RB Cunninghame's Pollybaglan is a mystical vision of the forgotten past

Like “The Laroch”, it’s a slow, vivid, melancholy description of a desolate stretch of land by Flanders Moss in Stirlingshire, and a small half-derelict farmhouse and the man who dwells in it.

It’s a damp, mossy, watery place, immersed in a quasi-mystical vision, saturated with the sense that “the forgotten past still lived in spite of us” and a depth of Celtic “glamourie” or grim enchantment. The wind among the reeds on the riverbanks sounds out low, sorrowful music.

The man we meet, the “bodach”, spins his strange account of his experience going down into the depths of the river to encounter the trout and the salmon and pike close up. Like Coleridge’s ancient mariner, he buttonholes the reader as he addresses the Laird who’s unlikely to get more than a few words for his rent. But what strange words they are. This man will not let us go until he’s done. Now read on …

POLLYBAGLAN By RB Cunninghame Graham

Alone it stood, outside the world, remote and desolate, washed by a sea of heather, just where the sluggish Forth, meandering slowly like a stream of oil through Flanders Moss, had formed a grassy link, but not of those which, as the saying went, were worth a knight’s fee in the north.

Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham

In times gone by, the moss which in most places marches with the Forth, leaving a narrow ribbon of green turf, had been drained off, and floated down the stream, exposing in its in its place some acres of stiff clay and a dull whitish scaur. In these, the steading stood like some lacustrine dwelling, on the river’s edge, shut from the world of moss. 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.

The drumly water flowed between banks of peat, through which at intervals a whitish clay peeped out, like strata in a mine. Slowly it flowed in many windings towards the sea, cutting the Flanders Moss across, receiving, as it went, the streams which gurgled deep below the surface of the ground, forming canyons in miniature and issuing out to join the river through a dense growth of bulrushes, rank growing coltsfoot, and low alder bushes.

The deep black pools on which the foam brought by the current slowly whirled round and round before it took its course down stream were menacing in their intensity of gloom. Rarely the sun fell right upon them, and when it did its light ever appeared to pierce the water, which seemed to turn it back again, as if the bottom held some mystery down in its amber depths.

Perhaps in ages past some Celtic fishers paddled their coracles, had chosen out the place to build their cottary, remote from all mankind and inaccessible. But having chosen, with the instinct of their race, they gave a name to it which, strange and incoherent to the Saxon ear, to them was typical of the chief feature of the place. Stream of the ragweed it was dubbed by the rude settlers, perhaps when all Moss Flanders was a forest, stretching to the sea.

And still the ragweed grew luxuriantly in the stiff soil, commemorating the keen eyes of the first settlers, although the meaning of the name had long been lost, and twisted by the Anglo-Saxon tongue past recognition by the Celt.

The road which wound about the white clayey soil between the banks of moss which shut out the horizon was laid on faggots, and in places drew so near the river’s bank that a cart’s body passing seemed to overhang the stream. Such as it was, this track was the sole link with the unquiet world which had its being on the far side of the great moss.

But that the quiet of the mossland farm should not too easily be broken by swift contact with mankind, the path ran up and down to every house upon the moss, making strange zigzags and parabolas, till it emerged at last on the high road. Carts in the winter time sunk to their axles, whilst in summer horses’ feet stuck in the cracks formed in the sun-baked earth. But though the road was bad, to make communication still more difficult at intervals rough farm gates barred the way. Hung loosely, and secured by rusty back-band chains of carts, or formed of barked and crooked oak poles stuck into horseshoes in a rugged post, they either forced you to dismount, and pull laboriously each bar from its confining horseshoe, or tempted you to open them on horseback, when their schauchling hinges and bad balance usually drove them on your horse’s hocks as you essayed to pass.

When all the obstacles were overcome and you had reached your goal and slithered through the clay which formed the fields between the river and the moss, the world seemed leagues away. That is, the ancient world in which men plough and reap and sow, watching the weather as a fisherman watches the shaking of his sail, possessed one, and real things resumed their sway, whilst agiotage and politics, with arts and sciences, fell to their proper value in the great scheme of life.

The scanty crop of oats, growing like rice in water which seemed to lie eternally in the depressions of the clay, although the dwellers in the farm averred that it “seeped bonnily awa’ at the back en’,” became as all-important as the Stock Exchange.

The meagre turnips and potatoes, drooping and blackening with disease, between whose furrows persicaria and fumitory grew, moved one’s compassion, and excited admiration for the men who, in the fight with Nature, wrung a livelihood from such unfruitful soil.

Fences there naturally were none, but piles of brushwood fastened with rusty wire to ragged posts did duty for them, whilst broken ploughs, and carts which had seen weary service on the clayey roads, stood in the gaps and did as well as gates.

Some scattered drain-pipes lying in the fields looked like the relics of a battlefield of agriculture, in which the forces of the modern world had been defeated in the contest with the moss.

But road and drain-pipes, thatched farmhouse and broken fences, stunted crop and wind-hacked ash tree growing by the farm were but the outward signs, whilst the interior significance lay in the billowing moss, the sluggish river, and the background of the lumpy hills, which from the steading seemed to rise sheer from the heathy sea.

Vaguely the steading and the cultivated land stood out for progress; the broken carts and twisted ploughs seemed to stretch out their hands to Charing Cross; but moss and mountain, river flowing deep, the equisetum growing on its banks, and the sweet gale, its leaves all wet with mist, reminded one that the forgotten past still lived in spite of us.

Deep in the soughing of the wind, waving the heath with furrows and shaking out the dry brown seeds on the black soil, came sighs of a race whose joys were tinged with melancholy, and in the mists that crept along the faces of the hills its spirit seemed to brood, making the dwellers in the land appear as out of place as a poor Indian dressed in a torn frock coat and with an eagle’s feather stuck in a hard felt hat looks in a frontier town.

The tussocks of the heather were not made for boots to tread upon, nor the few acres of poor soil, redeemed at many times their worth fee simple, to be sown in a fourfold rotation, or to have top dressing and bone manure shot from an agricultural machine upon their clay.

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A pair of Highland garrons ought to have scratched the surface of the ground, yoked to some pristine plough by ropes which cut into their chests, or harrowed with a thorn bush, and the broken implements which lay about but seemed to accentuate the undying presence of an older world.

But as the place in which a man is set to live always proves stronger than his race or creed, the dweller in the farm, though not a Highlander, had put on all the exterior and not a few of the interior graces of the Celt.

Tall and shocked-headed and freckled on the red patches of skin which a rough crop of beard and whiskers left exposed, his eyes looked out upon the world as if he had a sort of second sight begot of whisky and loneliness.

His monstrous hands hung almost to his knees, which in their turn stuck forward in the way a horse’s hock sticks back, but for all that he crossed the moss as lightly as a mountain hare springs through the snow before a collie dog.

Although his feet, encased in heavy boots, looked more adapted to the muddy roads which wound through his domain than for the heather, he seemed to have become, during his life-long sojourn in the place, as light of foot as any clansman on whose feet in the old times the dun deer’s hide was tied to form a moccasin.

The country people said that he was “afu’ soople for his years”, which may have been some five and forty, or, on the other hand, threescore, for nothing told his age, and that he was a “lightsome traveller,” not that his travels ever carried him more than ten miles from Pollybaglan, but then with us to travel is to walk. Withal a swimmer, an unusual thing amongst the older generation in Menteith.

‘Ye ken, man laird, whiles I just dive richt to the bottom o’ a linn, and set doon there; ye’d think it was the inside o’ the Fairy Hill. Trooties, ye ken, and saumon, and they awfu’ pike, a’ comin’ round ye, and they bits of water weeds, waggin aboot like lairch trees in the blast. I mind ae time I stoppit doon nigh aboot half an hour. Maybe no just sae much, ye ken, but time gaes awfu’ quick when ye’re at the bottom o’ a linn.”

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These talents and his skill in walking on the moss, together with his love of broken carts and gates, did not perhaps go far towards making him an agriculturalist such as a landlord loves, but looking back into the past, although his rent was often in arrear, he laid up, so to speak, and quite unconsciously, a real treasure for his laird, which, though moth may corrupt, no thief would waste his time breaking through to steal, as it lies gathering dust on the top shelf of someone’s library.

And as the older life had entered into the body of the Lowland “bodach,” making him seem a Highlander in all but speech, so had it filled the air of the oasis in the peaty moss that the dry reeds upon the riverbanks were turned into chanters, and gave out their laments for the forgotten namers of the land. Well did they call it by the name Menteith, the district of the moss, for moss invaded the whole strath, filling the space which once had been a sea with waves of heather and bog asphodel.

Stretching from Meiklewood it kissed the Clach-nan-Lung. Lapping the edges of the hills upon the north and south shores of the heathy sea, it put a peaty bridle on the Forth, and from its depth at evening and at morn rose a white vapour which transformed it into a misty archipelago, upon whose waves the lonely steading rode, like the enchanted islands which old mariners descried, only to lose again into the fog at the first shift of wind.

Birch trees and firs reflected on the mirage of the mist floated like parachutes, and heath and sky were joined together by the vapoury pall which brooded on the moss, billowing and boiling as if some cauldron in the bowels of the earth was belching forth its steam.

Fences were blotted out, roads disappeared, and from the moss strange noises rose, as Forth lapped sullenly up against the bank where Pollybaglan stood.