It's a chill wind

Greater celandine gets torn by the wind but is the arch survivor

It is the vernal equinox and true to the old adage the winds have increased.  The statistics seem to show that there is no validity in the belief that there are storms around the equinoxes but  the cold wind has suddenly returned after the sunny days of early March.  It seems odd that such a widespread belief should have no scientific basis.  Dickens mentions them and even Sherlock Holmes is surprised to receive a visitor such is the severity of the equinoctial gale in  The Adventure of the Five Orange Pips.
The equinoctial gales are more often noted at the autumnal equinox in late September and early October but are also associated with the equal days of spring.

A teuchat

My grandfather, a farmer, called the autumnal gales the “teuchat storms” as they occurred as the teuchats (peewits or lapwings), started to move on to the farmlands from higher summer pastures and their numbers were augmented by over-wintering flocks from Northern Europe.

Lambs can stand the cold winds but rain  is a hazard

The spring gales were often called the “lambing storms” by  reason of their timing.  Yet we are informed that it is all a misapprehension and that there is no evidence of wind and weather changes specifically at the equinoxes.    Be that as it may, it has been a cold windy week

The Brownie of Bodsbeck

 James Hogg monument at The Loch of the Lowes

James Hogg is now being given the status he deserves as a writer.  During his lifetime and for long afterwards, he was regarded as a minor figure in Scottish  literature.  Befriended but patronised by Scott and the  Edinburgh literary establishment, his true ability wasn’t fully recognised.
 Now, his Confessions of a Justified Sinner is seen as a truly modern novel
The Brownie of Bodsbeck is his tale of the bloody strife that surrounded the struggle between the Stuart kings on their new English throne and their Presbyterian Scottish subjects
Published after Sir Walter Scott’s Old Mortality, it received little of the latter's popularity but Hogg himself was always at pains to point out that it was written before Scott’s novel but held back by the publisher, presumably not to foreshadow and possibly devalue what was certain to be another bestseller from Scott.
Scott has been accused of caricaturing the Covenanters and white-washing the Royalists which is what one would expect from a member of the Tory establishment.  True or not, Hogg’s account is much  more from the people’s point of view as they saw their herds seized, their relatives shot and tortured by ruthless agents of the Crown.   James Graham of Claverhouse, latterly Viscount Dundee, was such a man and his swathe of suppression through the Borderlands forms the background to the novel.

The Watch Law from where a lookout was kept during Covenanter services

 A group of Covenanters, mainly in the southwest, followed the teachings of Richard Cameron and offered armed resistance to the Crown
When the crown ejected ministers from their parishes for refusing to submit to the rule of bishops, the Covenanters followed them to the hills and worshiped at open air services called conventicles.
Every year in July, an open air “Blanket preaching” is held at the Kirkyard of St Mary of the Lowes by St Mary’s Loch in Yarrow in memory of the Covenanters.
http://www.selkirk.bordernet.co.uk/news/30.html

 As the threat from government forces increased the Covenanters began to carry weapons to their conventicles and to post armed pickets to keep a lookout.
The Cameronian regiment - The Scottish Rifles - which arose from these Covenanting origins, continued to take their rifles to church parades and to post sentries at each service until disbanded in 1968

Chapelhope

Hogg’s story concerns Katherine the daughter of the farmer at Chapelhope, a farm in Yarrow.   Hope is one of these intriguing geographic terms. On the coast it means a bay- Longhope.  In the hills it means a valley or hollow .  There are several hopes in the Brownie of Bodsbeck - Kirkhope, Riskinhope,  Kershope
  Katherine plays on the superstitions of her family and neighbours by pretending to be in league with the Brownie of Bodsbeck allowing her access to the moors at night.   According to custom, brownies must be placated with food - bannocks and milk, thus Katherine is able to hide and feed the fugitive Presbyterians in the hills.
Clerk, the cowardly priest, a Royalist spy who denounces his parishioners, attempts to seduce her under the guise of exorcism but is unhinged when he meets, Katherine’s brownie - a  escaped Cameronian, twisted and misshapen by torture and hidden by her in a cave under the waterfall at Chapelhope.
 It is clear where Hogg’s sympathies lay and, with only eighty years separating his birth from the death of “Bluidy Clavers” at Killiecrankie,  his childhood would have been filled with tales of the “Killing Times”.

The Brownie of Bodsbeck is, at times, difficult as some of the dialogue is in the everyday speech of the locals which even in Hogg’s day contained many words that were slipping out of usage.  He makes passing reference to this when Clavers is interrogating an old shepherd and  admits to not understanding him

Chapelhope still has its beautiful linn or waterfall but never was there a cave.

The chapel that gives the hope its name and where the sly priest Clerk spied on his flock is now a series of grassy mounds and the only flock that attends there are the sheep.

Rodono Chapel ruins

All is now quiet and peaceful with few reminders of the death and oppression visited on the people of the valley, but perhaps the hills remember.

When is a mile knot a mile

March  came in like a lion but hopefully will go out like a lamb as the old saw has it.  Certainly it is looking that way.  The local farmers must be heaving a sigh of relief.  The hill men haven’t started lambing yet  but those closer to sea level are well into it.  Last year was a disaster with freezing cold, driving rain killing many young lambs.  This year the sun is on their backs and they are thriving.

The fine weather took us up on to the path that snakes along the cliff tops with spectacular views along our beautiful coastline.  Not a route for the vertiginous.  Trying to  photograph a little waterfall to add to my collection of linns, made me aware of the two hundred foot drop to the rocks below.

Waterfall

  Rafts of guillemots are collecting for their annual return to shore to breed having spent the rest of the year riding the waves. Their numbers seem to be down from  previous times and only a few kittiwakes are to be seen the cliffs.

The Admiralty, in the days of empire and dreadnoughts, erected two marker posts along the cliffs as a  “measured mile”. Deep water close to shore allowed mighty steamships to be paced over one nautical mile  checking the top speed possible.  No longer necessary, the posts still stand as mute reminders of the days when Britannia ruled the waves.

Measured mile post.  The other is just visible at the highest point on the distant clifftop

The great liner Mauritania had  her sea trials off  St Abbs Head in 1907, captured on a glass plate by local photography pioneer John Wood.

http://www.coldingham.info/galleries/johnwood.shtml

RMS Mauretania passing the lighthouse after completing a speed trial over the measured mile, 1907.

 One knot is one nautical mile per hour, a nautical mile being one minute of arc of the Earth's circumference  .The metric equivalent is the meter/second   1 knot is equal to 1.94384449244 mt/secs.
 Somehow is just doesn't have the same ring to it, does it?
 " The Cutty Sark reached 17 knots on the wool clipper run from Melbourne... The battle-cruiser could do 28 knots,..."  Just doesn't sound the same in meter/seconds.
There is a romance, a poetry about miles, knots, leagues, fathoms and furlongs  that the metric measurements can never capture The words create images in the mind from stories heard as a child but like the Admiralty measured mile they are all part of history now. 


Skirting the outline of a semi-circular Iron Age fort that never needed complete encirclement, perched as it is above an unscaleable cliff, we headed inland and back to the village.
My companion, of course, was all set to go again !

Where now?

Tombstone Tales

Although our village predates its mediaeval priory, since the twelfth century the  priory has been at its centre and thus the current kirk and graveyard is  not on some distant edge but right in the middle of the community.  The dead centre -  to resurrect a hoary old pun .

Shoppers, dog walkers, school children, use the cemetery as a shortcut, making their way through what was once the nave and transepts  of a mighty ecclesiastical foundation and is now the last resting place of the local populace. 
I watched a television programme that explored the burial practices of the Bronze Age tomb builders and it seems they kept their ancestors' bones very much in the community.   Our graveyard is a bit like that. As I collect my morning paper, although I have no ancestors there, I pass old acquaintances and neighbours and see stones that tell of four generations occupying the same farm.
The headstones are sometimes a tale in themselves, a couple who lived into their seventies yet were predeceased by all of their four children who died in infancy and early childhood.  A life of perhaps fifty years of unremitting sadness.   Another tells of a young surgeon to the Nabob of the Carnatic who died in the Neilgarry (sic) Hills working for the East India Company at the start of the Raj and yet another of the life of a missionary in Calabar.

Fascinating places, cemeteries, always with a story to spark your interest, an oddity, a connection or sometimes a wry memorandum to the living.

A trip to Edinburgh to collect my rebound copy of my predecessor’s  local history  ( Blog 27 Jan 2014)  gave me an opportunity to wander about in St Cuthberts Churchyard where the great and the good of Auld Reekie were laid to rest  including George Kemp, designer of the Scott Monument. His Neo-Gothic rocket ship on Princes Street is in a better state than his algae green tombstone.

Kemp's headstone

The stones  speak of desperate efforts to claim a place for posterity, detailing the merits and successes of the departed  There are surgeons and physicians; businessmen and merchants of every trade, bookseller, engraver, ironmonger, iron founder, baker; army officers from the days of empire and their deaths in far off outposts; and ministers of religion whose tombs are amongst the biggest with the most effusive eulogies carved thereon, their desire for immortality on this earthly plane outweighing the risks of condemnation for the sins of pride and vanity.

Soot-blackened, moss-covered and algae-stained, ignored and forgotten, the stones are a testimony to the often futile desire to be remembered.

Can storied urn or animated bust
 Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath
Can honour’s voice provoke the silent dust
 Or flattery soothe the dull cold ear of death

 Amongst all this self-aggrandisement is one stone detailing only the birthplace and date of death of St Cuthberts most noted inhabitant. 

A man confident in his own abilities in life, he has nothing on his gravestone to trumpet his achievements.

Thomas Penson De Quincy, writer, essayist, journalist, philosopher, translator, classicist- at fifteen, his schoolmaster said of him “that boy could harangue an Athenian mob better than I could address an English one” - and original exponent of what might be called addiction literature. He was a friend, and occasional critic of, Wordsworth, Coleridge, another opium user, and Lamb
His Confessions of an English Opium Eater has never been out of print.
His essays are still immensely readable. The most well known are
 On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth
On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts
Suspiria de Profundis
 Novels, stories, reminisences, journalism, treatises, all flowed from his pen
 His passing remarks on politicians, economists, Ireland,  Lake district visitors, and suicide have a bite of truth.

His friendship with John Wilson (“Christopher North”) whom he met at Oxford, brought him to the Edinburgh literary scene where he met James Hogg and, eventually, Thomas Carlyle.  He moved to Edinburgh but his chaotic finances caused him to seek debtors sanctuary in HolyRood Park.
 In the last years of his life, his finances improved and his collected works were published in America.
 He immediately influenced  Poe, Baudelaire and Gogol and later, writers such as Aldous Huxley and William Burroughs.  George Luis Borges claimed to have been influenced by his work
Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique owes much to the Confessions of an Opium Eater

His headstone simply gives the date and place of his and his wife’s birth and death, nothing else.
 His writings stand on their own merits, the perfect  memorial.

Berwick cockles

In this centenary year of the outbreak of that most terrible of conflicts, you cannot escape The Great War - drama, documentary, analysis, opinion, reconstruction, review, poetry, diaries, letters, recorded recollections.
WWI is no longer reality as it was to many older people when I was young.  It is history now.  An eighteen year old today is as far from the Somme as an eighteen year old then was from Waterloo.
The war memorial in the village is still dutifully tended, indeed beautifully tended. The names on it are still those of many of the local families.  In that respect, we are no different from hundreds of villages throughout the land.
The village does have one quirky unique feature.  The commander of the British forces, Douglas (later, Earl) Haig spent his boyhood holidays in our village. During the war, his niece stayed at The Mount, a large house overlooking the bay and a local woman recalled to her that she had dried her uncle’s wee feet and putting on his “sockies” for him when he was a child paddling in the sea.
 “He was a good wee boy”, she remembered.

The Mount

The beach still has its Edwardian style bathing huts

His niece sent some Berwick Cockles, locally produced sweets with a minty flavour, to him in France.  He was fond of these and received so many that, soon the Cowe family in Bridge Street, Berwick upon Tweed who made them, were labelling their tins of Berwick Cockles  “as supplied to F.M. Haig”
In his letter of thanks to his niece, he reminisced -
 “Well do I remember when I used to exchange me (sic) pennies at the Post Office  for Berwick Cockles"

The Old Post Office on the right

http://www.scotsatwar.org.uk/AZ/HaigFellows%27Addresses02.html

It is recorded that Field Marshal Haig suffered from toothache whilst in Flanders and sent for a Parisian dentist.  His sweet tooth had its price.

Children still paddle in the sea at the beach in the summer but none will ever know horrors such as those that that engulfed that little boy.