In search of Tibbie Fowler

 So far, my involvement in the revival of interest in Wilson’s Tales of the Border has  been confined to the dramatisation of a few of the Tales.

 http://www.wilsonstales.co.uk/

  I thought I ought to read a few more of what were, in their day, hugely successful publications. The print run extended to thousands of copies for each edition.  Further interest, from my own point of view, was added by the fact that, after John Mackay Wilson’s untimely death, a local doctor, Alexander Carr was asked to produce some stories for the next edition to keep the magazine going.
Browsing through the first volume of what became an extensive collection of tales, I came across the story of Tibbie Fowler of the Glen.   The story has a local setting on the northern bank of the Whitadder river near Berwick, moves to Edinburgh and back to Berwick
In his introduction to the narrative, Wilson equates Tibbie of the Glen with  the Tibbie Fowler featured in the old song sometimes attributed to Robert Burns but actually much older. As with many of the songs of Burns, he polished up an existing folk song.
Allan Ramsay mentions it as the tune  to one of his own songs.

Tibbie Fowler o' the glen
There's o'er mony wooin at her
Tibbie Fowler o' the glen
There's o'er mony wooin at her

Wilson’s story has Tibbie, orphaned at the age of nineteen, beset by suitors, all after her inheritance of five hundred pounds.  She sets off to Edinburgh to work as a nanny to “a gentleman  in Restalrig”  keeping her tocher or dowry money a secret so that she will no longer be wooed  by false swains. 
 The mention of Restalrig may be  significant in the unravelling of Tibbie’s identity.
 Wilson gives explicit details of where Ned Fowler, Tibbies’s father, had his cottage and smallholding.    It stood above a small glen on the north side of the Whitadder river, four miles west of Berwick-upon-Tweed.

The Whitadder below Tibbies cottage site looking towards Clarabad

 Despite the rain, the glaur and the clart, I tramped off to find Tibbie’s cottage or at least the spot where, according to Wilson, it stood between Edrington Castle and Clarabad.
The glen, now densely wooded, is home only to roe deer and buzzard with ancient moss and lichen covered trees and new plantings.

Tibbie Fowler's glen

The farmer soon put me right as to the site still marked on farm maps as “Tibbie’s cottage” on a promontory above the river.  The site is apparently also the site of an Iron Age fort.

Site of TIbbie Fowler's cottage

The little bridge nearby is called “Tibbie’s bridge” and the field is called “Tibbie’s field” but of her dwelling, not a stick or stone remains.    There are the decaying trunks of mighty elms, long since cut down, around the edge above the steep drop to the river.
Are they the remnants of the trees planted by Ned Fowler, surely misprinted as “palms” in Wilson’s tale?
“… a shadowy row of palm trees(sic) planted by the hand of Tibbie’s father - Ned Fowler”

Old  trunks - once mighty elm trees

The Tibbie Fowler of the story seems to have been a real person.   In the tale, she marries a sailor, William Gordon and, with her dowry, they buy a brig and prosper in the coastal trade until he is captured by enemy ships and disappears for eighteen months.  Tibbie and her children are reduced to destitution until William returns laden with riches and honours and they settle down in her father’s old cottage - a fairly typical Wilson Tale.
This is not the Tibbie of the song.   Wilson’s Tibbie is a great beauty with cheeks “where the lily and the rose have lent their hue”
 The song makes it clear that the attraction of its Tibbie is her wealth not her looks
Tibbie of the song has jewels in her ears and silver strapped high heeled shoes

 “She’s got pendles in her lugs…
…High heeled shoon and siller tags”

Not at all like the douce Tibbie of Wilson’s tale.

The cynical ,worldly humour of the song is also found in Allan Ramsay’s   Gie me a lass wi’ a lump o’ land and Burns’ Hey for a Lass wi’ a Tocher.  Both imply that beauty doesn’t last but wealth does.
  Kate Dalrymple  has a similar theme.
 These are not the sentiments of romance and virtue rewarded that suffuse Wilson’s Tales.

I think Wilson has conflated two different stories and two very different Tibbies. 
 I’ll have to look further afield for the  Tibbie of the song.    Restalrig might be a  clue.
Why did Wilson mention that specific part of Edinburgh?

More of this anon.  I shall seek some answers in our capital city.

Sunshine on Leith Walk

At last the snowdrops have pierced the cold ground.  There they were, under the hawthorn hedge among the blackbird-pecked windfalls, their green spikes with just a flash of white.   Spring is most definitely here.  In some parts, daffodils are out and rhubarb is sprouting.   Despite all the gloomy predictions, it has been a mild winter so far. No rarities have come to the bird table, unless you count the woodpecker, no long tailed tits, no bramblings, just the garden birds - the tits, great, coal and blue: the sparrows, house, tree and hedge: the finches, green, chaff and gold: the robin, the wren, the blackbird, the collared dove and the wood pigeon.   We had our annual visit from the pheasant, hiding from the guns and the occasional raiding jackdaw but nothing unusual.

Spring having apparently sprung, it was with spring in my step that I set off with LotH for a trip to the capital.  Park-and-ride is the greatest idea yet.  No fighting through traffic, no exorbitant city parking charges, just leave the car at Newcraighall and take a train to Waverley.
Beside the steps to the station platform is a monument to the late Bill Douglas, film-maker, whose harrowing trilogy  My Childhood,  My Ain Folk and My Way Home was made with local  inhabitants playing the parts.  They are worthy of  the revival that was mounted in October last year.   Bill Douglas was born in the depression - hit mining village of Newcraighall in the thirties and grew up in  material and emotional poverty, but escaped by way of National Service and a career in acting then film making.
His films can be seen on YouTube.

Bill Douglas memorial, Newcraighall

LotH left for the shops to undertake what I understood to be some absolutely essential transactions while I set off down Leith Walk to find a book binder to recover an old battered history of the village which has been long out of print.
 This copy was signed by the author so it seem worth preserving especially as he too had been a doctor to the community and, though he was described as a Surgeon in those nineteenth century times, he would have provided a service as physician, surgeon and apothecary not much different from  that of the dispensing country doctor of the late twentieth century. This particular medical man also dabbled in writing so I felt a duty to preserve his efforts.

Leith Walk is long and,while it is all downhill one way, it is all uphill on the way back. It is a  wonderfully cosmopolitan  stroll.
A wide busy road with some imposing Georgian and Victorian     architecture if you look up from the activity at street level, it made a change from the country walks I usually manage.

Imposing frontage

It always pays to look up

 You could eat in almost any corner of the globe in the coffee-shops, restaurants, cafes and takeaways that line the street - Punjabi, Nepalese, Turkish, Tibetan, Indian, Italian, Polish, Chinese, Thai, Kurdish, American as well as organic, and macrobiotic, and vegetarian.  Little local shops have a huge range of services and produce - Fruit and veg., bakery, fishmongers, wine merchants, Halal butchers, Italian and Chinese delicatessens sit cheek by jowl with tattooists, body building gyms, tanning parlours, hair dressers and barbers some offering hair braiding , interspersed with second hand furniture shops, auction rooms, florists, solicitors, estate agents, carpet sellers, picture framers, IT consultants, printers charity shops and a tarot card reader.   Dozens of people all trying to earn a living. To get some money to spend in other shops.
Sometimes city walks can be just as enjoyable and a stimulating as tramping the high moors.
 LotH  having still not completed the shopping trip, another stroll  took me along to the National Gallery to have a look at the Turner water colours.  An experience ruined by the incessant chattering of middle aged, middle class, Edinburgh women who would be the first to shush any one speaking during a play or a concert but seem to think it is acceptable to blether mindlessly while viewing  the work of one of our nation's finest painters.    Silence should be a rule in art galleries.