All posts by Ken Cockburn

Ken Cockburn is an Edinburgh-based poet, translator, editor and writing tutor.
Edinburgh Poetry Tours

An Edinburgh Alphabet, A–G

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An Edinburgh AlphabetThis Edinburgh Alphabet features poems (and some prose) about the city; I’m posting it on Facebook in July and August. I’ve taken the idea partly from J.F. Birrell’s book  from 1980, which I came across by chance recently in an Oxfam bookshop; and partly from the exhibition currently running at the City Art Centre.

 

A is for Auld Reikie

Auld_Reikie_RF  Burns Fergusson epitaph

Edinburgh’s cramped and densely populated Old Town was known as Auld Reikie (‘Old Smoky’). The poet of its bustle and vapours was Robert Fergusson, who wrote in both Scots and English, but it’s for the Scots work that he is best remembered; his longest poem ‘Auld Reikie’, captures the sights, sounds and smells of the city he lived in.

He died in 1774, tragically young, and was buried in the Canongate Kirkyard. beneath a stone commissioned by Robert Burns. Today on the Canongate, David Annand’s bronze statue of the poet, book in hand, walks beneath the cherry trees. At his feet are inscribed the opening lines of ‘Auld Reikie’.

Auld Reikie, wale o’ ilka toun
That Scotland kens beneath the moon;
Whare couthy chiels at e’ening meet
Their bizzing craigs and mous to weet;
And blythely gar auld Care gae by
wi blinkit and wi bleering eye…

(wale: best; ilka: each; mouthy: friendly; chiels: fellows; craigs: throats)

B is for Burns

Burns Moument 1 Burns Moument 2 Burns Moument 3

Robert Burns (1759–1796) was born, grew up and farmed in Ayrshire. His Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect were published to acclaim in 1786, and he travelled to Edinburgh at the end of that year hoping to find a patron. He was welcomed and celebrated, but disappointed in his hopes; eventually he had to take a job as an exciseman to achieve a measure of financial security.

While in Edinburgh he arranged for a stone to be erected in the Canongate Kirkyard for the poet Robert Fergusson (1750–1774), who had been buried there in a pauper’s grave. Burns knew and admired his work, and wrote this epitaph for his stone:

No sculptur’d Marble here, nor pompous lay,
No storied Urn nor animated Bust;
This simple stone directs pale Scotia’s way
To pour her sorrows o’er the Poet’s dust.

Ironically, Burns himself was memorialised in ‘sculptur’d marble’ by the citizens of Edinburgh. In 1824 John Flaxman was commissioned to produce a life-size statue of Burns in white marble, and a monument was built to house it, designed by Thomas Hamilton. If Fergusson lived in Auld Reikie, after his death the city become known as the ‘Athens of the North’, thanks to such buildings as Hamilton’s neo-classical Royal High School. As his template for the nearby Burns’ monument, Hamilton chose the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates in Athens. Completed in 1831, in 1839 it was handed over to the care of the city council, when the statue was moved due to smoke from the gasworks below discolouring the marble; Auld Reikie was determined not to be forgotten. The statue is now in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery on Queen Street.

 

C is for Clarinda

Clarinda

‘Clarinda’ was Agnes (Nancy) M’Lehose (1758–1841). She met Robert Burns in December 1787 when he was visiting Edinburgh for the second time, and they began a ‘passionate friendship’. Married with four children, she was estranged from her husband (who lived in Jamaica where he owned a plantation). She had moved from Glasgow to Edinburgh where she was supported by relatives including her cousin William Craig, a lawyer and judge.

It’s thought her and Burns’ relationship wasn’t sexual – as a married woman she had too much to lose. Burns managed to get one of her serving girls pregnant – perhaps a sign of his frustration at this state of affairs. When he left Edinburgh they wrote to each other, and it was her idea to use the ‘Arcadian’ names of Clarinda and Sylvander. He wrote several poems to her, which don’t rank amoing his finest.

They last met in December 1791. She was about to sail for the West Indies to attempt – vainly, as it turned out – a reconcilation with her husband. By then he was married, and living in Dumfries where he worked for the Excise department. On the occasion of their last meeting he wrote for her ‘Ae Fond Kiss’.

 

D is for Dùn Eideann

DùnEideann_DBMgrave

Dùn Eideann is the Gaelic name for Edinburgh. A Gaelic speaker who lived in the city was the poet Donnchadh Bàn Mac an t-Saoir, whose name is anglicised as Duncan Ban MacIntyre (1724–1812). From Glen Orchy in Argyll, he worked there and in Perthshire before settling in Edinburgh in 1767 where he served with the City Guard. He is buried in Greyfriars Kirkyard.

Among his poems is ‘Oran Dhùn Eideann’ (Song to Edinburgh), which praises many aspects of the city: soldiers, ladies, and judges; lamps, bells and coaches; the castle, palace and infirmary. Below is the opening verse in Gaelic and English (translated by Angus Macleod, in The songs of Duncan Ban Macintyre, 1978), and I’ll add a link to a now digitised earlier edition of his work published in France.

‘S e baile mór Dhùn Eideann
A b’ éibhinn leam bhith ann,
Aite fialaidh farsaing
A bha tlachdmhor anns gach ball;
Gearasdain is batraidh
Is rampairean gu teann,
Taighean móra ‘s caisteal
Anns an tric an d’ stad an camp.

‘Tis in Edinburgh city
I would rejoice to be—
a bountiful and spacious place
that pleased in all respects:
garrison and battery
and ramparts all compact;
great buildings and a castle

where oft the camp has stayed.

E is for Eneados

Eneados_GavinDouglas Eneados_GavinDouglas_MakarsCourt Eneados_SicIturAdAstra

When Gavin Douglas (1474–1522) translated Virgil’s Aeneid into Scots – ‘our awyn langage’, as he put it – in 1512–13, he was Provost of St Giles in Edinburgh. Soon after it was completed came the disastrous Scottish defeat at the Battle of Flodden, and Douglas spent the rest of his life involved in political intrigues. He died in London, where his Eneados was published thirty years after his death. It was the first complete translation of Virgil’s work into a northern European language, and was extended by Douglas’s own prologues; Ezra Pound reckoned it “better than the original, as Douglas had heard the sea”.

From its founding in 1128 until its amalgamation with Edinburgh in 1856, the Canongate was an independent burgh. Its Latin motto, SIC ITUR AD ASTRA – ‘thus one travels to the stars’ – was taken from the Aeneid. Virgil’s epic tells the story of Aeneas, a Trojan who is destined to found the imperial city of Rome. The phrase comes in a section which describes the God Apollo descending to praise Aeneas’ son Iulus, who has distinguished himself in battle. Douglas’s version runs

Down from the regioun of the hevin tho
The brycht curland haryt Appollo,
Apon a clowd syttand quhayr he wald,
The ostis of Italianis can behald,
And eyk new Troyis cite, with cheyr glayd
Till lulus the victor thus he sayd :
Eik and continew thy new vailyeand deidis,
Thou yong child ; for that is the way the ledis
Up to the sternis and the hevynnis hie,
Thou verray Goddis ofspring, quod he,
That sal engendir Goddis of thy seyd.

F is for Finlay

Finlay Coble SP 1 Finlay Green Waters SPL Finlay Hunter Square 1 Finlay RLS A Man of Letters 2

Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925–2006) is a poet best known for his garden, Little Sparta, south of Edinburgh in the Pentland Hills, made with his wife Sue. It is a small piece of the world dense with resonances and echoes, especially of the absent worlds of the sea and classical antiquity. Finlay made several works for sites in Edinburgh. A tapestry of the poem ‘Green Waters’, made of fishing boat names, hangs in the Scottish Poetry Library, while ‘Coble’ can be found in the The Scottish Parliament; bronze baskets of northern and southern fruits with accompanying quotations can be found in Hunter Square, by the Tron Kirk on the High Street; and his memorial to Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘A Man of Letters’, is in Princes Street Gardens.

G is for Golden

Golden City 1 Golden City 2 Golden City 3

In 1965 James T.R. Ritchie published Golden City, a follow-up to his earlier collection (and film) of Edinburgh children’s rhymes, songs and sayings, The Singing Street. He writes in the Prologue to Golden City that “I made it a rule never to take any rhymes out of any book, only to note down what I heard by word of mouth, and from the pupils of this one school.” (The school was Norton Park School, just off Easter Road.)

 

Canongate, Edinburgh Poetry Tours

Ye Jacobites by Name

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Bonnie Prince Charlie, ‘The Young Pretender’, and his father James, ‘The Old Pretender’, were the subjects of songs, poems and stories praising and reviling them during their lifetimes, and pretty much ever since.

I’ve been researching a new poetry walk, linked to the exhibition Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Jacobites at the National Museum of Scotland. The walks run 13–16 July 2017 – for tickets click here.

The walks begin at the Palace of Holyroodhouse, and end at the Museum on Chambers Street, taking in various sites associated with Jacobites on the way.

Charles, or the Chevalier as he was sometimes known, entered Edinburgh via Holyrood in September 1745, and he stayed at the palace until the Jacobite army moved south at the end of October. Walter Scott, in Waverley (1814), imagines his titular hero arriving at the palace, his fate in the Prince’s hands.

A long, low, and ill-proportioned gallery, hung with pictures, affirmed to be the portraits of kings, who, if they ever flourished at all, lived several hundred years before the invention of painting in oil colours, served as a sort of guard chamber or vestibule to the apartments which the adventurous Charles Edward now occupied in the palace of his ancestors. Officers, both in the Highland and Lowland garb, passed and repassed in haste, or loitered in the hall as if waiting for orders. Secretaries were engaged in making out passes, musters, and returns. All seemed busy, and earnestly intent upou something of importance ; but Waverley was suffered to remain seated in the recess of a window, unnoticed by any one, in anxious reflection upon the crisis of his fate, which seemed now rapidly approaching.

Panmure House, off the Canongate, is named for the Jacobite Earl of Panmure. He fought in the 1715 rebellion, and was later name-checked by Burns in ‘The Battle Of Sherramuir’:

They’ve lost some gallant gentlemen,
Amang the Highland clans, man!
I fear my Lord Panmure is slain,
Or fallen in Whiggish hands, man…

He survived the battle, was captured but escaped, and went into exile.

A Jacobite who fought at the Battle of Falkirk, John, Lord Macleod, was buried in the Canongate Kirkyard. One soldier on the government side that day was Duncan Ban MacIntyre, one of the great Gaelic poets of the 18th century, who described how his side were routed:

We, the total force the Whigs possessed,
were one day in the Scottish Lowlands
when the rebels fell in with us—
and cheerless to us was the company
when they compelled us to retreat
and chased us with intent to slay us—
unless we used our legs to good purpose:
we fired never a shot with our muskets.

(Translation: Angus Macleod)

Tobias Smollett is remembered for his novels, but his first published work was a poem, ‘The Tears of Scotland’, bemoaning the Duke of Cumberland’s brutality after the Battle of Culloden.

Thy hospitable roofs no more
Invite the stranger to the door:
In smoky ruins sunk they lie,
The monuments of cruelty.

On 14th August 1773, Samuel Johnson arrived in Edinburgh from London, ready to embark for the Hebrides with his friend James Boswell. They made a point of visiting Flora Macdonald on Skye, who had helped the Prince or, as Boswell called him, The Wanderer, to escape. Charles disguised himself as Flora’s maid,  an incident which Boswell describes in his journal with relish:

He was very awkward in his female dress. His size was so large, and his strides so great, that some women whom they met reported that they had seen a very big woman, who looked like a man in woman’s clothes, and that perhaps it was (as they expressed themselves) the PRINCE, after whom so much search was making.

Robert Burns was capable of writing pro- and anti-Jacobite songs. Just weeks before the Chevalier’s death, he wrote and recited to a pro-Jacobite gathering in Edinburgh a ‘Birthday Ode For 31st December, 1787’:

Beasts of the forest have their savage homes,
But He, who should imperial purple wear,
Owns not the lap of earth where rests his royal head…

But he was capable of direct criticism too:

Ye Jacobites by name, give an ear, give an ear,
Ye Jacobites by name, give an ear,
Ye Jacobites by name,
Your fautes I will proclaim,
Your doctrines I maun blame, you shall hear.

George IV Bridge recalls the king who visited Edinburgh in 1822 amid much pageantry, the first reigning monarch to do so for nearly 200 years. By then Jacobitism was no longer a political threat, and three years earlier James Hogg, a friend of Walter Scott, had published The Jacobite Relics of Scotland. His ‘Dedication’ includes these lines:

These Songs I consign, as memorials that tell
Of the poets that sung, and the heroes that fell,
Whom interest ne’er moved their true king to betray,
Whom threat’ning ne’er daunted, nor power could dismay.

Later poets were able to take a longer and sometimes more critical view of Charlie and the consequences of his ambition. Iain Crichton Smith, who is remembered in Makars Court, wrote

The silly Prince
hits the wall of fact, the steel fence

of Culloden flashing fire, and discipline
clicking clearly its rehearsed routine.

Drunken sot, I hope you endlessly suffer

for the sufferings your boyish game caused…

And yet the Prince, the Pretender, the Chevalier, the Wanderer, continues to fascinate.

Canongate, Edinburgh Poetry Tours

Spring on the Canongate

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It’s nearly the end of April, and despite ongoing night-frosts and occasional hail, there are signs of spring on the Mile.

Canongate spring John Knox House

The figure on John Knox House pointing towards the sun is lit by the sun.

Robert Fergusson walks beneath a canopy of cherry blossom, which stretches to shadow the board listing the kirkyard’s famous dead.

Canongate spring AWAKE

And a contemporary author knows what time of year it is too.

 

 

exhibitions, Publications, The Road North, Visual Arts

Kakimori Bunko

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The exhibition Wordsworth and Basho : Walking Poets was shown at Kakimori Bunko, Osaka, Japan last autumn.

I contributed a sequence of seven short poems, taking as my starting point Wordsworth’s ‘The Solitary Reaper’. They were presented as prints, and as a booklet in the display case.

The photographs on the wall are by Tomohiko Ogawa, and show postcards of Scotland ‘matched’ with landscapes in Japan. Tomohiko also took these exhibition photographs.

Some of Alec Finlay’s word-mountains were also shown. There is a fine, informative catalogue; below is a page with Tomohiko’s photographs, including one we used on the cover of The Road North (middle left; on the book cover it’s reversed), and a page with background to my take on ‘The Solitary Reaper’.

Canongate, Edinburgh Poetry Tours

Words on the Street

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Canongate Stars & Stories is an illuminated walking trail for Edinburgh’s Old Town, organised by Edinburgh City of Literature Trust. There are 20 lightboxes featuring quotations on the lower High Street, Canongate and surrounding streets and closes. Best seen after dark, they’ll be in situ till, I believe, the end of March. Below are photos of some of the light boxes, and notes about the quotations.

Hutton, from Theory of the Earth (1785)

Fountain Close: Blessed be the sempill lyfe, Robert Henryson (c.1420–c.1490), from the fable ‘The Twa’ Mice’ (c.1480s), printed by Thomas Bassandyne (d.1577) who lived in Fountain Close.

Blissed be sempill lyfe withoutin dreid;
Blissed be sober feist in quietie;
Quha hes aneuch, of na mair hes he neid,
Thocht it be littill into quantatie.
Grit aboundance and blind prosperitie
Oftymes makis ane evill conclusioun:
The sweitest lyfe thairfoir, in this cuntrie,
Is sickernes with small possessioun.

The White Horse Inn, Canongate: Every writer has his use, by Samuel Johnson (1709–1784), from Rambler, no.145 (6 August, 1751). Established in 1742, The White Horse is the oldest pub on the Royal Mile and on 14 August 1773 received Johnson, who had arrived in Edinburgh to meet his friend and biographer James Boswell (1740 –1795) before their tour of the Hebrides. Around the corner off St Mary’s Street, a plaque at Boyd’s Entry (named for the proprietor of the White Horse, James Boyd) commemorates the event.
As every writer has his use, every writer ought to have his patrons; and since no man, however high he may now stand, can be certain that he shall not be soon thrown down from his elevation by criticism or caprice, the common interest of learning requires that her sons should cease from intestine hostilities, and, instead of sacrificing each other to malice and contempt, endeavour to avert persecution from the meanest of their fraternity.

Our Dynamic Earth: Nothing but time, by James Hutton (1726 –1797), from Theory of the Earth (1788 / 1795). Edinburgh born and educated, James Hutton is often referred to as the ‘Father of Modern Geology.’ His research into local rock formations, particularly Salisbury Crags in Edinburgh, led him to formulate a new theory of the origins of the earth – an earth much older than previously thought, made of layers or rock with a molten core. He first presented his Theory of the Earth to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1785, but his ideas only gained wide circulation and influence after his death.
From the top of those decaying pyramids to the sea, we have a chain of facts which clearly demonstrate this proposition, That the materials of the wasted mountains have travelled through the rivers; for, in every step of this progress, we may see the effect, and thus acknowledge the proper cause. We may often even be witness to the action; but it is only a small part of the whole progress that we may thus perceive, nevertheless it is equally satisfactory as if we saw the whole; for, throughout the whole of this long course, we may see some part of the mountain moving some part of the way. What more can we require? Nothing but time. It is not any part of the process that will be disputed; but, after allowing all the parts, the whole will be denied; and, For what?—only because we are not disposed to allow that quantity of time which the ablution of so much wasted mountain might require.

Burns, from ‘Lines on Robert Fergusson’ (1787)

St John’s Pend: Edinburgh is a hot-bed of genius, by Tobias Smollett (1721 – 1771), from The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker (1771). Smollett occasionally lodged with his sister at St John’s Pend, just off the Canongate. Along with his famous 1755 translation of Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Smollett was a popular author of ‘picaresque’ novels. The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, a epistolary novel, follows Mathew Bramble, his family, and his servants as they travel through England and Scotland.
Edinburgh is a hot-bed of genius. — I have had the good fortune to be made acquainted with many authors of the first distinction; such as the two Humes, Robertson, Smith, Wallace, Blair, Ferguson, Wilkie, &c. and I have found them all as agreeable in conversation as they are instructive and entertaining in their writings. These acquaintances I owe to the friendship of Dr Carlyle, who wants nothing but inclination to figure with the rest upon paper.

Canongate Kirkyard: Ill-fated genius! by Robert Burns (1759–1796), from ‘Lines On Fergusson, The Poet’ (1787). Robert Fergusson (1750 –1774) was a brilliant Edinburgh-born poet who died tragically young, and in such poverty that he was buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave in the Canongate Kirkyard. Dismayed by this injustice, Robert Burns arranged for him to have a proper gravestone.

Ill-fated genius! Heaven-taught Fergusson!
What heart that feels and will not yield a tear,
To think Life’s sun did set e’er well begun
To shed its influence on thy bright career.

O why should truest Worth and Genius pine
Beneath the iron grasp of Want and Woe,
While titled knaves and idiot-Greatness shine
In all the splendour Fortune can bestow?

Jeffrey Street: the happier productions of female genius, by Francis Jeffrey (1773–1850), from a review of a book of poetry by Felicia Hemans (1793–1835) in Edinburgh Review (1828). Francis Jeffrey, after whom Jeffrey Street is named, began his Edinburgh Review in 1802 in order to guide contemporary readers toward works of high acclaim; the magazine was published quarterly until 1929.
No Man, we will venture to say, could have written the Letters of Madame de Sevigné, or the Novels of Miss Austin, or the Hymns and Early Lessons of Mrs. Barbauld, or the Conversations of Mrs. Marcet. These performances, too, are not only essentially and intensely feminine, but they are, in our judgement, decidedly more perfect than any masculine productions with which they can be brought into comparison. (…) We think the poetry of Mrs Hemans a fine exemplification of Female Poetry – and we think it has much of the perfection which we have ventured to ascribe to the happier productions of female genius.

Stevenson, from The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)

Chessel’s Court: Man is not truly one, but truly two, by Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894), from The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). Chessel’s Court was scene of an infamous crime that inspired Stevenson. Deacon Brodie (1741 – 1788), city councillor and master cabinet-maker, used his position to steal from the wealthy who sought his services. A botched robbery of the Customs Office in Chessel’s Court led eventually to his arrest and execution, and revealed to the public his double life. As a child Stevenson slept with one of Brodie’s cabinets in his bedroom (it is now displayed in the Writers’ Museum in the Lawnmarket).
With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two. (…) It was on the moral side, and in my own person, that I learned to recognise the thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both; and from an early date, even before the course of my scientific discoveries had begun to suggest the most naked possibility of such a miracle, I had learned to dwell with pleasure, as a beloved day-dream, on the thought of the separation of these elements.

Dunbar’s Close: A city is a drama in time, by Patrick Geddes (1854–1932) from Civics: as Applied Sociology (1904). Geddes renovated buildings and developed green spaces, including the garden at Dunbar’s Close, in Edinburgh’s delapidated Old Town at the end of the 19th century. Geddes is renowned for his innovative ideas on social reform, environmentalism, and town planning, and his phrase ‘by leaves we live’ lives on in the Scottish Poetry Library’s Twitter handle.
But a city is more than a place in space, it is a drama in time. Though the claim of geography be fundamental out interest in the history of the city is supremely greater; it is obviously no mere geographic circumstances which developed one hill-fort in Judea, and another in Attica, into world centres, to this day more deeply influential than are the vastest modern capitals. […] Again the answer comes through geography, though no longer in mere map or relief, but now in vertical section – in order of strata ascending form past to present, whether we study rock-formations with the geologist, excavate more recent accumulations with the archaeologist, or interpret ruins or monuments with the historian. Though the primitive conditions we have above noted with the physiographer remain apparent, indeed usually permanent, cities have none the less their characteristic phases of historic development decipherable superposed. […] In a word, not only does the main series of active cities display traces of all the past phases of evolution, but beside this lie fossils, or linger survivals, of almost every preceding phase.

The World’s End: For ever and aye till the World’s End, by Sydney Goodsir Smith (1915 – 1975), from Kynd Kittock’s Land (1965). The World’s End pub stands at the top of World’s End Close, on what was once the edge of Edinburgh by the former city walls. Smith’s words conclude his poem based on a character in a medieval poem, an innkeeper who, admitted to heaven after her death, leaves again ‘for to get hir ane fresche drink, the aill of hevin wes sour’.

Here I be and here I drink,
This is myne, Kynd Kittock’s Land,
For ever and aye while stane shall stand—
For ever and aye till the World’s End.

Poems, Publications

Silence before Speech

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sbs-bog-cotton-jm  sbs-im-neil-christie  sbs-time-and-tide-kc
Silence before Speech is a new publication in memory of Neil Christie, a friend who died on Christmas eve three years ago. It’s a boxed set of 16 poem-cards, each featuring a poem by myself or Jane MacKie, and a painting by Dina Campbell. The portfolio was designed by Mary Asiedu.

sbs-barra-kc

We all knew Neil; he had a gift for friendship, and for bringing people together. One of his favourite tricks was to arrange a meeting to which he invited people from different parts of his life, and then cry off at the last moment, leaving us to get to know each other.

sbs-coast-jm

He worked as a graphic designer, and occasional publisher; Reading the Streets was made for his Duende Press, when he linked myself and illustrator Libby Walker. Latterly he lived down by the river at Cramond, and I’ve fond memories of eating fish soup in his small cottage there, packed with books and CDs, before emerging for a riverside stroll.

sbs-winter-solstice-kc

Jane and I both wrote to Dina’s images, and their titles. My poems all came out as unpunctuated six-liners; Jane allowed herself more scope, in length and stanza form.

The cards measure 195 x 94 mm. A set costs £15 – please contact me if you’d like to buy a set.

 

Poems

Apples & Pears

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This summer I visited Crailing Community Orchard, near Jedburgh in the Scottish Borders, and wrote a set of short poems about the apple and pear trees it contains. Each poem has the tree name as a title, and a verse of 3 lines. The poems were engraved on botanical labels (white text on a black background) by Sheen Botanical Labels, and the photos below were taken at Harestanes Countryside Visitor Centre, when the poems sat alongside their fruit as part of Apple Day in early October. Soon they will be attached to trees in the orchard, serving in part as practical identity labels, while also articulating something of the tree’s particularities.


CATHERINE is an apple first grown in Combs, Suffolk, outside a pub called Live and Let Live. — CATILLAC is an old pear variety which has been given many different names, including Monstreuse de Landes, Grand Monarque and Grand Mogol. Its current English name derives from the place-name Cadillac in the Gironde area of France.


DISCOVERY was raised c.1949 by a Mr Dummer of Essex, who raised several seedlings from Worcester Pearmain pips and decided to plant the best one in front garden. Having only one arm he needed his wife’s help, but she slipped and broke her ankle, so the unplanted tree remained outdoors during frosts. It survived, indeed thrived, and was later popularised by a Mr Matthews of Suffolk. — HESSLE is named for the Yorkshire village where it was first found. “It [succeeds] in almost every situation and part… the Hessle pear trees in Herefordshire were laden with fruit in the year 1880, when almost all other varieties failed.” (Herefordshire Pomona)


WHITE MELROSE was probably introduced to Scotland by the monks of Melrose Abbey, who as Cistercians wore white robes, to distinguish themselves from the black-robed Benedictines.

The poems were also printed as a set of cards, designed by Lise Bratton.

crailing-cards
GLOUCESTER MORCEAU is a pear originally raised by Abbé Nicolas Hardenpont in Wallonia in the 18th century, and named after him Beurré d’Hardenpont. However “in the environs of Mons… [it] was more often called the Glout Morceau, converted afterwards by the French, when M. Noisette brought it from Belgium in 1806, into Goulu Morceau. The word ‘glout’ in Walloon signifies dainty or delicate and thus ‘glou morceau’ means daintybit : ‘goulu’ on the contrary, signifies greedy, or great eater; the the Beurré d’Hardenpont has become, through this starnge alteration in name by the Fench, a gluttonous eater, instead of a fruit worthy of being eaten.” (HP) Presumably ‘Gloucester’ derives from a similar ‘translation’ of sound rather than meaning. — RED DEVIL is an apple variety which failed at Crailing.

I drew much of the poems’s content from information found in The New Book of Apples (ed. Richards and Morgan,1993), A Handbook of Hardy Fruits: Apples and Pears (EA Bunyard, 1920), and Herefordshire Pomona (Hogg and Bull,1876–85).

Canongate, Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Edinburgh Poetry Tours

Edinburgh Fringe 2016

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ABC KC Clarinda grave

I’ve just finished three and a half weeks of walks as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2016. It was a new experience for me, and an enjoyable one – walking in the city, meeting people on the walks, running into old friends and acquaintances on the High Street while handing out postcards, and getting to know the poems, and the places I’d matched them with, better. And I enjoyed the buzz of checking each morning to see how many tickets I’d sold for that day’s walk.

ABC KC Fergusson statue 2

Highlights? The young couple from Rio, delighted the Olympics had shunted their winter holiday from July to August, which meant they could come to the Edinburgh Festival. Reading the poem ‘Intercession’, written twenty years ago about St Margaret’s Well in Holyrood Park, at the well, to the sound of its water falling. Getting my tongue around 16th century Scots, which turns out to sound less foreign than it looks. And not having to cope with any serious rain; drizzle, yes, but the heavy stuff, when it come, always fell an hour or two before or after the walk.

ABC KC Holyrood 3

Thanks to everyone who came on the walks, all 150 of you. Thanks to Alice and Tamsin for the photographs here. And now I have the next five months to mull over whether I’ll do it all again next August.

TG SPL

Canongate, Edinburgh Poetry Tours

Tunnel & Stars

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Royal_Mile_Poetry_Walk.1.2016Earlier this year I led a poetry tour running the length of the Mile, from the Castle Espandade to the Scottish Parliament, for artist Brigid Collins and her students from Edinburgh College of Art. Her brief for them was, working in groups, to create a book inspired by the Mile, and the tour was, for many of the students, their introduction to the area and its history and literature.

They worked in two groups, and these photos show elements from their completed works – a ‘star’ book, and a ‘tunnel’ book.

Poems, Walks

Art in Aden

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I made What is a tree? for the Midsummer Arts Festival at Aden Country Park, near Mintlaw, Aberdeenshire, on Sunday 19 June. It’s a set of poems on botanical labels attached to trees around the park. The poems aim, as in a riddle, to provide an initially puzzling, but also recognisably accurate, description of the tree in question.

Below are some notes about the ideas behind the poems.

(1) Recognisable by its black buds, the ash is one of the last trees to leaf in spring.

(2) The beech’s smooth bark has made it a favourite for inscriptions over the centuries; these expand as the tree grows.

(3) Their branches used for besoms in the past, birches create an environment favoured by many plants, fungi, moths and birds.

(4) To encounter a cherry was considered auspicious and fateful.

(5) The elder’s branches don’t burn well; its flowers don’t have a very pleasant smell, but make a fine drink.

(6) The horse-chestnut is easily recognisable at different times of year.

(7) Lime flowers attract bees in numbers.

(8) Planted outside houses to fend off evil spirits, the rowan’s red berries worn as a necklace were considered protective.

(9) The water-resistant resin in the wood of the Scots pine makes it good for boat-building; rosin (a residue from pine wood) is used for treating the bows of stringed instruments.

(10) Spruce wood was used in early aircraft construction, including the Wright Brother’s Kitty Hawk.

(11) A non-native tree, it’s unclear when the sycamore first arrived in Scotland. Its wood produces much heat when burned, while trees that show a ‘flame’ patterning in the wood are favoured by violin makers.

(12) Yews are often found in churchyards. The middle two lines are taken from Wordsworth’s poem ‘Yew Trees’.

With thanks to the Friends of Aden Country Park for commissioning this work.