The Biggar Picture

There is a painting in the National Gallery of Scotland by
Alexander Moffat called The Poet’s Pub. It was made in
1980 and features Norman MacCaig, Sorley MacLean, Ian
Crichton Smith, Huge MacDiarmid, George Mackay Brown,
Edwin Morgan, Sydney Goodsir Smith and Robert Garioch.
A grand constellation of Scotland’s poetic stars at the time.
It’s possible, if you fancy breathing the air around some of
the landscapes which were important to the characters in
this painting, to use it as a travel guide through some of the
most fascinating places in Scotland.
If you’re looking at the painting you’re in Edinburgh where
Sydney Goodsir Smith lived after his family moved from
New Zealand and it was here that Robert Garioch was born.
A short hop east and you’re in Glasgow with Edwin Morgan.
If you head north and reach Orkney you can spend time
with George Mackay Brown before heading south to visit
Norman MacCaig in Assynt and Sorley MacLean around
Skye.
You might call in on Ian Crichton Smith who lived in Oban
for a while before reaching the centre of the painting. Here,
in the middle, Alexander Moffat places Hugh MacDiarmid
as the fixed point around which the other poets circulate
and Hugh MacDiarmid can be found in Biggar.
A warning should be applied to any travel based on
romantic notions from the past, however. It might still be
possible to enjoy history and heritage by visiting castles
and gardens, but when it comes to exploring what it was in
the landscape that energised poets to write about it, things
get a little more tricky. And when it comes to politics, as it
so often did for MacDiarmid, the social landscape might be
changed beyond recognition.
Of all the poets gathered in Alexander Moffat’s painting
perhaps only George Mackay Brown might still be smiling in
the 21st Century. His love was the story of Orkney, the
saints, the Vikings, the tradition and the continuity.
Those things are an industry now but they are being
explored in great detail and Mackay Brown would probably
be fascinated. Their power and mystery are being enjoyed
by thousands every year. The stories he told of his home
place can be touched now and wondered at.
He might even have enjoyed listening to the tales of some
of the tourists who stream from the cruise ships which
lumber into Scapa Flow and clog the arteries of Kirkwall
and Stromness.

He liked to listen to people over a pint but he would have to
organise himself around the difficulty that his bar of choice,
The Flattie, at the side of the Stromness Hotel, is closed and
used now as a storage place for drones which might, one
day, deliver goods from island to island across the
archipelago. He would also have to come to terms with the
fact that The Stromness Hotel is dry again despite his
campaign in 1945 to introduce pubs into what was then a dry
town.
What he might find more troubling is the popularity of Hoy.
The ferry to the island is booked days in advance and the
onetime solitude of Rackwick is largely gone.
Mackay Brown and his friends, the painter Sylvia Wishart and
the composer, Peter Maxwell-Davis, had a particular love for
Rackwick. Maxwell Davis lived there because of its solitude.
Solitude and mass tourism are bad bedfellows.
The same phenomenon exists as you travel south along the
west coast of mainland Scotland to Assynt with the poems of
Norman MacCaig in your hand.
MacCaig holidayed in Assynt with his family and was
enthralled by it. Before he began to stay at Inverkirkaig,
MacCaig spent summers in Achmelvich which is reached
down a steep single track road terminating at a beautiful
white sanded crescent beach. A hut used by children as a big
nature table full of drawings and shells and rocks once stood
in front of the beach on an open space of grass.
Today, people play volley ball and light fires on that beach
and the children’s shed is gone.
There has been a campsite at Alchmelvich for some time but
it has expanded and has become much more popular. The
problems with drainage in such a remote area are apparent
here and there.
The land which runs down to the beach is a building site just
now. The infrastructure of a very large car park, along with
another campsite to join those which are already there and
the North Coast 500 Pods which service travellers along that
ever more busy route, is under construction. The scars of
building work will heal over time but what remains will
welcome more and more people. The access is still steep and
single track.

In 1967 MacCaig wrote, in ‘A Man In Assynt’;
‘Who possesses this landscape?-
The man who bought it or
I who am possessed by it?’
The question is, now, much more difficult to answer. The man
who bought it has developed it and thousands of people,
every year, will find beauty in it, but not all of them are likely to
have the same emotional connection MacCaig experienced.
It’s difficult to deny that tourism has, to a large extent,
adversely affected the intrinsic lure of these remote places.
MacCaig was a city man, working and writing in Edinburgh,
who visited a place which was so remarkable to him that it
possessed him. Sorley MacLean lived and worked inside the
landscape which possessed him. Born on Rassay and living in
Skye and Plockton, he knew the landscape intimately.
His poetry, written in Gaelic, penetrates deep into what was
once an isolated place over which he laid international
concerns.
The bridge connecting Skye to the mainland consigned that
isolation to history and, like Hallaig, MacLean’s famous
deserted Rassay village, the old was swept away.
There may be a stark economic truth in the argument that
without the income generated by tourism the northwest of
Scotland would die. Young people would leave through lack of
work and decay would be inevitable. Progress is built into
survival and environmental compromise is the price.
So far the poets from Alexander Moffat’s painting might
lament that what possessed them and enlivened their writing
has been damaged by too much attention. It’s only when you
get to Biggar that your heart is saddened by the
consequences of too little attention.
Until the onset of the Covid pandemic in 2020 Hugh
MacDiarmid’s Brownshill cottage in South Lanarkshire was
ticking over as a fitting reminder of this important writer.
Furniture and memorabilia left after the death of the poet and
the later death of his wife, Valda, were still in place and a
series of important writers’ residencies had taken place in the
building. Since Covid, and the drying up of appropriate
financing, Brownsbank has slid into decay and decline.

A fine and energetic charity, MacDiarmid’s Brownsbank, has
struggled to preserve the building and fund its resurrection.
For some reason this task has proved to be a steep uphill
struggle.
If you stand by the little blue gate in front of Brownsbank it
might be interesting to reflect on why there might be a
celebratory George Mackay Brown trail in Stromness which
speaks of his work and points out every feature in the town
with any connection to the poet. You could also smile at the
pub in Plockton which has turned Sorley MacLean’s house
into a B and B but, nevertheless, has placed a proud sign,
‘Sorley’s House’ above the front door. You might scratch your
head and wonder why Brownsbank, this major reference to
Alexander Moffat’s central figure, is slowly disappearing.
MacDiarmid was hugely important to what became known as
the Scottish Renaissance which sought to imbue modernism
with a particularly Scottish cultural flavour. It celebrated
traditional influences and addressed Scotlands declining use
of regional languages.
Under his given name, Christopher Murray Grieve, he began
an exploration into a language form known as Synthetic
Scots, or Lallans, built from regional languages together with
words culled from Jameson’s Dictionary of the Scottish
Language from 1808. Norman MacCaig was fond of saying
that Chris Grieve plunged into Jameson’s dictionary and Hugh
MacDiarmid came out of the other end
MacDiarmid became a major player on the international stage
and visitors to Brownsbank ranged from Seamus Heaney to
Alan Ginsberg. Yevgeny Yevtushenko visited with his girlfriend
and MacDiarmid met and compared missions with
Shostakovich.
By any standards he was an important artist. To many he was
a Titan who was the most important Scottish poet of the 20th
Century. In fact he is widely seen as the most important
Scottish poet since Burns.
But – he was outstandingly difficult as a political thinker and
he did think about politics a lot.
That he wrote not one but three long poems entitled ‘Hymn to
Lenin’ indicates that he was never going to inhabit safe
middle ground.

He had a brief flirtation with Fascism which, until the rise of
Mussolini, he felt had considerable left wing potential. He had
an unfortunate record of saying that a German victory in the
war might not be as bad for Scotland as continued English
dominance. He, at various times, championed Communism
and Nationalism. He was co-founder of the National Party of
Scotland from which he was expelled because of his
Communist sympathies and he was a member of the
Communist Party for whom he stood as Parliamentary
candidate against Conservative Prime Minister Alec Douglas-
Home in Kinross and Western Perthshire during the 1964
election. He was expelled from the Communist Party because
of his nationalist sympathies.
Following his political thoughts is like riding a rollercoaster but
at every twist and turn they are imbued with a deep and
revolutionary humanity which challenges everyone to try
harder to make the most civil, and proudest, civil society
possible.
Burns too, a not too distant neighbour in Dumfriesshire,
penned lines which navigate towards a better way of being.
When he looked toward a time when … ‘Man to Man the
warld o’er shall brithers be for a’that…’ his sentiments were
taken to hart, chipped into stone and memorialised alongside
the carefully preserved places where he was born, farmed and
died. There are statues to be found in odd places where he
might have stopped to think and there might, one day, even
be a route to the site where he disturbed a mouse.
When you get to Biggar, you might take some lines from
MacDiarmid’s ‘Drunk Man Looks At The Thistle’ from 1926
with you…
‘And let the lesson be – to be yersel’s,
Ye needna fash if it’s to be ocht else.
To be yersel’s – and mak’ that worth being’
No harder job to mortals has been gi’en.’
There is an irony to be found these days in Alexander Moffat’s
painting. The artists in The Poet’s Pub who circle that central
figure are, by and large remembered and celebrated whilst a
fitting memorial to the centre of the painting decays.
The atmosphere around Brownsbank radiates a quiet
forgetfulness whilst the landscapes which some of the other
poets drew upon have changed beyond recognition.
For some too much attention, for others, not enough
attention. Dinna fash yersel ower much, but the whole
clanjamfrie’s worth the thocht. (It’s worth looking up.)

 

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Fred Chance

 

 

 

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One Response to The Biggar Picture

    1. Surely there were/are some women poets in Scotland?

      Comment by jeff cloves on 10 August, 2024 at 9:39 am

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