by Sean Flynn
* * *
Tullibole Castle is near Crook of Devon, in Kinross, a twenty-minute drive north of Dunfermline, which is an old city of dampness and stone across the water from Edinburgh. Scotland used to bury its kings and nobles in Dunfermline. Malcolm Canmore, the great king who founded a Scottish dynasty almost a thousand years ago, is buried in the abbey at the edge of the city center, as is his queen, the former Margaret of Wessex and the current Saint Margaret, who founded the priory that became the abbey and who was canonized in 1250. Robert the Bruce, who led the first war of Scottish independence in the fourteenth century, is there, too, except for his heart, which was taken on a crusade before it was buried in a different abbey. Five other kings are interred at the abbey, as well as the mother of William Wallace, a blue-faced version of whom Mel Gibson played in Braveheart. For almost four hundred years, Dunfermline was an important city in Scotland, the center of royal and religious authority, until the capital moved across the Firth of Forth to Edinburgh in 1437 and the Reformation swept through the following century.
The town never reclaimed that level of status or glory. It kept the remains of the dead and ruins of the palace next to the abbey and the nave of the twelfth-century church, but Dunfermline wasn’t resurrected for more than two hundred years, and then it was as a workingman’s town. Coal and textiles, mostly, and damask linen most famously, much of it woven on handlooms by men in their own cramped cottages. One of those was a man named William Carnegie, who worked in a dirt-floored studio below the single room he shared with his wife, Margaret. In 1835, she gave birth to a son, Andrew; eight years later, after they’d moved to a larger yet still modest home, she had a second son, Thomas.
The Carnegies lived near the edge of a sprawling woodland estate called Pittencrieff. It was the only green space in the city, the place where Malcolm Canmore built a tower and the ruins remained, but Andrew and his brother could not play there. No one could. Pittencrieff had been private property for centuries, and the current owners, ripening aristocrats by the name of Hunt, forbade the townspeople to enter. The public grievance festered for generations, but to a boy, the Glen, as it came to be called, was a wonderland. Forbidden and unreachable but a wonderland nonetheless. “When I heard of paradise,” Andrew wrote years later, “I translated the word into Pittencrieff Glen, believing it to be as near to paradise as anything I could think of. Happy were we if through an open lodge gate, or over the wall or under the iron grille over the burn, now and then we caught a glimpse inside.”
The Carnegies left in 1848 for America, where Andrew, who was twelve, grew up to become one of the richest men on the planet, possibly in the history of the world, depending on who’s doing the accounting: At his peak, Carnegie was worth north of $300 billion in 2020 money (Jeff Bezos, the wealthiest man alive that year, was a piker at $204 billion). But Carnegie believed that accumulated riches were only held in trust for the public, that wealthy people had a moral obligation to distribute money for the public good, and to do so while they were alive. “The man who dies thus rich,” he wrote in 1889, “dies disgraced.”
He’d been giving away money for decades by the time he sold Carnegie Steel in 1901 and retired, at the age of sixty-six, to be a full-time philanthropist. He funded theaters and a university and twenty-five hundred libraries in the English-speaking world and more than a dozen major trusts, institutes, and endowments. Carnegie built one of those libraries in his hometown, and people in Dunfermline will tell you with understandable pride that it was the very first Carnegie library, that the cornerstone was laid by his mother, Margaret, in 1881, and that there was a grand public holiday when it opened two years later. Dunfermline also has a Carnegie Hall and the Andrew Carnegie Birthplace Museum and the Carnegie Leisure Centre and the Carnegie Conference Centre and the Carnegie Dunfermline Trust, which allows Carnegie money to be spent on other things that do not necessarily have the Carnegie name on them.
I learned most of this, initially, from a tour guide. I needed this primer because I had not come to Dunfermline for the abbey or the ruins. I was not aware of the kings and queens who were buried there, nor that one of the most influential men in modern Western history had been born there and had pretty much funded the place in perpetuity. (Nor did I know that the front man for Big Country and the bass player for Nazareth were both from Dunfermline, which is the kind of trivia I usually sniff out first.) I did not come for the history, fascinating as it is.
I came for the peacocks.
A few months earlier, I was searching for stories about peacocks living among people that did not involve half of those people complaining about the noise and the poop. Or killing them. Those stories are very hard to find, but I dredged up a headline from the local Dunfermline paper: “More Peacocks join The Glen Family!”
I had never seen an exclamation point attached to a peacock-related headline. Not favorably, anyway. There were references to “Dunfermline’s iconic birds” and “the town’s famous peacocks” and Tullibole Castle, which was supplying peacocks and peahens to the city. There was mention of a new children’s book. There was not a single sour note in the story; even the comments were pro-peacock.
I emailed the reporter, told her I wanted to learn more about Dunfermline’s famous peacocks, and asked if she could put me in touch with the right people. She forwarded my note to Jim Stewart, the chairman of the Central Dunfermline Community Council. Hi Jim, she wrote. You can see below the bizarre request but can you help this guy? (That was not an uncommon characterization of a request for peacock information, by the way.)
Jim reached out the next day. He would tell me everything I wanted to know about peacocks and about Dunfermline, or he would find the people who could.
* * *
The most significant gift Carnegie gave Dunfermline does not have his name on it. In 1902, he bought Pittencrieff, which officially is Pittencrieff Park but the locals call it simply The Glen. The following year, he gave it away. “No gift I have made or can ever make can possibly approach that of Pittencrieff Glen, Dunfermline,” he wrote in his autobiography. “It is saturated with childish sentiment—all of the purest and sweetest.” He put the land in a trust along with $2.5 million in bonds paying five percent, “all to be used,” he told the trustees, “in attempts to bring into the monotonous lives of the toiling masses of Dunfermline more of sweetness and light[.]”
One of the sixteen trustees was a wealthy mill owner named Henry Beveridge, and he’s the person who introduced peacocks, a quartet, to the park in February 1905. There is no record that he imported the birds for the occasion, and no reason to believe so: It’s just as likely he had them on hand at his house, which was called Pitreavie Castle, as peacocks were in fashion among people who owned big houses they called castles. Peafowl bones have been found in Britain dating back to the Romans, and the birds were an established status symbol by the Middle Ages. Chivalric knights purportedly swore an annual vow on peacocks (as well as swans, herons, and other birds), an idea they most likely picked up from an epic French Romantic narrative written in 1312 called, accordingly, “The Vows of the Peacocks.” That a wealthy Scotsman would have a surplus dotting his estate six hundred years later is not a stretch.
In any case, the arrival of peafowl in Pittencrieff apparently was not marked with any exuberance. The very helpful staff at the Carnegie Library found just one contemporaneous mention, a single sentence at the end of a brief newspaper update in 1905 noting only that the promised birds had been delivered and would be confined until accustomed to their new surroundings. (This gave me a glimmer of hope about letting my own birds out, though that required ignoring the fact that Pittencrieff Park is seventy-two times larger than our yard and has a lot more land to which a bird could get accustomed.)
As their numbers grew, the peacocks occasionally were mentioned in meetings of the trust for their uncivilized antics, destroying plants and such, and the flock was periodically thinned by giving away a few birds. But for decades, peacocks and pea
hens had the run of The Glen and the city. They would patrol the cobblestones on High Street or the graveyard by the abbey, rest in a doorway or on a wall, bright blue ornaments against mossy, mottled granite. They never really bothered anyone. Well, except a barman everyone called Kill. He liked big American cars, had a Cadillac, black or green depending on who’s telling the story, and very shiny. A peacock saw his reflection and pecked at it, as peacocks do, dinged the paint, and made Kill so mad he kicked the bird in the backside. Didn’t seem to hurt him, though.
The point is, peacocks were a feature, not a bug, in Dunfermline.
Public budgets started getting tight in the early aughts. The little zoo in Pittencrieff Park—where there were donkeys and llamas and marmosets and tanks of tropical fish and a cockatoo named Billy who would take pennies from your fingers and hide them in gaps between the bricks in his enclosure—was shut down in 2002. The peacocks weren’t officially part of the zoo, but they roosted on the building and were used to at least minimal care and feeding from humans.
Damian Williams volunteered to look after them. He was in charge of the toilets in The Glen, keeping them clean and stocked, and he has a soft spot for animals that runs in the family: His father had been one of the handlers in the little zoo back in the seventies and eighties, and Damian would chop up fruit for the sick animals and bottle-feed the baby goats. There were fifteen peafowl when he took over, but the job wasn’t much work, just making sure the birds had access to food and shelter and weren’t sick or injured. He was squeamish about syringing antibiotics into the white peacock after the vet patched up a wound, but Damian did it anyway because being the keeper of the peafowl, even part-time, was important. The peacocks had been there his whole life. In the summer, Damian collected train feathers for the day when he volunteered at a festival for disabled kids. “Hey, there’s the peacock man!” kids would say, and he would pass out feathers and be happy because the kids were happy. He knew there was magic in those feathers, even if he couldn’t say why. “If I see a dead pigeon or a dead seagull, I don’t feel nothing for it,” he told me. “But if I see a dead peacock? Aye, I feel something.”
Then the birds started dying off. It was nothing Damian did or didn’t do. Some got old. One flew into a window and broke his neck. Another one was found on his back behind the pie shop, and the half-serious joke was that he got fat from pie scraps and fell off the roof. A dog chased the white peacock into traffic from its roost on the wall along the edge of Coal Road. A few just disappeared.
By 2012, there was only a single peacock left in Dunfermline. His name was Clive, and he became a celebrity, a mascot, even. Nothing focuses a spotlight more tightly than being the last of your kind. Clive the lonely bachelor peacock made the national press that year, page two of one of the tabloids. The BBC mentioned him as well, in a story about how The Glen got partial funding from the lottery for improvements that included, ironically, a new enclosure for Pittencrieff Park’s iconic peacocks.
But for the first time in more than a hundred years, there weren’t any to enclose. Only Clive remained, walking around free and completely alone.
* * *
He had it coming, really,” Jim Stewart told me. He meant the peacock who got run over on Coal Road, the white one. “Aye, he did.”
He was smiling when he said it, setting up a joke. He has a round face and white hair clipped close and appears to be in a fairly constant state of restrained Scottish bemusement. “That bird used to sit on the wall along the road at night,” he said, “and the headlights would hit him, and he’d look like a ghost peacock. Scared the hell out of people.”
Jim, the council chairman, was my host in Dunfermline, and an excellent one at that. Every city should have a Jim Stewart. Jim took me to a hockey game one night in Kirkcaldy, where we watched the Fife Flyers lose to the Cardiff Devils, eight to three, and where we noticed that the title sponsors of the Devils, the company that paid to paste its name across the front of every jersey for the next three years, was a chain of discount fashion stores called Peacocks. We drove up to St. Andrews one afternoon to walk the edge of the Old Course and see the Chariots of Fire beach and noodle around a kilt shop, and we stumbled into a pop-up fair where there was a small trailer covered in familiar blue-green feathers called Screaming Peacock Gourmet Burger Bar. It did not serve peacock; the name and the decor were meant to stand out, as a peacock does. The special was venison burgers.
On the way to a fish tea in Anstruther—that’s takeaway fish and chips at teatime—Jim insisted that those peacock encounters had been coincidences. He is one of the reasons there are peacocks in Pittencrieff Park at all, but he is not obsessive about the topic. His efforts for the previous six years, and the efforts of several others, were about preserving the character of his city, which just happened to involve peacocks. The point was not to randomly dress out the city with gilded birds but, rather, to reclaim and preserve a place where those birds by right of tradition belonged. “When you walked through the glen, you were sure to see two things, peacocks and squirrels,” he said. “If there’s no peacocks, there’s a little bit of history gone. And if you can have squirrels, why not have peacocks?”
I stared at him blankly. Every place has squirrels. There is no correlation, biological or mythological, between squirrels and peacocks. If squirrels, then peacocks is not a formula anyone has ever applied anywhere. “That’s kind of a leap from squirrels to peacocks, yeah?”
Jim smiled. He has a droll sense of humor. The tagline at the bottom of messages that he sends from his mobile says, Sent from my Aye-phone. “No, not really,” he said. “And what I mean is, if you can have wow, why not have wow?”
When the birds had almost all died off, Jim was the one who nudged a few reporters to write about Clive, pitched the lonely-bachelor angle. It wasn’t technically true, though. A young peacock by the name of Malcolm was skulking about, but he was either hiding or was off somewhere else. In any case, no one ever saw Malcolm and Clive together, and the underlying theme, that Pittencrieff’s peacocks were on the edge of extinction, was still true: Two confirmed bachelors aren’t any more conducive to repopulating a park than one.
Sympathy for Clive produced two hens, donated in 2014 from an estate with a surplus. Volunteers named one for Carnegie’s wife, Louise, which was at least one thing I had in common with the richest man in history; they named the other Henrietta, an homage to Henry Beveridge. Henrietta took a runner almost immediately, but Malcolm reappeared. A year later, a woman up the road in Crieff gave the park a white hen and five chicks. Pittencrieff Park was back to eight peafowl.
All five chicks died three months after they arrived, for reasons no one figured out, and their mother was put down a little more than a year later when the vets couldn’t heal a festering wound. Four months after that, in July 2017, Clive died. It should not have been unexpected. He had arthritis in his legs and he was twenty years old, which is the ballpark life span for a wild peacock. It is just easy to forget an animal is wild once he gets his name in the newspapers.
While all those peacocks were being donated and dying, two things happened. The first was that the promised lottery money came through and the monkey cage at the old animal farm was rebuilt into a large aviary that is now impeccably kept.
The other was that Caroline Copeland went on holiday to the United States for her birthday. In the gift shop of a museum in Boston, she happened upon Make Way for Ducklings, the children’s book about a family of mallards who settle on an island in the lagoon of the Public Garden. It’s a classic book and one of those enduring emblems of Boston, like the Cheers bar or Bobby Orr: There is a statue of Mrs. Mallard and her eight ducklings waddling across thirty-five feet of cobblestone in the garden. Louise and I have a picture of Calvin straddling Mrs. Mallard when he was three or four, one hand on her head and the other on her neck, where the bronze has worn smooth from the hands of countless children.
“So I had a flick through it and thought, wouldn’t it be l
ovely if Dunfermline had a book for the peacocks?” Caroline said. “I mean, how lovely, right? They’ve made this big thing for the ducklings, and we’ve got these lovely peacocks, and we hadn’t done anything with them. And I just thought, if children read that story when they’re little, the peacocks would mean something to them.”
She wrote Peacocks in the Glen Again, about a young peacock who travels from Tullibole Castle to Pittencrieff Park. The community council helped her get it published in 2016, with all the proceeds going toward upkeep of the real peacocks, and copies moved so swiftly that a second book, Christmas in the Glen Again, was published the following year.
By the autumn of 2018, when Jim was telling me jokes about ghost-white birds, there were ten peafowl in Pittencrieff, including a troublesome fellow named Bruce rescued from a village where he was making a nuisance of himself. Six birds, a hen and five chicks, were a gift from Lord and Lady Moncreiff of Tullibole Castle.
* * *
A curious male paced toward the edge of Lord Moncreiff’s driveway, the low December sun sparkling off the right side of the bird’s neck, throwing a long shadow peacock to the left. Other birds, peacocks and peahens, were wandering out of the trees and in from the fields, cautiously inquisitive, like survivors of an unfortunate nuclear event.
Jim brought me to Tullibole, too, along with Suzi Ross, Pittencrieff’s peafowl warden. He wanted me to meet Lord and Lady Moncreiff and, besides, a peacock tour of Fife isn’t really complete until you hit a couple of castles. We’d already done Scone Palace, where kings were crowned for centuries and where one peacock got so belligerent that he was rehomed to Pittencrieff.
“When they see the others run, they run,” Rhoderick said. He swung his arm in an underhand loop, released a piece of fruitcake. “But it’s a ‘Who’s gonna run first?’ thing.”