SIX
Then the sea approaches with great speed, gaining as it goes; the wave is white with tumbling foam; a great curve of broken surf follows in its wake; and the white horses of the Solway ride in to the end of their long gallop from the Irish Sea with a deep and angry roar.
GEORGE NEILSON, Annals of the Solway (1899)
AS WE STAND at the side of the B724 waiting for a number 79 bus to swing round the corner to take us to Dumfries, a few dozen grazing whooper swans paddle into the air –then they’re off north in a blizzard of wings, as in some dream scene out of an Attenborough documentary. It’s the end of March, time for them to obey an impulse beyond our understanding: to make their direct, non-stop flight back to Iceland until next autumn. Many species of bird fly up and down, north and south, back and forth around here, as if by radar. I live below a migration highway for thousands of geese steering south, their beaks cold as bone, chevrons of them working as a team, announcing their arrival in September in a honking crescendo to their winter digs along the firth.
Rooks – packed parliaments of them – haggle on their stick nests in the canopies of old trees above the T junction in the hamlet of Bankend as we chug in on the number 6A bus. As a boy I used to see dead crows strung along fences, pour encourager les autres, and I considered it barbaric. I’ve a soft spot for corvids, even carrion crows, and I love how rooks ride sideways on the thermals with wings that seem to have been clicked by a ticket inspector.
We disembark and find the sign for the path to Ward Law hill. I’m having to hit the ground running to help me up the path to the summit after a lazy winter. It is the site of an Iron Age hill fort now adorned by mature Scots Pines and beeches, with rugs of bluebells and wild garlic. The Clan Maxwell rallied here in times of strife. Beacons once blazed at the end of the ridge that flanks the eastern bank of the Nith estuary.
Wrens teleport perky-tailed to and fro now as the upper limbs of lofty trees creak in the wind. Candles of gorse are bursting with bees. Gull gangs screk for worms in a field ploughed into giant corduroy. Badgers have slightly undermined Wardlaw, but not as much as ploughing did to an adjacent temporary Roman camp, probably used during Hadrian’s invasion; it is now no more than a crop mark. Below, the sea glints and ripples all the way to England; Caerlaverock Castle, the only triangular castle in Britain, stands in the foreground, a magical medieval stronghold that was used as a film location for The Decoy Bride (2011) and various television dramas. Edward 1st famously besieged it, as did the Covenanters three centuries later. The castle was closed for repairs. Therefore, I was unable to look for evidence that Burns had left his mark inside. During his motor tour of Britain in 1908, American author Thomas Murphy declared: ‘On one of the stones of the inner wall were the initials, R.B. and the date, 1776, which our guide assured us were cut by Robert Burns; and there are certain peculiarities about the monogram which leave little doubt that it was the work of the poet.’
However, the initials have a different look about them than those on record for Burns. Furthermore, Burns would have been only 19 when the initials were inscribed, and he still lived in Ayrshire, which leaves me wondering whether Murphy’s guide was winding him up or he genuinely thought Burns had popped by to leave his mark.
He wasn’t the only one fooled. The last-but-one edition of Historic Environment Scotland’s guide to the castle (1995) attributed the initials to Burns, but the latest edition (2005) attributes them to one Richard Blennerhassett, whose family were landowners in Cumbria and Ireland. How they found out I will never know as a call to the press office proved fruitless.
In the 1990s archaeologists discovered three small fragments of Islamic glass on the hall floor of the castle. Nowhere else in Scotland has such glass been found.
Skeins of barnacle geese fly 2,000 miles down this big sky from Svalbard and arrive here every Autumn: a mile of sighs in migration, tugged by arctic clockwork for their furlough on the mudflats. We patrol the duckboards in March through swathes of swishing reeds. Buntings warble. The geese have returned home, those which survived the destructive avian flu. Skylarks sing today, soaring above rare, aromatic holy grass, one of the first grasses to flower in spring. Holy grass used to be strewn on church floors. It was used in France to flavour candy, tobacco, soft drinks, and perfumes; in Russia to flavour tea, and in Poland for vodka. For the Plains Amerindians it was a sacred herb. It is only found at five locations in Dumfries and Galloway (a region that represents at least a third of the known locations in Britain).
The north Solway coastline has inspired many myths, legends, half-truths and lies. Tales of mystery and imagination. When you take in the dimpling, swelling, and foaming tides it’s easy to think of the supernatural, and Allan Cunningham’s ghost ships supposedly lurked around the Caerlaverock shore looking for victims. In The Haunted Ships Cunningham’s character, Mark McMoran, the mariner, who knows every creek and cavern of the Solway, tells the tale of a man driven to his death in the swamps by monsters on boats.
I’ve heard it told, myself, that at Hallowmass covens of witches met at Caerlaverock Castle. Witches who flew on broomsticks shod from the bones of murdered men. Witches who sacrificed unchristened babies and used bridles made from their skin to ride ragwort chariots.
Rains dance across the sky like ghosts of smoke, and what sun there is casts changeable cotton clouds. Two doves sit wired together like quavers, cooing. The bus takes us around the estuary to the former ship-building village of Glencaple, which has a restaurant overseen by Lady Clare Kerr, whose grandmother, the Duchess of Norfolk, held the canopy above Queen Elizabeth at the coronation of George VI. Along the roadside we come across a cairn that commemorates Angus MacKay, who knew royalty just as intimately. He was Queen Victoria’s piper for 14 years, but he succumbed to syphilis and was committed to the Crichton Royal lunatic asylum, whose magnificent sandstone campus still stands on the verge of Dumfries. McKay, who according to case notes used to ‘hoot, howl and shriek like an owl’, believed that Victoria was his wife and Prince Albert had robbed him of his conjugal rights. He absconded from the Crichton and drowned in the river. A poem about him by Tom Pow was judged to be among the best Scottish poems of 2008 (‘the tenderest of epitaphs’, offered the judges).
There’s another memorial worth noting: Robert Paterson, the stonemason on whom Sir Walter Scott based his novel Old Mortality, is buried in Caerlaverock churchyard.
