C ulture Heritage and Nationalism

This is third and final version of Oral presentation.

The Influence of Scottish Cultural Heritage on the development of Scottish Nationalism since 1707.

The key to understanding Scottish modern history is to grasp the sheer force, violence and immensity of social change in the two centuries after about 1760. No country in Europe, and perhaps no country on earth until the European explosion into the interior of North America and Australia, underwent a social and physical mutation so fast and so complete. Tidal waves of transformation swept over the country, Lowland and Highland, drowning the way of life of hundreds of thousands of families and obliterating not only traditional societies but the very appearance of the landscape itself. ...[In the Lowlands] a countryside of open, hedgeless fields, with tenant farmers and cottars living n small communities of a dozen or so families known as ‘ferm touns’ now came abruptly to end... Within a generation, the very placenames and locations of the ‘touns’ were sinking out of memory, as if a new map had been laid over the surface of the land.... Somethings, however, did not change, or at least they stayed recognisable. It depended on who you were. Most people in Scotland experienced the arrival of capitalism as the inset of an obliterating, scattering cyclone...But if you were and advocate or a minister, a university lecturer or a banker, it was different. For the professions and for Scotland’s small middle class, the cyclone was no worse than the bracing Edinburgh wind...for this minority there was a continuity about what they did , and what they thought they were doing. [Ascherson: 2002: 80/83]

This ‘deep discontinuity between the experiences of the ‘hurricane survivor’ majority and the ‘healthy breeze-blown’ minority’ is a useful distinction. It is also very challenging. Is it not the case that the ‘Scottish Cultural Heritage’ we are studying is the cultural heritage of Ascherson’s ‘healthy breeze- blown’ minority? How far into the Scotland of the ‘hurricane survivor majority’ does Scottish cultural heritage really extend? Not very far, I suspect.

Nor, which is more directly to Ascherson’s point, does cultural or civic nationalism extend much further into the Scotland of the hurricane survivors. Yes, after 18 years of minority ( in Scotland) Conservative rule, a Devolution Settlement was reached and a Scottish Parliament was reconvened in 1999. But as Ascherson puts it:

A strong tide of public opinion brought it into being between 1997 and 1999; the Scottish middle class, or governing stratum, or intelligentsia or what every one may call it finally succeeded in rallying the majority into decisive political action. At the same time, the division has not gone away. The minority are pleased and proud at much of what the Scottish Parliament has done, whilst admitting to its severe teething problems. The majority are much more reserved about what the Parliament may do to change their lives now and in the future... Their support is astonishingly tepid. [2002:86]

If anything, popular support for the Scottish Parliament is diminishing. In 1999, 58% of the electorate voted in the Scottish Parliament election. In 2003, the figure was only 49%. It is feared that even fewer will vote in 2007. In response to this fear, the Scottish Executive and the Electoral Commission have set up a ‘votescotland’ campaign designed to encourage popular participation in democracy.

The 2007 election to the Scottish parliament will be held on the 3rd May. On the 1st May 1707, the Act of Union between the parliaments of Scotland and England came into effect. With a total electorate of approximately only 2400 in 1706 [Whately : 2006: 56] there was little scope for ’popular participation in democracy’ in the Scottish parliament which passed the Act of Union. As a result, popular opposition to the Union took other forms, the most dramatic of which occurred in Dumfries on the 20th November 1706. Led by the Reverend John Hepburn of Urr, a group of armed horsemen rode up to the Mercat Cross at the foot of the Mid-Steeple and with the enthusiastic support of a large crowd, ceremonially burnt a copy of the 25 Articles of Union. Hepburn then affixed a declaration of his opposition to the proposed ‘incorporating union’ between England and Scotland to the Mercat Cross before retreating back into Galloway. [Whitelaw: 1907]

Hepburn was a strong (even extreme ) Presbyterian. His opposition to the Union was based on the fear that Union with Anglican England would encourage Episcopalianism in Scotland and thus the return of church government by bishops rather than elders. There may have been a personal aspect to this. Hepburn became minister of Urr by popular proclamation in 1681 rather than official appointment. Along with his friend, the Cameronian supporting Reverend John Macmillan of Balmaghie, Hepburn claimed to represent ‘the poor, wasted, misrepresented remnant of the suffering, anti-popish, anti-prelatic, anti-erastian, anti-sectarian true Presbyterian Church of Scotland’. [Whately: 2006 and Reid: 1928]


1706 also saw the publication by James Watson in Edinburgh of the first of three volumes of his ‘Choice Collection of Comic and Serious Scots Poems’. As the ‘auld sang’ of the Scottish Parliament was coming to its end, the ‘auld sangs’ of Scotland were being recalled and revived.

According to Michael Fry, in his new book on the Union of 1707:

[Watson] sets out what was still then known of the older Scottish literature, at the risk of being lost because the royal court had long gone from Edinburgh, and the Parliament, also a patron of culture on a modest scale , was preparing to follow. The preface boasts it is the first printed anthology of poems ‘in our own native Scots dialect’. It too, contributed to the vernacular revival which led on to the poetry of Alan Ramsay, Robert Ferguson and Robert Burns. Each delighted to find in Watson’s collection traditional genres and metres with which to enrich his own work. That line of intellectual descent shows how, as if by some intuition, Scotland prepared for extinction as a state with a revival of her culture.

Indeed the Scots have endured, to the present, as a cultural community sustained by recurrent revivals, which also laid the foundation for their re-emergence as a political community 300 years later. As Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun had said : ‘If a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he would not care who should make the laws of a nation’. [Fry : 2006: 255/6]

But, when Fry’s description of Watson’s book is compared with that given by Christopher Whatley in his new account of the Union [ Whatley: 2006: 12] an immediate problem emerges. According to Whatley, Watson was “ a renowned patriot, Episcopalian and opponent of the union who had been accused of publishing anti-government pamphlets on at least two earlier occasions.”, and compares Watson to Gaelic bards like Iain Lom who also opposed the Union. Both Watson and Lom, Whatley suggests, “were contributors to the cultural nationalism that emerged as a result of the loss of Scottish political nationhood caused by the union”. For Whatley, this ‘cultural nationalism’ then overlapped with ’popular Jacobitism’.

In which case, if, rather than being Fry’s ‘intuitive’ ( implying ‘unconscious’) response to the Union, the Scottish cultural revival of 1706 was deliberate and conscious, was a political response to the threat of Union, then a form of Scottish nationalism already existed in 1706. Yet, whilst Fry and Whatley find evidence of early 18th century ’nationalism, Graeme Morton has drawn attention to the absence of Scottish nationalism in the 19th century :

In many ways the student of nationalism in Scotland is not helped by the tools available to do the job. The search for a universal theory has proved increasingly fruitless, and the discipline remains fragmented into communicative, elitist, modernist and ethnic theories (to name but a few). This is despite a convergence between those who regard the nation- state and nationalism as inherently modern - an invention of the late eighteenth century - and those who stress the ethnic sentiment which all ‘nation-states’ use to legitimate their existence. Yet Scotland’s pre-modern identity (with the Declaration of Arbroath in 1320 at its pinnacle) has not become the ‘blood and belonging’ of ethnic cleansing or genocide or xenophobia or emancipation characteristic of modern nationalisms. [Morton: 1998 : 158]

At the end of his analysis, Morton suggests that what emerged in Scotland at the end of the nineteenth century was ‘a thoroughly modern civic nationalism’, or a ‘cultural nationalism’. Can this ‘cultural nationalism’ be equated with that of Watson and Lom in the early 18th century ? I suggest not. Whilst Watson and Lom were part of a Scottish ’cultural resistance’ to the Union of 1707, late 19th / early 20th century Scotland was represented by the parochial ‘kailyard‘ stories of J.M. Barrie and S.R. Crockett and the imperial adventure novels of John Buchan. By way of contrast, the same period in Ireland produced Yeats and Joyce and a powerful nationalism which tore apart Gladstone’s Liberal Party and led to the Easter Rising of 1916.

Looking back from 1977, when the SNP had 11 MPs and a Scottish Devolution Bill was grinding its painful way to ultimate failure in 1979, Harvie [1977] traced the emergence of the Scottish National Party (founded in 1933) to its roots in a Scottish literary renaissance in the 1920s. According to Harvie this 1920s renaissance involved ‘talents considerably superior’ to those of late 19th century Scotland : Neil Gunn, Edwin Muir, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, James Bridie, Compton Mackenzie and Eric Linklater, as well as ‘the genius of Hugh MacDairmid, a figure comparable to Yeats and Joyce’.

In particular, Harvie draws attention to the importance of MacDairmid’s 1926 poem ‘ A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle’ (note Harvie’s gendered language)

The Thistle, mutating throughout the drunk man’s vision, is not a symbol of nationalism; it is the eternal negation of man’s present state, on which his mind must act, as thesis on antithesis, to secure his liberation. The nation on the other hand is a human construct, a necessary matrix of traditions and institutions, which can be -indeed has to be - used to cope with and homogenise this process:

Thou Dostoevski, understood,
Wha had your ain land in your bluid,
And into it as in a mould,
The passion o’ your being’ rolled
Inherited in turn frae Heaven
Or sources for abune it even.

Is Scotland big enough to be
A symbol o that force in me,
In wha’s divine inebriety
A sicht abune contempt I’ll see?
For a’ that’s Scottish is in me,
As a’ things Russian were in thee,
And I in turn ‘ud be an action,
To pit in a concrete abstraction
My country’s contrair qualities
And mak’ a unity of these
As my love owre its history dwells
As owretone to a peal o’bells.
[Harvie: 1977, quote from MacDiarmid: 1926]

Yeats was a contemporary of MacDairmid and was also part of a nationalist movement. In 1928, Yeats wrote :

The bees build in the crevices
Of loosening masonry, and there
The mother birds bring grubs and flies.
My wall is loosening; honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare

We are closed in , and the key is turned
On our uncertainty; somewhere a house is burned,
Yet no clear fact can be discerned;
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

A barricade of stone or of wood;
Some fourteen days of civil war;
Last night they trundled down the road
That dead young soldier in his blood;
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart’s grown brutal from the fare;
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love; O honey bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

[from Yeats: Meditations in Time of Civil War : 1928: Everyman edition: 1997: 54]

Although MacDairmid helped found a ‘radical’ National Party in 1928, when it amalgamated with the moderate Scottish Party to form the Scottish National Party in 1933, MacDairmid was thrown out. Nor, since Scotland did not achieve independence in his life time, did MacDairmid have to deal with the conflict between fantasy and reality as Yeats had to.

Yeats’ ‘Easter 1916’ was written in 1921, just as Ireland had gained her long sought for independence. Or at least, the 26 southern counties had. The 6 counties of northern Ireland remained part of the United Kingdom. In 1922 this division of Ireland triggered a civil war between southern Irish ‘realists’, who accepted the division as a political fact and the ‘idealists’ who did not. Yeats’ lines -‘Last night they trundled down the road/ That young dead soldier in his blood’ and ‘We had fed the heart on fantasies/ The heart’s grown brutal on the fare’ from ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’ may be less often quoted (and hence less well known) than his refrain ‘All changed, changed utterly/ A terrible beauty is born’ from ‘Easter 1916’ . Perhaps the lines from ‘Meditation in Time of Civil War’ should be as well remembered..

Although the southern Irish aspect of the civil war lasted only 11 months [Tanner: 2003: 291], the ‘Troubles’ of northern Ireland have yet to be fully resolved. Northern Ireland’s devolved Assembly remains in suspension. One important factor in the complex negotiations around ‘power-sharing’ (between Republican and Unionist parties) is the strong anti- Republican position adopted by the Protestant politician Ian Paisley, born in Armagh in 1926. According to Tanner:

Paisley’s childhood was steeped in the traditions of the sixteenth-century Scottish Calvinist opponents of episcopacy… Paisley’s daughter, Rhonda, was to recall happy times spent with her father rooting around the hills of south-west Scotland and looking for their graves: ‘Many a holiday we spent trekking over the moors to be photographed at some Covenanter’s grave in Scotland.`…[Paisley’s] politics, theology and entire thought process appear to be located in the ecclesiastical battlegrounds of the sixteenth century… [Tanner:2003: 360/1]


This image of Paisley as successor to Macmillan and Hepburn as representing ‘the poor, wasted, misrepresented remnant of the suffering, anti-popish, anti-prelatic, anti-erastian, anti-sectarian true Presbyterian Church of Scotland’ may provide an answer to the questions posed by Ascherson.

Perhaps the ‘failure’ of Scotland’s middle-class civic nationalism to engage with Ascherson’s ‘hurricane survivors’ reflects a fear of what might emerge. Football is deeply embedded in Scottish popular culture, but unique to Scotland [Harvie: 1977:208] the rivalry between Celtic and Rangers in Glasgow and Hibs (Hibernians) and Hearts (Heart of Midlothian) in Edinburgh is expressed as a ‘political- religious’ sectarian conflict. Supporters of Celtic and Hibs wave Irish tricolours and sing nationalist songs like ‘A Nation once Again’ and proclaim their support for the IRA whilst Rangers and Hearts supporters wave the Union Jack and sing Unionist songs like ‘The Sash my Father Wore’ and proclaim their support for the UDA (a Unionist paramilitary group). However, although England experienced acts of violent terrorism during the ‘Troubles’ [ between 1969 and 1993] Scotland did not. The violence of Scottish ‘sectarianism’ remained part of Scottish popular culture and did not cross over into the sphere of political violence.

Perhaps it is this ‘spectre of sectarianism’ which has haunted, even halted, the development of Scottish nationalism beyond its nineteenth century ‘Unionist nationalism’ roots? That the sombre echoes of Yeats’ ‘Meditation in Time of Civil War’ have had a sobering effect on all but the most enthusiastic ‘assertors of Scotland’s liberty and opponents of Union‘. [From Latin inscription on gravestone of Robert Johnston, MP for Dumfries in Union parliament of 1706]








Sources

TDGHNHAS - Transactions Dumfriesshire and Galloway Natural History and Antiquarian Society.
Ascherson, N: Stone Voices, The Search for Scotland: Granta: London: 2002
Broun, D., Finlay, R. and Lynch, M.: eds: Image and Identity, The Making and Re-making of Scotland Through the Ages: John Donald: Edinburgh: 1998
Cowan, E. and Finlay, J. :eds.: Scottish History, The Power of the Past: Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh: 2002
Donnachie, I and Whatley, C, : eds: The Manufacture of Scottish history: Polygon: Edinburgh: 1992
Ferguson ,W. :The Identity of the Scottish Nation:, an Historic Quest: Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh: 1998
Fry, M: The Union, England, Scotland and the Treaty of 1707 : Birlinn: Edinburgh: 2006
Harvie, C.: Scotland and Nationalism, Scottish Society and Politics 1707-1977: Allen and Unwin: London : 1977
Kehoe, S. and MacPhail ,I. : eds : A Panorama of Scottish History, Contemporary Considerations: University of Glasgow: Glasgow: 2004
MacDairmid, H. : Selected Poems: ed. Craig, D. and Manson, J.: Penguin : London: 1970
Morton, G. : What If, The Significance of Scotland’s Missing Nationalism in the Nineteenth century : in Broun, Finlay and Lynch, eds: Scotland Image and Identity: 1998
Paterson, L: The Autonomy of Modern Scotland : Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh: 1994
Reid, H.M.B.: The Hebronites : TDGNHAS: Series III : Vol.7: 1928

Tanner, M. : Ireland’s Holy wars, The Struggle for a Nation’s Soul 1500-2000: Yale University Press: London : 2003
Whatley, C. with Patrick, D.: The Scots and the Union: Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh : 2006
Whitelaw, H.: The Union of 1707 in Dumfriesshire : TDGHNAS: Series II: Vol. 19: 1907

Yeats, W. B. : Everyman’s Poetry: selected and edited Kelly, J: Dent: London: 1997

A 712 : the Road to Union ?

The A 712 - the Road to Union?
OR
Dalrymples of Stair - Scottish Whigs or Irish Tories?

This could be (Talking Heads song from 1977ish) taking me on ‘The Road to Nowhere’. However, I will set off and see where it takes me.

The A 712.

The A 712 runs for about 30 km/ 20 miles from Minnigaff (Newton Stewart) to Crocketford, both on the A75 Gretna/ Stranraer ( for ferries to Northern Ireland) ‘Euro-route’.


From Minnigaff to New Galloway the road follows roughly course of the Old Edinburgh Road, a pre-Reformation pilgrimage route from Edinburgh to Whithorn. This section passes through the Galloway Forest Park and skirts the ‘highland’ zone of the Southern Uplands which contains 11 peaks over 2500 feet high. From my Galloway Levellers research I have established that by 1660 (e.g. tacks for Drumbuie and Roundfell) this was an area which specialised in the summer pasturing of cattle. By 1690 the Herons of Kirroughtrie had cattle on six identifiable farms here. Each of these farms can be associated with a particular ’hill’, examples being Drigmorn and Drigmorn Hill (545 m/ 1700 ft )and Lamachan and Lamachan Hill (685 m / 2230 feet). In some cases only the name of the hill has survived. For more details see final section of

http://westlandwhig.blogspot.com/2006/10/irish-sea-cattle-trade-and-galloway.html

Beyond what is now the Clatteringshaws Loch/ Reservoir [built 1930s as part of Galloway Hydro-electric power Scheme] the pilgrimage route would have headed straight for St. John’s Town of Dalry [ Knights Hospitallars held land here] and then onwards via A 702 to Moniaive [ Note: according to Ian Whyte in Agriculture and Society in Seveteenth Century Scotland: 1979, Moniaive is mentioned in an Act of the Scottish Parliament from 1661 concerning the ‘delimitation of drove roads‘] , Durisdeer and a Roman road into Clydesdale. Post-reformation, the Old Edinburgh Road was diverted via New Galloway. New Galloway was founded as a Royal Burgh by Sir Robert Gordon of Lochinvar in 1612.

In 1697, a group of mainly Wigtownshire landowners (but including Viscount Alexander Gordon of Kenmure/ New Galloway) petitioned the Scottish Privy Council to have a drove road legally marked out and fenced off between New Galloway and Dumfries. [For details see passage below from online Chamber’s Annals of Scotland highlighted below - all local mentions of this drove road seem to be derived from Chambers].


One of the local sources which quotes Chambers’ is Agnew in his History of the Hereditary Sheriffs of Wigtownshire. [ 1868 edition, page 435]. Agnew immediately moves on to list the Galloway members of the Scottish parliament of 22 May 1700. Of these, James Stewart / Earl of Galloway, Viscount ( Earl) Stair and Sir Andrew Agnew were amongst the landowners who petitioned for the New Galloway/ Dumfries drove road. Of the others, William MacDowall of Garthland, Patrick Dunbar of Machermore and McGuffoc of Rusco can be identified (especially McGuffoc/ McGuffog) as landowners involved in the cattle trade. Finally , amongst the four Commissioners for the Boroughs, Agnew gives Sir Hew Dalrymple as Commissioner for New Galloway. This is quite interesting.

Cattle barons and the Union of 1707.

According to Christopher Whatley’s new book ‘The Scots and the Union’ [Edinburgh University Press : 2006] John Dalrymple, 1st earl of Stair played a decisive role in ‘driving the articles of Union through parliament in 1706-7’.Sir Hew (or Hugh) Dalrymple was John’s brother. Although he represented North Berwick in the Union parliament , his earlier link with New Galloway does give him a ‘cattle trade’ connection, since New Galloway was the ‘fiefdom’ of Viscount Alexander Gordon of Kenmure as successor to the Gordons of Lochinvar. [Note: Sir John Clerk of Penicuik was another key driver towards Union. In the Union parliament, he represented Whithorn, a borough controlled by his brother-in-law and cattle trader, James Stewart, 5th Earl of Galloway].

At which point I will pause. I am not writing an academic thesis, I am merely speculating wildly on the basis of the existence of a road which follows a cattle drove route.

The real problem is that where there should be detailed / formal/ academically recognised and respected local studies of , for example, the Galloway Cattle Trade and the Union of 1707, there is nothing.

The information exists, but no-one knows about it.

Good grief, here is John Dalrymple, first earl of Stair, a major figure in Scottish history (Massacre of Glencoe, Union of 1707), son of James (author The Institutions of the Law of Scotland: 1681 . See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Dalrymple,_1st_Viscount_Stair
for biog.) worrying about a drove road betwixt New Galloway and Dumfries. Why? How important was the cattle trade to the fortunes of the Dalrymple of Stair dynasty? Whyte [1979: 126 ] states that the earl of Stair (John?) took over cattle parks in Wigtownshire constructed by the Cassillis family between 1640/ 1650 at Drummuchloch (near Stranraer)and that by 1700 these were ‘one of the largest cattle parks in the south-west’.

Did the cattle trade (and the threat posed by the English ‘Aliens Act’ which would have banned the it ) help) drive the Union forward? I suspect Yes, but where is my evidence? Does it lie in the ‘Stair muniments’ held in the Scottish Record Office/ National Archive of Scotland ? Possibly…

William Clerk in Strahanna and Irish drovers.

Strahanna is a farm which lies upstream of High Bridge of Ken on the Water of Ken and on a very minor road which leads up past the Holm of Dalquhairn to the abandoned steading of Lorg. A track leads through a pass between Lorg Hill and Altry Hill into Dumfriesshire at Pulskeoch. From Pulskeoch the Southern Upland Way heads towards Sanquhar whilst a very very minor road winds its way to join the A 702 between Moniaive and Thornhill.

Strahanna is pretty remote now and can hardly have been much less remote in 1698. Which makes me wonder why William Clerk of Strahanna was troubled in that year by an Irish drover, one Arthur Ferguson of Pillshaskie , parish of Derry who Clerk claimed was responsible for the riot and abuse committed by him “ rydding down and destroying some cornes belonging to me untill samen was turned red and useless when samen ground was noeways a rodd nor adjacent therto but most wilfully so abused by himself and others his accomplices to my great loss and damnadge probable by his own oath and famous witness. “ [Kirkcudbright Sheriff Court Deeds 1623- 1700: Vol. II: Entry 3346 recorded 13 June 1699: page 764].

What was Arthur Ferguson doing so far from the ‘rodd’ (road)? Was he, perhaps, taking a herd of still illegal Irish cattle by this circuitous route to Edinburgh? Or was the plan to take them down Nithsdale and present them as ‘Highland’ cattle at Dumfries or Alisonbank (Gretna) customs posts?

It does make me wonder how many of the ‘Galloway’ cattle passing along (or off ) drove roads like the A 712 were really Irish?


In which case how many of the Galloway whigs (like the Dalrymples of Stair) were really Irish tories? [Historic pun, go figure]

Now here is entry from Chamber's Domestic Annals of Scotland


http://www.electricscotland.com/history/domestic/vol3ch2c.htm


Oct 15
It is a rather whimsical association of ideas, that Sir David Dunbar, the hero of the sad story of the Bride of Baldoon —the bridegroom in the case—was an active improver of the wretched rural economy of his day. Some years before his unfortunate death in 1682, he had formed the noted park of Baldoon, for the rearing of a superior breed of cattle, with a view to the demands of the market in England. It was, as far as I can lean, the first effort of the kind made in Scotland, and the example was not without imitation in various parts of the southwestern province of Scotland.
Andro Sympson, in his gossiping .Deseription of Galloway, written before the Revolution, speaks of the park of Baldoon as a rich pastoral domain, of two and a half miles in length and one and a half in breadth, to the south of the river Blednoch. It ‘can,’ he says, ‘keep in it, winter and summer, about a thousand bestial, part whereof he [Sir David Dunbar] buys from the country, and grazeth there all winter, other part whereof is his own breed; for he hath nearly two hundred milch kine, which for the most part have calves yearly. He buys also in the summer-time from the country many bestial, oxen for the most part, which be keeps till August or September; so that yearly he either sells at home to drovers, or sends to St Faith’s, and other fairs in England, about eighteen or twenty score of bestial. Those of his own breed at four year old are very large; yea, so large, that, in August or September 1682, nine-and-fifty of that sort, which would have yielded betwixt five and six pound sterling the piece, were seized upon in England for Irish cattle; and because the person to whom they were intrusted had not witnesses there ready at the precise hour to swear that they were seen calved in Scotland, they were, by sentence of Sir J. L. and some others, who knew well enough that they were bred in Scotland, knocked on the head and killed.’
The estate of Baldoon having, by the marriage of the heiress, Mary Dunbar, come into the possession of Lord Basil Hamilton, a younger son of the Duke and Duchess of Hamilton, we now find that young nobleman petitioning the Privy Council for permission to import from Ireland ‘six score young cows of the largest breed for making up his lordship’s stock in the park of Baldoon,’ he giving security that he would import no more, and employ these for no other end.

The example of the Baldoon park was followed by the Laird of Lochnaw and other great proprietors, and the growing importance of the cattle-rearing trade of Galloway is soon after marked by a demand for a road whereby the stock might be driven to the English market. In June 1697, the matter came before the Privy Council. it was represented that, while there was a customary way between the burgh of New Galloway and Dumfries, there was no defined or made road. It was the line of passage taken by immense herds of cattle which were continually passing from the green pastures of the Galloway hills into England—a branch of economy held to be the main support of the inhabitants of the district, and the grand source of its rents. Droves of cattle are, however, apt to be troublesome to the owners and tenants of the grounds through or near which they pass; and such was the ease here. ‘Several debates have happened of late in the passage of droves from New Galloway to Dumfries, the country people endeavouring by violence to stop the droves, and impose illegal exactions of money upon the cattle, to the great damage of the trade; whereby also riots and blood-sheds have been occasioned, which had gone greater length, if those who were employed to carry up the cattle had not managed with great moderation and prudence.’
On a petition from the great landlords of the district, James Earl of Galloway, Lord Basil Hamilton, Alexander Viscount of Kenmure, John Viscount of Stair, Sir Andrew Agnew of Lochnaw, Sir Charles Hay of Park, &c., a commission was appointed by the Privy Council ‘to make and mark a highway for droves frae New Galloway to Dumfries,’ holding ‘the high and accustomed travelling way betwixt the said two burghs.'

Amongst Sir David Dunbar’s imitators, it appears that we have to class Sir George Campbell of Cessnock, in Ayrshire, so noted for his sufferings under the late reign. The parks of Cessnock had formerly been fnrnished with ‘ane brood of great cattle’ and a superior breed of horses, both from Ireland; but, on the unjust forfeiture of the estate, the stock had been taken away and destroyed, so that it was ‘entirely decayed out of that country.’ Sir George, to whom the estate had been restored at the Revolution, obtained, in March 1697, permission from the Privy Council ‘to import from Ireland sixty cows and bulls, thretty-six horses and mares, and six score of sheep, for plenishing of his park.’ Soon after, the Council recalled the permission for the sheep.

Clearance by tractor

Rural clearance through mechanical improvement.

On a journey along the A 75 from Castle Douglas to Gatehouse of Fleet via Twynholm I discussed the significance of the Dundrennan Range cultivation rigs with my brother Kenneth whilst peering through the murk at every field we passed.

Thinking about the changes in the landscape and the corresponding social and economic changes since the 1940ies, Kenneth suggested that the period 1950 to 1980 must have seen the biggest ever change in Galloway/ rural Scotland. I wasn’t so sure, arguing that the period 1760 to 1830 is considered to have marked the biggest ‘discontinuity’. But then, how would we know? No-one has ever carried out such a study in Galloway, or if they have, I have missed it…

For example, in this week’s Galloway News and Dumfries and Galloway Standard there is a Farming Review ( a monthly feature) and in it there is a double page feature ‘Farming scenes from archive libraries’.
This is a set of eight photographs of farming scenes from 1900 to 1969. Two are of particular interest. One shows two horses and four people (farmer and farmer’s son, a Land Army ‘girl’ and a farm worker) at Barcloy farm near Kirkcudbright, the other shows baled hay being loaded onto a horse drawn cart near Balmaclellan in 1969. The fact that the hay has been baled in the 1969 photograph reveals the hidden presence of a tractor [balers require a ‘power take off‘ from a tractor to work] , thus even the hill farms of the Glenkens were mechanised by then.

The physical impact of mechanisation on the rural landscape has been studied, since it has had a marked and obvious impact on natural heritage/ bio-diversity/ ecology/ environment/ archaeology. But what of the impact of mechanisation on rural society and culture? Adam Gray [Borgue - the Land and People, Annals of a Parish : G.C. Books: Wigtown: 2001: 253] notes:

The advent of the tractor meant a great reduction of the numbers of farm-workers required. Lennox Plunton and Plunton Mains comprising of approximately 1100 acres (449 hectares) in 1931 employed 16 people, in 1972 employed 5 and at the end of the century 2. In many places there is one man to one farm. Gone are the pleasant conversations of horse-farming days at ‘piece-time’ [meal time] sitting behind a dyke on the headland of a field being ploughed, or leaning against a rick in a sunny hayfield, or behind the stooks in the harvest field…nowadays the tractor driver lives a life that is more solitary and not half as interesting because he spends ‘most of his waking life as a slow moving hermit with his transistor radio in a world filled with mechanical clatter’.

Janet Dwyer and Ian Hodge [The Challenge of Change: Demands and Expectations for Farmed Land: in T.C Smout (ed.) : Nature, Landscape and People Since the Second World : Tuckwell: Edinburgh : 2001: 117 ] sum up this change :

With mechanisation and increases in land and labour productivity , farms became larger and concentrated on fewer enterprises. The eastern counties increasingly specialised in arable cropping in general, and cereals in particular. The west of the country in grazing livestock… Developments in agricultural technology also profoundly altered rural landscapes and biodiversity.

But such typical ‘objective’ descriptions of rural change since WWII totally miss (evade, discount, silence, elide) the human dimension which Adam Gray manages to include in his account of the impact of mechanisation. It is also this human dimension to the historical rural experience of ‘progress, modernisation, rationalisation, improvement, mechanisation and industrialisation’ which the work historians like Tom Devine (e.g. Clearance and Improvement : Land, Power and People in Scotland 1700-1900: John Donald: Edinburgh: 2006) have brought to the fore.

What is ‘history’? And when was it?

My wife died in 1996. Between 1981 and 1984, she was an active participant in the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp. About four years ago I was somewhat taken back when our daughter came back from school with a Standard Grade History handout on ‘Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp’.
I said to her ‘ This can’t be history- your mum was there! I went to visit her at Greenham in 1984...”. My daughter just shrugged.

So does the mechanisation of farming in Galloway count as history, despite still being within living memory ? I guess it does. In which case… I wonder if I can take the strongest (as advised on the day) theme from my Oral Presentation [see blogs below] - the final section quoting from Neal Ascherson’s ‘ Stone Voices’ and develop it. But how?

Feel free to use ‘Comment’ section below to make suggestions.

Standing stones and cord rig - or sheep tracks.

In a field below the Urr Valley Hotel and Ernespie farm on the north west edge of Castle Douglas are two small standing stones. About 500 metres from these stones, on the sloping face of a hill are a set of parallel field markings.

One possibility is that these are the remnants of prehistoric 'cord-rig'. The other that they are sheep-tracks. Soil-creep has also been suggested.

This morning I walked out to Ernespie and took a set of photos of the standings stones, field markings and of the immediate area. I took sevral photos of fields and hills (the hills are small 'drumlin' type glacial deposits).

As you can see, sheep do graze in the fields, and walk around on the slopes of the hills, but in a 'random', sheepish way. It is hard to imagine how they could have created the parallel markings on one but not other hills.

However the main type of farming is dairy. The farm shown is Gerranton, and the photo was taken half-way between Ernespie and Blackerne farms, which are 1km apart. Gerranton is 1km from Hillowton, and Hillowton less than a km from Chapmanton. The farms are listed as belonging to Lincluden Collegiate Church in 1560, when they were arable farms.

They are also in Crossmichael parish (its boundary with Kelton passes through the standing stones). This is an interesting boundary. Farms within Kelton parish belonged directly to the lordship of Galloway, and (e.g. Carlingwark, Whitepark and Threave) were amongst those listed as forfeit to the Crown in 1456. In some places, e.g. Blackpark/ Carlingwark , the farm boundary is the parish boundary. Blackpark was a Lincluden farm and so in Crossmichael, whilst Carlingwark (no longer a farm, now part of Castle Douglas) was lordship so in Kelton.

Since the original gift of land to Lincluden nunnery (as it then was) was made by Uchtred, son of Fergus, of Galloway in 1174, this is a very old boundary.

Could it be even older? The Kelton parish boundary makes a 'omega' shaped loop around Carlingwark loch, following the course of two streams which flowed southish down into the marshland to the west and east of the loch, with the standing stones and Erne Hill at the top of the loop. Since the loch appears from recovery of votive offerings [ Carlingwark Cauldron plus others] to have been a late Bronze Age/ Iron Age religious site, perhaps the boundary is also prehistoric?

Lost landscape of the Levellers?

The following was inspired by aerial photographs of rig and furrow cultivation in the Milton Parks/ Dunrod area of the Kirkcudbright (Dundrennan Range ) Military Training Area which can be found in an RCAHMS report at :

http://www.rcahms.gov.uk/kirkcudbrightreport.pdf


Do these images reveal remnant and fugitive traces of a lost landscape?

The Lost Landscape of the Levellers

In the Hornel Library, Broughton House , Kirkcudbright [National Trust for Scotland] is a transcript (see below) made by John Nicholson [1778-1866] of a case brought against 22 named Galloway Levellers by Sir Basil Hamilton on 27th January 1725. The transcript gives the 13 locations these Levellers came from. Eight are the names of farms, two are mills and three are crofts or cots.

Mapping the Levellers

Of the farms, Beoch NX 681 609, Orroland NX 773 466, Kirkcarswell NX 755 493, Merks NX 732 519, Bombie NX 714 503, Gribdae NX 710 503 and Lochfergus NX 515 698 are still working farms, but Mullock NX 711 444 is on land occupied by the Kirkcudbright/ Dundrennan Military Range since the 1940ies.

The site of Auchleandmilne [Auchlane NX 711 584] can be traced from Ainslie’s 1797 map but is now ruined. Nethermilns [Fagra] survived to be recorded by Donnachie: Industrial Archaeology of Galloway : 1971 at NX 748 467.

Of the crofts and cots, Greenlane NX 747 558 survives as a mid 20th century cottage, Meadow Isle [possibly NX 755 580] as a field name only on Airieland farm NX 757 571. Cotland has not yet been identified.

The Lost Landscape of the Levellers

With the exception of Beoch, all these Leveller locations lie within a 10 km wide by 15 km long area to the east of the lower river Dee. It is an area I am very familiar with, but despite this familiarity, it is very difficult to imagine the area as it was in 1724. The farms may bear the same names but that is all. Most of the farms are now dairy farms. The farm buildings, their layout and sometimes locations, are different. Their fields are laid out in a rationalised grid-like pattern, divided by dykes, hedges, ditches and barbed wire fences. The courses of streams have been altered, areas of marsh and bog and even a few lochs have been drained. In winter, the bright green grass of ‘improved ( through drainage and the application of fertilisers ) pasture’ stands out against the yellows and browns of the ‘unimproved’ rough grazing of higher land. Roads and bridges have been built.

Is it possible to imagine, to re-construct and re-discover this lost landscape? This is what I have been trying to do as part of my Galloway Levellers’ research. This is important if I am to understand the actions of the Levellers. The Levellers’ actions were not spontaneous, they were planned and organised. They took place over several months in several different locations and involved hundreds (up to 1000 allegedly ) of people. The specific action which led to the 1725 court case was directed against Sir Basil Hamilton, who had been an active Jacobite in 1715 and whose grandfather and great-grandfather [David Dunbar I and II of Baldoon] were Episcopalian anti-Covenanters in the 1670s and 1680s is significant. But the ’location’ of the Levellers named in the case is also significant. From studying some 300 tacks recorded between 1623 and 1700 in the Kirkcudbright Sheriff Court Deeds plus records of teind payments from the same source, it is clear that these Levellers came from arable ferm-touns and crofts producing oats and ‘beir’ [bere, bear, a hardy four-rowed type of barley] as their main crops. Although not accurate in detail, Roy’s Military Survey of 1750 confirms this, showing extensive areas of open field rig and furrow cultivation in this area.

Some enclosed areas are shown, but these are large enclosures which cannot be related to present day field boundaries. One of these large enclosures appears to correspond with the cattle enclosure between Bombie and Galtway [ NX 71 49 area] demolished by the Levellers in 1724. This held 400 head of cattle. Another such large enclosure appears to be at ‘Milton Parks’ [ NX 70 45 area]. From the Kirkcudbright Sheriff Court Deeds [Volume II, Entry 1265 ] there was a cattle park at Netherlaw [NX 73 45 area] in 1688 which the landowner, Sir Robert Maxwell of Orchardton required ‘not to be set to the plough’.

Land ‘not set to the plough’ but used as extensive cattle enclosures did not require the labour of cottars to work it. Although an exact figure is difficult to establish, the eviction of some sixty cottar families at Whitsun 1723 by Hamilton and other cattle-trading landowners seems to have been a key trigger for the events of 1724. It was the threat of further expansion of such cattle enclosures at the expense the traditional arable farmed landscape and the cottar families this landscape supported which provided mass/ popular support for the Galloway Levellers.

However, although the cattle parks did not depopulate the landscape as the Levellers feared ( possibly due to the expansion of the Highland cattle trade at the expense of the Galloway cattle trade), the landscape they knew was transformed from the 1760ies onwards. To begin with, up until the 1840ies, arable farming was still important and so the transformation was not total. But as dairy farming, especially once rail links to population centres were built (1860 onwards), came to predominate, the arable fields became pastureland.

Finally, it would seem, the post-war mechanisation and intensification of farming completed the transformation. At the MoD Kirkcudbright Training Area [Dundrennan Range] large areas of rig and furrow cultivation can still be seen. Since the Range has preserved the farmed landscape as it was in 1940, I wonder if the last traces of Levellers’ landscape have only been erased within living memory?

The Leveller Court case

From A.S. Morton: The Levellers of Galloway: Transactions Dumfriesshire and Galloway Natural History and Antiquarian Society: Third Series, Vol.19., 1936.
Based on John Nicholson’s research notes (circa 1830)


On the 27th January 1725, at a court held in the Tolbooth of Kirkcudbright in the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright in Galloway, with the following justices being on the bench- Thomas Gordon of Earlston, David Lidderdale of Torrs, Colonel William Maxwell of Cardoness (presiding)

NOTE: Maxwell's father presbyterian minister of Minnigaff parish, removed in 1662. Maxwell had to flee into exile in Holland in 1685 after showing support (embracing him on scaffold!) for the Duke of Argyll's 's rebellion, In 1688, joined William of Orange's invasion army, fought against Jacobites at Killiecrankie and Boyne, organised defence of Glasgow against Jacobites in 1715 and 'sympathised' with Levellers in 1724.

, John Gordon of Largmore, Robert Gordon of Garvarie, Nathaniel Gordon of Carleton, and John Maxwell, provost of Kirkcudbright - the Honourable Basil Hamilton brought a complaint at the instance of Lady Mary Hamilton of Baldoon (being his mother) and himself as her factor against:

Thomas Moire of Beoch and Grisel Grierson his wife
John Walker of Cotland
Robert McMorran of Orroland
John Shennan and William Shennan of Kirkcarswell
John Cogan, John Bean, Thomas Millagane and Thomas Richardson of Gribty
James Robeson of Merks
John Donaldson and John Cultane the younger of Bombie
John Cairns and John Martin of Lochfergus
Alexander McClune and James Shennan of Nethermilns
James Wilson of Greenlane croft
Robert Herries of Auchleandmiln
John, George and Robert Hyslop of Mullock
John McKnaught of Meadowisles

that between the 12 and 16th days of May 1724, they did in a most riotous, tumultuous and illegal way assemble and convene themselves with some hundred other rioters, mostly all armed with guns, swords, pistols, clubs, batons, pitchforks and other offensive weapons on Bombie Muir, parish of Kirkcudbright on the Stewartry thereof and marched to the lands of Galtways, belonging to the complainer and then:

demolished 580 roods of dykes, equal to £19 6s 8d, in consequence of which the complainer was damnified of her stock of 400 black cattle kept at grassing within said inclosure, amounting to £50 by the loss of mercats; the fences being pulled down obliging the complainer to drive them to some remote place before sunset each night and watch them all night and keep them from straying which hindered them being fattened for which the sum of £50 is claimed, as also for the complainers cattle breaking away and destroying other people's corn for which the complainer is chargeable, together with the sum of £500 sterling as damages sustained for rebuilding the said dykes.

The defendants presented a petition 'expressing their sorrow for the loss and damage' which had happened then due to 'people's madness and ignorance' and prayed that consideration might be taken to the 'indignant circumstances' (i.e. poverty) of many of them. A Commission of honest and discrete men was appointed - Willam MacMillan of Barwhinnak, Francis Rogerson of Rascarrell, John Kuton of Knabiee and John Johstone of Airds. They presented their report in March 1725 and as a result the defendants were 'jointly and severally ' fined £777 Scots.

Cultural/ Political Constructions: Scottish Identity

This is revised version of Oral presentation- for first draft see blog below

Cultural and Political Constructions of Scottish Identity since 1707.

Three hundred years ago this month, at 1pm on the 20th of November 1706 to be precise, construction of the Mid-Steeple in Dumfries was brought to a temporary halt. The event which interrupted work that day was no ordinary occurrence.

Led by the Reverend John Hepburn of Urr, a group of armed horsemen rode up to the Mercat Cross at the foot of the Mid-Steeple and with the enthusiastic support of a large crowd, ceremonially burnt a copy of the 25 Articles of Union. Hepburn then affixed a declaration of his opposition to the proposed ‘incorporating union’ between England and Scotland to the Mercat Cross before retreating back into Galloway.

Despite this dramatic, almost theatrical, intervention by Hepburn, on 1st of May 1707 a union between Scotland and England was established. And yet, despite fears raised at the time and subsequently, Scotland never became ‘North Britain’. Thus in 1999, Winifred Ewing could proclaim that “ The Scottish parliament , adjourned on the 25th day of March 1707, is hereby reconvened.”.

The structure of this presentation is historical, beginning with a suggestion by Fry that the re-emergence of Scotland as a formal political community in 1999 can be traced back to a Scottish cultural revival which began in 1706. I then discuss, following Morton, the puzzling absence of a Scottish ‘nationalism’ in the 19th century. However, as Harvie shows, following a Scottish literary renaissance of the 1920s, ’modern’ Scottish nationalism did emerge in the 1930ies. Finally, drawing on Ascherson’s challenging description of a Scotland still deeply traumatised by enforced urbanisation and industrial collapse, I pose the question: XXXXXX

I will now return to 1706. In that year, James Watson published the first of three volumes of his ‘Choice Collection of Comic and Serious Scots Poems’. So just as the ‘auld sang’ of the Scottish Parliament was coming to its end, the ‘auld sangs’ of Scotland were being recalled and revived.

According to Michael Fry, in his new book on the Union of 1707:

[Watson] sets out what was still then known of the older Scottish literature, at the risk of being lost because the royal court had long gone from Edinburgh, and the Parliament, also a patron of culture on a modest scale , was preparing to follow. The preface boasts it is the first printed anthology of poems ‘in our own native Scots dialect’. It too, contributed to the vernacular revival which led on to the poetry of Alan Ramsay, Robert Ferguson and Robert Burns. Each delighted to find in Watson’s collection traditional genres and metres with which to enrich his own work. That line of intellectual descent shows how, as if by some intuition, Scotland prepared for extinction as a state with a revival of her culture.

Indeed the Scots have endured, to the present, as a cultural community sustained by recurrent revivals, which also laid the foundation for their re-emergence as a political community 300 years later.

As Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun had said : ‘If a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he would not care who should make the laws of a nation’. Fry: The Union: England , Scotland and the Treaty of 1707: Birlinn: 2006: 255/6

But, when Fry’s description of Watson’s book is compared with that given by Christopher Whatley in his new account of the Union [ Whatley: Scots and the Union: Edinburgh: 2006] an immediate problem emerges. According to Whatley, Watson was “ a renowned patriot, Episcopalian and opponent of the union who had been accused of publishing anti-government pamphlets on at least two earlier occasions.”, and compares Watson to Gaelic bards like Iain Lom who also opposed the Union. Both Watson and Lom, Whatley suggests, “were contributors to the cultural nationalism that emerged as a result of the loss of Scottish political nationhood caused by the union”. For Whatley, this ‘cultural nationalism’ then overlapped with ’popular Jacobitism’.

In which case, if, rather than being Fry’s ‘intuitive’ ( implying ‘unconscious’) response to the Union, the Scottish cultural revival of 1706 was deliberate and conscious, was a political response to the threat of Union, then a form of Scottish nationalism already existed in 1706.


This leads directly on to a question which our previous discussion of Benedict Anderson’s theme of nations as ‘imagined communities’ touched on. According to the ‘standard’ models of nationalism, a Scottish nationalism based on cultural or ethnic constructions of national identity should not have emerged until the mid 19th century. Yet, whilst Fry and Whatley find evidence of early 18th century ’nationalism, Graeme Morton has drawn attention to the absence of Scottish nationalism in the 19th century :

In many ways the student of nationalism in Scotland is not helped by the tools available to do the job. The search for a universal theory has proved increasingly fruitless, and the discipline remains fragmented into communicative, elitist, modernist and ethnic theories (to name but a few). This is despite a convergence between those who regard the nation- state and nationalism as inherently modern - an invention of the late eighteenth century - and those who stress the ethnic sentiment which all ‘nation-states’ use to legitimate their existence. Yet Scotland’s pre-modern identity (with the Declaration of Arbroath in 1320 at its pinnacle) has not become the ‘blood and belonging’ of ethnic cleansing or genocide or xenophobia or emancipation characteristic of modern nationalisms. [Morton: What if?: The Significance of Scotland’s Missing Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century: in Broun, Finlay, Lynch: eds.: Image and Identity: The Making and Re-making of Scotland Through the Ages: John Donald: Edinburgh: 1998]

Why is this ‘missing nationalism’ significant? A photograph in Morton’s book ’ William Wallace: Man and Myth’ [Sutton : Stroud : 2001] provides an illustration. It is of a collection of letters written in 1868 by European supporters of the National Wallace Monument. Included are letters from the Italian nationalists Garibaldi and Mazzini. Yet in 19th century Scotland, nationalist heroes like Wallace and Bruce were invoked in support of the Union, the argument being that by securing Scotland’s independence, they ensured that (unlike Ireland and Wales) when Union came, Scotland could join as an equal partner in the United Kingdom. At the same time as this ‘Unionist Nationalism’ was being promoted, Scotland’s industrial workers, soldiers, emigrants, traders and administrators were contributing the emergence, through imperialism, of Britain as a dominant world power.

At the end of his analysis, Morton suggests that what emerged in Scotland at the end of the nineteenth century was ‘a thoroughly modern civic nationalism’, or a ‘cultural nationalism’. Can Morton’s late 19th century ‘cultural nationalism’ be equated with that of Watson and Lom in the early 18th century ? I am suggest not.. However, whilst Watson and Lom were part of a Scottish ’literary renaissance’ in 1706, no similar renewal existed 1906. Instead, there were the ‘kailyard‘ stories of J.M. Barrie and S.R. Crockett and the imperial adventure novels of John Buchan. In contrast, the same period in century Ireland produced Yeats and Joyce and a powerful nationalism which tore apart Gladstone’s Liberal Party and led to the Easter Rising of 1916.

The ultimate convergence between an ‘independent’ Scottish cultural identity and anti-Union nationalism did not emerge until the Depression years of the late 1920s and early 1930s.

Writing in 1977, when the SNP had 11 MPs and a Scottish Devolution Bill was grinding its painful way to ultimate failure in 1979, Christopher Harvie’s ‘Scotland and Nationalism’ [ Allen and Unwin: London: 1977] traces the emergence of the Scottish National Party in 1933 to its roots in a Scottish literary renaissance in the 1920s. According to Harvie this 1920s renaissance involved ‘talents considerably superior’ to those of late 19th century Scotland : Neil Gunn, Edwin Muir, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, James Bridie, Compton Mackenzie and Eric Linklater, as well as ‘the genius of Hugh MacDairmid, a figure comparable to Yeats and Joyce’.

In particular, Harvie draws attention to the importance of MacDairmid’s 1926 poem ‘ A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle’ (please excuse Harvie’s gendered language)

The Thistle, mutating throughout the drunk man’s vision, is not a symbol of nationalism; it is the eternal negation of man’s present state, on which his mind must act, as thesis on antithesis, to secure his liberation. The nation on the other hand is a human construct, a necessary matrix of traditions and institutions, which can be -indeed has to be - used to cope with and homogenise this process:

Thou Dostoevski, understood,
Wha had your ain land in your bluid,
And into it as in a mould,
The passion o’ your being’ rolled
Inherited in turn frae Heaven
Or sources for abune it even.

Is Scotland big enough to be
A symbol o that force in me,
In wha’s divine inebriety
A sicht abune contempt I’ll see?
For a’ that’s Scottish is in me,
As a’ things Russian were in thee,
And I in turn ‘ud be an action,
To pit in a concrete abstraction
My country’s contrair qualities
And mak’ a unity of these
As my love owre its history dwells
As owretone to a peal o’bells.

And in this hiecher stratosphere
As bairn at giant at thee I peer...

But when the ‘radical’ National Party, which MacDairmid helped to found in 1928, amalgamated with the moderate Scottish Party to form the Scottish National Party in 1933, MacDairmid was thrown out. However, although Harvie compares MacDiarmid to Yeats, unlike MacDiarmid, by 1928 Yeats had to confront the descent of the idealist nationalism he had helped to create into bloody civil war:

The bees build in the crevices
Of loosening masonry, and there
The mother birds bring grubs and flies.
My wall is loosening; honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare

We are closed in , and the key is turned
On our uncertainty; somewhere a house is burned,
Yet no clear fact can be discerned|:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

A barricade of stone or of wood;
Some fourteen days of civil war;
Last night they trundled down the road
That dead young soldier in his blood;
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart’s grown brutal from the fare;
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love; O honey bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

[from Yeats: Meditations in Time of Civil War : 1928]

Reflecting on the Irish experience of nationalism, perhaps it was just as well for Scotland that what Harvie describes as the ’treacly effluent of the Kailyard’ held back the development of Scottish nationalism for a generation. But this still leaves the question of why it took fifty year from their formation in 1933 for the SNP to achieve political break through in 1974. That this was done under the slogan - “It’s Scotland’s Oil !“. rather than ’It’s Scotland’s Culture!’ leads on to Neal Ascherson‘s contribution to my theme.

Ascherson is a journalist rather than a historian. Back in 1979, he reported on the first devolution referendum. In his book ‘Stone Voices’, Ascherson wonders why this failed to deliver a Scottish Parliament? He then goes on to wonder why , despite the success of the 1997 devolution referendum, popular support for the new Scottish Parliament is so weak.

The key to understanding Scottish modern history is to grasp the sheer force, violence and immensity of social change in the two centuries after about 1760. No country in Europe, and perhaps no country on earth until the European explosion into the interior of North America and Australia, underwent a social and physical mutation so fast and so complete. Tidal waves of transformation swept over the country, Lowland and Highland, drowning the way of life of hundreds of thousands of families and obliterating not only traditional societies but the very appearance of the landscape itself. ...[In the Lowlands] a countryside of open, hedgeless fields, with tenant farmers and cottars living n small communities of a dozen or so families known as ‘ferm touns’ now came abruptly to end... Within a generation, the very placenames and locations of the ‘touns’ were sinking out of memory, as if a new map had been laid over the surface of the land.... Somethings, however, did not change, or at least they stayed recognisable. It depended on who you were. Most people in Scotland experienced the arrival of capitalism as the inset of an obliterating, scattering cyclone...But if you were and advocate or a minister, a university lecturer or a banker, it was different. For the professions and for Scotland’s small middle class, the cyclone was no worse than the bracing Edinburgh wind...for this minority there was a continuity about what they did , and what they thought they were doing. [Ascherson: Stone Voices, The Search for Scotland: Granta: London : 2002]


This ‘deep discontinuity between the experiences of the ‘hurricane survivor’ majority and the ‘healthy breeze-blown’ minority’ is a useful distinction. It is also very challenging. Is it not the case that the ‘Scottish Cultural Heritage’ we are studying is the cultural heritage of Ascherson’s ‘healthy breeze- blown’ minority? How far into the Scotland of the ‘hurricane survivor majority’ does Scottish cultural heritage really extend? Not very far, I suspect.

Nor, which is more directly to Ascherson’s point, does cultural or civic nationalism extend much further into the Scotland of the hurricane survivors. Yes, after 18 years of minority ( in Scotland) Conservative rule, a Devolution Settlement was reached and a Scottish Parliament was reconvened in 1999. But as Ascherson puts it:

A strong tide of public opinion brought it into being between 1997 and 1999; the Scottish middle class, or governing stratum, or intelligentsia or what every one may call it finally succeeded in rallying the majority into decisive political action. At the same time, the division has not gone away. The minority are pleased and proud at much of what the Scottish Parliament has done, whilst admitting to its severe teething problems. The majority are much more reserved about what the Parliament may do to change their lives now and in the future... Their support is astonishingly tepid.

If anything, popular support for the Scottish Parliament is diminishing. In 1999, 58% of the electorate voted in the Scottish Parliament election. In 2003, the figure was only 49% . It is feared that even fewer will vote in 2007. In response to this fear, the Scottish Executive and the Electoral Commission have set up a ‘votescotland’ campaign designed to encourage popular participation in democracy.

To summarise: although there are apparent continuities of cultural heritage and national political identity between Scotland as it was in 1706 and Scotland as it is today, I suggests these continuities are ‘narrative constructs’ rather than innate features. I am thinking here of the ‘Hilton of Cadboll’ case discussed by Angela in her lecture. Whilst museum curators and nationalist politicians ( if not Ascherson’s university lecturers!) may claim to be presenting such continuities as objectives facts, key figures like James Watson, Robert Burns , Walter Scott and Hugh MacDairmid were (in their very different ways) conscious of their roles as active ’creators’ rather the passive ‘curators’ of Scotland’s cultural and political identity.

But, despite the ‘votescotland’ campaign, the problem identified by Ascherson remains. How can the ‘hurricane survivors’ be persuaded that they are creators rather observers of Scotland’s history and identity? This is a question I have puzzled over. I believe that the part of the answer lies in promoting the study of ‘history from below’. To give an example, Chris Whatley includes John Hepburn in his study of the Union of 1707. From my research, I have found that Hepburn’s followers helped spark the Galloway Levellers’ uprising of 1724, an uprising against Ascherson’s hurricane. But why, I wonder, have the actions of the Galloway Levellers been relegated to local rather than national history? Why, I wonder, are the voices of the ‘hurricane survivors’ still not heard?

Neilson's Monument

This is a photo of Neilson's Monument aka 'Hot Blast' aka 'the black pyramid' on the summit of Barstobrick Hill. It was erected in 1888 to commemorate James Beaumont Neilson's invention of the 'hot blast' form of iron-smelting.

On the far side of the monument are the remains of a defensive stone wall built as part of a hillfort.

Kilnair, Tack, 1669

Click on image to enlarge - it is readable- just.
This tack (lease) is from the Kirkcudbright Sheriff Court Deeds 1623-1675. I have found Kilnair on Roy's 1750 Military Survey of Scotland - complete with 'scrtach marks' indicating the 'arrable' land which grew oats (corn) and bere (beir). It is also shown on Ainslie's 1797 mpa of the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright. It can still be found on modern OS Maps in Grid Square NX 66 86. Plan [ see 'Witches drowned in sea of sitka spruce' below) is to visit and record what remains. Of particular interest is the mention of making 'twa staine cheis for ewery twelf ewes' i.e. sheep's milk cheese.

Threave Castle

Photo take 08.00 a.m. GMT 01 November 2006 from Dunmuir Hill. Hill in back ground is unamed between Loch Mannoch and Loch Whinyeon. In middle ground is Neilson's Monument on Barstobrick Hill. Neilson was Robert Beaumont Neilson who invented 'hot-blast' technique of iron-smelting and thus triggered Scottish heavy engineering industry. On same hill is also remains of large hillfort. Threave Castle is in foreground.