Dumfriesshire: A Frontier Region

by Andrew McCulloch

Origin/Birlinn, £30

Review by Brian Morton

In the summer of 1818, John Keats went on a walking tour of the Lake District, Ireland and Scotland with his friend Charles Armitage Brown. As the pair approached Dumfries, the poet’s mood began to darken. He had begun to tire of “scenery”, but thought “human nature is finer”. Standing in front of Burns’s tomb, the immediate object of his pilgrimage, he began to compose one of his more sombre and incoherent sonnets: “The town, the churchyard, and the setting sun, / The clouds, the trees, the rounded hills all seem / Though beautiful, cold – strange – as in a dream / I dreamed long ago”.

Keats had much on his mind. His beloved brother Tom was dying, albeit quicker than John knew; his own career seemed stalled; he was mocked by Scotch reviewers as belonging to “Cockney school” of laddish pornographers; and the country was in the grip of political oppression – the “Peterloo” massacre, much discussed at the moment, was only months away. And yet, through or despite all this, Keats seemed to intuit something of Dumfries’s long and darkly ambiguous history.

The county’s story has been told before, most notably by Sir Herbert Maxwell in his 1896 A History of Dumfries and Galloway. Maxwell’s surname is as deeply inscribed in the region as Johnstone (the earls of Hartfell, Annandale and Hopetoun, so heavy hitters), Douglases “black”, “gross”, “dull”, “good” and “le hardi”, and, needless to say Bruce; these dynasties seem to dominate the medieval to early-modern period, reinforcing an impression of Nithsdale, Annandale, Eskdale as a distinct region with its own complex internal politics. Another name that figures strongly in the region is McCulloch and no one – not even Sir Herbert - has written about Dumfriesshire with such clear-eyed energy and verve as Andrew McCulloch. There’s considerable local pride and affection in his long account – we’re a full 150 pages in before we get a verdict on Robert Bruce – but not a whisper of hagiography. In a single, crisp paragraph, Bruce is rescued from one-dimensional heroism and exposed to a few “inconvenient” truths. Though raised in a Gaelic-speaking family, having been fostered out at birth, and despite holding a Scottish earldom, he spent much of his formative life among the English aristocracy and considered himself one of them. That’ll go down coldly in some quarters, but it makes an important point and helps correct our unshakable habit of mythologizing historical figures.

The only complaint about McCulloch’s book, if it be a complaint, is that instead of writing a county history, he has produced a history of Scotland from the point of view of one of its most tempestuous and politically ambiguous regions. Not for nothing was an ungovernable strip of it known as the Debatable Land. The frequency of reference to Lochmaben and Caerlaverock is a salutary reminder that the political geography of Scotland prior to the Union is very different from what we think it to be today, when the Central Belt and the other cities represent an epicentre. McCulloch’s subtitle is well chosen. It implies history as a dynamic and a process rather than a series of set-pieces.

With that in mind, he starts with Dumfries under the icesheet and brings his narrative to a close with a rain of fire from the Lockerbie bombing, one of the best and most measured short accounts of that terrible, tragic event you’ll ever read. What follows is a short coda on the Land Reform (Scotland) Act of 2016, which feels tacked-on but continues and rounds out McCulloch’s regular excursions on land use and management in the region. Dumfriesshire’s land, prior to improvement, was acid and grudging; only the monks seem to have wrangled it into productive use. When Keats visited, the countryside was only just recovering from the Year of No Summer, a chill, harvestless spell caused by the eruption of Mt Tambora. Burnings of a more deliberate sort – human nature in its less fine manifestation – were frequent, as is typical of border or frontier regions; and, just to keep the reader attentive and alert, there is much political trimming, turncoatery, and pragmatic switching of sides. This continued even into the 20th century, when Dumfriesshire’s county and burgh representation seemed to oscillate, though not unrepresentatively, between Liberal, Unionist and even Labour interests.

You’ll find no mention of Keats in McCulloch’s Dumfriesshire. It would be odd if there were, because he shows no great interest in native sons either. There is a brief mention of the great engineer Thomas Telford, who was born in Westerkirk, Eskdale; there’s a picture only of Thomas Carlyle, who was born and is buried in Ecclefechan, and left a corner of his heart in Craigenputtock, but nothing is said about him or his famous irascibility; no mention, either, of Hugh MacDiarmid (or Christopher Murray Grieve), who hailed from Langholm; and sadly, nothing about Kirkpatrick Macmillan, the inventor of the bicycle, who was born in Keir and did his work at Courthill Smithy. Perhaps Dumfriesshire McCullochs don’t talk to Dumfriesshire Macmillans. Stranger feuds have been known.

So rich and dramatic is the historical personnel that perhaps these modern references are not needed, but the tone is cooler and more detached as a result. A pity, perhaps. Some years ago, I got astride Kirkpatrick Macmillan’s invention and explored Dumfriesshire. It’s where the Mortons hail from: somewhere near Thornhill, as far as I can determine. There is a Half Morton parish further to the south and east, as if to remind me that I’m unlikely to make such an expedition again, and certainly not on a bicycle. If I were to, I’d have Andrew McCulloch’s book with me, even if that required separate transportation. It’s a big book, packed with detail and incident. It’s too objective and unflinching to become a vanity possession for proud Dumfriesians. For anyone who wants an attractively slanted, if not exactly biased, primer on Scottish history as a whole, it’s very hard to beat.