David Kerr Cameron is an admirable author, and his book, The Ballad and the Plough, is indeed “rich in anecdote and insight”, as promised.
For a book which is basically an historical record of old Scottish farms, there is some lovely lyrical writing.
He writes “…they
have long been lain to sleep in quiet kirkyards up and down the country, these
old farmtoun men, buried in a haze of drams, all rancour stopped, all debts forgiven.
Tyrant farmer lies now by the bothy hell-raiser, the brief legends of their lives, the names of their old touns, hacked in the cold granite of simple stones.
The moss has long obscured their names but it little matters, for those lichened stones were never their true memorials. These stood in the fields of each year’s harvest: the yellow stooks lit by sunlight...”
Tyrant farmer lies now by the bothy hell-raiser, the brief legends of their lives, the names of their old touns, hacked in the cold granite of simple stones.
The moss has long obscured their names but it little matters, for those lichened stones were never their true memorials. These stood in the fields of each year’s harvest: the yellow stooks lit by sunlight...”
And so say all of us.