Under the greenwood tree

 The road to Abbey Saint Bathans is winding and narrow as befits a journey into the past.

A cautionary word on a blind bend

Abbey St Bathans is a place of mystery.  Firstly, there isn’t and never has been, an abbey there.  Then there is St Bathan.  Who was he?  There is a St Bothan’s collegiate church mentioned in 1421 in the  nearby parish of Yester but the old name for Yester village near Gifford, was Bothans without its saintly prefix.
St Batheine was the cousin and successor of Columba on Iona and there is a reference to a St Bothan in Shetland in 636 A.D.  Both seem remote connections to the little hamlet nestling along the banks of the Whiteadder.
There was a priory here with twelve nuns and a Prioress. Founded in  the 12th century by Ada, daughter of Wiliam the Lion. Never a large foundation, the priory was damaged in the Anglo-Scottish wars of the 16th century and further destruction visited on the site in the Cromwellian period.

The present kirk incorporates some of the original buildings into the north and east walls and the  surviving effigy of a prioress, found during  the restoration now lies in a special niche.

There was another religious foundation only a mile or so away at Trefontanis, now Strafontaine.  Nothing remains of this site though ruins were recorded up until the seventeenth century.  Whether it predated the Cistercian priory, or was contemporary with it is unknown.
Why all this religious activity in what would have been, even in twelfth century, a fairly sparsely inhabited and poor place?  Perhaps it was all about St Bathan or Bothan. 
Since the time of Oswui and the kings of Northumbria and the Synod of Whitby in 664, the influence of the Celtic church had been waning against the power of the Roman church with its hierarchical structure beloved of kings.  The Johannine, contemplative way of the Columban church was less acceptable and, though not actively suppressed, was allowed to wither on the vine.
 The Culdees,  Celi De, the monastic order of the Celtic church had attracted some previously pagan devotees incorporating some of their beliefs about the natural order of the universe. They allowed their followers to marry and tended to function independently, electing their own abbots.  The term “abbot” was applied to the heads of Culdee establishments though they would not be regarded as abbeys in the Roman church. 
Queen Margaret wife of Malcolm II - Saint Margaret - for all her perceived piety, was a Norman and steeped in feudalism.  The independent nature of the Culdees did not sit well with the rigid structures of feudalism.  She and her sons, Alexander I and David I, were active in  bringing the Culdees under canonical rule and by the end of the 13th century, the order had all but disappeared.
 About half a mile from the kirk at Abbey Saint Bathans, in a field called the Chapelfield, are the remains of St Bathan’s chapel, set deep in a copse of  mature trees.

Chapelfield

Virtually nothing can be seen except a grave slab or altar stone and a broken ring of stone possibly a font or a piscine.
This could have been the site of a Culdee monastery, with its “Abbot” dedicated to the Celtic saint, Batheine, Columba’s successor, revered in the Celtic church.

The chapel almost covered except for a slab of stone

 It explains why there was a need to establish not one but two orthodox religious establishments in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to counteract the influence of the earlier church and why the term Abbey survives even to this day.

Abbey St Bathans held yet another mystery.    While exploring the little wood surrounding the old chapel, I came across a beautiful carving inside a old stone. An arched recess containing a representation of the ancient Tree of Life or the World Tree. *

The stone in the wood

The world tree

The sacred tree, the cosmic tree connecting  heaven and the underworld and all forms of creation is a universal symbol in many theologies and religions.   The carving is certainly not from the sixth century of St Bathan but I’m sure he would have immediately understood its significance.   A wonderful, in the original meaning of the word, experience, it made me wonder.

*  have since discovered the sculpture may have been by John Behm an artist and sculptor  living in the area at the time

Merlin - The Green Man

Merlin is on the telly; Merlin is in comics; Merlin is the prototype for Gandalf and Dumbledore; Merlin is the wizard whose name is synonymous with prophecy and, of course, with King Arthur. Everyone has heard of Merlin


The real Merlin was a historic figure, Myrridin to the Welsh, Lailoken to the Scots, a Druid or bard at the court of one of the small  Brythonic kingdoms under attack from, and eventually being subsumed by, the Anglo-Saxons from the eastern seaboard and the Scots from their Gaelic domain to the northwest.  It is said he went mad after the defeat of the pagan Britons at the Battle of Arfderydd (Arthuret 573 A.D. ) on the edges of what is now Cumbria and fled  back to “live with beasts in the Forest of Caledon”.

The Tweedsmuir hills where Merlin sought refuge  in the  Forest of Caledon

  This is thought to be the magic mountain of Hart Fell with its chalybeate spring of healing waters close to the spot where three great rivers, the Tweed, the Clyde and the Annan arise.  An important site in Druidic lore.
He also appears in the hagiography of St Kentigern otherwise known as St Mungo, the patron saint of Glasgow.   Kentigern is said to have met  Myrriden and found a kindred spirit but the old Druid could not give up his ancient beliefs and the saint in a gesture of tolerance blessed him. 

 “As old Druid wisdom taught me, I have lived and I will die”

The window in nearby Stobo Kirk

The seer then foretold of his own threefold death by being clubbed speared and drowned.   This strange ritualistic death is echoed in the Norse tales of Odin and, perhaps, by the injuries to some of the sacrificed bodies found in peat bogs.
Merlin is said to have been struck on the head whereupon he fell into the river and was impaled on a stake set for fishing nets and thus, drowned.
 His burial site is said to be
“not far from the green chapel where the brook Pausayl flows into the Tweed”

At the little village of Drumelzier, sheltering beneath the Tweedsmuir hills not far from Hart Fell, the Powsail Burn meets the Tweed.

The confluence of the Powsail and the Tweed

The tradition has it that Merlin/ Myrridin/ Lailoken was buried here at the foot of a thorn tree.

Merlin  appears again in the fragmentary Life of St Kentigern where the saint is the grandson of King Lot of Lothian and the nephew of Sir Gawain who in the Arthurian legends fights the gigantic Green Knight.  The Green Knight cannot be slain despite having his head cut off and demands that Gawain meets him again at his castle in a year and a day to receive a similar stroke.  The Green Knight like the greenwood can be cut down but will always recover.

All these stories seem to reflect the struggle for survival of the Druidic, shamanic religion with its emphasis on trees, waters and wild Nature - the Green Man -against the organised power of the Christian church.

Sir Gawain sets off north to meet the Green Knight in his castle but the knight  doesn’t kill him.  The old religion yields to the new.
Merlin is said to have been buried “hardly two miles from the castle of the Green Knight.”  There is an Iron age fort on Vane Law above Drumelzier.  Vane Law means Green Hill.  Maybe this was the castle of the Green Knight, the embodiment of the greenwood.

Vane Law

Are the tales of the death of Merlin; the blessing by St Kentigern; the triumph of Sir Gawain, all folk memories of the supplanting of the naturalistic Druidic religion by Christianity in late fifth and sixth centuries as the petty tribal chiefdoms themselves were overcome and merged into larger kingdoms?

After sixteen hundred years, Merlin the wild prophet, the magician, the green man, still holds our attention.  Things have come full circle and his identification with the wild and the natural  would now be seen as part of green eco-politics.    Just like the Green Knight and the greenwood, Merlin cannot be killed off.   Known as a shape-shifter in his lifetime, capable of assuming different forms, he is still capable of  survival in many guises.

The Greenwood always blooms again

Mosses, stiles and long Scotch miles

I  climbed up the long hill to the moor to see if the local council had cleared the old route to what was once common land.  The Moss Road is at least medieval and  probably much older.  It allowed the villagers to take their stock, their cattle sheep and goats, up to the moor for summer grazing.   It also provided access to the high bog land where they could cut peat.  Many of the farms around the area still have the right to cut peat.    
The old road was as overgrown as ever but I circumnavigated the whins and rank undergrowth and reached the moor.  Eventually, I arrived at the Long Moss now designated a Site of Special Scientific Interest. An SSSI.

Alder carr

It is a raised bog, home to a variety of plants and mosses; alder and willow carrs like small islands in a sea of heather; snipe who spring up from their watery rests with that characteristic zig-zag flight that tempts the shooters and, in the summer, adders and  small copper butterflies.

The beauty of the moss

Our coast has quite a low rainfall and the survival of the bog, its not drying out in the summer, is apparently due to the sea haars, the dense mists that encroach on to the land in July and August just when the sun is at its warmest.  It is true that a few miles inland, folk will be basking in blazing sunshine while we shiver in swirling wet clouds.    Given the continued existence of the Long Moss or a summer free from mists, I  suspect locals would happily do without their SSSI.
Since it persists, we might as well get some benefit from it. In the past it would have been extensively dug for peat for fuel hence its name.
The old Scots word for a peat bank is a moss.  

 Today, it lies alongside giant wind turbines. Where once cows and sheep grazed, the wind is farmed for energy.   Where people dug their peat for fuel, they now capture the wind to provide their heat and light and at a much greater profit.
Ancient cairns and quern stones amid the heather suggest that the bog is at least partially due to the activities of humans.

Quern

 The felling of trees, the subsequent working for peat, and, recently, the legislative preservation of its current state have all contributed to what is there today. What it was like two thousand or four thousand years ago might have been very different.   The lack of grazing means the establishment of scrub trees and heather. The moss will change as it always has in response to the activity or lack of activity from mankind.

Tibbie Fowler sought and found

Tibbie Fowler o' the glen, there's ower mony wooin' at her
 Wooin' at her, pu'in at her
Wantin' her, canna get her
Silly elf, it's for her pelf
A' the lads are wooin' at her

The Logan family had a long  history of association with the Scottish Crown. A Logan had accompanied the “Good Sir James” Douglas on his ill-fated mission to the  Holy Land with Bruce’s heart.  By 1382 the Barony of Leith had come into their possession.   Good and bad, they  ruled over the port and the neighbouring estate of Restalrig until the early 16th century by which time the lands had been divided amongst three branches of the family.  Sir James Logan, Sheriff or “Shirra” of Edinburgh built his mansion where St Thomas’church stands at the top of Sheriff Brae. The church is now a Sikh temple

Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis

The catastrophe of Flodden and subsequent, ill-judged political ventures brought a decline in Logan fortunes until, in the late 16th century, Robert Logan “ ane godles, drunkin and deboshit man” had lost his Restalrig lands to pay his debts. After his death, he was accused of being implicated in the Gowrie conspiracy and the family were outlawed and any remaining lands confiscated. Some of their lands in Berwickshire were later returned to them and the  sentence of outlawry revoked.
Respectability of a sort returned to the family.  Tradition has it that George Logan, a grandson of Robert, married “weel tochered” Isabella Fowler and, with her large dowry, built a mansion at the head of Shirra Brae where he could view all the comings and goings of  Leith harbour.

Isabella was the daughter of  Ludovic Fowler of Burncastle near Lauder.
Burn Castle stood overlooking the Earnscleugh Water  near to where one of the branches of the ancient Herring Road  wound its way from Dunbar to Lauder. Of the castle nothing remains except the name of the farm on the site.

The Herring Road - Burn Castle stood close by

Another version has her as the daughter of a portioner or the owner of a small portion of land at Lochend, now a sprawling housing estate. Lochend House built in 1820 incorporates the gable end of the old Logan stronghold, Lochend Castle.

Lochend House

I think this is less likely given the amount of money needed to restore the Logan fortunes and  rebuild on the old site of Shirra House.
It seems to be the old story of the nouveau riche buying their way into an ancient family name.
One can imagine the folk of Leith, who had not always benefited from their Logan superiors, having a good laugh in the taverns along the Shore as the wags sang their comic songs about the newest lady of the house with her jewels and high heeled shoes and attempts to overcome the deficits of nature

The Shore

She's got pendles in her lugs, aye cockle shells would set her better
High-heeled sheen wi' siller tags and a' the lads are wooin' at her

This must be the Tibbie of the satirical song.

Wilson’s bonny Tibbie Fowler’s five hundred pounds  might have bought a coastal trading boat (blog 30th Jan 2014) but, even in those far off times, it wouldn’t have been enough to build the mansion house in Leith and pay off the Logan debts.
 It is also unlikely that a small-holder at Lochend would have accumulated enough of the  penny siller  to make George Logan throw his hat into the ring with the other suitors.

Ten cam' east and ten cam' west and ten cam' sailin' ower the water
Twa cam' doon yon lang dyke side, there's ower mony wooin' at her

 No, for my money, and for Tibbies’, it has to be Isabella Fowler of Burncastle.

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.

Midwinter sunrise

The standing stones

The solstice  is just a  moment in time when the maximum height of the sun above the horizon is at its lowest point for the year.  Further north, above the Arctic Circle, it doesn’t rise above the horizon and the dawn doesn’t break.  The winter night is total.
The period of midwinter or Yule has now been subsumed into Christmas  but to the old peoples, it was  the turn of the year.   Although, because of the Earth’s tilt and its elliptical orbit, the days don’t actually get longer for some time after the solstice, it still represented the tipping point, the start of a new cycle.
In our electrically-lit, gas-warmed world it is difficult to imagine just how dark and cold the winter was four thousand years ago, especially how dark it was in the short days of midwinter.  Sunlight would have been precious, a gift to be enjoyed.
I got myself out to the standing stones to experience the sunrise of  midwinter.  The wind from the north seemed to come straight of the polar ice-cap. Walking out in the semi darkness of first light, the rays of the still hidden sun reflected on the  clouds along the horizon, in the bitterly cold wind, I wondered if people had come to the stones at this time thousands of years ago or were they erected for another purpose and I was merely being fanciful.

Sunrise

After waiting and freezing for what seemed like ages, I was rewarded with a spectacular sunrise and, turning round, with an equally evocative moon-set.

Moon-set

What ever the beliefs of the folk who put up the stones, I know that  the feeling of the sun on one’s face in the depth of winter is enough to lift the spirits and dispel the gloom.  The walk back was certainly brisker but the wind was behind me and breakfast beckoned.