The Mythic 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 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.

Lobsters, Rum and Teachers

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 legendary Billy Marshall desert his regiment every year to go back to the Rhonehouse Horse Fair?- 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.

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 Palnure 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