in the style of Kidnapped or The Thirty-Nine Steps which carries the reader along by sheer narrative exuberance. Set in early eighteenth-century Galloway, it evokes:
… the graceless unhallowed days after the Great Killing [of the Covenanters], when the saints of God had disappeared from the hills of Galloway and Carrick, and when the fastnesses of the utmost hills were held by a set of wild cairds, cattle reivers and murderers. (p. xiii)
Patrick Heron, a straightlaced almost priggish character, tells how in his youth he had been caught up between these groups and entangled in a violent feud. Patrick is a generally reliable narrator who seems very much an innocent abroad in a world he does not fully understand. Even in retrospect he manages to sound thoroughly bemused by much of what he has to tell us, and quite often reveals himself to have had only the vaguest idea of the significance of the events he describes so vividly.
The first chapter is marvellous, from the romance of its title ‘Moonlight and May Mischief ’ and its mysterious first sentence, so reminiscent of the beginning of Treasure Island and countless other smuggling tales ‘It was upon Rathan Head that I first heard their bridle-reins jingling clear’, to the description of Patrick’s first encounter with the smugglers as he rows across the bay in the moonlight.
My skiff lay just outside the loom of the land, the black shadow of the Orraland shore on my left hand; but both boat and I as clear in the moonlight as a fly on a sheet of white paper. (p.2)
This is a very striking visual image. With its stark opposition of light and shadow, and the human figure seen as small and defenceless within a greater frame, it is emblematic of the whole book, and of how Patrick sees his world.
The calm, static quality of the image is shattered when the smugglers fire on the defenceless boy in the boat. Patrick is shocked into action and, seizing his oars ‘by instinct’, struggles to get back into the shadow as a musket ball flies towards him:
It knocked the blade of my left oar into flinders, just as the water dripped silver off it in the moonlight. (p.3)
This world of instinct, where things do not happen to plan, but are more spontaneous and unpredictable, is alien to Patrick who sees things in terms of a socially-defined morality. Although telling his story in retrospect, his words reflect his feelings at the time: he is self-righteously angry at the ‘cowardly, senseless and causeless cruelty’ of the attack. Yet the story he goes on to tell will describe how, for a time, he gained access to this other world.
The whole of the first chapter shows Patrick struggling to comprehend a world that has suddenly changed from the orderly universe he knows to something much more fragmented and disorderly. The entire episode takes place in moonlight with Patrick (and his readers) trying to form a clear idea of what is going on as shadowy figures and disconnected voices move in and out of his awareness. More than that, even, there are sudden shifts into yet another realm of being:
what we saw in the next moment brought us both to our knees, praying silently for mercy. Over the wall at the corner farthest from us there came a fearsome pair. First a great dog, that hunted with its head down and bayed as it went. Behind it lumbered a still more horrible beast, great as an ox, grim and shaggy also, but withal clearly monstrous and not of the earth. (p.6)
With the smugglers fleeing in terror from the ‘Ghaistly Hounds’ this is in the best tradition of melodramatic horror but there are other, more subtle shifts too.
There was a broad splash of moonlight on the rough grass between me and the tomb of the MacLurgs. The old tombstones reeled across it drunkenly, yet all was still and pale. I had almost set my foot on the edge of this white patch of moonshine to strike across it, when, with a rustle like a brown owl alighting swiftly and softly, someone took me by the hand, wheeled me about, and ere I had time to consider, carried me back again into the thickest of the wood. (p.3)
That ‘splash’ is a lovely touch, exact but lively and linking effortlessly with the water dripping silver from the oar when it was struck by the musket ball. The incident itself is genuinely mysterious – the image of the owl being apt but also profoundly disturbing – and offers a glimpse of a different kind of reality. It is real in its suggestion of the touch of the owl in a way that the ghostly hounds are not.
Almost every character Patrick meets in the course of the book is unconventional in some way (smugglers, gypsies, the ‘lost boys’ who move in to Rathan House, the splendid Lady Grizel) but two characters in particular represent for Patrick the possibilities of life lived freely and unconstrained by the dead hand of rigid social convention: May Maxwell and Silver Sand.
May is something totally outwith Patrick’s comprehension. Having been brought up by his father due to his mother’s early death, Patrick has absolutely no idea of how to deal with women. Like Miranda in The Tempest he lives in a world that is in many ways severely circumscribed, and it is a major theme in the book that in leaving his island and venturing deeper into the world, Patrick grows in awareness. Much of this comes from his deepening relationship with May.
When first we meet her, May is described in ways that highlight her lively, unconventional nature. In one of the many reversals that are part of the fabric of The Raiders, May is seen to be much more capable and adventurous than Patrick, the apparent ‘hero’ of the piece. Her dress, her behaviour, her language (so different from Patrick’s own ponderous language): all of these set her apart as a free and independent spirit who can be teasingly mischievous, ‘stately and dignified’ by turns.
Silver Sand, too, represents life lived outside normal social conventions and is one of the great successes of the book. With his great hound Quharrie by his side he flits in and out of Patrick’s story like the ghostly presence of a guardian angel. He is a very mysterious character whose quiet dignity has not been won easily and as he reveals late in the book he has his own dark secrets. He is a character right out of folk-tale and legend like some kind of nature spirit (Crockett also acknowledged his debt to Hogg’s Brownie of Bodsbeck): he can see in the dark; he has a strange affinity with animals; and unlike Patrick he has easy access to many different worlds and many different levels of experience. When Patrick was a child Silver Sand had been a figure of mystery and magic, a role he continues to play right to the end of the book when it is revealed that he is actually John Faa, the king of the gypsies, and so has been directly involved in many of the events with which Patrick has been struggling.
Right to the end Silver Sand guides Patrick in his growing awareness of a new way of seeing the world. Perhaps, though, it is in the wild, untamed Galloway landscape itself that Crockett found the perfect metaphor for this new state of mind. As Islay Donaldson says in The Life and Work of Samuel Rutherford Crockett1:
Crockett involves the reader to an extraordinary degree in the varied physical experiences which Patrick passes through – the movement of sunshine and shadows across great spaces, the texture of rocks and sand and boggy moorland … (p.121)
So successful is Crockett in this that it is now impossible for anyone who has read The Raiders to walk the hills around Loch Enoch and not remember his descriptions. That he knew this landscape we know because he spent some time with the MacMillans of Glenhead Farm in Glentrool and went into the hills with them. Dr Donaldson describes how much these visits meant to Crockett in her book, and I have just come across a passing remark by the singer Joe Rae in Sheila Douglas’ book The Sang’s the Thing2 which shows that Crockett also gave something in return.
When [my grandfather] started there in 1894, the great friend o’ these MacMillans was Sam Crockatt [sic], S. R. Crockatt – an’ my granfather heard a lot o’ the stories o’ the area
