The Nature of Winter

by Jim Crumley

  Sympathetic ministers, caught between a rock and a very hard place indeed, were evicted from their churches, and so they sought secret places where they could continue to preach, and so began the relationship between the Covenanters and the quiet places of the hills. But it didn’t stop there. Those who failed to attend local church services were branded “rebels”, and rebels were rounded up by Government troops. Many were fined or tortured, or both, and confronted with a simple choice: swear an oath acknowledging the king as head of the Church, or face execution. By the time Charles II took charge of things the land was pockmarked with countless skirmishes and battles. Among the hostilities, the so-called Pentlands Rising of 1666 consisted of a series of skirmishes that culminated in the hopelessly one-sided Battle of Rullion Green on November 28th of that year – 350 years and one day before I found myself slaking my thirst in the Medwin Water. The Covenanter army, if it can be called that, had mustered in the south-west of Scotland and travelled by way of Lanark to the Pentlands en route to Edinburgh. What they hoped to achieve there, only their God knows. There were 900 of them, and at Rullion Green on the eastern edge of the Pentlands near Penicuik, they were intercepted by a Government army of 3,000 men. One hundred Covenanters were killed in the battle, 300 more as they fled the battlefield, 120 were taken prisoner to Edinburgh where many were executed, while a handful were sent to be hanged in the south-west as an example to the natives.

  So far, so very history textbook. But then there was John Carphin, and his story is the reason why I have come back, for he it is who lies in the Covenanter’s Grave, up by on the summit crest of Black Law.

  Carphin was an Ayrshire man, and he had marched with the Covenanters to Rullion Green. He was badly wounded, but somehow he eluded the mopping-up operation that killed the 300 fleeing men. From Rullion Green to Black Law is about twelve miles in a straight line, but any reasonable route between the two is going to be nearer fifteen miles, and as I have already explained, I have some experience of walking fifteen miles among these southern Pentland Hills in winter, and I hadn’t just marched from the south-west of Scotland, fought a battle, then suffered a wound so serious that I would be dead within twenty-four hours; and nor were the hills awash with Government troops in a fever of bloodlust.

  None of that deterred him. He had one idea in his head. It was that he should stay alive long enough and travel far enough towards the south-west so that he could reach, or at least see, the hills of Ayrshire; just possibly, he might make it all the way back to his own hills of home and die there in peace. Given where he ended up in the dead of night at Medwinhead on the Medwin Water, it would seem that he knew enough of the Pentlands topography to find his way back to the Lanark Road, but he was still four miles short of it when he stumbled into the arms of a Samaritan.

  Adam Sanderson was a shepherd who lived at Blackhill, an isolated cottage on the banks of the Medwin. Carphin was far gone when Sanderson found him, and the shepherd made to take him in and tend his wounds as best he could. But Carphin declined. He reasoned that Sanderson’s life would be endangered for harbouring a fugitive Covenanter – an amazing show of concern for his fellow man considering what he himself had just been through. One must assume that he knew by then that he was breathing his last, that the Ayrshire hills were out of reach to him, and it seems that he then asked Sanderson to bury him in sight of his homeland. The two men sheltered for a while under an oak, and it was there that Carphin died. Sanderson carried him up to the summit slopes of Black Law, a distance of perhaps half a mile and an ascent of 300 feet. From there, there is a sightline through a gap in the hills between Bleak Law and The Pike, and at its furthest reach, eighteen miles distant, is a glimpse of Ayrshire hills. He marked the spot with a rough stone, on which was carved a coded message, one the Covenanters would understand, but which would baffle the dragoons if any of them chanced that way. That stone is now in Dunsyre Kirk, and at the Covenanter’s Grave there is a tombstone erected around 1840. By then, there had already been a bizarre sequel, which was reported in Blackwood’s Magazine of October 1817:

  An enterprising youth, a farmer’s son in the Easdon district [Easton, a farm near Dunsyre], went to the top of the hill with a spade with a view to discovering whether tradition was correct in declaring that this spot was the Covenanter’s Grave. He began to dig, and speedily found what he was after. He came home in triumph with a skull, some pieces of cloth, and a few brass buttons, but his father, a true-blue Presbyterian, indignant at the desecration of a spot hallowed to the mind of every patriotic Scotsman, first administered a severe thrashing to his son, and then went with him to re-inter the sacred relics . . .

  A minister of Dunsyre, a Dr Manuel, eventually acted on a proposal to create a permanent monument, and at his own expense the tombstone was erected where it still stands. And around 1990, George Garson copied out the inscription and set it at the start of his own poem to Adam Sanderson: “sacred to the memory of a covenanter who fought and was wounded at Rullion Green Nov 28th, 1666, and who died at Oaken Bush the day after the Battle and was buried here by Adam Sanderson of Blackhill.”

  BEFORE THE BATTLE

  Come first light, his commonplace skyline

  ran mad with curses and pikes.

  He had slept fitfully on his strae bed,

  listening . . .

  The nocturnal raspings of stoat and rat

  riven by the alien tongues and the yelp of steel.

  A gaunt straggle:

  some had guns with rusty ratches;

  others the coulter of a plough,

  scythes and spades.

  Some had halbards, forks and flails.

  ‘The Almichty bless the shiel, hird.

  Nae ill tae ye guidman.

  Oor fecht lies furth o’ your bit dykes and fanks.

  But pray for us.

  For Presbyterian bluid micht weel smitch

  your puckle knows gin dayset.’

  Weaned on the moor’s elemental creed,

  he mumbled rough blessing on the day

  and called his dog to heel,

  flummoxed by the grim tenets of Kirk and Covenant.

  Inching into sleep that night,

  he pondered on the Westland man:

  a shilpit chiel,

  yellow hair slaggered to his brow

  by winter’s ceaseless blash,

  legs clad in hoggers of strae

  bound with rags.

  Unaware that, come dawn,

  he’d spade down the bairn’s sword-bitten corpse

  in a shallow hillside grave.

  I concede that I am still as “flummoxed by the grim tenets of Kirk and Covenant” as Adam Sanderson was 350 years ago, and “the moor’s elemental creed” is a surer star to steer by for me too, as it was for him. Yet it is impossible to be unmoved by his selfless response to the plight of John Carphin, as impossible as it is to be unmoved by Carphin’s concern for his would-be rescuer; an exchange of mutual old-world courtesy between two such different men of the hills. And I am well aware that I used the word “Samaritan” back there to introduce Sanderson, and there are few more potent symbols of the Christian faith than the Good Samaritan. But to go to war over a book of prayer, to die and to kill because you believe your take on that faith is better – truer – than someone else’s . . . “flummoxed” is the right word. Why not, for example, pay lip service to episcopalianism in the kirk building, and keep the old ways alive in those secret meetings in the hills until the fuss died down, until they could be reintroduced by stealth, until some other king from some other dynasty or other came up with another daft idea of the true faith, or an enlightened one who simply repealed the stain of the daftness?

  But it is hard to deny the beauty and the tranquil atmosphere of the little kirk at Dunsyre, and I have never passed that way without pausing to push open the door and touch the old stone, the original one with its coded carving, and to acknowledge what passed up the valley of the Medwin Water that day and night in 1666. Th
is was my starting point again, that earliest winter morning of 2016, in the shadow of Dunsyre Hill, which my old friend so revered. His God alone knows how many times he climbed it, drew it and otherwise committed it to the inner sanctum of memory. Ten years before, I had visited him and Jean at their home in the West Lothian village of East Burnside, and a decent stone’s throw from the Lanark Road and the west flank of the Pentlands. He handed me a big charcoal drawing. Its title, written on the back, is The Path to the Mountain. It is a rough drawing, done quickly, and his instruction to me was that if I wanted to put it on a wall I should just stick it up with Blu-Tack, because it wasn’t worth framing, and for a few years I did just that. He said it was a hill of his imagination but that Dunsyre Hill was in the back of his mind. But after he died, and a retrospective exhibition of his work was being organised, involving the framing of a considerable body of late work, I added it to the framer’s workload, and now it hangs in a more dignified setting in my house, and I take it as a kind of constant injunction from the artist that I should keep following the path to the mountain, whether it’s lowly Dunsyre Hill or Bràigh Riabhach or Suilven, or my friendly neighbourhood mountain of Ben Ledi, or, as on the morning of November 29th, 2016, Black Law. So I raised a hand to Dunsyre Hill and set off for sweet Medwin Water one more time. And when I reached its banks and turned north to fall in with its amiable company and downed a ceremonial dram of its water from my cupped hand, I guessed that the nature of winter would never taste sweeter than this, no matter where its journey took me.

  Improbably, Adam Sanderson’s Blackhill cottage still stands, or at least the footprint of it does. What survives is a low ruin, less than waist-high in places. I stopped there to look at the stonework and to see if I could still detect the places where a kind of rough restoration had been applied in patches. This was George’s homage to Sanderson, long before he wrote the poem. His years of studying the architecture and the archaeology of Orkney, and applying what he learned there to his slate mosaics, not to mention his great enthusiasm for the Pentlands’ repertoire of wonderfully worked drystane dykes . . . all that had given him a certain easy familiarity with, and a fluency for the craft of setting stone on stone so that it “reads”. He may have wrought his art and his poetry from Orkney bedrock, but he understood the timeless strength that underpins it too. And besides, he’d built ships.

  The passing of time, the blessing of lichen, and the cold fire of many a winter wind, had absorbed his handiwork into the body of the ruin and I couldn’t tell his stonework from the rest of what remains of Blackhill, and I dare say he would judge that I could pay him no higher compliment.

  The Medwin is a heron’s water, and in the same way, the heron is a Pentlands bird. The myriad burns, cleuchs, sykes, bogs and reservoirs fill these hills with small fish, frogs, toads and other heron food. I had been sitting for a while by Sanderson’s ruin, and when I finally stood and advanced a few yards towards the water, a heron I had not seen and which had not seen me, rose from the burn with a ponderous heave of a wingspan that looks more than is strictly necessary to do the job. As it rose from shadow into sunlight, its unfolded legs scattered pinpricks of watery light, its shadow rippled across the decrepit stone walls of Blackhill, and suddenly my memory was turning cartwheels. I had seen that simple shadow-dance before.

  George Garson and I were padding up the Medwin, rounding the scrap of a pinewood that clings there, dropping down through the worn-out bracken to the burn, when a heron rose from a pool, spread a grey-blue sailcloth of wings, and as he climbed, I saw his shadow fall across the walls of Sanderson’s cottage. It was done within a few seconds, but it had caught my eye as it clambered the slope up to the ruin, and I had turned to George and shouted:

  “The shadow!”

  For the sight of it had stopped me dead, and the thought it implanted was this:

  How many shadows of how many herons have fallen across these walls throughout the life and long death of the cottage of Blackhill? Say 400 years? When there was a roof on the walls, Sanderson would see the shadow slide down it whenever a heron dropped down to the pool. He would see an otter’s wake bubbling upstream, and he would see the shadow climb the house again as the heron leapt in slow alarm with a Presbyterian oath of its own. I have no doubt that from time to time the shadow would wear the embellishment of an eel at the sharp end (the immortal Henry Williamson referred to it as “a two-pointed spear on a shaft hidden by long, narrow feathers”), as the bird was disturbed while it wrestled with its catch. There are few things in nature less willing to die than an eel in a Scottish hill burn. In that way, or some other, thousands of heron shadows have darkened Sanderson’s window and scaled his walls and the pitch of his roof.

  The particular heron George and I disturbed that day had, in its turn, disturbed a dipper from a mid-stream rock. There are few more eloquently displayed extremes of the diverse art of bird flight than these – the ponderous heave of heron wings and the tiny headlong blur of the burn-clinging dipper. Yet when the dipper goes underwater-hunting, his wings slow to a heron’s gait as he dives down, effortlessly defying all the instincts of natural buoyancy, and he drags his shadow down with him to walk along the river bed. On the bank, we grounded bipeds watched with a kind of stupefied wonder.

  I hefted a few stones as if I knew what I was doing and set them thoughtfully into the wall of Blackhill, but I don’t know what I’m doing and they never seem to find a snug fit. It’s the thought that counts now, as far as that particular ruin is concerned. It has ceased to be Sanderson’s place, and instead it has become a landmark in George Garson’s territory, in George Garson’s Pentlands, which is how he thought of it himself. I headed off uphill into the sun and the cold, still air and the brilliance of snow-light. I paused at Carphin’s final resting place, his plain stone graced by a thin arch of frozen snow, and here and there patches of the same snow still clung to the inscribed face of the stone like white lichen, eccentrically editing its text: . . .and who di . . . . . . sh/ the day a . . . . . . e Battle/ and w . . . . . . uried here . . .

  I hope he found his peace and his God, and I hope his God was generous to him. Whatever the nature of the reason why you died, John Carphin, there are worse places by far to be laid to rest, even if it isn’t Ayrshire.

  So I had paid my small tribute to the events of the day after the Battle of Rullion Green and to the landscape which had witnessed them, and I had honoured the memory of the man who introduced me to Carphin’s story and to the douce hills that feed sweet Medwin Water. And then the day’s focal point was behind me. I turned away from his stone and looked around. A wide plateau tilts gently northwards from Black Law to White Craig, and I had the place to myself. For want of anything more pressing or fulfilling to do, I walked north, content in my solitude. An elemental simplicity fell into place as I walked, for I simply walked for the pleasure of walking, of just being in that landscape for that moment. There was a line of old footprints in the snow and I followed these in the general direction of White Craig. From time to time, circumstances conspire in this nature-writing life to create a space, an emptiness of a kind, but a fertile emptiness in which a self-sown seed begins to stir into life and an idea begins to grow. And somewhere between Black Law and White Craig, the day gently slipped its moorings and sailed away without me. In its departing wake I stepped beyond landscape, beyond time, into a sphere of complete freedom. At first, it was perhaps the product of a kind of aimlessness, but I rarely keep nature’s company without a purpose of my own or one that nature imposes on me. It only ever happens in winter, in an undemanding landscape where the eye suddenly finds nowhere to linger, where the sky is more of a presence than the land, and that sky devoid of all cloud and almost all colour; so it is rare, and then travel becomes a thing of the mind. What arose was the idea that I was following footsteps that were many years old, in the snows of all time. Norman MacCaig voiced the idea in a poem following the death of his great friend A.K. MacLeod in Assynt: He is gone: but you can
see / his tracks still, in the snow of the world. So perhaps something of the nature of the day imbued a line of footprints in the snow with a particular significance, a spectre composed of all those who walked here between, say, Garson and Sanderson, Carphin for that matter, all of them urged on by motives of their own. But the direction they ushered me along was not what you might have expected.

  A few years ago now, I was looking for a new way into a story I was trying to write. What I finally settled on emerged from circumstances not unlike these in which I now found myself. I had been walking a high, broad and featureless ridge on a day which had long since lost its purpose: I had been looking for golden eagles and instead I encountered only a single south-making whooper swan. Later, eagle-less and (almost) swan-less, I was taken aback by the apparent knowledge that I was walking in old south-making footsteps. They were not the footsteps of the day before or the weekend before, but rather of many years before. I inhabited the footprints as if I were the print-maker. In my mind, then, he became a shape-shifter from the far north of the world, a poet and storyteller from a mountain country where swan legends were born and endure – swans becoming people, people becoming swans. He was on a kind of pilgrimage, following a command from a tribal elder to spend a winter furth of mountains, so that he might see them “through the eyes of those who live beyond”.

  That story became a short novel, The Mountain of Light (Whittles, 2003), and it was set between the Stirling Castle rock and Ben Ledi, the handsome pyramidal mountain which dominates the north-west skyline from Stirling. By that time, these two conspicuous landmarks where Highland and Lowland Scotland collide had become central to my everyday life. And suddenly, walking that modest Pentland Hills plateau fifteen years later, first Norman MacCaig’s lines crept into my mind, followed at once by the vivid recollection of the day I stepped in the spoor of the old swan-wanderer. We had not met since the day I finished writing the book.