Showing posts with label Solway Coast. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Solway Coast. Show all posts

At Brow Well on the Solway



At Brow Well on the Solway, you walk to the very edge of the land and almost tumble into a mass of thrift, clumps of pink flowers fringing the shore, like some wild garden. They face the sea, looking outwards and when the wind blows through them, they tremble with a dry, feathery sound.

At all times of the year, the wind blows unhindered across these mudflats. There is nothing to stop it, down here, on the Solway. The sky is dazzling: high and bright with the glitter of a sun half hidden behind clouds. It is a place of endings, of dizzying infinities. A place where long horizontals constantly carry the eye outwards and beyond.

In June, when the thrift is still in bloom, it is as restful as it will ever be. There are wild roses in the hedgerows, white, pale and dark pink. There is a froth of bramble flowers with the promise of fruit to come. Oystercatchers and peewits patrol the mud. There are whaups bubbling in the peaty wastes. And you can hear the laverock, climbing higher and higher, to the very edges of sound and tumbling through the skies in an ecstasy of movement. Down there, in front of you, a burn meanders through the mud, fresh water meeting salt, while beyond that again is more mud and silver water, cloud shadows and the misty hills of another country. But it is still the loneliest sight you will ever see.

On the third of July in the year 1796, Robert Burns left his home in Dumfries and travelled to Brow Well on the Solway. It was, essentially, a poor man’s spa. There was a chalybeate or mineral spring with a stone tank built to house it and not much else. One Doctor Maxwell had diagnosed a wholly fictional malady called Flying Gout, and advised him to drink the waters in an effort to alleviate his symptoms. He was thin, he was weak, he could barely eat and he was in constant pain. He stayed in a cottage close by. He ate a little thin porridge, and drank some porter with milk in it. When the porter bottle was empty, he told his landlady that the ‘muckle black deil’ had got into his wallet, and asked her if she would accept his personal seal as payment but she refused it and brought him the porter anyway. 

In July, the thrift would have been dying. As well as instructing him to drink the foul tasting waters, the doctors had recommended that Robert should try seabathing. They were only following the fashion of the time. In the south of England there would have been snug bathing machines and separate beaches for men and women to indulge in the novelty of salt water against skin. One month’s bathing in January was thought to be more efficacious than six months in summer. But perhaps there was a sense of urgency in the poet’s case. No time to wait for winter.

He was, no doubt, in that state of desperation where you will try anything. He would have gone struggling and staggering and wading into the sea, half a mile every day, far enough for the water to reach up to his waist, because that’s what the doctors had advised. Did they know how shallow these waters were? How far he would have to walk? How bitter the struggle for desperate mind over failing flesh? His landlady would have gone flounder trampling when she was a lassie, kilting her skirts up and wading out into the firth, feeling for the fishes with her toes. Did he feel the Solway flounders slithering away beneath his unsteady feet? It was his last chance of a cure and he was full of fear. Fear for his wife who was heavily pregnant. Fear of debt. Fear of death.

Nearby is the village of Ruthwell. In the church, there is an Anglo Saxon Cross. It is so tall that the floor has been dug out to make room for it. Because it was judged an idolatrous monument with its intricate carving, its runic inscriptions, which must have seemed suspiciously pagan, it was smashed into pieces on the orders of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. That was in 1664, but it lay where it fell for many years and the good folk of Ruthwell used the stone blocks as benches to sit upon, while they yawned their way through interminable sermons. They had to destroy it where it stood, because the cross was there long before the kirk, which was built around it, an irony which seems to have been lost on these stone killers, as they were sometimes called. They would light fires beneath the stone and pour cold water on the cracks until they split apart.

Later the pieces were removed into the churchyard, which was where the poet may have seen them. In 1818, one Henry Duncan gathered the fragments together and restored the whole. The runes are a quotation from a powerful Anglo Saxon poem called The Dream of the Rood. It is a poem in two voices – the dreamer who relates his dream and the voice of the cross itself, telling how he – or perhaps she, for there is a certain sexual element in the poem - was cut down in the forest, how the young hero was sacrificed, struggling in blood and pain upon the body of the tree, both of them victims of a savage betrayal. Rod wæs ic aræred. Ahof ic ricne cyning. A cross I was raised. I lifted the mighty king on high. The poet’s voice calls to us down the years but only if we are willing to listen.

The seawater would have done some good only in that it numbed the pain. In July at Brow Well on the Solway, you can still hear how the laverocks climb to the very edges of sound while at his feet there would be the silvery meander of a burn finally finally

It would have been his last chance. 



He had been a week at the salt water and had secret fears that this business would be dangerous if not fatal. No flesh or fish could he swallow. Porridge and milk and porter were the only things he could taste. And how could he attempt horseriding, which the doctors had also ordered, when he could not so much as drag himself up into the saddle?

‘God help my wife and children if I am taken from their head with Jean eight months gone’ he wrote. He sent letters to his father-in-law, James Armour, begging him to ask Jean’s mother come to Dumfries, but Mary Armour was visiting relatives in Fife and there was only silence from Mauchline. His correspondence reeks of desperation.

From the middle of the month, the tides were unsuitable for bathing, so he went home, borrowing a gig from a farmer named John Clark, in Locharwoods. When he got back to Dumfries, he was too weak to walk up the Mill Vennel, let alone climb the stairs to his bed. 

Poor Burns had almost run his course. Still, he must struggle with the stream, till some chopping squall overset the silly vessel at last. Love swells like the Solway but ebbs like the tide. Life too. And all the sweet waters flowing by, the bonnie banks and green braes, all the soft flesh, pressed close, all these things come only to love and he was a poet who wrote of love.

It is not hard to see these things, here at Brow Well, on the Solway. He walks to the sea, and comes to the edge of the land and almost falls into a great mass of thrift, clumps of pink, fringing the shore like some wild garden. But it is already dying. You can picture him. You can see him in your mind's eye, as he goes struggling and staggering and wading through the water. It is July. The wind blows unhindered across the mudflats.

You come to the edge of the land. The thrift fringes the shore like some wild garden. But it is already fading to brown. When the wind blows through the flowers , they tremble, with a dry, feathery sound. You walk to the sea and there are laverocks singing. Who knows where sky ends and sea begins or where sea dissolves into sand? This is a place of endings, a place of infinities. He, who always sang of rivers and streams, is coming, at last, to the sea.


Donald Pirie and Clare Waugh as Rab and Jean



You can buy a copy of the Jewel here








The Last Days of Robert Burns

I'm reblogging this from Authors Electric today, because it's a significant anniversary - the day Robert Burns died, in the house at Mill Hole Brae, in Dumfries.

I can’t think of anything except Robert Burns at the moment – well, Robert Burns and Jean Armour – since I’m deep into a new novel about Jean and becoming ever more absorbed in the lives of the couple. It helps that I’m living in Ayrshire and it’s summer and the landscape here is very beautiful and – once you get off the beaten track – not a million miles from the way it must have looked in Burns’s day. It strikes me that I could probably write a whole other book about researching this novel. This has involved not just online research, but visits to the various places where they lived and worked. I've also used various old books, collections of his poetry and other volumes of the time, even if the connection is fairly tenuous, like the beautiful little Old Testament below - most of them bought on eBay or in our local saleroom.

Clarinda's husband's cousin's bible!
There’s nothing quite like holding in your hands a book printed before or not long after the poet’s death – and most certainly while his widow was still alive.

But the poet himself died young, at the age of 37,  on 21st July 1796. I’ve been looking at pictures of his signature, once so bold and beautiful, but not long before his death, at the early age of thirty seven, it had deteriorated into a sad, frail scrawl, laboriously inscribed onto the page and with a little blot to one side. It haunts me, that signature from the beginning of the July in which he died, because it’s clear that he can no longer even hold a pen properly.

The bare facts of his death can still make me cry. 

Some years ago when I was working on a play about his last days, down on the Solway Coast, I went to the Brow Well near Ruthwell in Dumfriesshire – a sort of poor man’s spa, a tank into which a ‘chalybeate’ spring drains. People would come to drink these waters, known to contain iron salts, in hopes of a cure.  There used to be a huddle of cottages, in one of which Burns took lodgings. He had been prescribed seabathing for what was called the ‘flying gout’: gout in the sense that he was in intense pain, flying because it was everywhere.

We can’t be sure exactly what killed him, but there is some evidence that he had rheumatic fever when he was young, that hard work on stony ground had placed stress on his heart and that endocarditis was the cause of his death. He seemed to suffer from what would certainly be diagnosed as panic attacks throughout his life, and quite possibly bipolar disorder or clinical depression as well. Certainly in those last months he had the high temperature, the chills, the night sweats, the intense fatigue, the muscle and joint pain that are symptoms of endocarditis. It all seems to have come on relatively slowly, which – I gather – is evidence of subacute pulmonary heart disease – something that he may have had for a long time. He was in intense pain, he was confused and worried, he could hardly eat – and the doctors had prescribed seabathing.

You have to understand that down on the Solway, there are mudflats and the sea is very shallow. People go flounder trampling there, feeling for flatfish with their bare toes. I went there on a June day, a few years ago, and found an atmospheric place of long horizontals. There was a mass of pink thrift, a natural rock garden, fringing the shore near the Brow Well, and then a vast expanse of glistening water, like polished metal, cold even in summer, into which he must have struggled and staggered, because he had been told that the water must reach his waist. God knows how he did it. I remember wondering why he didn’t die on the spot, but he even said it did him a bit of good, although I suspect it just numbed the pain.

He was running out of money and he was running out of time. People are fond of pointing out that he wasn’t exactly destitute, and he certainly wasn’t. But he was an exciseman, a customs officer, and this was an active profession. A few years previously, he had been riding 200 miles a week, even in the middle of winter, through hail, rain and snow. Now he was based in Dumfries, but it was still hard work. His writing wasn’t exactly lucrative and he had refused payment for his song collecting and writing, seeing it as a service to the nation, a nation that seemed rather stubbornly to resist helping him out in more acceptable ways. The fear of penury that comes with sickness, with the inability to work, and with a large family to support, must have haunted his last days, and the more sick he became, the worse his fears grew for that family. Jean was heavily pregnant with his last child, a son. She would give birth on the day of his funeral.

Clare Waugh and Donald Pirie as Jean and Rab at Glasgow's Oran Mor
Production pictures by Lesley Black.

Earlier, he had written:
Waefu want and hunger fley me
Glowrin by the hallan en
Sair I fecht them at the door
But aye I’m eerie they come ben.


Woeful want and hunger frighten me, glowering by the porch (not quite, but there’s no equivalent!)
I always fight them at the door, but I’m terrified they’ll come in.


He was aye eerie they would come ben.


Also, he knew he had not set his papers in order and he fretted about his work. He knew that they were hawking ballads on the streets of Dumfries with his name attached to them, paltry pieces of work that he had not written and would have been ashamed of. He was desperately worried about leaving Jean to cope with all this. A haberdasher had threatened him with prosecution for an unpaid debt. The reality was that somebody would have paid it for him, people owed him money, but in his woeful state of health and mind, the threat must have loomed very large.

He offered his landlady his seal – a beautiful piece he had designed himself in happier days - if she would refill his bottle of port wine, because that and a little milk was all he could manage to swallow, but she refused the seal and filled the bottle anyway. She arranged with a local farmer to lend him a gig so that he could get back to Dumfries, some ten miles away. He could not have ridden. He could not have mounted a horse. On 18th July, he came home to Dumfries. He got down from the gig at the foot of the cobbled vennel where the family lived, and had to be helped – oxtered - up to the house by Jessie Lewars, a young neighbour who was helping Jean. He could not walk alone. They sent the children out with friends to keep the house quiet for him. He took to his bed, and lived only three more days, dying on this day in 1796. Jessie made the children gather the wild flowers he had loved to strew over the body.

Then, of course, everyone came scrambling out of the woodwork to attend the great poet’s funeral and to beg, borrow and steal scraps of his life from his widow. They never stopped harassing her throughout her long life, and she treated them all with patience and understanding.

 I suppose we – and I don’t except myself here – have been doing it ever since.



My novel about Jean Armour is due for publication some time next year, but if you want to see what else I've written set at much the same time, you could try The Physic Garden, available as an eBook and in paperback from, as they say 'all good bookstores' as well as online, here in the UK and here in the US.

Burns on the Solway Now on Kindle


I've just uploaded my play Burns on the Solway to Kindle (with extreme difficulty, I might add, so if you buy it, please forgive any formatting glitches!  Plays are much harder than novels to format!) It was staged at the Oran Mor in Glasgow, and is a play about the last few weeks of Robert Burns' life, down on the Solway Coast of Dumfries and Galloway. I remember clearly when I first had the idea for this play although it was many years before I wrote it and even more years before the actual production.
We were camping on the shores of Loch Ken, as we used to do every summer when the village kids were young, going off in a huge group (sometimes as many as 50 adults, kids and dogs. We used to tell the police that we were all going to be away!) to camp and go canoeing and boating. The kids, all grown-up now, still remember it as a magical time. The adults all remember it as fairly magical too, although we also remember the extreme cold, on occasions, and the thunder-storms and the mud and the endless barbecues. But on the whole, it was wonderful.
It was on one of these trips that - since son, husband, and others were out on the lake - I took myself off in the car, alone,  to a place called Brow Well on the Solway, which was the 'poor man's spa' to which the seriously ill poet was sent by his doctors, and advised to go 'sea-bathing' in an effort to find a cure for what may have been a terminal heart condition, although there are still debates about the cause of his death. It doesn't look as if it has changed much in all the years since, a simple, picturesque place with a chalybeate spring, and a few cottages. From there, it's a short walk down to the coast, where the mud flats stretch to infinity and there is a wild rock garden fringing the whole place with big clumps of pink thrift, rustling in the breeze, and other small flowers clinging to the edges of the land. A deeply atmospheric and evocative place. And I was there at the same time of year - July, when the thrift was dying.
Not hard to imagine the poet here. And then you realise, with a shock, just what 'seabathing' must have entailed. The water is wide and shallow and for him to wade until he was waist high must have entailed a terrible struggle through cold water. He was still a young man, his wife Jean was about to go into labour with his last child, he was terminally ill and he was totally poverty stricken, with people pursuing him for unpaid debts. A few weeks later, after his death, he was already being lauded as The Bard and people had descended on poor Jean in ravening hordes, begging for manuscripts, anything written in the poet's hand. Ghoulish souvenir hunting is not a modern phenomenon.
This is what the play is about, as well as everything that lead up to it. There are only three characters: Burns, played by Donald Pirie, looking and sounding and  being as like the poet as it was possible to be - uncanny really - an equally superb Clare Waugh as Jean, and Celine Donoghue as the musician, weaving her sinuous way between the two of them, playing a variety of instruments perfectly.
It was a lovely, well reviewed production and a totally happy process, directed by Michael Emans.
I have more writing on this theme planned - a couple of novels which are gnawing away at my imagination as these things have a habit of doing - but I can't imagine myself making a start on the first of them until next year. We'll see. Perhaps another visit to Brow Well will be needed. I love the poems and - in particular - the songs of Robert Burns and find myself coming back to the work and the man, as well as the women in his life, time after time. So perhaps it is time for me to tackle something longer on the subject.