Cloud Howe. Lewis Grassic Gibbon
finished.’ She turns back to look at the hills, bare of clouds for once—the clouds of past doctrines and ideologies, ‘the pillars of mist that aye crowned their heights, all but a faint wisp vanishing south, and the bare, still rocks upturned to the sky.’
What she sees in that epiphany is the reality of the high places and their granite peaks, not necessarily truer but certainly different from the REAL that is ‘below’. It was perhaps those perceptions of Chris that Neil Gunn called ‘wan or fey’, and that led Hugh MacDiarmid, the day after it first went on sale, to end his review with the challenging and provocative conclusion: ‘Cloud Howe is the only really religious book Scotland has produced for a century and a half.’8
Thomas Crawford
NOTES TO INTRODUCTION
MSS in the National Library of Scotland are quoted by kind permission of the NLS and of Gibbon’s daughter. Mrs Rhea Martin.
1. Quoted in Ian S. Munro, Leslie Mitchell: Lewis Grassic Gibbon (Edinburgh, 1966), p. 120.
2. Early list of ‘Dramatis Personae’ for The Morning Star, the first title that occurred to Gibbon for Cloud Howe, in NLS MS Acc. 26040.
3. Ian Campbell, Lewis Grassic Gibbon (Edinburgh, 1985), Ρ. 95.
4. In NLS MS Acc. 26064.
5. See ‘Action and Narrative Stance in A Scots Quair’, in Literature of the North, ed. David Hewitt and Michael Spiller (Aberdeen 1983), pp. 109–20; and Isobel Murray and Bob Tait, ‘Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A Scots Quair’, in Ten Modern Scottish Novels (Aberdeen 1984), pp.10–31. Also Deirdre Burton, ‘A Feminist Reading of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A Scots Quair’, in The British Working-Class Novel in the Twentieth Century, ed. J. Hawthorne (1984), pp.35–46
6. ‘A Feminist Reading’, p.38.
7. In NLS MS Acc. 2064. Gunn may have written ‘humans’ rather than ‘humors’.
8. In The Free Man, 29 July 1933.
The present text follows that of the first edition as scrupulously as possible, except in such matters of typographical styling as the use of roman, not italic, capitals for words emphasised in direct speech. Misprints that were not picked up in later editions have been corrected. We have gone back to the original paragraphs of 1933, and the map of Segget has been prepared from the one in the first edition.
THE BOROUGH of Segget stands under the Mounth, on the southern side, in the Mearns Howe, Fordoun lies near and Drumlithie nearer, you can see the Laurencekirk lights of a night glimmer and glow as the mists come down. If you climb the foothills to the ruined Kaimes, that was builded when Segget was no more than a place where the folk of old time had raised up a camp with earthen walls and with freestone dykes, and had died and had left their camp to wither under the spread of the grass and the whins—if you climbed up the Kaimes of a winter morn and looked to the east and you held your breath, you would maybe hear the sough of the sea, sighing and listening up through the dawn, or see a shower of sparks as a train came skirling through the woods from Stonehaven, stopping seldom enough at Segget, the drivers would clear their throats and would spit, and the guards would grin: as though ’twere a joke.
But God alone knows what you’d want on the Kaimes, others had been there and had dug for treasure, nothing they’d found but some rusted swords, tint most like in the wars once waged in the days when the wife of the Sheriff of Mearns, Finella she was, laid trap for the King, King Kenneth the Third, as he came on a hunting jaunt through the land. For Kenneth had done her own son to death, and she swore that she’d even that score up yet; and he hunted slow through the forested Howe, it was winter, they tell, and in that far time the roads were winding puddles of glaur, the horses splashed to their long-tailed rumps. And the men of Finella heard of his coming, as that dreich clerk Wyntoun has told in his tale:
As through the Mernys on a day
The kyng was rydand hys hey way;
Off hys awyne curt al suddanly
Agayne hym ras a cumpany
In to the towne of Fethyrkerne
To fecht wyth hym thai ware sa yherne
And he agayne thame faucht sa fast,
Bot he thare slayne was at the last.
So Kenneth was dead and there followed wars, Finella’s carles builded the Kaimes, a long line of battlements under the hills, midway a tower that was older still, a broch from the days of the Pictish men; there they lay and long months withstood the folk that came to avenge the death of Kenneth; and the darkness comes down on their waiting and fighting and all the ill things that they suffered and did.
The Kaimes was left bare and with ruined walls, as Iohannes de Fordun tells in his time, a Fordoun childe him and had he had sense he’d have hidden the fact, not spread it abroad. Some kind of a cleric he was in those days, just after the Bruce drove out the English, maybe Fordoun then had less of a smell ere Iohannes tacked on the toun to his name. Well, the Kaimes lay there in Iohannes’ time, he tells that the Scots folk halted there going north one night to the battle of Bara; and one man with the Scots, a Lombard he was, looked out that morn as the army roused and the bugles blew out under the hills, and he saw the mists that went sailing by and below his feet the sun came quick down either slope of a brae to a place where a streamlet ran by a ruined camp. And it moved his heart, and he thought it an omen, in his own far land there were camps like that; and he swore that if he should survive the battle he’d come back to this place and claim grant of its land.
Hew Monte Alto was the Lombard’s name and he fought right well at the Bara fight, and when it was over and the Bruce made King, he asked of the Bruce the lands that lay under the Kaimes in the windy Howe. These lands had been held by the Mathers folk, but they had made peace with Edward the First and given him shelter and welcome the night he halted in Mearns as he toured the north. So the Bruce he took their lands from the Mathers and gave them to Hew, that was well content, though vexed that he came of no gentle blood. So he sent a carle to the Mathers lord to ask if he had a daughter of age for wedding and bedding; and he sent an old carle that he well could spare, in case the Mathers should flay him alive.
For the Mathers were proud as though God had made their flesh of another manure from men; but by then they had come to a right sore pass in the mouldering old castle by Fettercairn, where hung the helmet of good King Grig, who first had ’stablished the Mathers there, and made of the first of them Merniae Decurio, Captain-chief of the Mearns lands. So the old lord left Hew’s carle unskinned, and sent back the message he had more than one daughter, and the Lombard could come and choose