THE BEST OF SCOTTISH BOOKS

With the clocks due to go back this weekend, we turned to Anna Levin to tell us all about why we should celebrate the dark skies. Her latest book is a celebration of the starry sky and the experience of darkness. In this extract, she recalls a visit to one of Scotland’s so-called Dark Sky Places.

 

Dark Skies
By Anna Levin
Published by Saraband

 

In a Dark Sky Place 

 

“But why? I just don’t get it!” my friend grumbles. “There are dark skies throughout Scotland, so how can you say ‘this is a Dark Sky Place and not that, this island and not the next, this glen rather than that woodland’ – what’s it all about?” 

I’d suggested a weekend at one of Scotland’s designated Dark Sky Places. We’ve got a fair few to choose from now. First there was Galloway Forest Park, then the Inner Hebridean island of Coll. The southern village of Moffat followed, then Tomintoul and Glenlivet Dark Sky Park in the heart of the Cairngorm Mountains. More recently, North Ronaldsay, the most north- ern island of the Orkney archipelago, became a designated dark sky community. And now the Isle of Rum is Scotland’s first International Dark Sky Sanctuary. 

It’s true, I concede, that these are not necessarily the places with the darkest skies, and they may not be darker than neighbouring areas. And yes, we could drive north, south, east or west from here to a remote spot and be sure to find some glorious sky-gazing on a clear night. But the sky is only half the story. To become a designated dark sky area requires not ‘an exceptional or distinguished quality of starry nights’, but local people committed to keeping it that way. Where there is a dark sky designation, there’s also a shared human commitment to protecting and celebrating the darkness. 

This was the additional lure for me. I wanted to meet the people who cared enough to set this process in motion and sustain it, measuring the sky quality, building a team, liaising with local businesses and explaining to other residents why it matters. In a dark sky place, there’s a heightened awareness and understanding of issues like the angles, intensity and brightness of outdoor lighting. Street lighting may be dimmed or directed to the ground instead of the sky and lights on public buildings will be softened. Above all, there’s a questioning: how much artificial light at night do we actually need? 

Dark Sky status is awarded by the Arizona-based, globally active organisation Dark Sky International. Initiated by astronomers, it has now become a major global force with groups and chapters in many countries leading the counter-current against an over-lit world. Dark sky places are essentially reserves. Like anything endangered, darkness needs ring-fenced areas for its protection. There are now more than 200 certified places in more than twenty countries, including parks, sanctuaries, reserves, islands and communities, and a vibrant network of individuals working as dark sky defenders around the world. The Pacific Island of Niue became the first ever Dark Sky Nation in 2020, and New Zealand is on a mission to follow suit. 

Like any reserve, the very concept has its limitations, as the natural world doesn’t observe our designated or legislated boundaries. Whales don’t stay within marine protected areas, nor birds within their sanctuaries. Pollution in the sea and sky can’t be kept out of these areas. The sky encompasses every- thing and has no boundaries. Skyglow smudges miles beyond its original source and the protected status of an area on Earth won’t alter the course of hundreds of thousands of low-orbit satellites. And yet, like any reserve, it’s a good starting place and a valuable intention. Crucially, it’s an acknowledgement of something of value, something that’s appreciated, noticed and worth concerted action to protect and preserve. 

From this starting place there’s an upward spiral, a location now on the map as having something special in its sky. There’s also a connection to other dark sky places and people around the world. This stimulates interest among local residents and draws visitors in, boosting tourism and increasing the perceived value of darkness. ‘Astro-tourism’ has now become a ‘thing’ and interest is surging around the world. This is not just for spectacular and famous phenomenon like trips to Norway to see the northern lights, nor for the fanciest telescopes and astronomical facilities. There has also been a quiet resurgence – bolstered by dark sky places – of demand for a calm village with no streetlights; towns with soft lighting so you can visit the local pub and still stargaze on your way home; and local hotels with a star chart, a telescope, or a pair of binoculars on the windowsill. In our garish, glaring, too-bright society, darkness itself has a growing appeal and commercial value. 

We decide on the Cairngorms. When we tell friends where we’re heading, they’re full of advice. It seems everyone has something to recommend, a favourite spot or cherished memory of the walk to Loch Mallachie, the ospreys at Loch Garten or the crested tits in the woodlands. No one mentions what for me is the main attraction: the darkness. I’m going to the Cairngorms to lie at night with the campervan window open and feast on the sky, to carry sleepy children out in their sleeping bags and show them a night full of stars and, when the night is cloudy, to relax at last into the balm of deep darkness. I can’t wait. 

 

 

Extract taken from Dark Skies by Anna Levin. Published by Saraband on the 27th October, priced £8.99.

Between Two Waters is the bold new book from chef Pam Brunton in which she reflects on Scotland’s culinary heritage, the gender politics of the food industry, and offers a call to arms for everyone the world over to start using food more sustainably. We spoke with Pam about how she approached this and her childhood inspiration.

 

Between Two Waters: Heritage, Landscape and the Modern Cook 
By Pam Brunton
Published by Canongate

 

Hello Pam, many congratulations on the publication of Between Two Waters. Could you tell our readers a little bit of what to expect from your book? It’s a very different kind of book, part memoir, part call-to-arms. 

The book tells some deeply personal stories from my own life to show how each of us is intimately connected, through food, to people and landscapes the world over. We are united, to each other and with the natural world, it only takes a wee bit of imagination and empathy to understand that.  

 

The book really explores the wider issues around food and our relationship with it. One is of Scotland’s own relationship to its food heritage; what would you like to see happen so that kitchen dwellers rustling up family meals every day can appreciate what’s on our own doorsteps? 

I’d like to see better accessibility to the country’s great, affordable produce, for all – our fresh vegetables and fruits, meat like wild venison, or bivalve shellfish like mussels, available from independent shops that are as easy to access as supermarkets are now.  This is bigger than individual shoppers’ decision-making; it would take a concerted effort from local government planning departments, national government infrastructure directives and budgets, and the education department re-instating proper cooking skills in schools. These are all the conscious, structural decisions that currently direct our choices of  the food we put in our baskets. We just don’t see them happening.  

 

What are your first memories of food? What inspired you to get into the kitchen? 

In my childhood, cooking was an everyday craft. Mum worked full-time (so did dad) but most meals were cooked simply from fresh ingredients and mum grew veg in the garden. There was little fanfare; no-one would have considered themselves a ‘foodie’. Cooking – and growing- was normal. I started work in a professional kitchen because my friend offered me a job in one, and I had recently quit uni so I needed to work! But I stayed with it because I valued the craft.  

 

Your time studying philosophy shines in the book – you think deeply about landscape, community and culture and how they relate to food. Why do you think food touches so many aspects of living? 

We take food for granted today because it is – in our relatively rich Western country- seemingly so cheap and plentiful. But really food is the first thing any government must secure if its population is to survive, never mind thrive. These days our governments have outsourced this task to the supermarkets, who are allowed to make a lot of money at the expense of farmers, public health, environment and climate (and we pay for the clean up with our taxes). All of our lives are organised around procuring food – human lives always have been; just because others are now making unseen decisions on our behalf doesn’t make this any less true.  

 

Tell our readers more about your restaurant, Inver, near Loch Fyne. Your memory of telling a potential customer your menu over the phone made me drool! 

Inver is a prism for all the landscapes on a plate: the human and imaginative landscapes as well as the beautiful, historic, ’natural’ landscapes outside the window, and much further away. We use produce from the loch, hills, farms, gardens and hedgerows around us, animals and plants raised and harvested by the people who share our community and love of craft. I hope we allow them all to sing.  

 

Do you have any favourite books on food you’d like to recommend?   

There are so many! I have a very nerdy collection of several hundred books… Catherine Brown’s Scottish Cookery was an early reference, my great-aunt Ann’s century-long hand-written kitchen notebooks are another. Michael Pollen’s Omnivore’s Dilemma was one of the first to question industrialised eating in recent years, in an accessible way, and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring decades before that. And Thomas Keller’s French Laundry Cookbook was the first in my experience to feature farmers and growers and their stories alongside the recipes and glossy photos. Judy Rodgers’ Zuni Cafe Cookbook is perfect for simple recipes that let great produce really shine. And more recently Anna Higham’s The Last Bite shares that same ethos, with a more contemporary aesthetic - everything I’ve cooked from it has been super delicious!  

 

Between Two Waters by Pam Brunton is published by Canongate, priced £20.00.

Gaza I Spy provides a fly-on-the-wall view of children’s daily life in Gaza since October 2023. Juxtaposing childhood joy and resilience with the reality of violent conflict, this powerful collection of poetry, prose and photography is a must-read.

 

Gaza I Spy
By Feda Shtia
Published by Sunono Publishing

 

“Sunono” is the Arabic word for the swallow, an international migratory species that returns to its nesting grounds each year. We traverse the globe, gathering tales from diverse countries, even those where flying is forbidden. Thus, we spy…

The Gaza I Spy book is a nonprofit publication. All proceeds from the book will go to support children in Gaza.

 

Children were dragging empty water canisters because that’s one of the most precious items. Now anything that you can put water in, it is one of your most precious valuables.

Louise Wateridge
2024
UNRWA Spokesperson in Gaza

 

They steal your bread, then give you a crumb of it…Then they demand you thank them for their generosity…O their audacity!

Ghassan Kanafani
1936-1972
Assassinated
Palestinian Novelist

 

 

 

A person can only be born in one place. However, he may die several times elsewhere: in the exiles and prisons, and in a homeland transformed by the occupation and oppression into a nightmare. Poetry is perhaps what teaches us to nurture the charming illusion: how to be reborn out of ourselves over and over again, and use words to construct a better world, a fictitious world that enables us to sign a pact for a permanent and comprehensive peace… with life.

Mahmoud Darwish
1941-2008
Palestinian Writer and Poet

 

You have something in this world. So, stand for it.

Ghassan Kanafani
1936-1972
Assassinated
Palestinian Novelist

 

WCNSF

UNICEF reported in February 2023 that at least 17,000 minors in Gaza were unaccompanied or separated from their families. The actual number is likely much higher now. Hospitals have coined a bleak new acronym to identify them: WCNSF – wounded child, no surviving family.

 

German Shepherd

My son has always wanted a German Shepherd – intelligent dogs. He has done his research, eager to convince me.

What he didn’t find in his research was the story of Muhammad Buhar, a young man with Down syndrome from Gaza. The Israeli army’s German Shepherd tore into his arm and chest, leaving him for dead. Buhar, who was 24 but had the mental age of a 5-year-old, was patting the dog’s head with his free hand, pleading, “Leave me, Habibi. Leave me, my darling.”

I can’t explain to my 8-year-old that this is the image I carry with me, etched into my mind forever.

A Husky is good for Scotland. The IDF won’t train them to torture Palestinians, to maim and brutalize them as they did in Gaza. “Yes, my son, you can have a Husky.”

 

Gaza I Spy by Feda Shtia is published by Sunono Publishing, priced £85.

2024 marks 900 years since Edinburgh was first named and recorded in a letter by King David I, and to celebrate the occasion a number of excellent books on Auld Reekie’s history have been published. In his latest review, David Robinson compares two of these, their contrasting approaches, and the storied city they mythologise.

 

Edinburgh: The Autobiography
Published by Birlinn Ltd
Edited by Alan Taylor

 Edinburgh: A New History
Published by Birlinn Ltd
By Alistair Moffat

 

Of the making of books about Edinburgh there is no end, and certainly not in its 900th year. Yet Alan Taylor’s Edinburgh: The Autobiography and Alistair Moffat’s Edinburgh: A New History offer pleasingly different takes on the city’s past. 

Moffat is, as The Scotsman describes him on his book’s front cover, ‘a great storyteller’. You can see that right at the very start of the book. Chapter One, ‘Royal David’s City’, opens like this:  

‘Nine centuries ago, a scribe sat down at his writing board on a summer’s day, and with a knife sharpened a quill into a nib. Having dipped it into ink made with oak gall, he began to write history…’ 

Some historians might huff and puff at a paragraph like that. They wouldn’t dare to  presume that the scribe sat down to write or that he didn’t already have sharpened quills. And they certainly  wouldn’t  call that chapter ‘Royal David’s City’ because, well, Edinburgh certainly wasn’t, not then, on 17 July 1124, when a letter from King David I to the bishop of St Andrews mentions a house plot in Edinburgh which he has gifted to the priory of Dunfermline.  

Yet here, in Latin legalese about a transfer of land ownership in a small town nowhere near as important as say, Berwick, is where Scotland’s future capital first enters the history books. The land itself was in burgo meo de Edensburg: in my town of Edinburgh.  A  trained medievalist, Moffat knows not only about the oak gall ink but also, presumably, how tedious medieval history can be when written by academics without imagination, who glory in irrelevant details, are incapable of synthesis, and don’t give a damn about the general reader.  

His book is the opposite of that. Each of his 50 chapters is only about four pages long, flannel-free and engrossing. And if, as we range across the centuries, the effect on the reader is akin to that of someone looking at the Great Tapestry of Scotland – each panel a clearly defined topic, with fascinating detail, and storytelling skill – we shouldn’t be too surprised. Moffat selected the subject matter and wrote the text for that project too. 

Inevitably, for at least the first half of Edinburgh’s 900 years, the narrative historian has the advantage over the anthologist attempting, as Alan Taylor does, to tell the city’s story through the words of those who were there at the time. Instead, Moffat can use a whole battery of sources to reach back to prehistory to speculate about the first inhabitants of the area and the Romans’ (probable) pontoon bridge across the Forth at Stirling, moving on to the building of Edinburgh Castle and the boom times that followed the loss of Berwick to the English.  

While most civic histories are little more than a Gradgrindian trudge, Moffat writes with flair and imagination. He can convey both  the revolutionary  excitement of the Covenanters and the impact of Leslie’s arrival in Leith in 1638 (‘Suddenly the National Covenant became much more than pious words. Christ’s Kingdom of Scotland had an army’) and its antithesis, as here with the 1746 burning of the clan banners captured at Culloden with a pithiness and panache Macaulay himself would have found hard to beat:  

‘At the Mercat Cross, the hangman burnt the silk banners of the Highland army, and as their smoke floated above the rooftops of the old town, an older vision of Scotland began to disappear.’ 

By now, though, the Enlightenment is lighting up Taylor’s book too. Here is Boswell, escorting Johnson up the High Street at night and embarrassed by the stench (‘A zealous Scotsman would have wished Mr Johnson to be without one of his five senses upon this occasion’); Smollet on the aged golfers of Leith ‘who never went to bed without having each the best part of a gallon of claret in his belly’; or Scott emphasising how Burns’s eyes ‘literally glowed when he spoke with feeling or interest’. 

Meanwhile, the New Town is being built.  Sometimes, as Moffat points out, land ownership got in the way of symmetry, which is why North Bridge doesn’t run straight into St Andrews Square, as originally envisaged. Sometimes the planners just got it wrong, which is why there’s still that slight dogleg between the Mound and Hanover Street. The Mound itself, Taylor points out, quoting an 1805 source, seems to have arrived almost by accident; a shopkeeper on the Lawnmarket, not wanting the inconvenience of having to  walk to the New Town over North Bridge, got some of his neighbours to lay stepping stones across the still swampy remains of the old Nor’ Loch, and then persuaded New Town builders to dump the earth there that they’d dug out for the foundations of their buildings – all (he’d done the maths) 1,305,780 cartloads of it. 

Yet wrecking a city is just as easy as building one and as Taylor shows in a fine piece by George Rosie, the 1960s plan for a six-lane inner ring road wasn’t the only near-miss. As far back as 1849, the redoubtable Henry Cockburn pointed out a few other ‘ways of spoiling the Beauty of Edinburgh’ that had been seriously considered, building on the north side of Castle Hill, filling up Princes Street Gardens to the level of the street and putting houses on its south side among them. Lest we complacently assume that such planning horrors no longer happen, Taylor also includes Guardian architecture critic Oliver Wainwright’s assessment of the W Hotel (‘You can’t polish a turd, but you can clad it in bronze-coloured steel’). 

Along with his wife, Rosemary Goring (Scotland: The Autobiography, Scotland: Her Story), Taylor has a formidable track record of putting together revelatory, thoughtful, and eclectic anthologies. Edinburgh: The Autobiography is no different, and fully lives up to his stated aim that each entry ‘should read well and add something vital to the tapestry of a place that never fails to bewitch’.  

Some of the early entries self-select, like Knox writing up his meeting with Mary Queen of Scots, and obviously there has to be some Scott, Stevenson, and Spark (though his selection of a delightful 1970 essay on the theme of ‘Nevertheless’ was new to me). A good anthology also knows when to go deeper into a topic, as Taylor does with Paul H Scott’s account of overturning the closure of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Ian Fraser’s barely credible story of the excesses of the Fred Goodwin regime  at RBS, and historian Angela McCarthy’s 2022 attack on the falsification of history in the plaque placed by the council on the monument to Henry Dundas in St Andrew Square – all quintessentially Edinburgh stushies. 

I’ve lived in Edinburgh for most of my adult life but Taylor’s book told me much I didn’t know or had never thought about, like what the city must have been like in the Second World War when all its private gardens lost their railings to the war effort (Charlotte Square Gardens were, noted The Scotsman, ‘trodden at all angles, till in wet weather they were a sea of mud’. When I walked my children to school, I didn’t realise that I passed Colt Bridge, where the Hanoverian dragoons fled in 1745 on the approach of the Jacobite army. On the way to work, I’d pass the White Hart Inn in the Grassmarket. I knew Burns had stayed there, but not that Dorothy Wordsworth and her brother had done too. I’d also pass St Cuthbert’s church, and while I knew De Quincey was buried in its churchyard, I now no longer will be able to forget this assessment of him by Carlyle in a letter to his brother:  ‘Poor little De Quincey! He is an innocent man; and, as you said, extremely washable away.’  

It’s hard to imagine any city getting two such excellent books about it at the same time, and they complement each other perfectly. I’ll give the last word to Stevenson. It’s a short poem his wife found among his papers after his death, but I won’t tell you which of these two books I found it in. You’ll have to read both.  

I saw rain falling and the rainbow drawn  
On Lammermuir. Hearkening I heard again  
In my precipitous city beaten bells 
Winnow the keen sea wind. And here afar,  
Intent on my own race and place I wrote. 

 

 

Edinburgh: A New History by Alistair Moffat is published by Birlinn, priced £14.99 

Edinburgh: The Autobiography by Alan Taylor is published by Birlinn, priced £20. 

We’re coming up to the season of many foodie traditions, and here we have a recipe ideal for making on Hogmanay – it’s The Hebridean Baker’s take on the classic Clootie Dumpling!

 

The Hebridean Baker: The Scottish Cookbook
By Coinneach Macleod
Published by Black & White

 

Hogmanay Clootie Dumpling 

 

Last year on my US tour I visited Fort Collins, Colorado. A lady in the audience raised her hand to ask a question. ‘How do I find a Hebridean man to marry?!’ As the laughter went around the room, I answered. ‘Easy, learn how to make a Clootie Dumpling, book a one-way flight to Stornoway and you’ll be wed within the fortnight!’ I’m not sure if she took my advice, but I hope you will with this recipe. I have taken a classic Clootie Dumpling recipe and given it a festive twist. Filled with spices, cranberries, orange zest and vanilla, this is perfect to share along with a dram of whisky to your guests on Hogmanay. Bliadhna mhath ùr! 

SERVES 16 

INGREDIENTS 

225g (8oz) plain flour, plus 

extra for sprinkling 

1 teaspoon bicarbonate of 

soda 

1 teaspoon mixed spice 

1½ teaspoons cinnamon 

1 teaspoon ginger 

½ teaspoon freshly grated 

nutmeg 

Pinch of salt 

175g (6¼oz) sugar 

100g (3½oz) suet 

100g (3½oz) cranberries 

150g (5oz) mixed dried fruit 

1 apple, grated 

1 teaspoon vanilla bean 

paste 

150ml (½ cup + 2 tablespoons) 

buttermilk 

1 egg, beaten 

1 heaped tablespoon black 

treacle 

1 tablespoon marmalade 

Muslin cloth or cotton 

dishtowel, for the ‘Cloot’ 

A length of string 

 

METHOD 

Everything goes in one bowl! Sieve your flour and add your bicarbonate of soda, mixed spice, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg and salt into a bowl and combine. 

Add your sugar, suet, cranberries, mixed fruit and grated apple to the bowl and stir together. 

Pour in your vanilla, buttermilk, beaten egg, black treacle and marmalade. Combine together. 

Place a piece of muslin cloth or a cotton dishtowel (the cloot) in boiling water, and once cool enough to touch, wring the cloth out. Place the cloth on your work surface and sprinkle liberally with flour. 

Place the mixture into the centre of the cloot. Gather up the edges of the cloth and with a length of string, tie it up (not too tightly), leaving some room for the dumpling to expand. 

In a large pan of boiling water (deep enough to cover the dumpling), place a saucer upside down. Place the dumpling onto the saucer, cover with a lid and simmer for 3 hours. Don’t let the water evaporate; you may need to top it up. 

Take out from the pan and carefully remove the cloot from the dumpling, trying not to take off any of the ‘skin’. In a warm kitchen, let it rest for 30 minutes before slicing. 

 

The Hebridean Baker: The Scottish Cookbook by Coinneach Macleod is published by Black & White, priced £26.00.

Malachy Tallack’s second novel is out soon and we can’t wait! In the meantime, we spoke to him about his favourite books.

 

That Beautiful Atlantic Waltz
By Malachy Tallack
Published by Canongate

 

The book as . . . memory. What is your first memory of books and reading?   

I know my parents read to me when I was very young, but what they read I can’t recall. The Very Hungry Caterpillar and Where the Wild Things Are must have been among those books, since there were still copies in the house years later. When I began making my own choices about what to read, though, it was the Famous Five and Just William books that I picked.   

  

The book as . . . your work. Tell us about your latest novel That Beautiful Atlantic Waltz. What did you want to explore in writing it?   

It’s a book about how easily a settled, stable life can become unsettled. The main character, Jack, is a solitary man, but his life is turned upside down when something unexpected arrives on his doorstep. It’s also a book about music, with songs scattered through the novel, which I’ve also recorded, to be released as an album at the same time. The novel is set in Shetland, and also explores unlikely friendships, and the way past events can shape a life.  

  

The book as . . . inspiration. What is your favourite book that has informed how you see yourself? 

George Mackay Brown’s books were very important to me when I was younger and thinking about the relationship between self and place, and about what it means to be part of and write about an island community. His memoir especially, For the Islands I Sing, resonated a great deal. 

  

The book as . . . an object. What is your favourite beautiful book? 

 The most beautiful books are often those that make you look anew at something that previously felt familiar. Two examples: Nests by Susan Ogilvy features stunning illustrations of nests built by various bird species. And Stone Walls is a collection of pictures by photographer Mariana Cook showing, yes, dry stone walls, from Shetland to Ireland to Kentucky. The diversity of building techniques – and of stones themselves – is part of what makes these pictures so fascinating. The walls are both functional and beautiful, built from the most basic of materials.   

 

The book as . . . a relationship. What is your favourite book that bonded you to someone else? 

 My wife Roxani and I lived on different continents for more than a year after we first met. There were many books we recommended to each other or read alongside one another in that time – albeit thousands of miles apart. It made the distance seem less daunting.  

 

The book as . . . rebellion. What is your favourite book that felt like it revealed a secret truth to you? 

I began reading Wendell Berry in my late twenties, starting with the The Art of the Commonplace. Those essays dealt with community, economy, land and much more. The thinking within them felt both radical and strangely familiar to me, as if I’d been waiting years to hear his words.   

 

The book as . . . a destination. What is your favourite book set in a place unknown to you?   

 Well, I’m currently reading (and thoroughly enjoying) Orbital by Samantha Harvey. It’s set on the International Space Station, which, as you might imagine, is not somewhere I’ve been before. It’s the second book this year I’ve read about space – not a subject that usually interests me much. The other was Martin MacInnes’s wonderful novel In Ascension.  

 

The book as . . . the future. What are you looking forward to reading next?   

As always, there is a pile of books in the bedroom waiting to be read, and others seem to land on the doorstep all the time. The most recent arrival was Richard Fortey’s Close Encounters of the Fungal Kind, which might just skip to the top of the pile. After spending time in space, it will be good to get right back down to earth again. 

 

That Beautiful Atlantic Waltz by Malachy Tallack is published by Canongate, priced £18.99.

Comedian Eleanor Morton has released a book celebrating women from the past and what we can learn from them still. It’s funny, wry, surprising and a brilliant starting point for discovering women’s history. We asked her to name her five favourite women from Scotland’s history.

 

Life Lessons From Historical Women
By Eleanor Morton
Published by Radar

 

1) The Edinburgh Seven – Cheating a bit, because there’s seven of them, but their story is so important. In the mid-19th century, frustrated at being unable to study medicine at university, seven Scottish women campaigned and eventually won places at Edinburgh University. It wasn’t the end of their struggle – a riot broke out amongst male students when the 7 attempted to sit an anatomy exam in 1870: the men even let a sheep loose. Sadly, the women were not granted degrees from Edinburgh, and had to obtain them abroad. In 1878, Sophie Jex Blake became Edinburgh’s first female doctor. Today it’s almost impossible to imagine the medical profession without the thousands of female doctors who contribute to our NHS.  

 

2) Mary Seacole – This is also cheating a bit, because Mary was in fact from Jamaica, but her father was Scottish, and I think it’s important to recognise Scotland’s ties with the Caribbean due to our large part in the slave trade. Mary was known as a ‘doctress’, a woman practised in traditional medicine (obviously not allowed to study it professionally). She’s perhaps best known for her work in the Crimean War, where she set up a self-funded field hospital, after the British government refused to give her money or training. She’s now getting the recognition she deserves for her entrepreneurial spirit and passion for healthcare, and I would love to see someone trace her father’s roots and find out a bit more about her Scottish background.  

 

 3) Mukami McCrum – With apologies to Ms McCrum, who I hope doesn’t mind being called a historical woman! Mukami was heavily involved in the Lothian Black Forum in the 1980s – an organisation devoted to fighting racism in Scotland. In particular, Mukami participated in the organisation’s battle to have the murder of Axmed Abuukar Sheekh in Edinburgh’s Cowgate recognised as a hate crime. Racism had long been an uncomfortable reality in Scotland, and Mukami and others paved the way for this status quo to be challenged. She also founded the Shakti Women’s Aid, an Edinburgh charity for Black women, in 1985.  

 

4) Williamina Fleming – She was a Dundee-born astronomer who was an early pioneer in the cataloguing of the night skies. She was also a single mother and a housekeeper, arriving in the USA with practically nothing, and rising to become a prominent scientist. Scottish women often feel overlooked in history, and Williamina’s name should be much better known – she even discovered the famous horsehead nebula. Her diaries also provide an incredible insight into what it was like raising a child as a full time working mother who was expected to help her male colleagues on top of her own work.  

 

5) Mary Queen of Scots – Mary gets a lot of attention, and yet I still feel most people don’t really know a lot about her. She’s been reduced to a rather tragic, glamorous figure, engaged in an eternal catfight with her cousin Elizabeth, but before her life went south (literally) she was the Queen of Scotland and France, a highly accomplished woman who made many good decisions alongside her bad ones. Mary’s role as queen in Presbyterian Scotland tells us a lot about power and gender dynamics of the time, and I think she deserves to be known as more than simply the doomed queen.

 

Life Lessons From Historical Women by Eleanor Morton is published by Radar, priced £18.99.

David Robinson looks at two books that give voice to health conditions that don’t have much of a profile, despite their devastating effects. He hopes these books can bring about awareness and action.

 

Joshua in the Sky: A Blood Memoir
By Rodge Glass
Published by Taproot Press

 

The Bright Fabric of Life
By Mhairi Collie
Published by Maclean Dubois

 

To paraphrase Alasdair Gray’s famous quote about cities, there are some illnesses and disorders that we know about because writers and artists have imagined them. Florence, Paris, London and New York are as over-represented in paintings, novels, and films just as tuberculosis, cholera and AIDS have been at various stages in cultural history.   

But what about the medical disorders that no writers and artists have yet tried to describe? What kind of impact will books about them make when they are written about for the first time? How can they give contours and heft to afflictions readers won’t know about? 

Unusually, this month we have two examples, both by small Scottish presses, both dealing with medically traumatic subjects, albeit in completely different ways.  

In Joshua in the Sky, Rodge Glass memorializes his nephew, who died in 2017 from HHT (Hereditary haemorrhagic telangiectasia), a genetic mutation which causes blood vessels to form abnormally.  At its worst, this can affect organs such as the brain, liver and lungs. That’s what happened with Joshua, who only lived for three hours outside the womb. 

I’d never heard of HHT. Most people haven’t, though apparently it affects some 1.4 million people worldwide. Glass, who has suffered from nosebleeds all his life, hadn’t heard of it either, nor had anyone in the rest of his immediate family, some of whom also had it. Although recurrent nosebleeds are a common indicator of HHT, many people who have it – Joshua’s father, Glass’s brother, is a prime example – might not have any symptoms at all.    

Because Glass blames himself for not knowing about HHT, guilt is veined throughout the book. If only he had checked out why he got all those nosebleeds and been diagnosed with HHT, he tells himself, he would have been able to tell Joshua’s parents and his nephew, whose lungs couldn’t work because of it, would have been able to breathe. It’s all, he is convinced, his fault. 

Except of course it’s not. When he apologises to Joshua’s mother, she is understanding. So too is his brother, who not only doesn’t blame him but doesn’t even understand why Glass thought it could be his fault in the first place. ‘Nothing would have been different, he says, without a trace of anger in his voice.’  

That’s the voice of sanity. All through the truly horrendous chapter in which Glass describes one of his HHT episodes, blood pouring out of him in the bathroom in the middle of the night, blood all over the bathroom floor and walls, arms scratched to ribbons, fists rammed into his eye sockets, that’s exactly what the reader is thinking too: that Joshua’s death is not Glass’s fault. Because how can you act on what you don’t know?  

Joshua in the Sky is more than just a memoir of grief and guilt. Because Glass reads to an almost pathological extent (often while walking), the story is threaded with texts – most of them refreshingly unpredictable – which mean a lot to him and reflect his various states of mind as he tries to make sense of his nephew’s death. And though as a writer he is still probably best known as Alasdair Gray’s biographer, he devotes the same attentiveness to describing the sadly much smaller life of his nephew, while also melding it with his own and those of his own adored daughters.   

In that project, the rage subsides, but doesn’t disappear. Months after HHT had left Joshua’s lungs unable to work, he and Joshua’s parents took tests at the London office of a specialist in the condition. ‘”What happened to Joshua is so rare,” she tells them. “Butterfly-on-your-chopsticks rare. There’s no making sense of it.”’ And yet Joshua died and if you search online at curehht.org you’ll find other people who have also lost children to HHT. ‘”Who the hell,” he asks of the specialist, “does she think she is?”’ 

Now, let me introduce you to Edinburgh colorectal consultant Mhairi Collie. If Glass’s is the first HHT memoir, Collie’s debut novel The Bright Fabric of Life is surely the first to deal with repairing fistulae in Ethiopia. As with HHT, my knowledge of fistulae is minimal, so allow me to explain.  

In much of the third world, women give birth far away from hospitals or medical care. According to World Health Organisation figures, in 300,000 cases the mother will die in childbirth. The same vast number – think of it as a three planeloads a day – will survive, but with life-altering injuries caused during labour. These women will be left incontinent, unable to work, possibly hidden away as embarrassment to their families, probably abandoned by their partners. In the absence of running water or sanitary pads, their lives will become an odorous hell, with fistulae leaking for the rest of their lives. 

You or I can, I think, be forgiven from not knowing about these 300,000 women. Collie herself was 30 and had nearly finished her surgical training before she found out that they existed in anything like those numbers. When she did, she was working in an MSF hospital for refugees near Ethiopia’s northern border with Eritrea. She wanted to learn more, so she went to a fistula clinic in Addis Ababa to find out how to, in layman’s terms, mend gynaecologically-damaged women. 

Three weeks at the fistula clinic in the Ethiopian capital in 2000 changed her life. Though she went back to work in the UK, she didn’t forget those incontinent African women, and knew exactly what she’d do to help them. She co-founded a charity where it seemed to be needed most – Uganda, she thought – in 2003.  They built up a team of UK-based and African doctors and nurses, the Africans gradually taking over with time. As, with better healthcare, Ugandan women’s childbirth injuries became less severe, they focussed their efforts on prevention instead of treatment and moved on to other countries – Malawi, Sierra Leone, Madagascar – where they were needed even more.  

Since then, there have only been a couple of years – when her children were very young -  when Collie hasn’t spent around half of her annual leave  working – unpaid – for her charity, Ugandan Childbirth Injury Fund. This year alone she has already worked in fistula clinics in the bush in Uganda, Madagascar, with Sierra Leone and another trip to Uganda still to come. Each week, they treat 30 or 40 women. The success rate per operation – each of which costs only £250 – is high. 

Mhairi Collie explores these flashes of hope amid despair in her debut novel, The Bright Fabric of Life, which is published this month – ‘A fine novel,’ in the words of Sir Alexander McCall Smith on its back cover, ‘that will linger long in the mind – and in the heart of the reader’. 

‘Essentially,’ says Collie, ‘it’s a medical romance set in a remote part of Africa that is just emerging from war.  The romance bit is made up, but the medical aspects – the landmine injuries, and of course the women’s childbirth injuries, are all based on things I’ve seen.’  All the money the novel raises will go to fistula work via the Uganda Childbirth Injury Fund (www.ucif.co.uk) and the Fistula Foundation. 

My own connection with Collie is almost as close as Glass’s with Joshua. Before I met her for the first time, I had bowel cancer, and afterwards I didn’t. It’s not just planeloads of women who owe her.  

 

Joshua in the Sky by Rodge Glass is published by Taproot Press, priced £14.99. 

The Bright Fabric of Life by Mhairi Collie is published by Maclean Dubois, priced £12.99. 

If you’ve yet to acquaint yourself with T.L. Huchu’s Edinburgh Nights series of books, then you need to rectify that as soon as possible! And especially if you like ghost hunting, mysterious organisations, family dynamics, futuristic Edinburgh and rollicking plots. Here is an extract from the fourth book, The Legacy of Arniston House.

 

The Legacy of Arniston House
By T.L. Huchu
Published by Tor

 

We’ve journeyed past Cameron Toll, and through Liberton, where you can barely find a tree standing on the roadside, since they’ve all been chopped down for firewood. Once we’re past the bypass, which arcs around the south of the city from Gogar to Old Craighall, we’re safely away from the barren wastelands of Gilmerton, with Briggs still urging the horses on.

This is a dangerous route. It’s best not to venture outside the city limits these days. Modern highwaymen ply their trade in the unlit wilds of Dalkeith. The news says they operate in gangs of five or more, some of them teenagers in hoodies, snoods covering their faces and budget Diadora sneakers on their feet. I feel a sense of panic as the carriage slows down, until Briggs halts it completely. I touch Cruickshank, my scarf, and then reach for my dagger.

‘What are you doing?’ Lord Samarasinghe asks, an amused expression on his face.

Before I can reply, Briggs calls in his broad Yorkshire accent from outside the carriage, ‘Milord, it appears we’ve hit a roadblock.’ The highwaymen often lay a log in the road to ambush their victims. ‘Would you like me to deal with it?’ The carriage sways and Briggs’s boots make a loud noise as he lands on the tar.

‘That’s quite alright, Briggs. I need to stretch my legs a bit. Ropa, will you be a dear and take this from me.’ Lord Samarasinghe hands me his cup and saucer, then winks.

The carriage door opens. Lord S never does this himself – not when he has us servants to hand. He takes his pocket watch out, checks the time, then puts it back, before stepping out with his cane.

‘This shouldn’t take long,’ he says.

Briggs shuts the door. I’m about to peek outside when the curtains on the carriage windows draw themselves shut sharply.

I don’t understand why we have to stop – this coach can fly. That’s how we journeyed from the Isle of Skye back to Edinburgh a few weeks ago, and it seems like the Sorcerer Royal can do this when he’s travelling long-distance. I’m sure tonight could have been an exception too. I try to open the door, only to find it’s locked. Fucksake, I don’t like being confined. I do the breathing exercises my psychomagician has taught me. In through the nose, out though the mouth. Repeat. Repeat. Until I start to calm down.

I hear the loud tapping of Lord Samarasinghe’s cane on the road, indicating he’s walking forward.

‘God save the king,’ the Sorcerer Royal says.

‘Bollocks. The king is dead,’ a man says, then he hocks loudly and spits. ‘The new queen of Scots reigns in these parts and she’s collecting tolls tonight.’

Coarse guffaws from his gang boost the highwayman’s words.

‘Gentlemen, you are blocking the king’s road. Would you be so kind as to remove this obstacle impeding my progress?’

Lord Samarasinghe’s voice is firm but cordial. ‘I would be most grateful.’

Rough laughter responds to his request.

‘You hear that, lads? This posh English wanker’s come all the way over here to tell us what to do,’ another man’s voice says.

‘Right, you better empty your pockets quick. And we’ll be taking whatever’s in that coach too. Come on, help them remove their stuff,’ someone who sounds like their leader says. It’s a female voice.

This isn’t good. We should just give them what they want. From what I’ve heard, the highwaymen patrolling the A7 are real savages, given to bludgeoning, mauling, stabbing, scalping, impaling, and all sorts of unsavoury stuff. And if the leader’s a woman, then it could only be Dirty Davina, the most notorious of the lot. Cruel fucker, who likes torturing her victims in the medieval style, so I’ve heard. Like, she apparently sucked the eyeballs out of one guy’s head and left him to wander the countryside blind. ‘Davina’s kiss’, they called it – I’ll take the Glasgow kiss over that any given Sunday. There’s a bounty on her head and all. But I thought she worked way out near the Borders. This is one of the rare moments in my life I find myself wishing the cops were here. There’ve been reports of cannibalism by her gang too . . . I really hope that was made up.

There’s an awful quiet outside.

Someone tries to open the carriage door. They rattle it roughly and then tap on the window. ‘Open up!’ I grab my dagger tightly, ready to stab whoever comes in. One of the horses neighs.

‘I don’t think you understand the situation you’re in. Shall we teach them a lesson, lads?’ Dirty Davina says.

‘We’re trying to be reasonable, guv,’ another replies. ‘Maybe the big fella in the greatcoat can talk sense to his master. We’re all working men here, after all.’

‘No skin off my nose,’ Briggs replies nonchalantly. He has that ex-military stoicism which can be intimidating to most, but probably means nothing to the highwaymen.

‘Look at Mr Posh Twat taking out his pocket watch as if we’re wasting his time,’ says Dirty Davina. ‘That’s enough of that. Get ’em, lads!’

A disconcerting stillness follows, punctuated by boots walking towards a certain point. I’m proper bricking it now. No use playing cool when there’s bampots ready to bash your noggin in. I feel the build-up of immense pressure, kinda like the weather changing. Then there’s a terrible sound, like a drum beat perforating my entire being.

‘What’s he doing, guv?’

‘I don’t care, smash his brains in,’ Davina orders.

The earth rumbles underneath the carriage. I sense an almighty entropic shift, as if the world is bending beneath the marching boots of an awesome army. And then it comes, the most horren- dous cracking noise, like all the demons in hell chattering. I double over in my seat and cover my ears from this drilling, but I can’t stop it coming through. My eardrums are going to burst.

Panicked voices coming from outside the carriage inter-mingle with the horrific sound.

The pressure builds up and I fall to my side in the seat, foetal-like.

The sound intensifies.

The horses stomp and snort like they might bolt.

And then the screams start. Terror. I’ve never heard anyone cry out like this.

‘It’s eating me!’ ‘Please help—’

‘God, no, no, no, no.’

‘It’s inside me. Arrrrrrrrrrrrgh.’ ‘We’re so-so-sorry.’

Their desperate pleas chill me to the bone. I find I’m trembling, goosebumps prickling up all over my skin. Sickening noises come through, like slabs of meat being torn apart. And still the horrible chattering continues, as if some incredible beast with multiple rows of teeth is setting upon them.

Then it all goes quiet again. Very quiet.

 

The Legacy of Arniston House by T.L. Huchu is published by Tor, priced £18.99.

We all think we know the Burke and Hare story, but author, Mairi Kidd, has reimagined their story through the women who loved them.

 

The Specimens
By Mairi Kidd
Published by Black & White

 

The next day, William seemed still possessed of the nervous energy that had beset him in the night. He went out to fetch breakfast, returning with bannocks and curds and whey, but he had barely sat down to eat before he was on his feet again, saying he should be out and about his business. Helen wanted to ask him about the money in his pocket, but she knew better than to try while he was in this humour, he’d only deny it and then he’d grow angry, and while she knew he wouldn’t raise a hand to her, he could cut her well enough with words alone. So she kept her counsel and got out her work, dumping the tangled threads he had swept onto the floor on the table to sort out. 

William paused at the door and turned back to her. ‘I’m sorry, Nelly,’ he said. ‘I’ve an odd humour on me. It was the bad night that did it. You have a good morning now. I’ll come back with a bite for you later on.’ 

Helen nodded and bent her head to her work. She only hoped Margaret Hare would stay clear for just one day. The woman had been like a constant shadow at the corner of Helen’s eye since they moved in, seemingly always at their door to ask for a hand reading a letter about a babby, or a loan of some sewing thread, or William to come and help Hare with some task or other. Helen had grown used to it now, for all it deaved her, but at first she had jumped near out her skin any time she opened the door and found Margaret lurking there in wait. 

Thankfully it seemed Helen was in luck, for there was no sign of Margaret that day, and when she ventured outside for a breath of air, she heard the sound of voices as she passed the Hares’ bedchamber. There had been some drinking last night, judging by the moaning and groaning and grousing. Margaret only had the one bairnie with her these days, and Hare was complaining sorely about its whining and complaining. No doubt there’d be a dose of something down its throat before too long. 

Helen passed a pleasant enough time outside, buying a few new hanks of thread from a peddler woman, and she got on fine with the sewing after she got home, managing to finish a pair of breeks for a wee laddie and a man’s waistcoat she had cut from a woman’s skirt ruined on one side by an ember from a fire, and putting them by in the lower part of the dresser. William didn’t come back before evening, but she hadn’t expected him to, and anyway she could wait for food, there were a few morsels left over from the night before. 

When he did come back, William was clearly the worse for drink and there was no sign of the bite he’d promised. He seemed listless and distracted, and when Helen asked if he’d gone to a prayer meeting, he said no, he’d been with his brother Constantine. Helen rolled her eyes at that, but she told him to sit and she went out herself with a covered dish to fetch a meal. There was a sausage seller by the mouth of the close and she thought the smell of fried onions and potato might cheer William up on this cold night, so she bought two portions and took herself home. When she arrived, though, there was no sign of William. Helen tiptoed along the corridor and stopped outside the kitchen, listening. William was there with both the Hares, and by the sound of it, spirits were high and the drinking had begun in earnest. Helen turned tail and took her sausages back to the room to eat in peace. William could have his cold tomorrow. 

In the middle of the night, Helen woke to the sound of muttering in the dark room. She fumbled for matches and lit a candle. William was sitting at the table, with his hand on his Bible, praying. He was very drunk indeed. 

‘It’s the middle of the night, William,’ Helen said. ‘Will you no come to bed?’ 

‘I can’t,’ William said. ‘I can’t sleep.’ 

‘Too much drink,’ Helen said.  

‘Aye,’ William said. ‘And I’ve done a thing that weighs heavy on me, Helen.’ 

Here it was then, Helen thought, at last he had come to it. ‘You can tell me,’ she said. ‘Whatever it is.’ 

William put his hand in his pocket and took out three notes and a scatter of coins. 

‘An old lad died in the room upstairs,’ he said. ‘Donald, his name was. He’d been a soldier.’ 

‘Aye,’ said Helen. ‘I know. Well, I never heard what his name was but I knew an auld man had died. It was just before we flitted here. I saw them take the coffin out. Is that money his, William? Did you take it? Is that it?’ 

‘No, no,’ William said. ‘Not that. You see . . .’ He seemed to lose his nerve then, but he took a deep breath and started again. ‘Do you remember,’ he said, ‘when Logue died and Margaret joked she should have sold him to the anatomists?’ 

‘No,’ Helen said. ‘But I can’t think she meant it. What a thing to say about her own man!’ Even as she spoke, though, Helen realised that she could quite imagine Margaret making a jest like that. And perhaps it wasn’t a jest – the besom was probably capable of selling her own husband’s corpse if she thought there would be a profit in it. 

‘Well . . .’ William said, and stopped, looking at Helen like he expected her to understand something.  

‘Well what?’ Helen asked. ‘Logue’s dead and buried, and the auld man too. What of it?’ 

‘We took his body out the coffin,’ William said, all in a rush. ‘Myself and Hare. We put it under the bed. Then we filled the coffin with bark from the tanners’ and nailed it shut again so no one would know. After the parish men had taken the coffin away, we stowed him in a tea chest and we took him to Surgeon’s Square. Hare said the fellow we needed was called Monro, but when we asked for directions to find him, a young lad sent us a different place. Two men there looked at the body and then the Doctor came and offered us the money.’ 

‘Oh, William,’ Helen said, appalled. ‘What a thing to do. The poor auld man. He wouldn’t like to be cut up. Nobody would.’ 

‘He won’t know anything about it, Nelly,’ William said. ‘He’s dead. And he owed Hare money. Four pounds, nearly.’  

‘But won’t he need his body . . . after?’ Helen had never managed to learn her scripture very well, but she had a notion folk needed their bodies whole at Judgement Day, or they would . . . well, in truth she wasn’t sure what would happen to them, she had always had enough to do keeping body and soul together in this life, to worry over much about the next one. She knew it was a bad thing, though, to cut up a dead body and do them out of a right burial. 

‘I don’t know, Nelly,’ Burke said. ‘I’ve been looking in my Bible and I can’t see where it says anything about anatomists. The Doctor said we need the bodies to help doctors learn to heal the sick, and there’s plenty about helping folk in the Bible, Nelly. Knox, his name was, the Doctor.’ 

‘How much did he give you?’ Helen asked. She still felt queasy, but it made sense, what William said, doctors did need to learn on someone, and maybe better on the dead than on the living. 

‘He gave us seven pounds and ten shillings,’ William said. ‘Hare took the greater share, because of all that Donald owed. I got three pounds and five shillings. I’ve got two pounds and twelve shillings left.’ 

‘And the rest down your throat in drink,’ said Helen. William coloured at that, and she felt her heart soften. She cuffed him gently round the ear. ‘And a fine meal you stood me, too,’ she said. ‘But, William . . . Let this be the last time you do such a thing. Do you promise me?’ 

‘I do,’ said William. He looked much happier now he had relieved himself of his burden. He allowed Helen to take him by the hand and lead him to bed, bringing his Bible with him and placing it in a drawer. 

‘Take care around Margaret and William Hare, though, William,’ Helen said, once they were in bed. ‘I don’t trust them. Even if it’s not in the Bible, it’s against the law to sell a body, it must be. You could be taken up, and there where would your Nelly be? Do you hear me? William?’ 

But William was fast asleep. 

The next day, Helen woke to find William gone. There was a small parcel on the pillow. She sat up and unwrapped it to find a brooch made of gold metal framing a piece of stone with bands and lines of brown in crystal the colour of tea. 

Helen had never had any jewellery of her own, not even a wedding ring. She held the brooch up to the light. It glistened like ice on a peaty loch. Carefully, she opened the drawer in the dresser where William kept his Bible and slipped the brooch inside. Then she said a brief word of prayer for the old soldier called Donald, and got up to face the cold December day. 

 

The Specimens by Mairi Kidd is published by Black & White, priced £16.99.

Legendary arts impresario Richard Demarco brings us his memories, thoughts and hopes for art in Scotland as well as a wonderfully idiosyncratic history of our landscape, mythology and culture.

 

DeMarco’s Scotland
By Richard DeMarco and Roddy Martine
Published by Luath Press

 

What am I doing here? 

 

So, once and for all, what exactly is this Road to Meikle Seggie that so often features in the extraordinary life of Richard Demarco? 

In his book A Life in Pictures (An Artwork Special from Northern Books 1995), Richard explains. The Road to Meikle Seggie does not lead to a town, village or hamlet but only to a farmyard of that name in Kinross on the Ledlanet estate of the late John Calder. It marks the site of an ancient settlement now considered too unimportant by map-makers to notice, and beyond that inconspicuous farmyard it leads to everything that exists in Scotland and beyond: 

The Road to Meikle Seggie should not be limited to this age. It does not fulfil the usual requirements of a modern road… It is a road at one with nature. It follows the lie of the land – rising, falling, turning and twisting, like a living thing. It does not detract in any way from the untouched landscape of rolling hills. 

The Road to Meikle Seggie is the gateway to the Scotland that eludes most Sassenachs (and surely that includes most tourists). It will take you through the valley between the Cleish and Lomond Hills where you will first glimpse the Ochil Hills as the introduction to the wild, unspoiled, unchanging mountainous land where the elemental forces are forever in control. 

The great abbeys, country houses and landed estates of Scotland with their tenanted farms, crofting communities and traditions are all part of The Road to Meikle Seggie – a lost village where once 200 people lived on the great publisher John Calder’s Ledlanet family estate, gainfully employed in the Calder brewery producing Calder Ale. It was therefore considered important in the world of the Demarco Gallery for it to become Scotland’s equivalent of Black Mountain College which was essentially a cattle ranch in the Black Mountains of North Carolina, the American version of The Bauhaus.  

The Meikle Seggie that once featured on a Kinross signpost is of equal symbolic importance to that of Stirling, Cupar and St Andrews. Alongside the lost villages of Scotland is the lost history of their inhabitants, many of whom are our ancestors. 

Scotland is therefore NOT all about the tourist destinations of Edinburgh, Glasgow, the Trossachs, Aberdeen, Inverness and the Highlands and Islands. It is so much bigger than that. This book is the profound expression of the deeply held and timeless love affair of two passionate European Scots for a so often misunderstood global Caledonian utopia.  

It is a celebration of what the Scots-born composer Hamish MacCunn called The Land of the Mountain and the Flood, its impact upon the world and the opportunities it has over the centuries provided for artistic endeavour throughout the world. ‘What am I doing here?’ is the everlasting cri de coeur, alongside ‘How lucky am I to be here!’ 

 

Journeys and explorations 

 

All of our lives involve journeys of one sort or another; a voyage through time, emotion and landscape. A voyage of discovery. A voyage of introspection. A voyage of failure. A voyage of achievement. 

We are all explorers. For the lucky ones, there is nowhere else in this universe where such a diversity of riches and folklore is so readily embraced than on the roadsides and hinterland of Scotland, signposted without prejudice for all to discover. 

On The Road to Meikle Seggie are a series of landmarks leading from the mists of an all too evasive continental pre-history into the remnants of a glorious, often violent inheritance, onwards towards an uncertain future where Scotland’s creative brilliance, past and present, are the only certainties.  

Everything is made possible on The Road to Meikle Seggie. It leads not only from the Edinburgh Festivals of the 1960s and 1970s. It leads to the farmscapes of Mellerstain House, Johnny Watson’s East Lothian Skateraw Farm and to certain ‘gardenscapes’, in particular, Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Stonypath Farm in Lanarkshire and the farmscapes of Dumfries and Galloway painted by Archie Sutter Watt, as well as the botanic gardens of Edinburgh and Benmore. It leads to the Border abbeys of Melrose, Dryburgh, Kelso, Pluscarden and Nunraw; to the prehistoric sites of Callanish, the Ring of Brodgar, Maeshowe, Cairnpapple, Kilmartin Valley; the estates and libraries of Falkland Palace, Traquair House; the houses and studios of Margot Sandeman on the Isle of Arran, Edna Whyte on the island of Luing; the farmscape of Dalmeny House; the Roman sites at Trimontium, Cramond, the Antonine Wall at Falkirk; the farmscapes abutting the Crinan Canal and the houses and estates of Marion Campbell of Kilberry in Knapdale and on the Isle of Harris where, in her early teens, she constructed her own loom to weave outstanding examples of Harris Tweed well into her 80s. 

The point of writing all of this down is that there are countless alternative sources of material to be studied and utilised within the histories of those given the task of ‘stewardship’; that is the caring for historic places identified within the history of Scotland from prehistoric times to the present day. 

And to underline how the history of the Edinburgh Festival must be re-rooted in that of the whole of Scotland is because the Edinburgh Festival was a direct response to the global sufferings of Europe caused by the Second World War.  

How many of us are aware that the second language of Scotland is Polish? If you study the physical fabric of the interiors of Dalkeith Palace or Falkland Palace, or Menzies Castle in Perthshire, or Black Barony Castle near Peebles, you will find evidence that the Polish Army left behind an indelible mark.  

Forty thousand Scots found gainful employment as long ago as the 15th century in Poland, and many Polish place and family names have their origins in the language of the Scots. The Demarco Gallery, founded in the 1960s, was totally reliant upon artists from that country to reveal how the cultural integrity of Scotland is deeply wedded into that of Poland, and to its adjoining countries such as Belarus, Lithuania and Moldova.  

At the same time, The Road to Meikle Seggie, which most probably had its origins as a drovers’ road, is also a pilgrimage road, connecting the Isle of Iona and the Orcadian cathedral of St Magnus and the Outer Hebridean medieval church dedicated to St Clemens. For over a thousand years it has never been possible to separate those drovers’ roads and the Celtic pilgrimage routes from the coastlines of Dumfries and Galloway and Kintyre, and County Down and County Antrim in Ireland. 

Within the pages of this book are to be found the nodal points that inspired the EDINBURGH ARTS programmes from the 1970s onwards in close collaboration with Edinburgh University’s School of Scottish Studies, under the direction of Professor John MacQueen, as well as the School of Extra-Mural Studies piloted by Dr Basil Skinner, co-founder of the Hopetoun Trust. 

 

DeMarco’s Scotland by Richard DeMarco and Roddy Martine is published by Luath Press, priced £14.99.

Mae Diansangu has been wowing poetry audiences with her spoken word performances in Aberdeen, so it’s brilliant to see a debut collection in print from the fantastic poetry publisher, Tapsalteerie. Here is a selection of her poems, which we hope make you rush to read the rest!

 

Bloodsongs
By Mae Diansangu
Published by Tapsalteerie

 

First came the universe… 

 

In the beginning, there was everything. 

 

At the world’s birthday party, the sky 

lit the candles on a red velvet cake, 

so the darkness could make a wish. 

 

Pandora was there handing out gifts. 

 

Among her party favours: 

flightless birds, metaphors, aesthetic 

appreciation, forgetfulness, earworms, 

cellulite, empathetic pain, orgasms, 

the perfect comeback concocted hours 

after the argument, post-meal fatigue, 

proxy wars, nostalgia, gender 

euphoria, novelty, doubt, cancer, the wordless 

agreement two people enter while pretending 

not to have spotted each other on a busy street, 

sugar, faith, the desire to fix things, compromise, 

poetry, calcium, secondhand embarrassment, 

community, disappointment, pins and needles, 

schadenfreude, object permanence, language, 

revolution, apples, snakes, ladders, 

hope. 

 

Jean Craig, 1784 

 

i wiz brocht up tae fear god. 

this wiz afore the word ‘love’ 

wiz pronoonced like it is 

the day – fan we used infinite 

fower letter configurations 

tae squish sufferin intae. 

a righteous path wiz rolled 

oot afore me, but i traipsed 

efter ambition an pride. the deil 

curled up inside ma lug. the wye 

she spake aboot love wiz queer. 

as if it were summin ye were owed, 

that ye could just gie tae yersel. 

she telt me, i could mak my ain 

happiness – thon weel-dressed 

wifeys werena ony better than me. 

so i stole a piece o linen tae prove 

i could be sumbdy. but ma sweet, 

lovin god wis ragin. unworthy 

an clarty wi sin, fit else could i dee 

but die fur him. this city hiz teeth. 

the fowk need tae eat. i feed them 

ma bleed, pray it learns their bairns 

tae keep fae makkin ill. ma body 

will mind them nae tae listen 

fan the deil creeps in. 

that tae love yersel above 

aahin else is a great muckle sin. 

 

‘Jean Craig, 1784’ was part of the exhibition, Symphony in Grey, commissioned by 

Aberdeen Performing Arts in 2023. 

 

Colourblandness 

 

I can’t taste the sunrise 

anymore. Yellow turns to grey 

 

in my mouth. The memory of you 

bleaches my tongue. 

 

Terracotta has no spice, 

lilac is unsalted rice. 

 

I have lost my sense of colour. 

 

I remember the morning 

we invented turquoise. 

 

Joni was singing about a 

blue boy while you spoonfed me secrets. 

 

Between scarlet mouthfuls, I let you into 

my past. You said this was the last time. 

 

Fake gold had greened my fingers. 

You kissed them, then slipped inside 

 

me, up to where your ring should be. 

 

I lick the pigment from this 

memory, hoping to jog my 

tastebuds. But, 

 

nothing comes. 

 

on gratitude 

 

when i see the granite streets 

that skinned the brown knees 

of my childhood, exploding 

with posters and slogans – 

 

something behind my ribcage 

starts to unstick. for years my 

chest has been thick with 

every ‘where are you really from?’ 

 

that has clung to my heart 

and stung every part of me. 

friendly smiles that shine 

with the kindest of knives 

 

make the deepest cuts. 

 

the city that birthed me has 

also cursed me under its breath, 

but when george stopped breathing, 

these streets breathed for him. 

 

i breathed a sigh of relief. 

unaware, i was even holding it in. 

this gratitude is blood-tinged, 

obscured by the shadows 

of guilt and grief. 

 

sometimes, i feel like a thief 

pick pocketing the death of a stranger. 

but research suggests, being grateful 

improves mental health. 

 

when a Black man is choked to death 

by racism, i don’t want to be grateful for 

anything. i don’t want to be grateful, 

i want to be equal. 

 

The poems in the ‘Black Notes’ section of Bloodsongs, which includes ‘on gratitude’ were commissioned by the National Library of Scotland (under the title ‘black lives, heavy truths’) as part of their Fresh Ink initiative in 2021.

 

Bloodsongs by Mae Dainsangu is published by Tapsalteerie, priced £10.00.

Vegan baking, like all vegan cooking, is really rising in popularity with cooks everywhere, and Jackie Jones is here to guide you with cakes, biscuits and other treats in her latest book. Enjoy this Ecclefechan Tart recipe!

 

Scottish Vegan Baking
By Jackie Jones
Published by Birlinn Ltd

 

 

ECCLEFECHAN TART

Makes 1 tart
Prep time: 15 minutes for the filling
Cooking time: 15 minutes (pastry) 15 minutes (tart)

INGREDIENTS

Tart case
½ quantity Sweet Shortcrust Pastry (see recipe on p. 39)

Filling
50g vegan butter
1 00g soft pitted dates, chopped roughly
2 tablespoons blackstrap molasses or black treacle
1 tablespoon date syrup
75g raisins
25g walnuts, chopped roughly
25g flaked almonds
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Water as needed – about 2 tablespoons

This delicious tart which is a combination of sticky toffee, raisins and crunchy nuts in a pastry case gets its name from the village of Ecclefechan in Dumfries and Galloway. The tart is often served as an alternative to mince pies at Christmas, and is rich and treacly.

METHOD

Heat the oven to l 80°C. Set aside an 18cm round, fluted tart tin.

Roll out the pastry to 3mm thickness and about 3cm wider than the pie dish. Put the pastry in the dish and press it into the base and sides. Trim away any excess and discard. Prick the base with a fork, cover in greaseproof baking paper and fill with baking beans (or dry rice), then part-bake (‘blind’) for 15 minutes. Remove from the oven and set aside while you make the filling.

Melt the vegan butter in a saucepan. Add the dates, molasses or treacle and date syrup and cook on low heat, stirring continuously and mashing with a spoon until the dates have softened and you have a toffee-like consistency. Remove from the heat and stir in the raisins, walnuts, almonds and vanilla extract. Then add as much water as needed to loosen the mixture a little – about two tablespoons. Tip the mixture into the pastry base, distributing it evenly.

Bake for 15 minutes until the filling is firm to the touch. Remove from the oven and cool completely before serving. Cut into slices and serve with Almond Cream (see recipe on p. 21) or Whipped Cream (see recipe on p. 40).

 

Scottish Vegan Baking by Jackie Jones is published by Birlinn Ltd, priced £18.99.

It’s Edinburgh’s 900th birthday this year, so BooksfromScotland will be bringing you books that celebrate the history of the city in the coming months. Firstly, we bring you storyteller’s Donald Smith’s lovely gift book that looks at Edinburgh’s history through its stories, poems and philosophies.

 

Edinburgh: Our Storied Town
By Donald Smith and Cath Outram
Published by Luath Press

 

Long before Edinburgh was accredited as a royal burgh, there was a fortress and settlement on the Castle Rock. The first name that has come down to us for this place is Din Eidyn, the fort of Eidyn. Who was Eidyn? God, king, hero, giant? We do not know, but the language is Cymric – what might now be called Old Welsh. Eidyn’s fort was in the Celtic kingdom of Gododdin, which had come to terms with the Roman Province of Britannia, whose shifting northern frontier eventually settled at Hadrian’s Wall.  

Above Din Eidyn was what we now call Arthur’s Seat. Again we are in a realm of gods and heroes, not medieval knights or holy grails. Like Benarty in Fife or Ben Arthur in Argyll, the rocky summit was literally a seat where the god could touch the heavens, especially, in Arthur’s case, the Bear star, Arcturus. Like a hibernating bear, Arthur still sleeps below his mountains, waiting on the call to rescue his people. 

So, remarkably, a sacred landscape sits in the centre of Edinburgh, with its hilltop seat and ascending terraces still visible. Beneath them is the holy water of Duddingston Loch – Trefyr Lin in Cymric – the settlement by the loch. Weapons and other metal offerings were cast in to the water as sacrifices, foreshadowing the myth of Arthur’s sword Excalibur. The medieval Duddingston Kirk still looks over the loch from what is likely an ancient religious site. 

In general, our oldest folklore is about how the landscape was formed. The forces of volcanic fire and then grinding ice which shaped Edinburgh are represented in this lore by a mother goddess or Cailleach (Carlin in Scots) and her rock-chucking giant children. Tradition tells us that this formidable giantess ‘let fart Berwick Law’!  

Later theories became more refined, but the core drama re-mains as land and sea, islands and hills, meet in a unique terrain. Arthur’s Seat, the Castle Crag and Calton Hill are remnants of one huge volcano worn down by the ice. To the east, Traprain Law, formerly Dunpelder, and North Berwick Law stand proud on the coastal plain below the long, low range of the Moorfoot and Lammermuir hills. Seawards, Inchkeith, the Bass Rock and May Isle, which sits in the mouth of what was called the Scottish Sea, are prominent. To the north, the Lomonds’ twin peaks – the Paps o Fife – complete the ensemble. From another angle, Edinburgh juts into the sea with Leith at its head, as if continuing the eastward run of the Pentlands which also extend westwards like a recumbent dragon.  

The old stories, like later history and literature, are also formed by that interaction of sea and land. The legends of Edinburgh’s ‘Castle of the Maidens’ nod across to the Isle of May or Maidens, blending Celtic priestesses with early Christian saints. It was the sea which brought the Romans to Edinburgh, establishing a major port and fortress at Caer Amon – now Cramond. Though the Romans remained an occupying power, never absorbing Scotland into their empire, they had great influence on the  tributary kingdoms like Gododdin. Their most lasting legacy was the spread of Christianity, and the fort by the River Almond later housed a church. 

A dramatic story from this period is best viewed from Arthur’s Seat. Tennoch or Thenew (later known as the biblical Enoch) was the daughter of Loth, king of Gododdin, who gave his name to the Lothians. He decreed that Tennoch should marry her cousin Owen, Prince of Strathclyde, sealing a royal alliance between the Cymric kingdoms. But she refused, having come under the influence of women missionaries from Ireland. They offered a radically different path for women in a patriarchal culture. Enraged by her disobedience, Loth sent Tennoch into the Lammermuirs to labour as a swineherd. But her resolve was unbroken. 

Owen, the story relates, came to claim his rights as a betrothed Prince. Later hagiography piously beat about the bush, but rape ensued and Tennoch fell pregnant. But still she resisted marriage. She was brought back to Traprain Law and sentenced by Loth to death by stoning. But, in biblical mode, the people refused to carry out the cruel sentence. Next, Loth ordered her thrown from the cliff in a ritual chariot. But the axle did not break, and Tennoch reached the ground bruised but alive. Lastly, stubborn old Loth had her cast off into the Forth in a coracle without sail, oar, food or water – an especially cruel, slow death in Celtic culture. 

But as the coracle drifted seawards out of Aberlady Bay, it was followed in procession by seals, fish and porpoises, so that no sea harvest was ever landed at Aberlady again. The coracle went out with the tide, but beached on the May Isle, where there was the freshwater Maidens Well. In this way, Tennoch survived until her little craft could be borne upriver by the tide, landing eventually in the darkness at Culross. She gave birth to her son on the beach, stirring the embers of a fish-smoking fire that had been smoored by the monks of St Serf’s community. They found mother and baby alive in the morning. The child became Kentigern, nicknamed Mungo, the founder of Glasgow. As for Tennoch, her wish to become a leader in the Celtic Church was fulfilled, and she founded a community of women on Inchcailloch in Loch Lomond. Her sacred well was in Glasgow Cathedral, and she was buried below what is still known as St Enoch’s Square.  

The same themes of sexual resistance and independence feature in the legend of St Triduana, a woman saint whose principal shrine and burial place was at Restalrig in Edinburgh. Triduana was remorselessly pursued by a Prince, till finally she demanded to know what part of her inflamed his desire. Her eyes, he re-plied, on which she pricked them out with a twig of thorns and handed them over. Subsequently, Triduana’s healing work and her shrines were associated with diseases of the eye. 

Triduana had chapels at Traprain, Rescobie in Angus and Papa Westray in Orkney. She may have been the same person as St Medana or Monenna in the Mull of Galloway, and this Saint is connected to the Chapel of the Maidens in Edinburgh Castle. Yet another legend in this cluster has Medanna accompanying St Rule when he brought the relics of St Andrew from Greece to Kilrymont, later St Andrews. These are the shifting sands of storytelling, yet the consequences were real in memory and devotion. Even in the 16th century, pilgrims came to Restalrig in significant numbers, while St Margaret’s Chapel in Edinburgh Castle, successor to the Maidens Chapel, is the city’s oldest surviving church building. 

 

Edinburgh: Our Storied Town by Donald Smith and Cath Outram is published by Luath Press, priced £14.99.

Christopher Rush is a fantastic writer of historical fiction that centres on artistic genius and his latest novel explores the love life of Frédéric François Chopin.

 

Nocturne
By Christopher Rush
Published by Sparsile

 

Journal of Eugene Delacroix
Entry for 9^th February

 

I have just returned to my studio after a long tiring day working in the Chapelle des Anges at Saint-Sulpice, and my faithful Jenny has handed me a letter informing me of the death of Miss Jane Stirling in Scotland three days ago. I was not close to this lady, although I knew her well enough through Chopin, but the news has saddened me, partly because any story of unfulfilled love and longing is a sad one, but more so because the letter has revived the terrible memories of ten years earlier, when poor Chopin was taken from us and we were left like paupers to mourn our loss, no one more so than Miss Stirling, although I was cut to the quick by my own grief for the passing of the best man I have ever known, and of whom I think so often, now that I am no longer able to see him before me in this world, nor hear his divine harmonies.

I last heard them at his funeral. It was 30^th October 1849. A clear sky sparkled over Paris that morning, nothing like the rainstorm during which the remains of Mozart only six decades earlier had been slung into an anonymous hole in the ground in Vienna, the downpour turning the quick sprinkling of quicklime to burning mush, rising like a mist from the uncoffined corpse.

This was so different. A classic autumn crispness prevailed, the sort I love to feel at my dear retreat at Champrosay, where I drink the air like white wine. Even here in the city you could hear deep inside you the sharp still sounds of the dead seasons turning over. Miss Stirling confessed she felt it too. She knew nothing of Champrosay, but I remember how she said to me that she could hear the stubble fields of her native Perthshire, back home in Scotland, piping farewell to the earth, echoing the blue emptiness, all the air suddenly becalmed between being and non-being. When she said that, I felt an instant wish to return with her to Scotland, and paint that sound, that feeling, express it as Constable would have done. But I’m no great traveller, and I’m an old man now. I know I never will.

She said something else too. She said she felt something deep in her belly, something deeper than grief.

‘It’s as if I were having a baby,’ she said. ‘His baby.’

It was an odd remark to make on the day of his funeral, but I understood what she meant.

‘I can hear it crying, you know. But it’s the unheard cry of a stillborn baby, one that is about to be buried. It’s the sound of that stillborn love being laid to rest, a love that should have been mine.’

At that point I must confess I wondered if she was deranged. Grief can unsettle the emotions and even unhinge the faculties. I was slightly embarrassed and murmured the usual platitude that I was sorry for her loss. It was no lie. We were all sorry. The whole world had lost him. And the whole world had come to mourn its loss.

The pallbearers stood up and I joined them as arranged, as we all came forward, ready for our burden. I knew that the massive casket far outweighed what it contained, the pathetic six stones of his remains, all that the long years of dying had left of him, all that could die of Frédéric Chopin. He’d been dying all his life.

The procession moved east, following the boulevards, skirting the slums, the sleepy whores, all the way to Père Lachaise. We inched away, stepping back a little from the grave, our pallbearers’ work done. In the end they throw dirt over the dead head – that’s the end of every story – and you have to turn your back on the place of tombs and walk away. I knew I’d never walk away, not in my heart. I knew Miss Stirling would never walk away either. The love of his life, so-called, Madame Sand, did not form part of our close circle of grief. She deserted him in death as she had in life.

As for me, I was in no mood to stay and suffer the interminable handshakes and mumbled platitudes of that vast crowd. I was only too glad to get back to the studio and to collect my thoughts. Jenny produced a wonderful capon she’d brought from Champrosay, cooked with enough garlic to put a whole company of British Grenadiers to flight. What a housekeeper I have! We dined on it together. Afterwards we had coffee, and to put me to sleep I took with me to bed a large glass of cognac. It unlocked all the doors in my brain, door that opened on the past, and all night long my dreaming head was filled with my friend Chopin.

 

Nocturne by Christopher Rush is published by Sparsile, priced £20.99.

One of our most distinctive middle-grade fantasy writers is back! Alex Mullarky’s The Edge of the Silver Sea delivers everything you’d expect: memorable characters, lush Scottish landscapes, Celtic folklore and more. Listen to the author introduce and read from the book below.

 

The Edge of the Silver Sea
By Alex Mullarky
Published by Floris Books

 

 

The Edge of the Silver Sea by Alex Mullarky is published by Floris Books, priced £7.99.

Gavin Francis dives deep into the history of bridges in his latest book, analysing not only their historic significance, but what they represent as symbols of connection. In this extract, he reflects upon his own memories of crossing the Forth Bridge connecting Lothian and Fife.

 

The Bridge Between Worlds: A Brief History of Connection
By Gavin Francis
Published by Canongate

 

In my loft at home there’s a newspaper clipping of a photograph of the Forth Road Bridge, with me and a thousand or so others setting off from its southern approach on a charity run. I was a couple of months shy of my thirteenth birthday; friends and family were to pledge a coin or two for every lap that could be made of it. 

Runners stream past a caravan set up by the organisers, some frowning, some shouting, some grinning as they jostle together, each finding their space and their rhythm. By chance the press photographer has framed me dead centre: a Nike T-shirt, a sweatshirt tied around my waist, white sports socks pulled up tight, one of the smallest runners in the crowd. The camera has also caught the haze that day over the Forth estuary – the coast of Fife is almost lost in the mist of distance. As I ran twelve crossings of the bridge my feet felt winged, soaring over the river’s cargo of ships and sailboats. 

I was not bad as a long-distance runner, wiry and slight. Running suited me because of its solitude, and because of the way I could feel my heart beating in time with the rhythm of my feet, my lungs heaving in my chest even as my mind grew ever more airy and light. 

From the hilltop behind my childhood home it was possible to see the topmost spires of the Forth Road Bridge, its towers painted the grey of doves’ wings, and also of battleships. A Sunday afternoon’s outing might be to take a walk over the bridge and back. If you close your ears to the traffic but open your eyes to the landscape, it’s a walk to expand your mind as well as your vision. 

A suspension bridge in the grand San Francisco style, it’s an estuary-wide handfast of concrete and steel. Two immense towers more than a kilometre apart suspend twin garlands of cables that hang in graceful parabolas, like playmates swinging a couple of skipping ropes. Each cable is over half a metre thick, spun from 12,000 high-tensile wires and bearing 14,000 tonnes of weight – you could hang the Statue of Liberty off them, or three Eiffel Towers. 

Two a half kilometres long, flanked by walkways and cycleways, with handrails like an ocean liner, it is fortified by gantries of trussed cross-beams to prevent it flexing in high winds. It was opened in 1964 by Queen Elizabeth as the Beatles’ ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ dropped to number 10 in the charts, and the Kinks’ ‘You Really Got Me’ reached number 1. Its designers boasted that it would last 120 years, but the burden of traffic it has been obliged to bear has meant it needed reinforcement long before that. On that day in 1964 the Queen was driven north over the bridge, then sailed back again by ferry – the final passenger of a service that had been running for nine centuries. Three men died in the bridge’s construction; several were saved by safety nets strung beneath decks. If you fell through those nets, it was a drop of 160 feet to the sea. 

The bridge was astonishing in its day for the elegance of its slender towers, which had to be built in five sections. Its north tower was built first, 156 metres tall; it swayed even in light winds before a dampening system was laid into it. The anchors for each cable are buried 80 metres deep into the bedrock of both shores. Those hidden anchors confer the strength necessary for the openness and connectedness of the bridge – an apt metaphor for all those unseen footings that our connections rely upon. The spinning of wire for its cables began in 1961 but was delayed by winter gales that year, which folded them in knots so tangled they had to be cut out. The decks of the bridge hang from its principal cables in 20- or 30-metre segments; metalled gaps between each segment allow for heat expansion in the summer. Cars driving over the bridge make a percussive rhythm as their wheels rumble over these metalled gaps, as if the bridge itself has a heartbeat and comes alive through the motion of those who cross it. Like the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, and the Pont Neuf in Paris, the crown of the bridge is a renowned spot for suicides, but also for declarations of love: fixed there are grids of steel wire festooned with padlocks, each marked with hearts and the initials of lovers. It’s a relatively new tradition, one thought to have started in Rome only within the last twenty years or so, underlining the way that the meanings we ascribe to bridges are always evolving. 

To cross any strait or watercourse, either by boat or by ford, has always been a risky activity, and was once much more so. Charon, ferryman of the Styx, demanded payment for access to the afterlife and to the bliss of forgetting; without that payment, the souls of the dead were trapped on the wrong side of the divide as ghosts, haunted by memories of their lives’ misdeeds. In some ages and some cultures bridges have been seen as horizontal crossings to another world; in others, the crossing is vertical, with death coming as a fall from the precarious bridge of life. For Nietzsche, ‘what is lovable in man is that he is an OVER-GOING and a DOWNGOING’. As with death, birth too is a risky crossing between worlds, and the umbilical cord a life-giving bridge between mother and baby.  

To confront the risks of river crossings, my own country developed a complex mythology of water spirits – ‘kelpies’ – that were to be appeased or avoided by travellers. Kelpie stories flourished until the military bridges of the eighteenth century made such myths unnecessary. Flowing waters have long been considered symbolic of the turbulence of life, and bridges, like ferries, emblematic of passage between its stages. As a child reading my Ladybird books I marvelled at the power and possibilities of bridges, and even dreamed of living on one. As I get older I realise how much each of us lives by them. 

Little remains to me now of that day running back and forth over the bridge at the age of twelve: a few flashing images of hot, exhilarating hours as I clocked up first ten, then twenty, then thirty kilometres back and forth between Lothian and Fife, Fife and Lothian. From the crown of the arch of the bridge the view was almost Olympian, and on that run I felt less earthbound than skybound. It seems to me now that I was running from the past into the future, from childhood into adolescence. 

 

The Bridge Between Worlds by Gavin Francis is published by Canongate, priced £20.

Our outgoing Makar’s newest poetry collection is a treat; celebrating language, people, nature and place. We’re thrilled to bring you a selection of poems, tantalising you with a little taster!

 

The Keelie Hawk
By Kathleen Jamie
Published by Picador

 

Killileepie 

Mind hou we sclimt a cleuch whaur a wheen birks grou’d, bieldit frae hungry deer, syne follaed the burn till we cam tae an airie amang laigh hills? Norwast stuid snaw-happit summits, and alang the burnside lay larachs and green knowes: traces o the fowk at yaised tae bide here aw simmer, takkin tent o thir kye. The map gied the burn as the Allt na Maddy. Wolves maun hae drank here, aince. 

Thur wis whaups, and a burd that dairtit up and doon the watter-side pipin Too-wee! Too wee wee wee! Mind we laucht – whit’s too wee? The moontains? Mibbes the river, thon wad hae been a michty glacier lang syne. In the tent we dovert an oor or twa, syne unzippit the flap and crept ootside. The glen wis eldricht wi muinlicht, the faurawa snaw-patches glentit. Ye howlt lik a wolf! But we’ve done awa wi thaim sae naethin answert bar the echo. And thon burd threapin – 

too wee wee wee 

Ah hinnae been back but thon freetfu craitur aye chides me nou and again. It flees in the door and oot the windae, giein its advice whan Ah’m sat here warplin wi wirds. Too wee! And aye, mibbes we did ware oot oor ambition ower suin – campin in the ruins, sae tae speik, and no ettlin fir the heichts . . . Is it ower late? Ah doot we’ll suin gang the wey o the glaciers, the wolves, the shielin fowk and become pairt o the laun’s lang dwam o mindin and forgettin. 

But it’s worth a shottie, eh no? Meet me the morn and we’ll gang. 

 

Remember when we climbed a gorge where a few birches grew sheltered from the hungry deer then followed the stream till we came to a pasture among low hills? Northwest stood snowcapped summits and along the riverside lay the sites of abandoned buildings and green knolls, traces of the folk who used to stay here all summer, looking after their cattle. The map gave the river as the Allt na Maddy. Wolves must have drunk here once. There were curlews and a bird that darted up and down the water-side piping too wee, too wee wee wee. Remember we laughed? What’s too small? The mountains? Maybe the river, that would have been a mighty glacier long ago. In the tent we dozed for an hour or two, then unzipped the flap and crept outside. The glen was eerie in moonlight, the faraway snow patches glinted. You howled like a wolf! But we’ve done away with them and nothing answered except the echo, and that bird persisting too wee wee wee. I’ve never returned but that fretful creature still chides me now and again. It flies in the door and out of the window, giving its advice when I’m sitting here wrestling with words. Too wee! And yes, perhaps we did spend our ambition too soon, camping in the ruins, so to speak, instead of striving for the heights . . . Is it too late? I expect we’ll soon go the way of the glaciers, the wolves, the shieling people, and become part of the land’s long dream of remembering and forgetting. But it’s worth a try, isn’t it? Meet me tomorrow and we’ll go.

 

The Brig 

Ah wis walkin ma lane
amang eastern moontains
the heichmaist snaw-peaks
gowden at dey’s dawn 

while deep in a cleuch
a gush o silt and glacier-melt
fled frae its origins
’mang the hiechmaist craigs. 

Syne: cock’s craw,
dung-reek, a wheen
cley biggins, and awriddy
sweein oot ower the torrent 

on a brig o twistit strae:
aw the clachan’s
weemin-fowk, awa
tae thir darg in the fields. 

Whit fields, ye micht wunner,
amang sic moontains?
Whit lifes, thae weemin
crossin yon chasm wi thir creels? 

Ah wis naethin then,
jist a stravaiger; ‘haunless’,
ma mither yaised tae sey.
Wad Ah gang back? 

Aye, mibbe,
had a wumman’s weird
no catcht at me an aw,
syne Ah wannert hame. 

But weel Ah mind o thae
ayebidin summits,
cauld as daith
at brek o dey, 

and hou Ah wis fine
wi jist the river’s roar
fur company, traivelin
ma lee-lane wey.

 

I was walking alone among eastern mountains, the highest snowpeaks golden at the day’s dawn while deep in a ravine a gush of silt and glacier melt fled its origins amongst the frightening crags.
Then: cock’s crow, smell of dung, a few clay buildings, and already swaying out over the torrent, the womenfolk of the village off to their day’s labour in the fields. What fields, you might wonder,
among such mountains? What lives, those women, crossing the chasm with baskets on their backs? I was nothing then, just a wanderer. ‘Incompetent’, my mother used to say. Would I go back? Yes, perhaps, had a woman’s fate not caught me too, as soon as I wandered home. But well I recall those eternal summits, as cold as death in the early light of day, and how I was content with the river’s roar for company, travelling my way alone.

 

Sirius 

Dug-stern,
gairdin the yett
atween ane year and the neist – 

weel micht ye blinter
emerant and reid
as ye lowp oor southron lift. 

Wi anely this ae
flicht o a Yird, this
ae speck o stour 

that alane can tak tent o ye,
hou wad ye no
bleeze at us? 

Ilka dug maun
hae its dey, and thur’s
naewhaur ither can cry ye 

by thon or onie name.
No that ye hear us,
birlin throu oor ain 

swith-passin deys.
We live and dee – and whiles,
on clear howe o winter nichts 

we see ye kythe,
leamin abuin the Black Craig,
stern o the bricht stern stare.

 

Dog star, guarding the gate between one year and the next, well might you glitter emerald and red as you leap our southern sky. With only this single speck of an Earth, this one mote of dust that alone can pay heed to you, why wouldn’t you blaze at us? Every dog must have its day and there’s nowhere else that can call you by that or any other name. Not that you hear us, spinning through our own swiftly passing days. We live and die and from time to time on clear midwinter nights we see you appear, glowing above the Black Craig, star of the bright stern stare.

 

The Ordinar 

 

Waukrife, alane,
ye’re hunkert on the doorstane 

lissenin while a daw-haze
o loss and bliss 

speels frae the neebourhood’s
ordinarness: its scroggit 

cooncil sycamore, thon
floorishin buss 

ye’d nivver afore
taen tent o. Leastweys, 

ye want tae cry it
‘loss’ and ‘bliss’ 

thon up-driftin
brek-o-dey veil . . . 

As fir thae crocuses
thrangit in a crackit pot 

jist by yer anklet
– whit’s thon purpie? 

‘Warld-luve’.
Warld-luve? 

Hou no? Naebodie’s
nearaboots tae lauch. 

Ye could e’en mibbes
cry it alood: 

Bliss! Loss! Warld-luve!
There. Whitivver rises 

will drift back doon.
Whit this dey brings ye’ll face. 

 

Wakeful, alone, you’re hunkered on the doorstep listening as a dawn-haze of loss and bliss ascends from the neighbourhood’s ordinariness, its stunted council sycamore, that blossoming bush you’d never noticed before. At least, you want to call it ‘loss’ and ‘bliss’, that up-drifting break-of-day veil. As for those crocuses crowded in a cracked pot just by your ankle, what’s that purple? World-love. World-love? Why not? Nobody is around to laugh. You could perhaps even shout it out loud: Bliss! Loss! World-love! There, whatever rises will drift back down. What this day brings you’ll face.

 

The Keelie Hawk by Kathleen Jamie is published by Picador, priced £12.99.

It is so fantastic to see editors Neil Williamson and Andrew J. Wilson reunite for another anthology of speculative fiction from Scotland – and what a collection of authors they’ve brought to the collection. With established names and up-and-coming authors and every kind of speculative genre, you’re going to find a story to delight you. Here we have an extract from Jane McKie’s story ‘Night Snow’.

 

Nova Scotia Vol. 2: New Speculative Fiction from Scotland
Edited by Neil Williamson and Andrew J. Wilson
Published by Luna Press Publishing

 

Extract from ‘Night Snow’ by Jane McKie

 

Your breath in the snow is a bird on the wing. 

You long to snake arms around the waist of snow. To hug a body that dissolves if you touch it. You want to lie on the bonnet of a stranded car as if it’s a gurney. You give it a go. Nothing moves in the pre-dawn cosy post-apocalypse of snow, but snow. 

 

* 

 

Being here, in the snow at night, reminds you of wearing your favourite headphones: white Sennheisers. This is what snow feels like, but instead of music, your own breath, your heartbeat. Reassuring. Cosy even. 

 

* 

 

It’s as if the world wants to clear its throat. Some kind of blockage, something there, just beyond description. In this hush, this non-noise, there is sweetness to being out on the street alone, in a world of unnatural light. The tenements wear white mantles; it must have been snowing for ages. They look both familiar and strange. Almost every shape is a lie: contour lost to the slow accretion of flakes that you wish would fall on you, yet, somehow, don’t. Every snowflake misses you even though you invite flurries. 

 

* 

 

Now someone is drilling just around the corner. You try to move towards the sound, but find that snow, which fell on everything but you before now, is compacted around your boots, sticking to your clothes, and movement is impossible. The drilling intensifies, the drill bit penetrating your skull, skewering the grey-beige sludge of your brain until you scream and wake up screaming. 

 

* 

 

‘Where am I?’ you ask the figures at your side. They say nothing. ‘Where am I?’  you scratch out again, throat on fire. 

No one answers. They look down at you, four of them, their expressions inscrutable, and you wonder why they don’t reply. 

You’re on your back, head slightly raised, aching all over, disorientated. And then, slowly, you remember. Remember signing the form with Amy, remember the weeks of talk before you did. 

She was all for it, wanting to make sure the best bits of your mind, your personality, weren’t lost in the march of the disease that had already begun to wreak its havoc. You were less convinced – after all, this was the choice of megalomaniacs and nutjobs. But she was the scientist, the one who could marshal arguments; and she had the patience for a fight. 

‘Mum, it makes sense. I know you think it won’t work. But what have we got to lose?’ 

And you wanted to say, perhaps as much as six months. Wanted to say, I’m scared; scared to go now, so quickly. Just a tiny bit early. But then, she’d wipe her eyes and say, ‘Mum, please.’ 

Cryonics when you were 50 was cryonics in its infancy. Sure, you had the money – money for Dignitas, money for the procedure – but a big part of you thought there would be a million better uses for it. That ‘please’ sat with you for days that stretched into weeks. You knew the thing Amy was best at was hope, and you had to give her that. She’d been a naive wee girl, too, but so sharp you could cut yourself on her, as your mum used to say. 

 

* 

 

You’re in a room so white it reminds you where you have come from. The walls are glowing. The people around you look very much like they did before you went under, and you wonder how much time has passed. They don’t talk even though you ask question after question. Sometimes there are as many as five of them, sometimes only one or two. But you are never alone. 

You watch them – the nurses – as they move around the room purposefully, and you realise it’s choreographed somehow: a silent dance. They seem to know what to do, who’ll reach over and adjust whatever is clamped to your head, who’ll bring liquid and take liquid away. 

 

* 

 

A couple of weeks have gone by, maybe more, and you haven’t moved from the semi-upright position they have you in. You’re angry now. Not one bloody word! No view save the exceedingly boring room you’re in, and the figures who move around you, whom you have come to think of as evil. Well, okay, maybe not evil, but you have no way of telling and you’re so pissed off, you’re like a pot left on the stove. You think of that cliche of alien abduction, and transpose your nurses into the role of alien experimenters even though they’re clearly human. They look, walk and smell human. Not aliens or androids, you’ve decided. 

You talk at them all the time. Shout a lot. Sing sometimes. 

You wish she was here. Amy. That she’ d been the one to revive you. But she probably died a long time ago, you realise, unless she, too, froze her body for posterity. 

 

Nova Scotia Vol. 2: New Speculative Fiction from Scotland edited by Neil Williamson and Andrew J. Wilson is published by Luna Press Publishing, priced £16.99.

The latest in Floris Books’ Illustrated Scottish Treasuries Collection, this utterly gorgeous anthology of dragon tales from around the world is collected and rewritten by Theresa Breslin with stunning illustrations by Kate Leiper. In this Scottish tale, the story of the holy man Serf and the dragon terrorising Kinnoull in Perthshire is reimagined as a local girl, Broca, lends a much-needed hand.

 

An Illustrated Treasury of Dragon Tales: Stories from Around the World
By Theresa Breslin and Kate Leiper
Published by Floris Books

 

 

An Illustrated Treasury of Dragon Tales: Stories from Around the World by Theresa Breslin and Kate Leiper is published by Floris Books, priced £16.99.