As December 31 draws to a close, the world pauses, if only for a heartbeat, between what has been and what is yet to come. It is a liminal moment, suspended in time, when reflection meets anticipation. In Scotland, this threshold has a name: Hogmanay.
More than a New Year’s Eve party, Hogmanay is a deeply rooted cultural moment , a time of gathering, storytelling, music, ritual, and goodwill. It is about clearing the old, welcoming the new, and stepping forward together. And for some, that step forward is taken quite literally… into freezing water.
On New Year’s Day, in the coastal town of South Queensferry, a peculiar and beloved tradition takes place: the Loony Dook. Participants affectionately known as “loonies” don flamboyant costumes and plunge into the icy waters of the Firth of Forth, often raising money for charity and always raising smiles.
The Loony Dook began modestly in 1986 as a friendly dare between locals. Over time, it grew into an iconic moment associated with Edinburgh’s Hogmanay celebrations. Though it was removed from the city’s official program around 2020, the tradition itself never disappeared. Smaller, community-led versions continue — proof that when a ritual has heart, it doesn’t need a spotlight to survive.
At first glance, the Loony Dook may seem like light-hearted madness, a whimsical spectacle of cold water and comic relief. But look closer, and it reveals something deeper. It is a ritual of release. A collective decision to face discomfort, laugh at it, and emerge renewed. A symbolic washing away of the old year’s burdens, fears, and fatigue.
And this is where Scotiana finds its rhythm, not only in Scotland, but across borders.
From Scotland to France and Quebec: One Spirit, Many Shores
In Scotland, people plunge into cold water, transforming shock into celebration.
In Quebec, winter is not merely endured, it is embraced with resilience, humour, snow-lit festivals, and a quiet strength born of long seasons and shared warmth.
In France, the New Year arrives around a table, through reflection, shared meals, conversation, and the simple yet profound comfort of being together.
The traditions are not the same. The climates differ. The rituals take different forms. But the intention is shared.
Wherever we stand, on a Scottish shoreline, beneath a Quebec snowfall, or in a French home glowing with candlelight, we cross the same invisible threshold. We let go of one chapter and open another. We pause, take stock, and step forward with hope.
In that sense, we all take a kind of Loony Dook.
Not always in icy waters, but in life itself. Each new year asks us for a small act of courage, to release what no longer serves us, to trust what lies ahead, and to enter the unknown with as much grace and good humour as we can muster.
Hogmanay reminds us that renewal does not have to be solemn. It can be joyful, communal, even a little absurd. It can involve music, laughter, stories, shared food, open doors, and open hearts. It can be loud or quiet, public or intimate, but it is always human.
As the year turns, Scotiana extends its heartfelt wishes to friends and readers in Scotland, France, Quebec, and beyond.
May the year ahead bring warmth, even when the waters are cold. May courage meet you where fear once stood. May laughter soften what feels heavy.
And may you cross into the new year feeling lighter, connected, and quietly renewed.
Happy Hogmanay. Bonne année. Bonne et douce année à tous!
My last post was about Inchmahome, the largest of the three lovely islands situated in the Lake of Menteith, in Stirlingshire, a truly enchanting place which shelters the ruins of a very ancient priory standing among majestic, centuries-old trees. Captivated as we were by the natural beauty of the island and the mysterious atmosphere that emanates from this place steeped in history, we had little desire to board the small boat that was to take us back to the little village of Menteith… but still we didn’t know we had discovered a place that would lead us far beyond our expectations…
“I took a boat and rowed over the grey water to Inchmahome. There come moments – you may have felt them, too, if you have ever been alone – when it seems that there is no such thing as Past, Present or Future, but as though Time were a maze in which we, suddenly turning a corner, might find ourselves in the Past or the Future. At such moments the Present is the least probable convention. And Inchmahome spreads this queer enchantment over the Lake of Menteith. And the soft woods whisper it. Even the high hills echo it.”
(H.V. Morton – In Scotland Again– Methuen 1933)
Inchmahome, ‘Isle of Rest’ in Gaelic…
R.B. Cunninghame Graham (1852-1936) and his wife Gabriela(1861-1906) who rest on Inchmahome, could not have found a better place than Inchmahome to rest but when we took pictures of their graves situated in the choir of the ruined Priory, we had no idea that the names engraved on the stones were those of two of the most remarkable Scottish figures, a man and a woman hors du commun… if you want to make an idea, just have a look at the very interesting page written about them, on June 30th 2020, by our dear friends Iain & Margaret. 😉
Robert_Bontine_Cunninghame_Graham00
“I valued Cunninghame Graham beyond rubies. We will never see his like again.”
(Hugh MacDiarmid)
Gabriela Cunninghame Graham by Frederick Hollyer
‘I shall always think of her as I saw her the first time, in a white monk’s habit, & her black hair over her shoulders, & that fire burning deep in her eyes.’
~ Will Rothenstein (English artist and writer 1872-1945)
Timeline
1852 (24 May) Birth of RBCG in London. Family moves to Finlaystone, 🏡 a mansion on the banks of the Clyde, where RBCG spent his early years.
1866: move to Gartmore, 🏡the Graham family seat, overlooking the Lake of Menteith
1870- 1877: first travels to South America
1878: marries Gabriela
1883: death of RBCG’s father
1884: move to Gartmore 🏡Don Roberto and his wife Gabriela will live there for 16 years.
1886: Elected MP for NW Lanarkshire 🏴
1887: Ardoch sold 🏡 Bloody Sunday 🏴
1888: Scottish Labour Party found
1892: Keir Hardie elected to the Labour Party 🏴
1894: Gabriela publishes St Theresa
1895:Notes on the District of Menteith
1896: beginning of his contributions to The Saturday Reviewwhich would continue almost until the end of his life – Publication with Gabriela of Father Archangel
Gartmore sold 🏡
1903: Gabriela’s health deteriorates. Ardoch bought back 🏡
1904: moves into Ardoch 🏡
1906: (8 September) Gabriela dies at Hendaye (France), aged 48
1925: Don Roberto’s mother dies aged 97
1931: campaigning for Scottish Home Rule 🏴
1934: President of Scottish National Party 🏴
1936: Don Roberto dies in Buenos Aires. Buried on Inchmahome
How I discovered Gabriela and Don Roberto’s writings
I first became interested in Gabriela because, as Iain and Margaret rightly pointed out, our daughter Nathalie, who sadly passed away recently, seemed to have a lot in common with Gabriela. I read all the poems of Gabriela lovingly collected by Don Roberto in Rhymes from a World Unknownand the first chapter of Santa Teresa: Her Life and Times. But I will return to Gabriela in a future post for I’d like to read first The Complete Scottish Sketches of R.B. Cunninghame Graham recently published by Edinburgh University Press. A must-read book, if you believe me…
“R.B. Cunninghame Graham was a hugely influential figure in late 19th- and early 20th-century Scottish politics and literature. For the first time, his entire Scottish oeuvre has been compiled chronologically, from their original sources, into one volume, and set in their historical, cultural and social contexts. This volume highlights Graham’s writings on landscape, climate, history, local traditions, mythology, Scots dialect and social diversity – but also pays rare attention to his writings about Scots abroad.”
(Edinburgh University Press)
We can be very grateful to the book’s editors for all the notes they have inserted throughout the pages. A mine of information which is very useful for readers—especially if they are not Scottish! 😉
I was inserting the internet link of Edinburgh University Press on this page when I discovered that an ‘afternoon of talks’ about R.B. Cunninghame Graham’s book was organised by Professor Alan Riach at the University of Glasgow Advanced Research Centre on 28 November 2025. Unfortunately, by the time my post is published, the event will already have taken place, but it’s worth mentioning it and perhaps other similar events will take place in the near future.
Event Programme
1-1.15: Welcome.
1.15-1.45: PAPER 1 The Journeys of Cunninghame Graham ~ James Jauncey.
1.45-2.15: PAPER 2 Cunninghame Graham & Wilson Harris ~ Alan Riach.
2.15-3: PANEL DISCUSSION: RBCG, travel, geography, the English language and literary form (fiction, historical sketches, biographies, histories).
3-3.30: coffee & tea.
3.30-4: PAPER 3 on Gabriela: The Biography ~ Jad Adams.
I suspected the book wouldn’t be easy read, and I was right. Lachlan Munro and W. R. B. Cunninghame Graham had made it clear from the outset:
“There is much to be gained from immersing oneself in Graham’s eccentric prose, but his works are not for everyone, certainly not the impatient reader, nor those who seek a coherent, well-plotted story with a happy ending”.
(From the Introduction of The Complete Scottish Sketches of R.B. Cunninghame Graham: ‘A Careless Enchantment’.)
“Judged upon [the sketches] rank among the best things ever written in this country… little works of art that place the writer by the side of the great story-tellers of France and Russia. In a few pages Mr Cunninghame Graham conjures up the colour, the idiosyncrasy, the soul of a whole people”.
(The Observer)
Cropped cover from James Jauncey’sDon Roberto
“All that we write is but a bringing forth again of something we have seen or heard about. What makes it art is but the handling of it, and the imagination that is brought to bear upon the theme out of the writer’s brain. It follows therefore that all writing, as I said before, brings sorrow in its train…..To record, even to record emotions, is to store up a fund of sadness, and that is why all writing is a sort of icehouse of the mind….
(Faith, Preface)
The Scottish Sketches of R.B. Cunninghame Graham John Walker
I’ve just received a second-hand copy of The Scottish Sketches of R.B. Cunninghame Graham by John Walker published in 1982 and now out-of-print. I like its cover, which shows a beautiful autumn view of a lake at dusk. Probably a picture of the Lake of Menteith. This book, organized differently, appears to be a very good complement to the Edinburgh edition. The author is a passionate admirer of Don Roberto and offers another point of view.
The Edinburgh edition presents RBCG’s texts in chronological order, whereas John Walker’s edition had opted for a thematic classification:
Landscapes and places.
The Scottish character.
Scenes and situations.
Types and Figures.
The Scots abroad.
Scottish Stories.
In the “Editors’ Note”, Lachlan Munro and W.R.B. Cunninghame Graham justify their chronological choice :
“… presenting [the sketches] thematically, valuable as it was, could not address the historical context of the works, nor Graham’s motivations (…) Your current editors have thus approached their task, not as littérateurs (for which they possess few credentials), but, like Graham himself, as historians, to provide factual background where possible, not only to make the works more accessible, but to cast a new light on Graham’s memories of a bygone age – ‘perfectly poised short stories, sharp, ironic, compassionate vignettes of Scottish life – a thoroughly original legacy, quite unique in all of Scottish literature. “
Chronological list of R.B. Cunninghame Graham’s Scottish sketches
De Heretico Comburendo***** A Survival
Salvagia
Heather Jock
S.S. Atlas Part I
S.S. Atlas Part II
A Pakeha
Pax Vobiscum
1900-1903 [48-51]
A veteran
A Relative
Beattock for Moffat
A Fisherman
A Convert The Laroch***** Pollybaglan A Traveller
1904-1910 [52-58]
Snow in Menteith***** Fate***** Tobar Na Reil
M’Kechnie v.Scaramanga The Grey Kirk Ha Til Mi Tulaidh
Miss Christian Jean Lochan Fallow*****
A Vigia
At Dalmary
A Retainer The Craw Road
1911-1913 [59-61 ]
Caisteal-Na-Sithan
San Andrés A Braw Day *****
Christie Christison A Princess***** Mist in Menteith*****
The Beggar Earl
The Falkirk Tryst
1915-1933 [63-81]
Brought Forward
With the North-East Wind
Fidelity
Transplanted in Vain Inch Cailleach*****
Euphrasia Up Stage
The titles written in bold are the ones I have already read. I will add more notes about them in the coming days. 😉 I’ve attributed five ***** to my favourite sketches (so far)! 😉
The Magic of Don Roberto’s texts
‘Moss, moss, and still more moss which rose piled like a snow wreath to the west, and south, and east, whist on the north the high clay bank sank steep into the flood.’
‘ALL was unchanged, and Nature cared not, being occupied with sun and moon and stars, the tides, the mists, the dew, rain, snow, the fall and reproduction of the leaf, and the great mysteries, the cause of which evades and always has evaded man. She smiled, as she does sometimes at a funeral, sending a glimpse of sun upon a coffin-plate, so that the cold nipped mourners read the age of the deceased whilst they stand peering down into the grave, as in a blaze of light.
All was unchanged.’
(‘Ha Til Mi Tulaidh’ – I Return No More*)
*“The name of a song that Rob Roy MacGregor reputedly requested on his death-bead. Walter Scott has it as a song ‘with which the emigrants bid farewell to their native shores’ in A Legend of Montrose” – EUP edition note 525 – The Earl of Menteith is one of the characters in the novel.
Flanders_Moss_2009
Nature is omnipresent in RBCG’s works, timeless and rejuvenating, an inexhaustible source of inspiration for the writer though indifferent to the human fate.
Don Roberto’s highly detailed descriptions of landscapes are of exceptional beauty – countryside, lochs, mountains, moors – with their poetic, cinematic quality, reflecting the author’s deep knowledge of Fair Menteith, his native country, with its rich fauna & flora.
Under the author’s pen, settings are created, colours multiply in subtle shades, light bursts forth, darkness creates gloomy atmospheres, mist obscures everything, snow creates a magical world. No one better than Don Roberto knows how to convey the atmosphere of a place, whether it be a rural or urban landscape, an old castle, a church, a cemetery…
I’ve read all the stories collected in John Walker ‘Landscapes and Places’ section. Each sketch is an invitation au voyage… an invitation to delve deeper into things and get a better “sense of place”, something that Don Roberto possessed to the highest degree.
Winter_Hills_(geograph_5209127)
“Snow in Menteith’ is probably Graham’s most beautiful evocation of his native locale. These closely observed, vivid remembrances of a winter landscape are particularly remarkable , as he claimed ‘I never took a note on any subject under heaven, nor kept a diary.”
(Complete Scottish Sketches of R.B. Cunninghame Graham: A Careless Enchantment – EUP 2025)
It is one of my favourite sketches. Inspired by the natural beauty of the landscapes surrounding Gartmore House, where don Roberto spent his happiest years, many of them with Gabriela, the author transports us to this enchanting world transformed by snow, and his magical pen allows us to share in the magic of the moment. The text (as many other ones in the book) reads like a poem…
‘As night fell slowly on the drear expanse of white, Ben Lomond, catching the last reflection of the setting sun, turned to a cone of fire, and at its foot the pine woods of Drumore stood out intense and dark as if cut out of blackened cardboard, and by degrees the hills and woods melted away into a vapoury mist.
Then, from the bosom of the moss came a hoarse creaking as a heron, rising slowly into the keen night air, after a day of unproductive fishing by the black frozen pools of the slow Forth, flapped heavily away.’
The weather was absolutely perfect for filming Loch Lomond with the drone on that day in June 2015. On the above picture you can see “The Island of the Nuns” (Inch Cailleach, Inchcailloch) quite clearly off Balmaha harbour.
RBCG’s sketch was published on 5 September 1925, it’s one of my favourite stories: a very poetic text which also contains, as always in Don Roberto’s stories, geographical descriptions of the place like in a map containing illustrations of animals, trees, plants… historical data… philosophical speculations … evocation of local myths and legends… tout y est ! This text is very representative of the Scottish sketches written by Don Roberto and contained in The Complete Scottish Sketches of R.B. Cunninghame Graham: ‘A Careless Enchantment’.
Wonderful poetic images:
“The Island of the Nuns lies like a stranded whale upon the waters of the loch, with its head pointing towards the red rocks of Balmaha.”
“No spot in the whole earth could me more fitted for a conventional life of meditation, or for the simple duties performed in simple faith, such as string out a life like beads upon a rosary, till the last prayer is said.”
“Hardly a footstep has beaten down the grass, for up above, in the lone circle of grey stones, lie men whose names were written in characters as evanescent as the smoke scrolls an aeroplane traces upon the sky.”
Geographical data of the Trossachs:
“Ben Lomond towers above the wooded Island, with its outcrop of grey rocks, and in the distance Ben Vorlich, Meall nan Caora and Bein Chabhan seem to protect it from all modern influences (…)”. Many thanks to the editors for the translation of the gaelic names which allows the non-gaelic speakers to feel the poetic meaning of the names (respectively “Beacon Mountain”, “Hill of the Bay”, “Round Hill of the Sheep”, “Hill of the Hawk”.
Fauna & Flora meticulously described.
Historical data
The tumultuous history of the Scottish Clans (the MacGregors, the MacFarlanes, the Colquhouns) is mentioned here with the Battle of Glen Fruin on 7 February 1603 –
Recurrent themes :
life and death,
churchyards and gravestones
the mist… the sounds, colours and scents of Nature…
A great sketch, pure “Enchantment” !
‘Haunting’ places: family houses, old castles, ruined houses, churches, cemeteries…
These are the kinds of places that haunt Don Roberto’s mind and come back in his writings like recurrent litanies filled with melancholy.
Gartmore House for example, Don Roberto’s beloved house, one of his favourite subjects especially since he was obliged to sell it in 1900. In many sketches we find very detailed descriptions of the old house and estate, of its environment, of Flanders Moss…
‘Fate’
(1905)
When this sketch appeared Gabriela was still alive, though not for long alas. Don Roberto had been obliged to sell Gartmore and, five years later, he remembers… there were two tapestries hanging in his office when he lived in Gartmore and their vivid memory had the same effect on him as Proust’s madeleine…
“In a long corridor of an old Georgian house, lit by a skylight and by a window over the hall door, there hung a piece of needlework in a dark rosewood frame. In silk, some lady of the family had worked a landscape setting forth the district and the house in which the picture hung. It stood four square and looked out on the east, across the moss which once had been a sea…”
(This sketch is illustrated with a 1898 picture of the upper landing of Gartmore House.)
‘A Braw Day’
(1911)
Gartmore_House_1 Wikipedia
“Never before, in the long years that had passed in the old place, had it appeared so much a part of his whole being, as the day on which he signed the deed of sale.”
This sublime and extremely moving text recounts Don Roberto’s and Gabriela’s last day at Gartmore House. It is the end of their story with the beloved ancestral home. It was written nearly twelve years after the House was sold. Gabriela has been dead for five years already. Don Roberto remembers the fondest memories they shared in that house and their desperate efforts to pay off the colossal debts they had inherited.
(Two pictures illustrate this Sketch in the EUP edition : one of Gartmore House taken in 1898 and a very endearing one of Don Roberto and Gabriela with their dogs at the ‘moodial of Gartmore House taken in 1898)
Gartmore_House_2 Wikipedia
‘The Laroch’
(1903)
Here is one of the most moving texts I have ever read about the Scottish clearances. We feel as if we were there, in the midst of the desolate and empty landscapes, entering ruined houses, imagining the families driven from their villages and deported to places completely unknown to them…
‘During the late eighteenth century, and well into the nineteenth, Highland glens were systematically depopulated by landowners, to make way for sheep and the deer-forest…” (EUP)
“An air of sadness and of failure, as if the very power, which placed the ancient owners on the soil had not proved powerful enough to keep them there, hung on the hills, and brooded on the lake. A Keltic sadness, bred in the bones of an old race, which could not hope to strive with new surroundings, and which the stranger has supplanted, just as the Hanoverian rat drove out his British cousin and usurped his place.”
“Here lies SinaKalula, Princess of Raratonga, the beloved wife of Andrew Brodie, Mariner”…
A meditative stroll through Buckhaven cemetery, an East Neuk kirkyard that no longer exists today, in a town situated on the east coast of Fife, on the Firth of Forth between East Wemyss and Methil. Also a reflection about the clash of cultures when a Scottish mariner marries a Polynesian princess.
The atmosphere of an old cemetery located not far from the sea, old tombs covered with inscriptions and symbols that can only be found in Scotland… a real treat for someone who feels attracted by this kind of place (without any morbidity as far as I’m concerned 😉).
“Still in the churchyard in which the graves of mariners, of old sea-captains (who once sailed, drank, and suffered, where their descendants, now sail, drink and suffer), lie thick, each waiting for the pilot, the headstones looking to the sea, their Mecca, there is an air of rest.”
“All round the churchyard wall are old-world tombs, of worthies of the places – Brodies and Griersons, Selkirks and Anstruthers – adorned with emblems of their trades, as mallets, shears, and chisels, with a death’s head and crossbones crowning all…”
Pen-portraits of characters, of special types, of old-world survivors…
Most of Don Roberto’s writings reflect a feeling of nostalgia for the good old days and a growing bitterness in the face of social and cultural decline…
A socialist at heart, Don Roberto is highly critical of the industrial revolution, of the rise of capitalism, of imperialism, of presbyterianism. He blames the development of the railway for being largely responsible for the destruction of the community spirit. Hence the obsessive search for “survivals”, those he calls the “shadows”, the “ghosts”… and he is at his best when he happens to meet an old-world type, a “Scottisimus Scotorum”, a “Scot of Scots”…
The portraits provide Don Roberto with an opportunity to develop his ideas on the evolution of society and to denounce the destructive effects of the so-called progress, symbolised, for example, by the expansion of the railway.
Each story is also an opportunity for Don Roberto to write unforgettable pages about his beloved country. His descriptions are sublime. They are pure literary gems.
Each portrait is a small masterpiece of its kind, realistic but not lacking in humour and tenderness.
Just a few words about a selection of RBCG’s sketches :
‘De Heretico Comburendo’
(1896)
In this first sketch of the anthology we are introduced to Father M’Donald, the Rector of the Valladolid Scottish College, a man of rare quality: “Only in Redgauntlet and in books of Jacobites does such a priest exist“… “A Highlander, a scholar, a linguist, a gentleman with the gentility that Presbyterianism seems to have crushed out of the modern Scotsman“… “In discussing with him one seems to see what sort of men the Scotsmen of the past had been before the Bawbee and the Bible had altered them“… Don Roberto does not hide his joy at having met such a man in a world that is degenerating a little more every day: “I say farewell to my compatriots and into the street thanking my stars for the chance of having seen that which enabled me to reconstruct the Scotland of the past more vividly than by perusing libraries”
‘Pollybaglan’
(1903)
is a colourful portrait of one of Don Roberto’s tenants, Mr James Mitchell of Polybaglot, who lives and works in a semi-derelict farm lost on the Flanders Moss, on the banks of the Forth…
‘A Traveller’
(1903)
Don Roberto deplores the unexpected death of a tenant he thought indestructible and with whom he got on well despite his constant whining. ‘Andra’ led a hard life at Tombreak, a very isolated farm situated on a high moorland platform. But you can get magnificent panoramic views of the surrounding Grampians mountains from up there, on the plateau. There is a very touching note at the end of the story about Andra’s collie and his roan Iceland pony who have lost their master…
‘A Veteran’
(1900)
we meet Alexander Graham Speirs (1793-1877), “the colonel”, a senior cousin of Don Roberto. He is the second Laird of Culcreuch, an estate and castle situated near the village of Fintry in Stirlingshire. The sketch begins with a veritable diatribe against the railway “that sworn enemy of old-world types”…
I have not read all the sketches yet. My reading is like doing a big Scottish jigsaw puzzle or a mosaic in which each new story allows me to add a new colourful piece to the whole and I’m still missing a lot of pieces !
Culcreuch_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_5512078
‘Miles from a railway station and jammed against the flank of a steep range of hills, between a melancholy little tarn, in which tenc, and a thick wood, it stands. The grey peel-tower with battlements either for defence or else to show its owner was a gentleman, stands sentinel beside a square grey house, with steep-pitched roof and corby steps, and with a low front door set in a roll-and-fillet moulding, opening upon the road.’
(‘The Craw Road’ -1910)
Local legends and myths…
In the “Sketches” :
‘Tobar Na Réil’
(1906)
… here we are, a gaelic phrase! Just like the long cryptic names on signs in the North of Scotland that make us wonder what kind of mysterious lands they will lead us to… Fortunately for the uninitiated reader, there’s a little footnote at the bottom of the page that gives the translation of Don Roberto’s title : ‘Well of the Star’ 🙂…
“Right at the summit of the pass it lies, nothing above it but the sky.(…) So at the little bealach [Gaelic: ‘high pass’ ] the well lies open to the sky, too high for the lake mists to touch it, as it looks up at the stars.” (…)
“They say that on a certain day in mid-summer, a star when at its zenith shines into the well.” (…)
“He who looks on the water at the fateful hour, and sees the star reflected in the well, acquires again the ancient universal tongue, by which in ages past men and the animals held speech.”
In the Introductions
The Introductions, together with two other texts by R.B Cunninghame Graham (‘Other Pieces’) are to be found at the end of the RBCG’s Scottish Sketches:
Scotland For the Scots by John Morrison Davidson 1902
The Wolf of Badenoch by Thomas Dick Lauder 1930
Inchmahome and The Lake of Menteith by John A.Stewart 1933
The Secret Commonwealth by Robert Kirk 1933
These texts, which I have skimmed through, are of great interest and will be the subject of my next post, as a follow-up to this one.
The first one that caught my attention was the introduction written about the mythical story of Robert Kirk: The Secret Commonwealth.
The Secret Commonwealth by Robert Kirk – 1933 edition
The 1933 edition includes not only R.B. Cunninghame Graham’s introduction but also a very long text by Andrew Lang.
I am all the more motivated to talk about it not only because we did we visit several legendary places linked to Reverend Kirk:
Aberfoyle Church where Reverend Kirk’s (empty?) grave is located,
Doon Hill where the Reverend is said to be held prisoner by fairies,
but also because today I understand the connection with Don Roberto.
‘A new and silent world, born in a night, had come into existence, and over it brooded a hush, broken but by the cawing of crows, which fabulated as they flew, perhaps upon the strangeness of the pervading white.
‘Even in Eden, in the days before man’s fall and woman’s motherhood, all was not purer than the fields and moors under their burden of the carpet formed of the myriad of scintillating flakes.”
(‘Snow in Menteith’)
The beautiful prose written by Don Roberto captivates me. I read it, I reread it, consulting notes and introductions. I carry my book from my office to the library, and in the evening it ends up on my bedside table! I often open my atlas and pore over the maps of Scotland… I never tire of Don Roberto’s stories.
Each Scottish Sketch is like an invitation to travel to Scotland. Only texts in Gaelic or Scottish baffle me, like those mysterious signs you sometimes find in the middle of nowhere in Scotland, whose meaning we don’t understand and which make us wonder where they lead…
I hope I have inspired you to travel, between the pages of Don Roberto’s books and in his footsteps in the country he loved so much, in Fair Menteith…
It was during one of our many journeys to Scotland that we found ourselves driving toward the northern tip of the mainland. The road to Durness wound through moors and heather, past lochs reflecting a restless sky. There, where land meets sea and time seems to slow, we discovered […]
Nothing delights us more in Scotland than coming across a picturesque old castle or a ruined abbey, whose mere presence in a wild and isolated landscape or its changing reflections on the quiet waters of a loch invite us to approach and find out more…
Today, in memory of our beloved daughter who was a […]
Dorothy Maclean (1920–2020): The Canadian Heart of Findhorn
Dorothy Maclean was born in Guelph, Ontario, and earned a B.A. from the University of Western Ontario. During World War II she worked with British Security Coordination in New York, later serving in Panama, where she married John Wood. The marriage ended in 1951.
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