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

The Great Galloway Tale Hunt

Dumfries and Galloway is rich in history  and myth as geographical corners tend to be. Open to four 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 fill the gap with fable and 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 for any length of time, they create a landscape of the mind and the language in this landscape is stories. The rich folk tales of Dumfries and Galloway are varied and well recorded in many 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 afresh into, our landscape, greatly changed through history but still one with which we interact and where we seek to make sense of our lives as best and happily as we 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', 'free Spirits' and 'Strange Encounters'. A 'Natural' was the word given by the great 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 staggering 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 at the Wigtown Festival which runs from 27th September to the 6th October and will post regularly on this blog.
 
Literature has become, in a way, the preserve of an elite. Stories are owned and swopped by everyone. Swop some with me.

Further posts at http://greatgallowaytalehunt.blogspot.co.uk/

Hugh McMillan

Ex-Teacher

Summer hols, back from Italy with the school and Majorca with the family. My goodness but from August 15th the ShugMeister is a retired teacher, woop woop. I hope to spend a lot more time writing, in particular prose. I hope to rewrite my very one dimensional comic novel 'Love Death and a bit of Opera' into something that might be published eventually. And I am going on a wee tour of North America and Australia in April and May 2014.

On the poetry front, I am still scribbling and have a wee collection from Mariscat coming out next year. What else? I'm crap at doing these sweeping summaries, and will try to keep the blog more up to date.

Here's my very last Higher Class

 

Last View of My chaotic classroom wall

 

 

And my retiral poem:

 

 

Excavation


Emptying cupboards from

the pre-Homeric Classroom era,

through strata thick as Schliemann’s Troy.

I am looking for bedrock and

the world before printing

when we worked with our bare minds

or a single piece of paper rolled

soaking wet from a banda machine.

When times were tough, we drank the fluid

and went outside to fight hairy colleagues from other lands.

Who can forget 1978 when that probationer

stole the Headmaster’s wife

and we sailed across the Firth in a fleet of long keeled ships,

the sun glinting on our oars?

Our beards have grown, our blood coarsened,

paper has closed over our bones like sand.

But there is a hot deep wind today at the skip.

It takes the sheets and spins them over rooftops,

all the dense tyrannies of words

gone to air at the end,  like birds.