
remove the flowerpot from her head,
and declare his love.
Hugelshofer. Not even port
in the Headmaster’s study
will cheer him up this year.
He knows
the strapping lads he coached this morning
in Catullus
are marked for death.

Women Drivers

Back to Penpont for the Day of the Region, narrowly escaping being mown down by a car on the way, to visit the newly revamped cottage belonging to Joseph Thompson the explorer, one of a bewildering generation or two of Dumfries and Galloway folk who, though they often came from humble backgrounds, went out to carve their names out in a variety of fields. They wouldn't have had problems with cars because there weren't any. Besides they were walkers who thought nothing of hiking to Edinburgh for dinner then back the next day.

Thornhill's far enough for me, 2 miles away. Unhappily drinkers must trudge there from Penpont now as its lovely old pub has been closed by its owners for the last two years. Or we can get the bus. My two favourite drivers are Robert Louis Stephenson- yes, really- and the other is a feisty girl called Annette who always delivers me to the door of the Farmers Arms, even though there isn't a bus stop there.  I must ask her if she knows about Dorothée Aurélie Marianne Pullinger.

 Dorothée Pullinger was a suffragette who after managing a munitions factory of 7,000 women in World War One established a engineering college and a car factory in Tongland near Kirkudbright completely run and staffed by women, making cars "built by ladies, for those of their own sex". The factory had a swimming pool, a music room, and its own hockey team. The college provided  "educated women, to whom a life of independence from relations is necessary, a new career of brilliant prospects." The company badge was the same colours as the Sufragette tricolour. 

The Tongland factory produced the 'Galloway' a lightweight vehicle designed especially for female drivers.

The Layered Landscape

The Mythic Galloway walk went well, 14 intrepid cliff walkers in a bracing wind and sunlight that turned the sea occasionally to pulses of silver. We walked from St Ninian's cave to Isle of Whithorn via Burrowhead.

 

 

Amazing such layers of occupancy in a landscape that looks deserted, but in truth this coastline was once one of the hubs in a bewilderingly busy trade network. Just a handful of miles away is the Isle of Man, the north of Ireland, north Wales, the Inner Hebrides. In fact, I suppose, the coming of internal transport systems like roads and later railways destroyed the place's importance. Chris who was leading the walk talked about the amount of Welsh sandstone that was used in Medieval buildings here- because it was easier to transport sandstone by sea from Wales than it was overland from Dumfries.

 

In Burrowhead, signs of a complex layered occupancy. Viking place names, Scottish promontory forts, the wall of a medieval tower, World War 2 huts from an extensive anti-aircraft training facility that later became a Polish re-settlement camp, and now a Caravan park. Add to that the dream landscape, the old tale recorded from an eyewitness in 1820, that at Burrowhead the fairies had said their last farewell to Scotland, and the fact that on this spot the Wickerman had been burned in the film of the same name, a cult classic that has in turn spawned many stories and myths. Throw in the actor James Robertson Justice rampaging through the area before the war with his giant punt-gun and dynamite and you have an idea of the richness and complexity of the myth landscape!

 

It's a reminder of how difficult my job's going to be. Remember, any stories or tales or comments, write to this blog or steamboatsmcmillan@hotmail.com

 

Word or phrase of the day? "A hinging ee".

As in "he's got a hingin ee for her" - meaning a slightly covert and unfulfilled fancy for a girl. (Galloway Arms Wigtown, 3rd October)

Lost in the Mythic Landscape

After blundering about in a forest near Garlieston in the pitch dark in the early hours of last Sunday morning I feel even more equipped to enter the mythic landscape!

How could I forget how useful taxi drivers are, and what a unique function they fulfil in the creation and transfer of tales?  Based on my experiences over the last few days in Wigtown, taxi drivers are going to be essential sources of information. I met two, one of whom used to be a tree planter in Palmuir who told me of the time the American army declared martial law on Cairnsmore of Fleet. The other told me some old weather lore from the same spot:
'When Cairnsmuir puts on his hat, Palmuir and Skyreburn laugh at that'.

You see? People continue to carry the lore, and add to it.

Phone call last night- "What about the two German submariners from Annan?'
Going to pursue that now....

Word of the day:  'Skraiking', discordantly squealing or squawking as in 'You'll no catch me skraikin at the karaoke'(overheard at Newton Stewart on Saturday night).

My mission statement's in the previous post. Contact me here at this blog or e-mail me at steamboatsmcmillan@hotmail.com

I'll be talking during the Mythic Galloway walk on Thursday so maybe see you there?http://www.wigtownbookfestival.com/programme/2228/2568

Dumfries and Galloway is rich in history and myth. Open to the sea and five neighbouring kingdoms how could it be anything else? It was, and continues to be, a refuge and a hub. The history is still being interpreted and re-interpreted- why do a series of hill forts face each other across the River Urr like some dark age 38th Parallel?- and where history fails we have always filled the gap with tales. Like the last Picts jumping off the Mull of Galloway with the recipe for heather ale, or Merlin stalking about Crossmichael.

Where people inhabit a landscape, they create a landscape of the mind and the language of this landscape is stories. The old folk tales of Dumfries and Galloway are varied and well recorded in works which continue to educate and entertain but story telling doesn't stop when we shut the book and people continue to inhabit, and move fresh into, an area where people still interact with the environment and still seek to make sense of their lives as best and happily as they can.

The Wigtown Book Festival has commissioned a writer to fill the gap and document the modern tales and stories of Dumfries and Galloway and I'm excited to say that writer is me. Over the next 6-9 months I will be meandering through the region rooting out tales and characters of contemporary or near contemporary times. I expect to rediscover some old themes, perhaps in heavy disguise. I've already met an alien abductee, for instance,  but was he really away with the fairies?

Provisionally I'm looking at the following categories: 'Woodsmen', 'Nomads', 'Dykers', 'Weans', 'Drunkards', 'Naturals',  'Taxi Drivers' and 'Strange Encounters'. A 'Natural' was the word given by  John Mactaggart to describe those ' who move about purely by the dictates of nature...and attract the attention of men by their wild and out-of-the-way eccentricities'. Throughout I hope I will be inspired by Mactaggart and his 'Gallovidian Encyclopedia', a work of individuality and humour which covered the same sort of ground in the 19th Century.

I am looking for stories and tales from the modern era and the language and vocabulary that goes with them. I hope to set up shop for a while in the different parts of the region and make contact with people in a variety of ways. One way would be through this blog. Feel free to leave contact details or e-mail me at steamboatsmcmillan@hotmail.com to set up a meeting or to establish contact. I will be present for several days at the Wigtown Festival which runs from 27th September to the 6th October and will post regularly on this blog during and after the Festival. The Galloway Mythic Walk taking place on Thursday 3rd October marks the launch of this project. Perhaps I'll meet you there?
 
Literature has become, in a way, the preserve of an elite. Stories are owned and swopped by everyone. Swop some with me.

Hugh McMillan