back to the castle and lays her lover’s body at her father’s feet; then she kills herself.
I sat on a rock in the sunshine contentedly eating an apple until a small white van pulled up. It had a wonderful meaty smell; the driver was delivering school lunches in the valley. As we approached Yarrow, I asked whether he knew the song. ‘Och, aye,’ he said, and pointed to some ruins overlooking the town. ‘There’s the castle where the laird lived and yon hill over there’ – pointing to a beautiful sweep of upland beyond the town – ‘that’s where the killing took place. She rode back this way,’ and he pointed to a worn trail through the grass. ‘It happened in the eleventh century.’ I thought about all the fuss in Princeton when Warwick found a 185-year-old cannon ball from the Revolutionary War.
On the outskirts of Edinburgh, I got out Bill’s scrap of paper with the phone number of singer Dolina MacLennan and her husband George Brown. Not only did they offer to put me up, they used my arrival as an excuse for a party. Moreover, they lived in Roy’s old flat so I could lean out of the window and gauge the drama of Archie’s leap. The party was going strong until ten minutes to ten, when the men all rose and headed for the door. ‘It’s closing time, Joe,’ one said. I asked why, with a table full of ales and stouts, we had to worry about Scotland’s licensing laws. ‘That doesnae matter, Joe, it’s closing time !’ We all trooped out, leaving the ladies to put a dent in the remaining bottles.
The sign on the pub across the road reads The Forrest Bar, but it is universally known as Sandy Bell’s. While I was taking in this famous outpost for writers, musicians, politicians, artists and Scottish Nationalists, two of our party placed ritual orders for rounds of heavy. As I contemplated the pair of pint glasses in front of me, the man on my right, Hamish Henderson, enquired whether I was familiar with single malts. My ignorance was rewarded with doubles of Laphroaig and Talisker.
Henderson was a remarkable man. The last Pictish speaker on the planet, he ran the School of Scottish Studies at Edinburgh University and had travelled the Highlands collecting songs and stories and documenting the disappearing dialects and ways of life of the most remote glens and islands. I had made a small start on my beverage collection when the landlord slapped his heavy palm on the bar: ‘Drink up, drink up. Time, gentlemen, please!’
After choking down the doubles and the pints, I could barely walk. Hamish and I fell behind on the way back to the flat and he helped me up the dark stairway. On the second landing, he pinned me against the wall, muttering, ‘Let’s have a kiss of ye, lad.’ I found a second wind of sobriety and scrambled up the stairs.
After a circuit of the Highlands that ended at the Kelvin Museum, I was joined by Warwick for a trip to the ’65 Padstow May Day celebrations in Cornwall. In this ancient ritual, two ‘hobby-horse’ teams circulate through the fishing village for twenty-four hours, playing and singing a fertility-rite song. The ‘horse’ dances and twirls and tries to catch girls under the skirts of his costume. Every house and pub in Padstow receives this pagan serenade. The melody worms its way into your brain and you become addicted, listening out for it when you stray out of range.
The local economy may have been meagre, but the villagers had little use for tourists or publicity. Non-Cornish singers were grudgingly welcomed but a camera crew was dragged out of their hotel room and thrown – equipment and all – off the end of the dock. When the tide went out, a 16mm camera was revealed in the mud, waves lapping gently over it.
May Day 1965 in Padstow represented a high-water mark for the English traditional folk revival. The town was full of great singers: the Watersons, Martin Carthy, Luke Kelly of the Dubliners, Cyril Tawney, Maddy Prior, Louis Killen and Annie
I sat on a rock in the sunshine contentedly eating an apple until a small white van pulled up. It had a wonderful meaty smell; the driver was delivering school lunches in the valley. As we approached Yarrow, I asked whether he knew the song. ‘Och, aye,’ he said, and pointed to some ruins overlooking the town. ‘There’s the castle where the laird lived and yon hill over there’ – pointing to a beautiful sweep of upland beyond the town – ‘that’s where the killing took place. She rode back this way,’ and he pointed to a worn trail through the grass. ‘It happened in the eleventh century.’ I thought about all the fuss in Princeton when Warwick found a 185-year-old cannon ball from the Revolutionary War.
On the outskirts of Edinburgh, I got out Bill’s scrap of paper with the phone number of singer Dolina MacLennan and her husband George Brown. Not only did they offer to put me up, they used my arrival as an excuse for a party. Moreover, they lived in Roy’s old flat so I could lean out of the window and gauge the drama of Archie’s leap. The party was going strong until ten minutes to ten, when the men all rose and headed for the door. ‘It’s closing time, Joe,’ one said. I asked why, with a table full of ales and stouts, we had to worry about Scotland’s licensing laws. ‘That doesnae matter, Joe, it’s closing time !’ We all trooped out, leaving the ladies to put a dent in the remaining bottles.
The sign on the pub across the road reads The Forrest Bar, but it is universally known as Sandy Bell’s. While I was taking in this famous outpost for writers, musicians, politicians, artists and Scottish Nationalists, two of our party placed ritual orders for rounds of heavy. As I contemplated the pair of pint glasses in front of me, the man on my right, Hamish Henderson, enquired whether I was familiar with single malts. My ignorance was rewarded with doubles of Laphroaig and Talisker.
Henderson was a remarkable man. The last Pictish speaker on the planet, he ran the School of Scottish Studies at Edinburgh University and had travelled the Highlands collecting songs and stories and documenting the disappearing dialects and ways of life of the most remote glens and islands. I had made a small start on my beverage collection when the landlord slapped his heavy palm on the bar: ‘Drink up, drink up. Time, gentlemen, please!’
After choking down the doubles and the pints, I could barely walk. Hamish and I fell behind on the way back to the flat and he helped me up the dark stairway. On the second landing, he pinned me against the wall, muttering, ‘Let’s have a kiss of ye, lad.’ I found a second wind of sobriety and scrambled up the stairs.
After a circuit of the Highlands that ended at the Kelvin Museum, I was joined by Warwick for a trip to the ’65 Padstow May Day celebrations in Cornwall. In this ancient ritual, two ‘hobby-horse’ teams circulate through the fishing village for twenty-four hours, playing and singing a fertility-rite song. The ‘horse’ dances and twirls and tries to catch girls under the skirts of his costume. Every house and pub in Padstow receives this pagan serenade. The melody worms its way into your brain and you become addicted, listening out for it when you stray out of range.
The local economy may have been meagre, but the villagers had little use for tourists or publicity. Non-Cornish singers were grudgingly welcomed but a camera crew was dragged out of their hotel room and thrown – equipment and all – off the end of the dock. When the tide went out, a 16mm camera was revealed in the mud, waves lapping gently over it.
May Day 1965 in Padstow represented a high-water mark for the English traditional folk revival. The town was full of great singers: the Watersons, Martin Carthy, Luke Kelly of the Dubliners, Cyril Tawney, Maddy Prior, Louis Killen and Annie
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