Chapter One
No Advantages
This parish possesses no advantages. Upon the hills the soil is in many places
mossy and fit for nothing. The air in general is moist. This is occasioned by
the height of the hills which continually attract the clouds and the vapour that
is continually exhaled from the mossy ground … The nearest market town is
fifteen miles away and the roads so deep as to be almost impassable. The snow
also at times is a great inconvenience, often for many months we can have no
intercourse with mankind. And a great disadvantage is the want of bridges so
that the traveller is obstructed when the waters are swelled … Barley oats
and potatoes are the only crops raised. Wheat rye turnips and cabbage are never
attempted …
There are ten proprietors of land in this parish: none of them resides in it.
Contribution by the Minister of Ettrick Parish, in the county of Selkirk, to the
Statistical Account of Scotland, 1799
The Ettrick Valley lies about fifty miles due south of Edinburgh, and thirty or
so miles north of the English border, which runs close to the wall Hadrian built
to keep out the wild people from the north. The Romans pushed farther, and built
some sort of fortifications called Antonine’s Wall between the Firth of Clyde
and the Firth of Forth, but those did not last long. The land between the two
walls has been occupied for a long time by a mix of people-Celtic people, some
of whom came from Ireland and were actually called Scots, Anglo-Saxons from the
south, Norse from across the North Sea, and possibly some leftover Picts as
well.
The high stony farm where my family lived for some time in the Ettrick Valley
was called Far-Hope. The word hope, as used in the local geography, is an old
word, a Norse word-Norse, Anglo-Saxon, and Gaelic words being all mixed up
together in that part of the country, as you would expect, with some old
Brythonic thrown in to indicate an early Welsh presence. Hope means a bay, not a
bay filled with water but with land, partly enclosed by hills, which in this
case are the high bare hills, the near mountains of the Southern Uplands. The
Black Knowe, Bodesbeck Law, Ettrick Pen-there you have the three big hills, with
the word hill in three languages. Some of these hills are now being reforested,
with plantations of Sitka spruce, but in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries they would have been bare, or mostly bare-the great Forest of Ettrick,
the hunting grounds of the Kings of Scotland, having been cut down and turned
into pasture or waste heath a century or two before.
The height of land above Far-Hope, which stands right at the end of the valley,
is the spine of Scotland, marking the division of the waters that flow to the
west into the Solway Firth and the Atlantic Ocean, from those that flow east
into the North Sea. Within ten miles to the north is the country’s most famous
waterfall, the Grey Mare’s Tail. Five miles from Moffat, which would be the
market town to those living at the valley head, is the Devil’s Beef Tub, a great
cleft in the hills believed to be the hiding place for stolen cattle-English
cattle, that is, taken by the reivers in the lawless sixteenth century. In the
lower Ettrick Valley was Aikwood, the home of Michael Scott, the philosopher and
wizard of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, who appears in Dante’s Inferno.
And if that were not enough, William Wallace, the guerrilla hero of the Scots,
is said to have hidden out here from the English, and there is a story of
Merlin-Merlin-being hunted down and murdered, in the old forest, by Ettrick
shepherds.
(As far as I know, my ancestors, generation after generation, were Ettrick
shepherds. It may sound odd to have shepherds employed in a forest, but it seems
that hunting forests were in many places open glades.)
Nevertheless the valley disappointed me the first time I saw it. Places are apt
to do that when you’ve set them up in your imagination. The time of year was
very early spring, and the hills were brown, or a kind of lilac brown, reminding
me of the hills around Calgary. Ettrick Water was running fast and clear, but it
was hardly as wide as the Maitland River, which flows past the farm where I grew
up, in Ontario. The circles of stones which I had at first taken to be
interesting remnants of Celtic worship were too numerous and well kept up to be
anything but handy sheep pens.
I was travelling by myself, and I had come from Selkirk on the twice-a-week
Shoppers’ Bus, which took me no farther than Ettrick Bridge. There I wandered
around, waiting for the postman. I’d been told that he would take me up the
valley. The chief thing to be seen in Ettrick Bridge was a sign on a closed
shop, advertising Silk Cut. I couldn’t figure out what that might be. It turned
out to be a well-known brand of cigarette.
After a while the postman came along and I rode with him to Ettrick Church. By
that time it had begun to rain, hard. The church was locked. It disappointed me,
too. Having been built in 1824, it did not compare, in historic appearance, or
grim character, to the churches I had already seen in Scotland. I felt
conspicuous, out of place, and cold. I huddled by the wall till the rain let up
for a bit, and then I explored the churchyard, with the long wet grass soaking
my legs.
There I found, first, the gravestone of William Laidlaw, my direct ancestor,
born at the end of the seventeenth century, and known as Will O’Phaup. This was
a man who took on, at least locally, something of the radiance of myth, and he
managed that at the very last time in history-that is, in the history of the
people of the British Isles-when a man could do so. The same stone bears the
names of his daughter Margaret Laidlaw Hogg, who upbraided Sir Walter Scott, and
of Robert Hogg, her husband, the tenant of Ettrickhall. Then right next to it I
saw the stone of the writer James Hogg, who was their son and Will O’Phaup’s
grandson. He was known as The Ettrick Shepherd. And not far from that was the
stone of the Reverend Thomas Boston, at one time famous throughout Scotland for
his books and preaching, though fame never took him to any more important
ministry.
Also, among various Laidlaws, a stone bearing the name of Robert Laidlaw, who
died at Hopehouse January 29th 1800 aged seventy-two years. Son of Will, brother
of Margaret, uncle of James, who probably never knew that he would be remembered
by his link to these others, any more than he would know the date of his own
death.
My great-great-great-great-grandfather.
As I was reading these inscriptions the rain came on again, lightly, and I
thought I had better start to walk back to Tushielaw, where I was to catch the
school bus for my return ride to Selkirk. I couldn’t loiter, because the bus
might be early, and the rain might get heavier.
I was struck with a feeling familiar, I suppose, to many people whose long
history goes back to a country far away from the place where they grew up. I was
a naive North American, in spite of my stored knowledge. Past and present lumped
together here made a reality that was commonplace and yet disturbing beyond
anything I had imagined.
MEN OF ETTRICK
Will O’Phaup
Here lyeth William Laidlaw, the far-famed Will o’ Phaup, who for feats of
frolic, agility and strength, had no equal in his day …
Epitaph composed by his grandson, James Hogg, on Will O’Phaup’s tombstone in
Ettrick Kirkyard.
His name was William Laidlaw, but his story-name was Will O’Phaup, Phaup being
simply the local version of Far-Hope, the name of the farm he took over at the
head of Ettrick Valley. It seems that Far-Hope had been abandoned for years when
Will came to inhabit it. The house, that is, had been abandoned, because it was
situated so high up at the end of the remote valley, and got the worst of the
periodic winter storms and the renowned snowfall. The house of Potburn, the next
one to it, lower down, was until recently said to be the highest inhabited house
in all of Scotland. It now stands deserted, apart from the sparrows and finches
busy around its outbuildings.
The land itself would not have belonged to Will, it would not even have been
leased to him-he would have rented the house or got it as part of his shepherd’s
wages. It was never worldly prosperity that he was after.
Only Glory.
He was not native to the valley, though there were Laidlaws there, and had been
since the first records were kept. The earliest man of that name I have come
across is in the court records of the thirteenth century, and he was up on
charges of murdering another Laidlaw. No prisons in those days. Just dungeons,
mainly for the upper class, or people of some political importance. And summary
executions-but those happened mostly in times of large unrest, as during the
border raids of the sixteenth century, when a marauder might be hanged at his
own front door, or strung up in Selkirk Square, as were sixteen cattle thieves
of the same name-Elliott-on a single day of punishment. My man got off with a
fine.
Will was said to be “one of the old Laidlaws of Craik”-about whom I have not
been able to discover anything at all, except that Craik is an almost
disappeared village on a completely disappeared Roman road, in a nearby valley
to the south of Ettrick. He must have walked over the hills, a lad in his teens,
looking for work. He had been born in 1695, when Scotland was still a separate
country, though it shared a monarch with England. He would have been twelve
years old at the time of the controversial Union, a young man by the time of the
bitter failed Jacobite Rebellion of 1715, a man deep into middle age by the time
of Culloden. There is no telling what he thought of those events. I have a
feeling that his life was lived in a world still remote and self-contained,
still harboring its own mythology and local wonders. And he was one of them.
The first story told of Will is about his prowess as a runner. His earliest job
in the Ettrick Valley was as shepherd to a Mr. Anderson, and this Mr. Anderson
had noted how Will ran straight down on a sheep and not roundabout when he
wanted to catch it. So he knew that Will was a fast runner, and when a champion
English runner came into the valley Mr. Anderson wagered Will against him for a
large sum of money. The English fellow scoffed, his backers scoffed, and Will
won. Mr. Anderson collected a fine heap of coins and Will for his part got a
gray cloth coat and a pair of hose.
Fair enough, he said, for the coat and hose meant as much to him as all that
money to a man like Mr. Anderson.
Here is a classic story. I heard versions of it-with different names, different
feats-when I was a child growing up in Huron County, in Ontario. A stranger
arrives full of fame, bragging of his abilities, and is beaten by the local
champion, a simple-hearted fellow who is not even interested in a reward.
These elements recur in another early story, in which Will goes over the hills
to the town of Moffat on some errand, unaware that it is fair day, and is
cajoled into taking part in a public race. He is not well dressed for the
occasion and during the running his country breeches fall down. He lets them
fall, kicks his way out of them, and continues running in nothing but a shirt,
and he wins. There is a great fuss made of him and he gets invited to dinner in
the public house with gentlemen and ladies. By this time he must have had his
pants on, but he blushes anyway, and will not accept, claiming to be mortified
in front of such leddies.
Maybe he was, but of course the leddies’ appreciation of such a well-favored
young athlete is the scandalous and enjoyable point of the story.
Will marries, at some point, he marries a woman named Bessie Scott, and they
begin to raise their family. During this period the boy-hero turns into a mortal
man, though there are still feats of strength. A certain spot in the Ettrick
River becomes “Will’s Leap” to commemorate a jump he made, to get help or
medicine for someone who was sick. No feat, however, brought him any money, and
the pressures of earning a living for his family, combined with a convivial
nature, seem to have turned him into a casual bootlegger. His house is well
situated to receive the liquor that is being smuggled over the hills from
Moffat. Surprisingly this is not whiskey, but French brandy, no doubt entering
the country illegally by way of the Solway Firth-as it will continue to do
despite the efforts late in the century of Robert Burns, poet and exciseman.
Phaup becomes well known for occasions of carousing or at least of high
sociability. The hero’s name still stands for honorable behavior, strength, and
generosity, but no more for sobriety.
Bessie Scott dies fairly young, and it is probably after her death that the
parties have begun. The children will have been banished, most likely, to some
outbuilding or the sleeping loft of the house. There does not appear to have
been any serious outlawry or loss of respectability. The French brandy may be
worth noting, though, in the light of the adventures that come upon Will in his
maturity.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from The View from Castle Rock
by Alice Munro
Copyright © 2006 by Alice Munro.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Knopf
Copyright © 2006
Alice Munro
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ISBN: 1-4000-4282-8
