The Sheet Folded Into the Session Book
The Bureau’s Scottish desk has spent the winter with a single folded sheet, sent by a correspondent in Angus who asks to be described only as a reader of old minutes. He found it, he says, laid flat inside the kirk-session book of a Lowland parish he declines to name, between a page of poor-roll disbursements and a page about a broken window. Nine staves, four lines each, in a small hand that has been taught to write English and is plainly thinking in Scots. No title. No signature. At the head of the sheet, in the same ink, the year: 1755.
There is a second hand on the sheet, later and larger, and it belongs to whoever copied it out. Our correspondent takes him for a parish schoolmaster, on the grounds that the letter forms are a teaching hand and the spelling has been half-tidied by somebody who could not decide whether he was preserving a poem or correcting an exercise. That is as far as the evidence goes and further than the Bureau would go. What can be said is that the copyist left the Scots alone. In at least one place he had begun the word where, plainly by habit, before he stopped himself and set whaur down over the top of it; the correction is still visible on the sheet.
Why 1755 is the interesting part. It is the year Scotland was counted twice over. The government commissioned the Reverend Alexander Webster, an Edinburgh minister who had been Moderator of the General Assembly two years before, to obtain the data for the first census the country ever had, and he carried it out that year: 1,265,380 souls, the first Scottish figure that is a count rather than an estimate. In the same season William Roy’s surveyors finished the last sheets of the military map that had been crawling over the country since 1747, so that the government would never again have to occupy Scotland without knowing where the roads went. A nation being enumerated by a minister and measured by soldiers in the same twelve months is a nation on paper for the first time, and the joke of the manuscript — if it is a joke, and the Bureau has not settled the question — is that something else took a roll that year too, and its returns were kept in verse.
The poem is printed below exactly as it reaches us, spelling and all. A glossary follows it, because the Bureau would rather explain sixteen words than modernise one.
The Gathering o’ Ghosts, Set Doun in Nine Staves
Nine staves, four lines to a stave, and no title anywhere on the sheet — the one above the poem is the Bureau’s, assembled out of the poem’s own words because a thing has to be called something before it can be filed. The plates came in the same packet as the manuscript and are reproduced as they arrived; our correspondent offers no account of who painted them, and neither can we. Read them as a second opinion rather than an illustration: in several places the painter has plainly gone his own way, and where he has, the notes beneath — which are ours — say so.
In the Hielands’ mist, ‘neath the siller moon’s beam,
Whaur the thistle an’ heather brawly bloom an’ teem,
Lies a tale o’ auld, frae the lips o’ those
Wha’ve lang syne passed, yet in mem’ry, close.
The glen as the copyist's marginal note has it: thistle to the knee, and a kirk on the shoulder of the hill with nobody in it.
In the year o’ our Lord, seventeen fifty-five,
When spectres an’ wraiths did sae seem to arrive,
To convene in secret, in Scotland’s ain heart,
For the Annual Ghost Summit, their stories to impart.
The summit assembled. Note the crowd at the right: whoever painted this understood that a meeting of the dead requires an audience of the living.
Frae the shadowed glens an’ auld stanes, they came,
Gathered, these silent, ethereal frame,
Each a story o’ yesteryear clutched in their grasp,
A mem’ry’s echo in each ghostly clasp.
Arrivals. The poem says each ghost carries a story; the painter has given several of them a bowl instead, and one of them a bird.
The air, laden wi’ whispers o’ ages past,
As if time itsel’ had at last been outcast,
They spak o’ battles, o’ love, o’ despair,
O’ the fleeting beauty o’ life, sae rare.
The whispering. Living and dead are painted at one scale and in one light, which is the poem's entire argument done in a single gesture.
The castle ruins, bathed in moonlight’s embrace,
Served as the venue for this spectral space,
Whaur history’s weave, thin an’ threadbare,
Allowed past an’ present to meet an’ share.
The venue. The windows are lit and the roof is gone, and the painter has not troubled himself about where the light is supposed to be coming from.
Here, the Braveheart’s cry an’ the bard’s verse,
Mingled wi’ the banshee’s mournful curse.
Tales o’ valour, o’ tragedy, o’ jest,
Were shared amongst those who no langer rest.
Stave six: valour, tragedy and jest. The bottle at the lower left is the only object in the suite that belongs unambiguously to the living.
As the first light o’ dawn crept o’er the land,
The summit concluded, as time’s shifting sand,
They vanished, like dew ‘neath the morning’s gleam,
Back to the realm o’ shadow, mist, an’ dream.
The dispersal, painted inside its frame. The plate reached the Bureau this way and is reproduced as received, moulding and all.
Yet, still in the Hielands, when moonbeams play,
An’ the wind whispers secrets o’ yesterday,
Ane can sense the spirits, baith bold an’ meek,
The Annual Ghost Summit, o’ which they speak.
The year after, and not a figure in it. There is an inscription along the lower margin that nobody at the Bureau has been able to read.
Sae here’s tae Scotland, wi’ her lore sae deep,
Whaur the past through the veil o’ time daes peep,
In seventeen fifty-five, ‘twas last seen,
The Gathering o’ Ghosts, in twilight’s sheen.
The last stave. Our correspondent calls this one the toast; it is the only plate in which the two crowds have stopped keeping to their own sides.
The Tongue o’ the Thing
Readers who write to ask whether we might not print a plain-English version are politely refused, and here is why. Scots is not an accent laid over English and it is not English spelled wrong: it is a West Germanic variety descended from Early Middle English, a sister to Modern English rather than a child of it, with five regional forms of its own and, at the last census, a shade over a million and a half speakers. It had been losing prestige since the Union of 1707, as educated Scots reached for Standard English in print, and it was in the middle of being rebuilt as a literary language by Allan Ramsay, Robert Fergusson and, at the far end of the century, Robert Burns — who was four years short of being born when our sheet was dated, and did not print a line until the Kilmarnock volume of 1786, thirty-one years after it. Translate the poem and the only remarkable thing about it goes into the bin.
There is a second joke buried in the vocabulary, and it is the strongest internal evidence the manuscript has. The verse is Lowland Scots throughout. Its subject is the Gaelic-speaking Highlands. Whoever wrote it was imagining the ghosts of a country whose language he did not have, in a language those ghosts would mostly not have spoken — which is either a serious flaw in the document or the most accurate thing in it, depending on how you feel about the eighteenth century.
A Glossary for the Nine Staves
Left exactly as found. Every entry appears in the poem in the form printed here.
| Means | Where it falls | |
|---|---|---|
| Hielands | The Highlands. | In the Hielands' mist — stave 1, and again in stave 8 |
| siller | Silver. As a noun on its own it also means money. | the siller moon's beam — stave 1 |
| whaur | Where. | Whaur the thistle an' heather brawly bloom — stave 1 |
| brawly | Finely, splendidly, well. From braw, meaning fine or handsome. | brawly bloom an' teem — stave 1 |
| frae | From. | frae the lips o' those — stave 1; Frae the shadowed glens — stave 3 |
| lang syne | Long since; long ago. The same two words Burns hung a tune on thirty-three years later. | Wha've lang syne passed — stave 1 |
| sae | So. | did sae seem to arrive — stave 2; o' life, sae rare — stave 4; her lore sae deep — stave 9 |
| ain | Own. | Scotland's ain heart — stave 2 |
| auld stanes | Old stones — a standing-stone circle, or the fallen stones of a ruin. Both readings are open here. | auld stanes, they came — stave 3 |
| spak | Spoke. The past tense of speak. | They spak o' battles — stave 4 |
| itsel' | Itself. | As if time itsel' had at last been outcast — stave 4 |
| langer | Longer. | those who no langer rest — stave 6 |
| ane | One, in the sense of anyone at all — the impersonal pronoun. | Ane can sense the spirits — stave 8 |
| baith | Both. | baith bold an' meek — stave 8 |
| tae | To. | here's tae Scotland — stave 9 |
| daes | Does. From dae, to do. | the past through the veil o' time daes peep — stave 9 |
What the Summit Is Playing Against
Scotland’s dead do not hold meetings. That is the first thing wrong with the poem and the most interesting thing about it, because the tradition it is departing from is unusually specific. The characteristic Scottish encounter with the other side is solitary, transactional and takes place at a ford: the bean-nighe, the little washerwoman, kneeling at a lonely stream scrubbing the grave-clothes of somebody who is still walking about. She is held to be a woman who died in childbirth, working out the span she should have had. Come up behind her without being seen and she is obliged to answer you — three wishes, and the name of the one whose linen she has got. She is squat and child-like on Skye, small and round and green-clad in Perthshire, and on Mull and Tiree she has a particular anatomical peculiarity that the folklorists record with great seriousness. She was seen at Loch Slin not long before the roof of Fearn Abbey came down in 1742 and killed something close to fifty people. That is one washerwoman, one ford, one death at a time. It is not a conference.
The sixth stave makes matters worse by hiring a banshee, who is Irish. The bean sí attaches to families rather than places, and the sound she makes is the caoineadh, the keen — which was a real and professionally practised form of Irish mourning before it was ever a ghost story. Bringing her to a Scottish glen is roughly the move of a poem that wants a wail and cannot be bothered to source one locally. And the calendar is missing altogether: if the Gaelic dead were going to keep one night’s business a year it would be Samhain, 1 November, beginning at the previous sunset, when the boundary is held to thin and food is set out at the door for the aos sí. The poem gives no date at all. An annual summit with no fixed night is the one detail no informant would have let pass.
Then there is the venue. Roofless castles are the picturesque choice; the traditional choice is a house somebody still lives in. Glamis in Angus has been occupied by the same family since 1372 and carries more ghosts than any ruin in the country: Earl Beardie, who played cards on the Sabbath with a stranger who turned out to be the Devil; a deformed child said to have been kept in a suite of rooms later bricked up; and a chapel seat kept permanently empty for Janet Douglas, Lady Glamis, executed for witchcraft in 1537. Ruins are what you paint. Houses are what people are actually frightened of.
And then there is the word Braveheart, sitting in the middle of the sixth stave like a hair in the soup. The man it points at, William Wallace, died at Smithfield on 23 August 1305, and a Scot of 1755 would have had him from Blind Harry’s fifteenth-century poem — the seven-foot height, the murdered wife, most of it unsupported by anything contemporary. The word itself is a film title from 1995, a film that dresses thirteenth-century Scots in belted plaids several centuries early, paints them in woad about a thousand years late, and stages the Battle of Stirling Bridge without the bridge. The Bureau has no explanation for its presence and offers the observation for what it is worth: a document that is otherwise consistent to the vowel with the mid-eighteenth century contains exactly one word that cannot be older than the twentieth.
What the poem gets right, it gets right by accident and it is the saddest thing on the sheet. In 1755 the Highlands of the first stave were nine years past Culloden — less than an hour of fighting, somewhere between fifteen hundred and two thousand Jacobite casualties against fifty government dead, 3,471 prisoners taken and twelve hundred of them shipped to the colonies for life. The Act of Proscription had been in force since 1 August 1746: six months in prison, without bail, for a first offence of wearing Highland dress, and transportation for a second. The heritable jurisdictions were gone, the chiefs were becoming landlords, and the Clearances had begun to move people off the hill and down to the coast. In the year the poem is dated, a gathering of Highlanders in tartan, armed, at night, in the ruins of a castle, was a thing that could only be held by people the law had no further hold on. The ghosts in these nine staves are the last Scots in the country who could still convene without a warrant.
A closing note on provenance, offered against ourselves. Five years after the date on this manuscript, a young Highlander named James Macpherson published Fragments of Ancient Poetry, Collected in the Highlands of Scotland, and told Europe he had translated them from ancient Gaelic. Johnson said flatly that he had not. The consensus now is that Macpherson wrote most of it himself, and that the Gaelic originals he eventually produced were his own English rendered backwards. Europe was moved to tears regardless. The Bureau is aware that it has just printed nine staves of unverifiable provenance about Highland antiquity, sent by a correspondent who will not give his name, from a parish he will not identify, out of a session book nobody else has seen. We print it, as ever, without endorsement, and note only that the tradition of forging Scotland’s past is at least as old as the past being forged.
