Pegg Highland Folk Tales

1. Auflage 2011
ISBN: 978-0-7524-7817-3
Verlag: The History Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 192 Seiten

Reihe: Folk Tales

The Highlands of Scotland are rich in traditional stories. Even today, in the modern world of the internet and supermarkets, old legends dating as far back as the times of the Gaels, Picts and Vikings are still told at night around the fireside. They are tales of the daoine sìth - the fairy people - and their homes in the green hills; of great and gory battles; of encounters with the last wolves in Britain; of solitary ghosts; and of supernatural creatures like the selkie, the mermaid, and the Fuath, Scotland's own Bigfoot. In a vivid journey through the Highland landscape, from the towns and villages to the remotest places, by mountains, cliffs, peatland and glen, storyteller and folklorist Bob Pegg takes the reader along old and new roads to places where legend and landscape are inseparably linked.

In a career lasting over half a century, storyteller, musician and songwriter BOB PEGG has performed in venues ranging from a Viking longhouse in the wilds of Iceland to the Royal Festival Hall in London. For sixteen years he was an arts worker in the Highlands of Scotland, organising the Tales at Martinmas festival and the Merry Dancers Storytelling Project. He has written a number of books on the themes of folklore and folk tales - three of them for The History Press - and the stories in his broad repertoire reflect the places he has visited and the cultures he has encountered.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Pegg, Bob

Leseproben

INTRODUCTION

In 1989 I moved from North Yorkshire to the Scottish Highlands. I came to live in Hilton, one of the Seaboard villages on the Nigg peninsula in Easter Ross. The three communities that make up the villages – Shandwick, Balintore and Hilton itself – thread round a bay in an unbroken string of white dwellings. They are old settlements. Their names, present and past, derive both from Gaelic and from Old Norse. In Gaelic, Balintore is Baile an Todhair, the bleaching town. For the Vikings, Shandwick was a sandy bay, and Cadboll, in the region of Hilton, was the farm of the cats. Out in the bay south of Shandwick is a rock shelf known as the King’s Sons, where local tradition holds that three Viking princes drowned when they came seeking revenge against the Earl of Ross for his cruel treatment of their sister.

The Nigg peninsula is known particularly for the three great sculpted slabs that once stood in Hilton, Shandwick and Nigg (the Hilton stone is now in the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, and was replaced by a replica, carved by Barry Grove, in 2000). At one time people believed that the stones had been erected to commemorate the three Viking princes who perished out in the bay. We now know that they were carved by the Picts, some time around the ninth century. They show hunting scenes, bestiaries, trumpeters, a harp, a woman apparently riding side-saddle, together with elaborately ornamented crosses and an array of symbols whose meanings have never been convincingly interpreted. In 1996 the discovery of the site of a Pictish monastery at Portmahomack, at the north-east tip of the peninsula, made it plain why such impressive Christian cross-slabs would be found close by.

One evening early in my first January in Hilton I saw fire, miles away on the far side of the Moray Firth. It was years later that I realised I must have glimpsed the Burghead Clavie, a rare survivor of what, not so long ago, were widespread midwinter fire parades. In Burghead, a blazing tar barrel is carried around the village – the site of a Pictish fort – on the shoulders of local men. Some believe that the Clavie is a survival from pagan times, a vital ceremony designed to ensure the return of light in the middle of winter darkness; it’s a fitting, if romantic, belief, in a place whose latitude is further north than that of Moscow, and whose winters can be long and hard.

The Seaboard villages can seem more isolated than the apparently more remote communities of the West Highlands, even though they are only a few miles off the A9, the main road to the north. Twenty years ago, the majority of the inhabitants were people whose families had lived there at least since the nineteenth century, the times of the Highland Clearances, when they had been evicted from their crofts in Sutherland, and Gaelic was still the first language of a handful of the older folk. They were the last generation of native speakers in the East Highlands, apart from some members of the Traveller community who still speak it today; though even among the Travellers it has almost died out.

One of the native Gaelic speakers in the village when I first arrived was Cathy Ross (there were many Rosses in the Seaboard). She was a tiny little lady who had never married, and who lived in a small, immaculately kept cottage just along Shore Street. Every day she would pass by my front door, taking a walk round the block for exercise, and would always stop to chat. The older inhabitants of Hilton knew her as ‘Toy’.

Dolly MacDonald, another Hilton dweller, was of a generation younger than Toy. I would often see her walking Mac, her West Highland Terrier, along the path between my garden and the beach. One morning I was sitting out in the sun playing the melodeon – an old-fashioned squeeze box. Dolly came towards me along the path, with Mac trotting beside her. She stopped by the gate and danced a little jig to the music. ‘My grandmother used to have one of those,’ she said, meaning the melodeon. ‘There was a lot of music around when we were bairns.’ She began to talk about the old times, and told me the story of a young man who lived in Balintore. ‘Did you hear of him?’ she said.

This is how I remember Dolly’s story. The young man was walking along Shandwick beach one day when he saw in the distance a merrymaid – that was Dolly’s name for a mermaid – sitting on a rock. She was very beautiful and he thought she looked as if she’d make a good wife, but he wondered how he could stop her going back to the sea. He remembered something he’d heard – that if you find a merrymaid sitting on a rock and you walk around the rock three times widdershins, her tail will fall away. He thought he’d give it a try. He walked round the rock three times, and indeed her tail did drop off, and she had a good pair of legs underneath it.

The young man grabbed the tail and ran back to his cottage. He went to the shed at the bottom of the garden, folded the tail up and hid it behind the plant pots. Then he went into the kitchen and waited. Well, eventually he saw the merrymaid coming up the road, getting used to her land legs. She knocked at his door. When he answered it she asked for her tail back. He wouldn’t give it to her, but he did invite her in. They shared a pot of tea and got on quite well together and soon they were married, and in time they had three children.

She was a good mother but she missed her life in the sea. One day the man woke up and there was no sign of the merrymaid. He went down the garden to the shed and looked behind the plant pots, and the tail had gone. Of course she must have found it and slipped it back on and returned to the sea. That was the last the man and the three children ever saw of her.

That was Dolly’s story. I had heard something like it before, told not about a mermaid but a selkie girl. The selkies, whom we’ll meet again later, are shape-changers. They are seals who can become human on land by taking off their skins. The story was about a young man who stole a selkie’s skin, so that she was forced to marry him; it became so popular in the late twentieth century that it was made into a children’s picture book, and became a feminist parable, in which a woman has to choose between her family and her true nature. But tellings of it were always set in a misty Celtic past. Dolly’s story took place just down the road in Balintore, some time within the past few years. The young man himself might still be living, perhaps remarried to a Seaboard girl.

The Highlands are no Arcadia. They famously have a turbulent, often cruel past, and are beset today by the same kinds of social problems and personal fears that afflict other parts of Britain. But hearing Dolly MacDonald tell the story of the merrymaid so casually that summer morning made me realise that I had come to live in a place where old folk tales were still living and breathing, and were part of the landscape and the life of communities.

On one occasion, I had an experience so strange that it felt as if I was actually in one of these stories. Among the many snippets of local lore that Dolly passed on was that there was a family in the Seaboard who were ‘off the seals’, meaning that, like the renowned MacCodrums of South Uist, their lineage had been enriched by a liaison between humans and the people of the sea.

November 5th was a big date in the Seaboard calendar. Small fires were lit in gardens and in streets throughout the villages, but there were two big bonfires, one in Balintore, the other in Hilton, and there was great rivalry between the supporters of each. The house of one of my close neighbours, a retired naval man, overlooked the field where the Hilton bonfire was stacked high, and he had taken it upon himself to keep watch, to make sure the Balintore boys didn’t sneak in and set it alight before the allotted time. When the evening of the 5th arrived, the Hilton field reeled in a bacchanal of explosions and merriment, with schoolchildren, matrons, respectable village tradespeople and shrieking teenage girls weaving round each other, and men brandishing half bottles staggering through the smoke. My neighbour was also the official lighter of fireworks. When the last Roman Candle had expired, and the bonfire was down to glowing ash, he beckoned me into his back garden. The old seadog had managed to procure a bottle of Pusser’s rum, which he had hidden in the garden – but had apparently hidden so well that we couldn’t find it at all (later we discovered that his wife had been there before us, had found the bottle and confiscated it).

‘Never mind,’ he said, ‘I know where there’ll be a drink.’ I followed him back into the field, over stone walls and down little paths for what seemed like miles, until we climbed over a fence into someone’s back garden. Without knocking, the sober sailor entered, with me close behind. In the kitchen, round a big wooden table, sat a group of people who all had round, pale faces and big brown eyes. I felt as if I was the seal killer entering the kingdom of the selkie folk – his story is told later. Surely these were the people Dolly had spoken of. Whether or not they were off the seals, we were shown great hospitality and they were warm company, though I never did meet any of them again.

Seven years after I came to the Highlands, early in the summer of 1996, Mairi MacArthur and I were in Thin’s bookshop in Inverness, for the launch of Timothy Neat’s book . The book gathers together the spoken autobiographies of some of the...