Britain’s Last Frontier

by Alistair Moffat

  But dearer far to me than they

  Are the braes o’ Bennachie.

  When blade and blossoms sprout in spring,

  An’ bid the birdies wag the wing,

  They blithely bob an’ soar an’ sing

  At the fit o’ Bennachie.

  When simmer cleads the varied scene

  Wi’ licht o’ gowd and leaves o’ green,

  I fain wad be whaur aft I’ve been

  At the fit o’ Bennachie.

  When autumn’s yellow sheaf is shorn,

  An’ barnyards stored wi’ stooks o’ corn,

  ’Tis blithe to toom the clyack horn,

  At the fit o’ Bennachie.

  When winter winds blaw sharp an’ shrill

  O’er icy burn an’ sheeted hill,

  The ingle neuk is gleesome still

  At the fit o’ Bennachie.

  As farms consolidated and grew large, what were known as ‘fermtouns’ grew up. Around the farmhouse and steading (where the clyack horn or harvest drinking cup was drunk), rows of cottages were built and, in an age before contraception, families flourished. Food was usually plentiful, if a little monotonous, and a brood of children could be useful around a farm for tending to the hens and looking for eggs, mushrooms and other wild fruits and roots. And, when they were old enough to roar and wield a stick, they could help herd beasts in and out at milking time. Some of the great fermtouns of the North-east had a hundred souls or more living around them.

  It could be a transient life. Farm workers of all degrees were hired on the fee system. At the hiring fairs held in market towns at intervals of six months, they would gather and present themselves for inspection and interview. Still just within living memory, it was sometimes a humiliating process and some farmers could be thoughtless, even arrogant. ‘No better than a cattle market,’ said Jenny Corbett, recalling the hiring fairs of the early 20th century in the Borders. But good workers were sought after and could strike a reasonable bargain. An annual or six-month sum was agreed on a handshake and a drink in a nearby pub. The cash was important but so were the payments in kind known as gains. These were usually several tons of potatoes, peat or coal, oatmeal, flour, pasture for a cow, a pigsty and other items. Gains were popular because they were inflation-proof and, with the free tenancy of a cottage, farm workers could subsist easily without spending scarce cash. But sometimes there was disappointment, even disingenuousness on the part of farmers. In another famous ballad, ‘The Barnyards o’ Delgaty’, a young ploughman accepts a fee at the hiring fair at Turriff.

  As I went doon to Turra market,

  Turra market for to fee,

  I fell in with a market farmer,

  The barnyards o’ Delgaty.

  He promised me the ae best pair

  I ever set my e’en upon;

  When I gaed hame to Barnyards,

  There was naething there but skin and bone.

  The auld black horse sat on his rump,

  The auld white mare lay on her wime,

  And a’ that I could hup and crack,

  They wouldna rise at yokin’ time.

  James Small’s revolutionary swing plough needed horsepower to pull it and, in the 18th century, another famous Scottish breed came into being to meet that need – something more reliable than the pair at Delgaty. But the new breed was not initially developed for farming. In Lanarkshire, the Dukes of Hamilton were growing wealthy on the proceeds of coal mining but, as industry began to demand more, they were unable to keep up. The central difficulty was that their draught horses could only pull small cartloads and, since profit depended on bulk transport, more powerful animals were urgently needed.

  The Hamiltons had been supporters of William of Orange in 1688 and their connections with the Low Countries supplied a solution to their haulage problems. Here is an informative entry in The First Statistical Account of 1793.

  Rutherglen Fairs are famous for the finest draught horses in Europe . . . About a century ago an ancestor of the Duke of Hamilton brought six coach horses from Flanders . . . They were all handsome black stallions. The surrounding farmers gladly bred from them, and the cross with the Scotch horse procured a breed superior to either, which has been improved by careful breeding. Great attention is paid to colour, softness and hardness of hair, length of body, breast, and shoulders of their breeders [stallions]. Every farm has four or six mares. The colts are mostly sold at the fairs of Lanark or Carnwath. They excel in the plough, the cart and the wagon.

  Good Clydesdales made good ploughmen and their size and stamina made the work easier and faster. With big feet and legs able to generate great power under well-muscled hindquarters and shoulders, they could pull the plough through even boggy or frosty ground with ease. Breeding became big business and perhaps the most famous and prodigious stallion was a wonderfully made horse called Dunure Footprint. Black with white, feathered socks, he was neat with his feet but took a good grip of the land and was highly intelligent and tractable with a calm temperament. Like every good sire, he stamped his foals with these characteristics and, because they were easy to train and manage, Dunure Footprint was in great demand.

  Long before artificial insemination, all covering was natural. And it could be dangerous. Dunure Footprint’s own sire, Baron of Buchlyvie, had to be put down when a mare he was covering kicked him and broke one of his legs – a very costly accident. But his son was luckier. At the beginning of the 20th century, his owner, William Dunlop, took him all over Lowland Scotland by train. In whichever locality he stood at stud, farmers would bring their mares to be covered and they paid Dunlop a huge fee, £60, for the privilege. Over the season, fortified by frequent feeds of milk mixed with beaten eggs, Dunure Footprint would mount a mare every two hours and, in what must have seemed like a long career, he sired more than 5,000 foals. At the end of the summer, he could still service a mare but sometimes fell off her, exhausted. His progeny dominated Clydesdale breeding for decades.

  Daintiness of foot was important for these huge horses (very often they weighed more than a ton and stood 19 or even 20 hands high) because of the need to turn at the end of the furrow and leave as little land unploughed as possible. When Archibald Grant complained about the S-shaped rigs left by teams of oxen at Monymusk, it was the waste of good land that frustrated him. Clydesdales, by contrast, could turn tidily, stepping inside each other, changing their leading leg, and, when potatoes began to be grown commercially, their neatness was amazing to see. Early 20th-century film shot in Angus shows a team of two ploughing out weeds between dreels of potatoes and not one green leaf is touched by the massive hooves even when they turn.

  Ploughmen and horsemen grew very fond of their paired teams. When the day’s work was done and lowsin time came, they unhitched a plough or harrow and left it in the unfinished field before riding back to the farm. How they got on is a mystery. Once in the stables, they groomed the sweat off the horses’ flanks, brushed and combed out their manes, washed the mud off their legs and picked out muck and small stones from their hooves before feeding and watering them. These are verses from a bothy ballad called ‘Harrowing Time’:

  So on we drive until the sun

  Ahint yon hills does hide;

  And syne we loose our horses tired,

  And homewards we do ride.

  And homewards we do ride fu’ keen

  To get our horses fed;

  We kaim them weel baith back and heel,

  Their tails and manes we redd.

  Ploughing, harrowing and carting were the main work for horses but much else was done on the fermtouns. Cattle were looked after by the bailies and women did manual jobs like weeding, shawing and milking. The harvest was both the culmination and the crisis of the year. Not only did everyone on the fermtoun lend a hand, for time and the weather were of the essence, but itinerant harvesters were also often employed. Mostly women, many came in groups from the Highlands with their sharpened sickles in late summer. Since the corn ripened first in t
he south, they would begin in Berwickshire and the Tweed Valley before moving north to Lothian, Fife, the Mearns and the Moray coastlands. When they bent to their work, they sang Gaelic songs and sometimes farmers hired a piper to play as they swung their sickles in what was a rhythmic movement through the fields. Bandsters followed them, tying the sheaves together by twisting stalks of straw around them. One of the very best of the bothy ballads, ‘Johnnie Sangster’, describes the hard work as well as the fun, the daffin’, of the harvest when men and women worked together late into the sunlit summer evenings.

  O a’ the seasons o’ the year

  When we maun work the sairest,

  The harvest is the foremost time,

  And yet it is the rarest.

  We rise as seen as mornin’ light,

  Nae craters can be blither;

  We buckle on oor finger steels,

  And follow oot the scyther.

  A mornin’ piece to line oor cheek,

  Afore that we gae forder,

  Wi’ clouds o’ blue tobacco reek

  We then set oot in order.

  The sheaves are risin’ thick and fast,

  And Johnnie, he maun bind them.

  The busy group, for fear they stick,

  Can scarcely look behind them.

  I’ll gie ye bands that winna slip,

  I’ll pleat them weel and thraw them.

  I’m sure they winna tine the grip,

  Hooever weel ye draw them.

  I’ll bang my knee against the sheaf,

  And draw the band sae handy.

  Wi’ ilka strae as straught’s rash,

  And that’ll be the dandy.

  Oh some complain on hacks and thraws,

  And some on brods and bruises.

  And some complain on grippit hips

  And stiffness in their troosers;

  But as soon as they lay doon the scythe

  And pipers yoke their blawvin’,

  They ane and a’ forget their dools

  Wi’ daffin an wi’ tyawvin.

  If e’er it chance to be my lot

  To get a gallant bandster,

  I’ll gar him wear a gentle coat,

  And bring him gowd in handfu’s.

  But Johnnie he can please himsel’

  I wadna wish him blinkit;

  Sae, after he had bred his ale,

  He can sit doon and drink it.

  A dainty cowie in the byre,

  For butter and for cheeses;

  A grumphie feedin’ in the sty

  Wad keep the hoose in greases.

  A bonnie ewie in the bucht

  Wad help to creesh the ladle;

  An we’ll get tufts o’ cannie woo’

  Wad help to theek the cradle.

  Though wonderfully well done and smacking of authentic experience, there is a hint of the elegiac in ‘Johnnie Sangster’, a look back over the shoulder at a sunny Arcadia already fading, the good years of high farming in Lowland Scotland. And indeed they were not to last. Mechanisation progressed and intensified. The first prototype tractors were being made in the early 20th century and, in Europe, a cataclysm was waiting to engulf the world of the ploughmen and the bandsters.

  The village of Arbuthnott lies in the centre of the Howe of the Mearns, home to some of the best farming country in all Scotland. South of Stonehaven, not far from the sea, it was the inspiration and the ill-disguised location of one the greatest novels ever written. Published in 1932, Sunset Song was the first in a trilogy based around the character of Chris Guthrie, the daughter of a Mearns farmer, John Guthrie. Its author, James Leslie Mitchell, grew up in Arbuthnott and, for most of his short life, he both loved and hated it.

  Born in 1901 at Auchterless in Aberdeenshire to Danes Mitchell, an impoverished smallholder, and Lellias Grassic Gibbon, he and his parents moved to the Mearns when Mitchell was very young. A fiery, impulsive and idealistic teenager, he was forced to leave Mackie Academy in Stonehaven after a series of disagreements with the school authorities. In 1917, aged only 16, Mitchell ran away to Aberdeen and the city exerted a profound influence on him.

  After persuading a local newspaper to take him on as a reporter, Mitchell became deeply involved in politics. In fraternal sympathy with the Russian Revolution, he founded a soviet in the city and probably joined the British Socialist Party (BSP) at that time. Having moved to Glasgow to work on Farmers’ Weekly, Mitchell was sacked and then blacklisted by most Scottish newspapers. Apparently he had been fiddling his expenses in order to make donations to the BSP. Unable to find work, the young radical was forced to join the Royal Army Service Corps, which he hated, but it did allow him to travel, mainly to the Middle East.

  On leaving the army in 1928, Mitchell and his wife, Rebecca, moved to the relative anonymity of Welwyn Garden City. Determined to devote himself to writing, he began an extraordinary period of almost frantic activity. More than a dozen books flowed, amongst them Spartacus, a treatment of the great Roman slave rebellion. But, for his most famous and original work, Mitchell took his mother’s and grandmother’s maiden names and wrote Sunset Song and its sequels, Cloud Howe and Grey Granite, as Lewis Grassic Gibbon. In 1935, at only 33 years of age, James Leslie Mitchell died of peritonitis caused by a perforated ulcer.

  The essence of Sunset Song is elegy, the sunset of a farming way of life, the old life on the land that was swept aside in little more than a decade by mechanisation, economics and, above all, the slaughter of the First World War. From a distance, either from Welwyn Garden City or abroad in the army, Mitchell’s home thoughts were sharpened into graphic focus and brought alive with extraordinary skill. The tone, the subject matter and the plot are none of them upbeat or even particularly appealing, especially to a predominantly urban audience. What makes Sunset Song sing is magnificent writing, pinpoint precision and an unblinking eye. Written quickly and probably without a break, it has a coherence and a pace that is deeply involving and dazzling in the brilliance of its language. But most of all it comes from the heart, from real experience. Here is an extract from an account of a return to the farmlands of the Mearns:

  Going down the rigs this morning, my head full of that unaccustomed smell of the earth, fresh and salty and anciently mouldy, I remembered the psalmist’s voice of the turtle and instinctively listened for its Scots equivalent – that far cooing of pigeons that used to greet the coming of spring mornings when I was a boy. But the woods have gone, their green encirclement replaced by swathes of bog and muck and rank-growing heath, all is left bare in the North wind’s blow. The pigeons have gone and the rabbits and like vermin multiplied – unhappily and to no profit, for the farmers tell me the rabbits are tuberculous, dangerous meat. Unshielded by the woods, the farm-lands are assailed by enemies my youth never knew.

  The seasons, the weather, the unchanging rhythms of farming and above everything a beautifully realised and utterly original sense of place all animate Sunset Song. The farms and people of Kinraddie (Arbuthnott) are lovingly, sometimes amusingly, described but it is the character of Chris Guthrie who represents Mitchell’s own feeling for the place and the changing attachments to it. Chris’s father, John Guthrie, farmed Blawearie. A dark, dour and angry man, he made life almost unbearable for his daughter. To escape from his moods, Chris found refuge at ‘the Standing Stones up there night after night and day after day by the loch of Blawearie’, where ‘around them there gathered things that wept and laughed and lived again in the hours before the dawn’. And it was ‘the only place where ever she could come and stand back from the clamour of the days’. Society, people changed, died and moved on and Chris knew that ‘nothing endured at all, nothing but the land she passed across, tossed and turned and perpetually changed below the hands of the crofter folk since the oldest of them had set the Standing Stones by the loch of Blawearie’.

  At the close of Sunset Song, after many of the men of Kinraddie, including Ewan Tavendale, Chris’s husband, had died in the trenches of the First World War, a me
morial to them is carved on one of ‘the Standing Stones’. The minister has organised an unveiling ceremony.

  And then, with the night waiting out by on Blawearie Brae, and the sun just verging on the coarse hills, the minister began to speak again, his short hair blowing in the wind that had come, his voice not decent and a kirk-like bumble, but ringing out over the loch

  ‘FOR I WILL GIVE YOU THE MORNING STAR’

  ‘In the sunset of an age and an epoch we may write that for epitaph of the men who were of it. They went quiet and brave from the lands they loved, though seldom of that love might they speak, it was not in them to tell in words of the earth that moved and lived and abided, their life and enduring love. And who knows at the last what memories of it were with them, the springs and the winters of this land and all the sounds and scents of it that had once been theirs, deep, and a passion of their blood and spirit, those four who died in France? With them we may say there died a thing older than themselves, these were the Last of the Peasants, the last of the Old Scots folk. A new generation comes up that will know them not, except as a memory in a song, they pass with the things that seem good to them, with loves and desires that grow dim and alien in the days to be. It was the old Scotland that perished then, and we may believe that never again will the old speech and the old songs, the old curses and the old benedictions, rise but with alien effort to our lips.

  ‘The last of the peasants, those four that you knew, took that with them to the darkness and the quietness of the places where they sleep. And the land changes, their parks and their steadings are a desolation where sheep are pastured, we are told that great machines come soon to till the land, and the great herds come to feed on it, the crofter is gone, the man with the house and the steading of his own and the land closer to his heart than the flesh of his body.’

  A piper then played the lament, ‘The Flooers o’ the Forest’ and the darkness crept over the land. The great machines did come and, after the Second World War, they came in great numbers. When the brilliant Ulsterman Harry Ferguson designed an affordable and adaptable small tractor with a three-point linkage that could not only pull machinery but give it power, the fermtouns finally emptied of their people and their horses. The Standard Motor Company sold more than half a million of these well-made machines known as ‘the Wee Grey Fergies’ and, by the mid 1950s, the Clydesdales had all but vanished. Far from being the work of many hands, farming became a solitary activity usually run by one man with help from outside contractors for haymaking and harvest time. Leslie Mitchell saw that future coming and his achievement was to give a fitting epitaph in Sunset Song.