Twa Excisemen

Robert Burns by Alexander Nasmyth (1758-1840)

Today the Scottish poet Robert Burns will be celebrated around the world with variations on the traditional supper of haggis, neeps and tatties. It was on this day in 1759 that Robert was born in Alloway, to William Burnes and Agnes Broun, and this supper tradition started in 1802.

Carmichael obviously held Burns in high esteem and in a lecture entitled 'The Poets and Poetry of Scotland' (CW223) he comments that: 

The glory of the sun the shining of the moon or the twinkling of the stars find no response from the stoical hearts of these. The “wee modest crimson tipped flower” the daisy of the field is of no moment to the careless eye or callous heart. But the kindly eye and loving heart of Burns saw beauties in the daisy that have made it for ever immortal.

Again in an unfinished essay entitled 'The Bards and Bardism of the Highlands' (CW107/1) Carmichael mentions Burns:

After Burns shined a meteor

of dazzaling brilliancy a host of imitations

appeared and although some of them

were poets of considerable merits and

sweetness none of them were able to ap-

proach their original.

Carmichael's effort to link the great poet to the Highlands via Walter Campbell who fled to Kincardine after committing mass-murder was outlined in a previous blog entry. 

Burns and Carmichael both worked as excisemen with Burns being commissioned 14 July 1788. Burns wrote the following verse prior to being appointed (you can listen to Paul Young reciting the verse for BBC here :       

Searching auld wives barrels,

Och-hon! the day!

That clarty barm should stain my laurels;

But-what'll ye say!

These movin' things ca'd wives and weans

Wad move the very hearts o' stanes!

Burns deliberated between farming and the excise but after a six week induction in Edinburgh accepted the excise position. Cunningham writes:

That the Poet delighted not in the name of gauger is well known: yet he would allow no one to speak ill of the Excise but himself. He was strict, but merciful: the smuggler had no chance of escape from him, while to the country purchaser he was very indulgent.       

If Carmichael and Burns ever met, what do you think they'd discuss: work or poetry?

Happy Burns' Day!

References

Carmichael, Alexander, ‘The Land of Lorne and the Satirists of Taynuilt', Evergreen, vol. I (Spring, 1895), pp. 110–15

CW107/1, fol. 7v

CW223. fol. 16r

Cunningham, A., The works of Robert Burns ; with his life, vol. 3 (London: James Cochrane and Company, 1834) p. 303

Henderson, T.F., Robert Burns (London: Methuen and Company, 1904)

Image

©Courtesy of the Trustees of Burns Monument and Burns Cottage. Licensor www.scran.ac.uk. 

Mass-Murdering Ancestor of Robert Burns

As today – or rather tonight – many Scots, both at home and abroad, will celebrate Burns Night, it would not be entirely inappropriate to see what Alexander Carmichael had to say about Scotland’s most enduring poet. Try as he might – and he tried very hard indeed – to claim Robert Burns, and, therefore, by extension the genius of his song and poetry – for the Highlands (and as a Campbell to boot), Carmichael would ultimately fail in his endeavour. Carmichael based his interpretation upon the tradition that Burns’s ancestor – called Walter Campbell, Ualtair Taigh an Uillt, that is, ‘Walter of the House of the Burn’ or Burn House, as well as being known as Fear Baile an Deòir. Now, this Walter, managed to outwit a pack of strolling bards called the Cliar Sheanchain by way of a ‘sleekit’ strategy as he had failed miserably in trying to get rid of them by outdoing doing them in satirical wit and sparkling repartee. A version of this tradition was noted down by Carmichael from an old schoolmaster, Duncan MacNiven (1804–1895), on 6 July 1892, who belonged to Cnoc na h-Àird near Taynuilt.

The Ceath[a]irne-Choill came
the way. They would not have
you if you gave them enter
tainm[en]t if not they took of[f] your
stock. Fear Bhail an deor had a
sail dharaich and he was splitting
up – He placed 8 on each side
and killed them all – with the sword.
16 of the ceithirn choill – because
they dwelt in woods.

Some twenty years were to pass before Carmichael managed to write up and eventually print a version of this tradition:

Walter Campbell felled a tree in a place known since then as ‘Glac-a-Chlamhain,’ the dell of the harrier, and ‘Glac nan cliar,’ the dell of the satirists. The dell scoops across a high ridge of glacial drift. It is narrow and confined on the south at the upper end, broadening on the north and expanding downwards to a wide plain. Walter Campbell asked the satirists to come out and help him to rend the tree, and they came. He placed half the satirists on one side of the tree, and the other half on the other side. He drove a wedge into the bole of the tree, and rent the bole along the line of the stem. Then he asked the men to place their hands in the rent, and to pull against one another, while he drove in the wedge. The men placed their hands as directed. Walter Campbell struck the wedge not in, but out, however, and the two sides of the rent tree sprang together like the sides of a steel trap, holding the hands of the satirists as securely as if in a strong vice. Walter Campbell, the son of the ‘deor,’ lost control of his pent-up anger, and he fell upon the satirists with great fury, and scourged them and maimed them, killing some and wounding others fatally.

The upshot was that Walter Campbell had to flee for his own life as he had broken the unspoken law of hospitality and where he eventually ended up in the Mearns of Kincardine. Carmichael continues with his supposition that, ‘Walter Campbell found people of the names of Burness, singularly like his own familiar cognomen of Burn-house at home in Muckairn; and as a slight disguise, he called himself by this designation of Burnhouse, dropping his clan name of Campbell. It was an easy transition from Walter Burnhouse to Walter Burness, Brunus, Burnes, Burns.’

A well-known fact is that Robert Burns’s descendants were called the Burness family from Kincardineshire, where they were tenant farmers. His father William moved to Ayrshire – where the prospects seemed better – in 1750 where Robert was born on 25 January 1759. One of Robert Burns’s great-great-grandfather’s was called Walter Burness who was probably born around 1625 and who died in 1670 in Bogjorgan, Glenbervie, Kincardineshire. So can this Walter be indentified with the one who escaped the West Highlands by the skin of his teeth? It is probably wishful thinking on Carmichael’s part for, along with a derivation that hardly seems to be water-tight, his romantic attachment to making a Scottish poetic icon be attached to a less than salubrious character seems a bit all too contrived and the evidence which he forwards does not make for a convincing argument to prove his point beyond any reasonable doubt. In other words, there is too much special pleading but it does make for an interesting story to say that Robert Burns was descended from a mass-murderer.

References:

Carmichael, Alexander, ‘The Land of Lorne and the Satirists of Taynuilt', Evergreen, vol. I (Spring, 1895), pp. 110–15

Carmichael, Alexander, ‘Traditions of the Land of Lorne and the Highland Ancestry of Robert Burns’, The Celtic Review, vol. VIII (1912), pp. 314–33

CW126, fol. 187v

Image: Robert Burns (1759–1796), Scotland’s National Bard.

Carmichael, Catholicism and the Bard

Next Monday, 25 January 2010, Dr Domhnall Uilleam Stiùbhart, Senior Researcher on the project, will give a seminar to the Scottish Catholic Historical Association about Alexander Carmichael's extraordinarily demanding collecting work between 1865 and 1878 in the Catholic islands of Benbecula, South Uist, and Barra, then as now some of the richest areas for traditional folklore in western Europe.

Using his field notebooks, we can trace in fascinating detail how Carmichael went about gathering his store, as well as get to know some of his favourite interviewees.

Dr Stiùbhart will also talk about how the Carmichael Watson project is progressing, and outline some of our plans for the future. Also, given that it will be Burns Night, Dr Stiùbhart will have to touch upon one of the more interesting conjectures made by Alexander Carmichael: Robert Burns' supposed descent from a poetically-gifted serial killer by the name of Walter Campbell who lived near Taynuilt.

All this and more at the Scottish Catholic Archives, 16 Drummond Place, Edinburgh EH3 6PL starting at 5.30pm. With refreshments!

Scottish Catholic Archives: http://www.scottishcatholicarchives.org/

 

Image: The first page of Carmichael's article on Robert Burns' Gaelic ancestry contained in Sir Patrick Geddes' Evergreen A Northern Seasonal (Edinburgh, 1895) pp. 110-115. (http://www.archive.org/details/evergreennorther01gedduoft)