Literary Corstorphine an ideal gift…

Posted on by raybell1820

If you have enjoyed this blog, why not consider buying the book? It’s a unique gift for anyone with links to this area. I include a lot of detail in the book which doesn’t appear on this blog at all, such as maps and a deeper dive into some of the subject matter. Many people have told me that they were amazed about the content, and that they were completely unaware of it beforehand. I have certainly tried to find a new angle on our local history.

You can buy Literary Corstorphine for £15 from the Gift Tree Café (pictured) which is on Station Road. If you can’t see the book on display, please ask to see a copy.

You can also buy it online at Lulu.com (click on this blue link).

I know a lot of people expect content for free, but remember content creators can’t all live for free!

And to all of those who have bought copies, thank you! I have sold a number of copies already, but I do appreciate all sales.

Patrick Richardson and Norman MacCaig

Posted on by raybell1820

Something old, something new… I started writing this some weeks ago, hence the opening sentence.

Yesterday, exactly five years after I wrote “On Norman MacCaig and a bit of controversy“, I bumped into the journalist Patrick Richardson, the author of Looking for Landfall. It turned out he had been taught by the poet Norman MacCaig while at Carrick Knowe primary school, and confirms that MacCaig was well known for beating children locally.

On one occasion, Norman MacCaig pulled up Patrick Richardson on some matter of spelling or grammar, and took the tawse to him. Patrick told me that his mother was so horrified by MacCaig’s brutality that she came in the next day and complained directly to the school.

Many years later, Richardson recognised MacCaig on the street – he was a kenspeckle figure – and confronted him about the beating. He said MacCaig blushed when he mentioned it and walked away.

Some details of this can be found in Patrick’s memoir.

Patrick Richardson: Brief Bio

Born in Sussex, Patrick grew up in Edinburgh, where he attended local schools. He later shared a flat with the politician Robin Cook.

Richardson is a successful journalist, having written for the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, the Sunday Telegraph, the Sunday Times, the Herald, the Sunday Herald, the Independent and The Scotsman. He has travelled through some of the most exotic parts of the world, and probably any summary I give here will not do him justice. He was raised as a Quaker which probably partly explains his mother’s disdain with McCaig.

Links

* Official website
* In Search of Landfall, official website
* Wikipedia article

Ridiculous Names?

Posted on by raybell1820

I recently reposted something from Threadinburgh’s blog about the Riversdale development in Murrayfield, where a number of new housing styles had been tried out. The name “Riversdale” was attacked at the time for being too English, and “ridiculous”. Ironically, “dale” does appear in a number of Scottish place names — Clydesdale, Nithsdale, Swordale to name but three.

Aside from comedy names, and I’ll get into those later, there are quite a few new names in Edinburgh that are either very anglified or inappropriate.

Manor Gait?

My first vote goes to just about anything with “manor” in the name. While I’m sure that somewhere out there in Scotland, there is an authentic manor, just like there are one or two “lakes” (as opposed to “lochs” etc.) The manor house is not a traditional concept here, unlike England, Wales or Ireland. Scots were too busy fighting each another for such a thing! The most common use of the word “manor” seems to be in residential care facilities. If you see a “manor” anywhere in an Edinburgh address, it is most likely to be an old folks’ home. There are exceptions. One or two streets such as Manor Place*, and of course Corstorphine’s own Chinese Manor House, on the Drumbrae roundabout. The Chinese Manor House is a restaurant, not an old folks’ home, but definitely not an old manor.

My second vote goes to “gait”. Normally I appreciate the use of Scots words in street names, but this falls flat for me. I don’t mind it in traditional usage, where it is normally rendered as “gate”, but it is extremely overused in new developments. Hermiston Gait is probably the prime example. It’s blocked off at one end. Various cul-de-sacs are now called “gait”. The word “gait” is old Scots for a road, and is related to “gasse” in German and “gata” in Icelandic street names. “Gate” pops up as far south as Norwich and York in old street names in the sense of a road. But I personally associate it with the word “gae” (go) and you cannot go through a cul-de-sac. Alas the etymological dictionary doesn’t appear to agree with this pedant!

Silly Names

As for silly sounding names, many of these still exist. I love names like Parrotshot (a refence to mining) near the Jewel (itself a great name) or Fair-a-Far in Cramond. One of my favourites is Knock(h)illbraehead, a path running down the back of Kingsknowe and Colinton. This arguably means “hill hill hill hill” much like the notorious Torpenhow Hill in Lancashire, with “cnoc” being the Gaelic for “hill”. Both words in Carrick Knowe arguably mean the same thing.

Some more literal minded people will put their own spin on names like Drumbrae, Broomhouse/Broomhall, Roseburn (ouch!), Almond (a bit nutty?) and so on, despite their real meanings. Or the New Town which looks old to the eyes of North Americans etc. Spare a thought for Davidson’s Mains and Fountainbridge — these used to be called Mutton Hole and Foulbriggs. No wonder they changed their names!

Notes

  • Without looking up Manor Place, I suspect it may be named after a person. I’ll look it up at some point.

The thread about the street with the “ridiculous” name that became an inter-war demonstration scheme for innovative, “non-standard” housing

Posted on by raybell1820

I’ve walked past these homes round the back of Murrayfield Stadium many times. I had no idea that they had such an interesting architectural history. The Threadinburgh blog is well worth a look, although sadly it doesn’t cover the west of Edinburgh very much, or Corstorphine itself.

Threadinburgh

This thread was originally written and published in January 2023. It has been lightly edited and corrected as applicable for this post.

Riversdale Road is, on the face of it, another sleepy little inter-war suburban Edinburgh street, of neat little bungalows and well-trimmed hedges. You can see streets like these all over Edinburgh. I’ve cycled down it hundreds of times, probably over a thousand, and never paid it much attention. If I had, I might have found out that this is no ordinary street.

Riversdale Road, Roseburn
Riversdale Road, Roseburn

You may recall the other week I wrote about the “Sighthill Demonstration Site”, the post-war living laboratory for municipal housing experiments in Scotland. Well, nobody was more surprised than me to find out that Riversdale Road is its inter-war equivalent!

Edinburgh Corporation had acquired the Saughton Hall Estate in 1905, to provide a new public park and land for suburban expansion. Riversdale…

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Who wrote this?

Posted on by raybell1820

See if you can recognise today’s poem. I take no responsibility for the quality of the work!

In Corstorphine’s Ancient Heart

In Corstorphine’s ancient heart, where sighs
The village breath turned mist o’er sacred ground;
A sense of yore pervades – a fragrant sweetness clings
To venerable stones and prickly dykes and banks,
As if with loving arms to shield and watch
That hallowed tea room, snug among the trees.

Gaze on the grey estate where bards of yore
Dreamed golden dreams of bonnet lairds and dames,
And the holy Kin, their hearts a’gleam for auld St. John,
Lurk in the shadows, robes and cassocks whispering
With secrets old upon their parted lips.
Corstorphine, none can ken thy hallowed haunts
But humble hearts and kind, that wake to kindness still.

The ancient yew, gnarled guardian of the Kirk,
Casts brooding shade upon the stones below.
Through chancel dark and vaulted portico,
I hear the sounds of ancient prayers and hymns,
The Stones forgotten lie and whispers low
Of ghostly figures clad in bygone garb.

No simple fame in poems sung or spoken
Shall shape the essence of the village heart;
The bards must sigh, their feeble voices rippling
Like wayward wind in autumn’s golden glades,
And weave their words with fingers all a-tremble,
To catch a glimmer of the past that lingers.

Corstorphine lies within the Western wing,
Beside the iron tracks of progress fast –
Yet hums a simpler, joyous tune of yesteryear,
Insulated from the city’s bustle grim
By sacred crowds of silent sainted trees
And whispers low ‘midst ancient walls of homes.

My plaintive heart belongs to thee, sweet village old;
The truth I find within thy shroud of green and stone,
In moments lost amongst the time-worn paths,
That wind through mossy gardens, past eldritch gables,
And churches steeped in tales of saints and knights,
Now sleeping sound in grassy beds unknown.

Oh Corstorphine, let me praise thy hallowed name,
Sing thee a song that echoes through the leaves,
Inscribe thy beauties in eternal verse,
And paint thy living portrait with my words:
The air that whispers, the trees that watch above,
The village heart that beats with quiet grace,

Within my soul, I find thy resting place.

Any guesses?

Let’s look at a few of the clues:

  • It seems that the writer is disinterested in modern Corstorphine.
  • The author does not know Corstorphine well.
  • Although there are mentions of “auld St. John” and “bonnet lairds”, there is not much of a Scottish flavour to the work. I am not aware of anyone locally who would qualify as a “bonnet laird”. A bonnet laird was someone who controlled a very small piece of land that would supposedly fit under a bonnet on a map.
  • “Autumn” is used instead of “Fall”, so not American.
  • I don’t know of any tea rooms “snug among the tree, but there are a few “prickly dykes and banks”, if you hunt around. Perhaps the writer was thinking of the Gift Tree Café on Station Road?
  • The word “village” seems to appear many times.
  • Clichés galore!

So who wrote it?

Answer: no one. A friend in the Borders texted me this. He went to the Chat GPT Bot’s website and requested a “heartfelt poem about Corstorphine in the style of Norman McCaig”. It feels as if the AI program was more interested in the Normans than the McCaigs.

Here are a couple of other works. One on the town of Newton Stewart, in McGonagall’s style, and another about a hamster in the style of Ted Hughes. For whatever reason, the AI seems to be much better at writing Hughes… and knows more about Newton Stewart than Corstorphine.

Beautiful Town of Newton Stewart (After William McGonagall)

Oh beautiful town of Newton Stewart,
In the County of Wigtown late shall we forget;
Thy lovely verdant banks and noble River Cree
Doth calme the soul and nourishes the heart with glee.

Near the river banks, ye Auld Brig stands with pride,
Built in the Seventeenth Century, an emblem of thee;
Where many passers-by might cross the lovely River Cree,
Which meanders gently like a silvery stream of thee.

Oh Newton Stewart, thou verdant town of beauty,
Your ample countryside would fill lovers with a sigh;
The lush and fertile land and the prosperous farmsteads,
These does set hearts aflutter for what the harvest begets.

The magnificent Galloway Hills doth grace thy skirts,
And o’er these hills the heather grows, like a fragrant sea;
Near them, the elegant winding River Cree doth flirt,
With thy charming banks, like lovers cradled with glee.

Gaze into the distant horizon with anxious eyes,
Ye might find red deer roaming, feasting on the heather;
Yon hills are theirs, lively maidens and stags so wise,
Nature’s gifts, they deserve praise from us together.

Thy neighbouring Galloway Forest Park is a wondrous sight,
Oh Newton Stewart, adorned with beauty near the viridian night;
Where cometh from every corner there, fine attractions meet,
The grounds for horse riding, cycling, and walks so sweet.

And hark! The famous Dark Sky Park doth offer beauty rare,
Where celestial wonders quite marvelous unfold in front of thee;
Galaxies, nebulae, and constellations ascending into the air,
Oh! what a wondrous sight the human eye is privy to see.

Be thy homage paid to keen and gallant sportspeople of Newton,
Where football, rugby, and cricket are played with spirit high,
And the mighty roar of supporters echoes through the air,
Like a clan of proud warriors with their songs jubilant and fair.

Oh Newton Stewart, thou art more than just an earthly gem,
Enriched with history, enchantment, culture and pride;
Ye stand, resplendent o’er River Cree or calm vale of green,
In the County of Wigtown, beauty and charm shall ne’er be denied.

For Hammy (In the Style of Ted Hughes)

Beneath an age-coiled sky seething,
Seeping sods of sheep-smells, earth-moon-dust
A shaggy spirit bestirred the clockwork dawn,
Which pulsed with mouse-cries sworn
To the spindle of the Milky Way.

This burrow of moon-wind and hay-bale hug,
This warm, star-buried pit of silent scuttling,
Gave birth — Hammy!
Who amidst a lineage of alchemists,
Plucked from the blind black-wheel of Time
The gossamer thread of his birth-rye chew,
Destiny.

His head was a globe with eyes of liquid pin-curiosity.
Within those darts shone the sunset sublime,
Last flares of day licked at the cooly-wind swept universe,
Eager to consume the descent to ether and ecstasy,
Unraveling shards of solar thoughts.

His feet, scratching at the veil of our dreams,
Knitted anew the myth-road of the moon.
A dancer, a kneader of shadows and spirits,
A faultless murmur-beast on holy night.
What mystery pulsing, in whiskered heart?

Every night, the oracle of the cage spun his wheel,
In a seamless circle of cyclic riddles,
Bound to the gleaming moon-spoked cage of stellar mystery,
Hammy the Conduit of Heaven and Earth,
The heart of dawn-fire flows and accelerates.

Like a time-worn prophet he wore the vestiges of his ancestry,
Threadbare as the moon-soaked night,
Each dusk he wore, he disrobed the day,
As Orion shed his belt onto the fate-stirred wheel,
And Hammy, consumed by the spinning reflection of his truth,
His kind eyes brown like the soil.

A life of revolutions,
A sun sparking, winking,
A celestial nova,
Bathing in his own nebulous debris,
A Cosmic Solipsist.

A captive lighthouse,
His light vibrated the worlds concealed
In egg-wind and the cosmic husk,
A will clinging to the birthing thread,
The umbilical cord of history’s obscurest moment.
Unblinking the doors,
The apocalyptic awakening of a cage undone.

Unfettered, our Hammy of untethered dreams,
Nibbling at the edge of eternity,
Inch upon inch,
The circle closing,
The treadmill ending,
He lays within the palm of Orphic hearts.

The Memory of History

Posted on by raybell1820

This is an old piece I have kept in draft form for several years. I was reluctant to post it because of the controversial nature of the subject and it is still rough around the edges. These are merely a few thoughts of mine on the matter. My aim isn’t to offend anyone.

October and November 2018 were interesting to say the least. The WWI centenary brought out so many family stories… Oral history. Documents. Photographs… Such a heavy weight of history to be revived, debated, and maybe soon forgotten. And not all of it has followed the official version of events at all.

I’ve written about the novelist Muriel Spark and her uncle Harry Camberg twice, who was not counted as a casualty of WWI since poison gas exposure took several years to finish him off after the war itself had ended. And of course, Wilfred Owen as well, who taught locally, and who ended up dying in the war.

My own experience

Does history mean anything without memory? Or does it only become history when it passes from living memory? We’re at the stage where all those involved in WWI have passed on. Now we’re into the next generation of memories, which consists of second hand accounts. My own links are tenuous. I did meet people who were around at the time, but I was so young that it is nigh on impossible for me to me to remember much about them.

I regret in some ways I know so little about my own relatives’ involvement in WWI. My paternal grandfather was a non-combatant due to his line of work, and my father a small child. My mother’s father was unlucky enough to fight in both world wars, and lucky enough to survive both of them. I have a picture of him in uniform from the second, but nothing from the first.

This broken chain continues with my great uncle George. I don’t recall hearing anything about him growing up so I had to fill in the gaps myself. George died at the Somme in his early twenties – which is quite old compared to many of his comrades in the trenches – and I’ve found a grainy picture of him which shows a man with a pinched, gaunt face. I can only guess at what produced that look on him. He would have witnessed terrible things happen to those around him, and lost many friends. His diet would have been limited, as would his sleep on some days. I know his rank, and where he served and died, but not much about him as a person.

The official version… the real version?

WWI is more controversial than WWII in many ways. From this point in time, over a century later, the causes of WWI are less obvious. Historians will give you explanations about treaty obligations, military buildups, economic issues and so on, but that’s only part of the story. Nowadays, many will stand in silence each November and talk about pride and respect, but the people who lived through those times had a much more complex and personalised understanding of them. I think WWII now fills the cultural space that WWI did when I was little, with those times being right on the edge of living memory.

It is fair enough to say that many have formed a view of both wars which is based on Hollywood. This naturally takes an American viewpoint. British media has attempted to tackle it, often with mixed results. 

The only recourse we have now is to look at old diaries and books. Photos will tell us part of the story, but not all the story, because some were officially approved (fact checked?). Sometimes you can glean a few things, as I say about the photograph of my great-uncle George… but most inner thoughts, feelings, relationships and even pastimes of the period are lost to us.

The writings of Wilfred Owen and Muriel Spark, who I mention above, give us a much deeper and rounded understanding of those times than official documents, war memorials which give us names and dates. There are numerous memoirs and writings from that time I will never see, and many things remained unsaid.

But even our understanding of WWI is much more simple compared to those in other places.

In Belfast, for example, it means radically different things to the two main opposing groups there. For unionists, WWI represented the ultimate test of loyalty to Britain, the Empire and the Crown, and they are very proud of it. For republicans, it would lead to the Easter Rising, the partition of Ireland and the setting up of the Free State. There too, no doubt, there will be a significant younger contingent who have little interest in WWI.

For Russians, WWI represents the collapse of the Tsar’s government, and the birth of the Soviet Union, two things which their country is still trying to process under Putin. For the Serbs, it is even more complex – they often get the blame for starting it, but they also suffered some of the highest casualties by percentage. For the Italians and Japanese, the legacy is even more complex: both nations were on the winning side in WWI, which in turn led to them being on the losing one in WWII. In the first, they were allies of Britain, and in the second enemies to it. For Germans and Austrians, the commemoration of WWI history is even more complicated for obvious reasons.

WWI may end up in similar territory to the Napoleonic Wars in the modern memory. Remembrance will take a very different form in decades to come as the ties grow weaker. 

The British Army of the Killing Times in the Winter of 1685 #History #Scotland

Posted on by raybell1820

“Edinburgh – Nine companies of the King’s Regiment of Footguards in and about Edinburgh.
Four squadrons of the King’s Troop of Lifeguards at the Canongate, Dalkeith, Musselburgh, Corstorphine and adjacent places.”

Jardine's Book of Martyrs

On 10 December, 1685, General William Drummond wrote a memorial of the winter quarters appointed for the King’s Scottish Army, aka., the British Army, until further orders.

The modern regiments descended from these regiments are @scots_guards, @2_SCOTS
and @SCOTS_DG

‘The winter quarters appointed for his majesties forces till furder ordor:
The Kings troop of guards, consisting of four squadrons, att the Canongate, Dalkeith, Musselburgh, Christorphin and the next adjacent places.
The regiment of horse consisting of sex troops.
The collonell at Jedburgh in Tiviotdale.
The leivetenent collonells at Drumfreis in Nithsdale.
The majors at Glasgow in Clidsdale.
The Earle of Balcarres at Calder and Bathgate, by turns, in West Louthian.
The Earl of Airlies at Mauchline, Newmilnes, Mayboll annd Kilmarnock, by turnes in Aire-shire.
Lord William Douglas at the toun of Kirkcudbright.
The regiment of dragoons consisting of sex troops.
The collonells troop at Drumfreis in Nithsdale.
The leivetenent…

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