Essays of Travel (eBook)

CHAPTER IV - A WINTER'S WALK IN CARRICK AND GALLOWAY - A FRAGMENT -  1876

AT the famous bridge of Doon, Kyle, the central district of the shire  of Ayr, marches with Carrick, the most southerly.  On the Carrick  side of the river rises a hill of somewhat gentle conformation, cleft  with shallow dells, and sown here and there with farms and tufts of  wood.  Inland, it loses itself, joining, I suppose, the great herd of  similar hills that occupies the centre of the Lowlands.  Towards the  sea it swells out the coast-line into a protuberance, like a bay- window in a plan, and is fortified against the surf behind bold  crags.  This hill is known as the Brown Hill of Carrick, or, more  shortly, Brown Carrick.

It had snowed overnight.  The fields were all sheeted up; they were  tucked in among the snow, and their shape was modelled through the  pliant counterpane, like children tucked in by a fond mother.  The  wind had made ripples and folds upon the surface, like what the sea,  in quiet weather, leaves upon the sand.  There was a frosty stifle in  the air.  An effusion of coppery light on the summit of Brown Carrick  showed where the sun was trying to look through; but along the  horizon clouds of cold fog had settled down, so that there was no  distinction of sky and sea.  Over the white shoulders of the  headlands, or in the opening of bays, there was nothing but a great  vacancy and blackness; and the road as it drew near the edge of the  cliff seemed to skirt the shores of creation and void space.

The snow crunched under foot, and at farms all the dogs broke out  barking as they smelt a passer-by upon the road.  I met a fine old  fellow, who might have sat as the father in 'The Cottar's Saturday  Night,' and who swore most heathenishly at a cow he was driving.  And  a little after I scraped acquaintance with a poor body tramping out  to gather cockles.  His face was wrinkled by exposure; it was broken  up into flakes and channels, like mud beginning to dry, and weathered  in two colours, an incongruous pink and grey.  He had a faint air of  being surprised - which, God knows, he might well be - that life had  gone so ill with him.  The shape of his trousers was in itself a  jest, so strangely were they bagged and ravelled about his knees; and  his coat was all bedaubed with clay as tough he had lain in a rain- dub during the New Year's festivity.  I will own I was not sorry to  think he had had a merry New Year, and been young again for an  evening; but I was sorry to see the mark still there.  One could not  expect such an old gentleman to be much of a dandy or a great student  of respectability in dress; but there might have been a wife at home,  who had brushed out similar stains after fifty New Years, now become  old, or a round-armed daughter, who would wish to have him neat, were  it only out of self-respect and for the ploughman sweetheart when he  looks round at night.  Plainly, there was nothing of this in his  life, and years and loneliness hung heavily on his old arms.  He was  seventy-six, he told me; and nobody would give a day's work to a man  that age:  they would think he couldn't do it.  'And, 'deed,' he went  on, with a sad little chuckle, ''deed, I doubt if I could.'  He said  goodbye to me at a footpath, and crippled wearily off to his work.   It will make your heart ache if you think of his old fingers groping  in the snow.

He told me I was to turn down beside the school-house for Dunure.   And so, when I found a lone house among the snow, and heard a babble  of childish voices from within, I struck off into a steep road  leading downwards to the sea.  Dunure lies close under the steep  hill:  a haven among the rocks, a breakwater in consummate disrepair,  much apparatus for drying nets, and a score or so of fishers' houses.   Hard by, a few shards of ruined castle overhang the sea, a few  vaults, and one tall gable honeycombed with windows.  The snow lay on  the beach to the tidemark.  It was daubed on to the sills of the  ruin:  it roosted in the crannies of the rock like white sea-birds;  even on outlying reefs there would be a little cock of snow, like a  toy lighthouse.  Everything was grey and white in a cold and dolorous  sort of shepherd's plaid.  In the profound silence, broken only by  the noise of oars at sea, a horn was sounded twice; and I saw the  postman, girt with two bags, pause a moment at the end of the clachan  for letters.

It is, perhaps, characteristic of Dunure that none were brought him.

The people at the public-house did not seem well pleased to see me,  and though I would fain have stayed by the kitchen fire, sent me 'ben  the hoose' into the guest-room.  This guest-room at Dunure was  painted in quite aesthetic fashion.  There are rooms in the same  taste not a hundred miles from London, where persons of an extreme  sensibility meet together without embarrassment.  It was all in a  fine dull bottle-green and black; a grave harmonious piece of  colouring, with nothing, so far as coarser folk can judge, to hurt  the better feelings of the most exquisite purist.  A cherry-red half  window-blind kept up an imaginary warmth in the cold room, and threw  quite a glow on the floor.  Twelve cockle-shells and a half-penny  china figure were ranged solemnly along the mantel-shelf.  Even the  spittoon was an original note, and instead of sawdust contained sea- shells.  And as for the hearthrug, it would merit an article to  itself, and a coloured diagram to help the text.  It was patchwork,  but the patchwork of the poor; no glowing shreds of old brocade and  Chinese silk, shaken together in the kaleidoscope of some tasteful  housewife's fancy; but a work of art in its own way, and plainly a  labour of love.  The patches came exclusively from people's raiment.   There was no colour more brilliant than a heather mixture; 'My  Johnny's grey breeks,' well polished over the oar on the boat's  thwart, entered largely into its composition.  And the spoils of an  old black cloth coat, that had been many a Sunday to church, added  something (save the mark!) of preciousness to the material.

While I was at luncheon four carters came in - long-limbed, muscular  Ayrshire Scots, with lean, intelligent faces.  Four quarts of stout  were ordered; they kept filling the tumbler with the other hand as  they drank; and in less time than it takes me to write these words  the four quarts were finished - another round was proposed,  discussed, and negatived - and they were creaking out of the village  with their carts.

The ruins drew you towards them.  You never saw any place more  desolate from a distance, nor one that less belied its promise near  at hand.  Some crows and gulls flew away croaking as I scrambled in.   The snow had drifted into the vaults.  The clachan dabbled with snow,  the white hills, the black sky, the sea marked in the coves with  faint circular wrinkles, the whole world, as it looked from a loop- hole in Dunure, was cold, wretched, and out-at-elbows.  If you had  been a wicked baron and compelled to stay there all the afternoon,  you would have had a rare fit of remorse.  How you would have heaped  up the fire and gnawed your fingers!  I think it would have come to  homicide before the evening - if it were only for the pleasure of  seeing something red!  And the masters of Dunure, it is to be  noticed, were remarkable of old for inhumanity.  One of these vaults  where the snow had drifted was that 'black route' where 'Mr. Alane  Stewart, Commendatour of Crossraguel,' endured his fiery trials.  On  the 1st and 7th of September 1570 (ill dates for Mr. Alan!), Gilbert,  Earl of Cassilis, his chaplain, his baker, his cook, his pantryman,  and another servant, bound the Poor Commendator 'betwix an iron  chimlay and a fire,' and there cruelly roasted him until he signed  away his abbacy. it is one of the ugliest stories of an ugly period,  but not, somehow, without such a flavour of the ridiculous as makes  it hard to sympathise quite seriously with the victim.  And it is  consoling to remember that he got away at last, and kept his abbacy,  and, over and above, had a pension from the Earl until he died.

Some way beyond Dunure a wide bay, of somewhat less unkindly aspect,  opened out.  Colzean plantations lay all along the steep shore, and  there was a wooded hill towards the centre, where the trees made a  sort of shadowy etching over the snow.  The road went down and up,  and past a blacksmith's cottage that made fine music in the valley.   Three compatriots of Burns drove up to me in a cart.  They were all  drunk, and asked me jeeringly if this was the way to Dunure.  I told  them it was; and my answer was received with unfeigned merriment.   One gentleman was so much tickled he nearly fell out of the cart;  indeed, he was only saved by a companion, who either had not so fine  a...