Worm o’ the Clachan’, ‘The Dole o’ the Thirteen Herrin’… (pp.38–39)
And Crockett’s accurate description of walking the Galloway hills will bring a rueful smile to the face of anyone who has walked them.
As I went the ground became wetter and boggier. My foot sank often to the ankle, and I had to shift my weight suddenly with an effort, drawing my imprisoned foot out of the oozy, clinging sand with a great ‘cloop,’ as if I had begun to decant some mighty bottle. (p.171)
While it is true that Crockett rearranged the geography of the region for his own artistic purposes, he still writes of the hills with the sure authority of one who has been there.
These hills are a strange territory for Patrick and it is much to his credit that he is willing to venture into this new world to rescue May from the gypsies despite being so obviously ‘lost’ in it. The strangeness is signified first of all by the names: The Dungeon o’ Buchan, Loch Enoch, Loch Neldricken, The Wolf ’s Slock, The Murder Hole. Throughout the book Crockett takes great delight in using actual placenames because he loves the sound of them or because they are so richly evocative. Perhaps only in the poetry of William Neill do we find a similar joy in the placenames and the landscape of Galloway.
Patrick finds the journey into this new world long and difficult and physically demanding. (He is, after all, an island dweller much more used to travelling by boat.) It is difficult, too, because he has to learn other and quicker ways of thinking and he has to learn something of the ways of the gypsies so that he can try to outmanoeuvre them. Having done this successfully on his first journey into the wild country he feels very pleased with himself and rather naïvely imagines that he has got the measure of it.
On his second journey to the Dungeon o’ Buchan, however, he finds that even this newly-discovered landscape has changed.
I looked down upon the desolate waste of Loch Enoch under the pale light of the stars … I saw a weird wide world, new and strange, not yet out of chaos – nor yet approven of God; but such a scene as there may be on the farther side of the moon, which no man hath seen nor can see. (pp.275–6)
The weird, boulder-strewn scene has become doubly strange because of its covering of snow. Such a vision seen by starlight must have suggested to Crockett that haunting image of the far side of the moon. As the snow comes on Patrick’s world changes yet again and his writing takes on a more threatening, almost Apocalyptic note as he and Silver Sand are caught in a ‘fearsome’ blizzard:
The darkness was white – above, around, beneath – all was a livid, solid, white darkness. (p.287)
They fight their way through this terrible storm and would almost certainly have perished had they not stumbled upon the House of Death, the cottage where Patrick had earlier been held captive. At this point in the book almost everything in his life is being turned tapsalteerie for it is now that he discovers the truth about Silver Sand.
Yet as always there is calm after the storm. Patrick gradually comes to terms with all that has happened to him and returns to May Maxwell and a happy marriage. Perhaps the ending is too pat for modern tastes (although it is traditional enough) and Patrick himself seems to think that the events he has described were simply a youthful aberration which he has no wish to re-live except in memory. It is as if he has chosen to renounce a new-found world of instinct only to return to conventional behaviour. This is true enough, but Patrick has still made some advance, for in marrying May Mischief he has accepted a partner whose behaviour (indeed, whose very name) suggests a liveliness and spontaneity he could not cope with at the beginning of the book. Perhaps for him that is achievement and reward enough.
There is much to praise in The Raiders. It is a book filled with a warm and generous humour as in the exchanges between Lady Grizel Maxwell and her servant Jen, carried out in a rich and vigorous Scots. Indeed Crockett’s handling of Scots dialogue is as good as anything in Stevenson, while his picture of the sharp but exceedingly droll humour of the people of Galloway is second to none. Above all, The Raiders has about it that surprisingly rare feeling that the writer actually enjoyed writing it – a wonderfully communicated sense of exhilaration and delight in the simple fact of being alive.
John Burns
1 Donaldson, I. (1989) The Life and Work of Samuel Rutherford Crockett, Aberdeen University Press
2 Douglas, S. (1992) The Sang’s the Thing, Polygon
I, Patrick Heron of Isle Rathan in Galloway, begin the writing of my book with thanks to God, the Giver of all good, for the early and bountiful harvest which He has been pleased to give us here in little Scotland, in this year of His Grace, 17––. It is not the least of the Lord’s mercies that throughout all this realm, both hill-land and valley-land, the crops of corn, Merse wheat, Lowden oats, and Galloway bear, should be in the stackyards under thack and rape by the second day of September.
So, with a long back-end before me, the mind running easy about the corn, and prices rising, I am not likely to get a better season of quiet to write down the things that befell us in those strange years when the hill outlaws collogued with the wild freetraders of the Holland traffic, and fell upon us to the destruction of the life of man, the carrying away of much bestial, besides the putting of many of His Majesty’s lieges in fear.
Now it will appear that there are many things in this long story which I shall have to tell concerning myself which are far from doing me credit, but let it not be forgotten that it was with me the time of wild oat sowing when the blood ran warm. Also these were the graceless, unhallowed days after the Great Killing, 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, worse than the painted savages of whom navigators to the far seas bring us word.
It was with May Mischief that all the terrible blast of storm began (as indeed most storms among men ever do begin with a bonny lass, like that concerning Helen of Troy, which lasted ten year and of which men speak to this day). The tale began with May Mischief, as you shall hear. I keep the old name still, though the years have gone by, and though now in any talks of the old days and of all our ancient ploys, there are the bairns to be considered. But it is necessary that ere the memory quite die out, some one of us who saw these things should write them down. Some, it is true, were deeper in than I, but none saw more or clearer, being so to speak at both the inception and the conclusion of the matter.
James, be the grace of God, King of Scottis: To our Schereffis of Edinburghe, principall … and to all otheris Schereffis, Stewartis, provestis, auldermenne, and bailleis within our realme, greting. FORSAMEKILL as it is huimlie menit and schewin to us be our louvit JOHNNE FAA, LORD AND EARLE OF LITTLE EGYPT: I charge you to assist him in punessing all that rebellis againis him, and in the execution of justice upon his company and folkis, conforme to the lawes of Egypt.
Subscrivit with our hand and under our Prive Seile, AT FALKLAND the fiveteine day of Februar, and of our reigne the xxviij year.
Subscrivit. per Regem
James
