It Has Little Claim To
Notice, Save That Burns Came There To Study Surveying In The Summer
Of 1777, And There Also, In The Kirkyard, The Original Of Tam O'
Shanter Sleeps His Last Sleep.
It is worth noticing, however, that
this was the first place I thought 'Highland-looking.' Over the
bill from Kirkoswald a farm-road leads to the coast.
As I came
down above Turnberry, the sea view was indeed strangely different
from the day before. The cold fogs were all blown away; and there
was Ailsa Craig, like a refraction, magnified and deformed, of the
Bass Rock; and there were the chiselled mountain-tops of Arran,
veined and tipped with snow; and behind, and fainter, the low, blue
land of Cantyre. Cottony clouds stood in a great castle over the
top of Arran, and blew out in long streamers to the south. The sea
was bitten all over with white; little ships, tacking up and down
the Firth, lay over at different angles in the wind. On Shanter
they were ploughing lea; a cart foal, all in a field by himself,
capered and whinnied as if the spring were in him.
The road from Turnberry to Girvan lies along the shore, among sand-
hills and by wildernesses of tumbled bent. Every here and there a
few cottages stood together beside a bridge. They had one odd
feature, not easy to describe in words: a triangular porch
projected from above the door, supported at the apex by a single
upright post; a secondary door was hinged to the post, and could be
hasped on either cheek of the real entrance; so, whether the wind
was north or south, the cotter could make himself a triangular
bight of shelter where to set his chair and finish a pipe with
comfort. There is one objection to this device; for, as the post
stands in the middle of the fairway, any one precipitately issuing
from the cottage must run his chance of a broken head. So far as I
am aware, it is peculiar to the little corner of country about
Girvan. And that corner is noticeable for more reasons: it is
certainly one of the most characteristic districts in Scotland, It
has this movable porch by way of architecture; it has, as we shall
see, a sort of remnant of provincial costume, and it has the
handsomest population in the Lowlands. . . .
CHAPTER V - FOREST NOTES 1875-6
ON THE PLAIN
Perhaps the reader knows already the aspect of the great levels of
the Gatinais, where they border with the wooded hills of
Fontainebleau. Here and there a few grey rocks creep out of the
forest as if to sun themselves. Here and there a few apple-trees
stand together on a knoll. The quaint, undignified tartan of a
myriad small fields dies out into the distance; the strips blend
and disappear; and the dead flat lies forth open and empty, with no
accident save perhaps a thin line of trees or faint church spire
against the sky. Solemn and vast at all times, in spite of
pettiness in the near details, the impression becomes more solemn
and vast towards evening. The sun goes down, a swollen orange, as
it were into the sea. A blue-clad peasant rides home, with a
harrow smoking behind him among the dry clods. Another still works
with his wife in their little strip. An immense shadow fills the
plain; these people stand in it up to their shoulders; and their
heads, as they stoop over their work and rise again, are relieved
from time to time against the golden sky.
These peasant farmers are well off nowadays, and not by any means
overworked; but somehow you always see in them the historical
representative of the serf of yore, and think not so much of
present times, which may be prosperous enough, as of the old days
when the peasant was taxed beyond possibility of payment, and
lived, in Michelet's image, like a hare between two furrows. These
very people now weeding their patch under the broad sunset, that
very man and his wife, it seems to us, have suffered all the wrongs
of France. It is they who have been their country's scapegoat for
long ages; they who, generation after generation, have sowed and
not reaped, reaped and another has garnered; and who have now
entered into their reward, and enjoy their good things in their
turn. For the days are gone by when the Seigneur ruled and
profited. 'Le Seigneur,' says the old formula, 'enferme ses
manants comme sous porte et gonds, du ciel a la terre. Tout est a
lui, foret chenue, oiseau dans l'air, poisson dans l'eau, bete an
buisson, l'onde qui coule, la cloche dont le son au loin roule.'
Such was his old state of sovereignty, a local god rather than a
mere king. And now you may ask yourself where he is, and look
round for vestiges of my late lord, and in all the country-side
there is no trace of him but his forlorn and fallen mansion. At
the end of a long avenue, now sown with grain, in the midst of a
close full of cypresses and lilacs, ducks and crowing chanticleers
and droning bees, the old chateau lifts its red chimneys and peaked
roofs and turning vanes into the wind and sun. There is a glad
spring bustle in the air, perhaps, and the lilacs are all in
flower, and the creepers green about the broken balustrade: but no
spring shall revive the honour of the place. Old women of the
people, little, children of the people, saunter and gambol in the
walled court or feed the ducks in the neglected moat. Plough-
horses, mighty of limb, browse in the long stables. The dial-hand
on the clock waits for some better hour. Out on the plain, where
hot sweat trickles into men's eyes, and the spade goes in deep and
comes up slowly, perhaps the peasant may feel a movement of joy at
his heart when he thinks that these spacious chimneys are now cold,
which have so often blazed and flickered upon gay folk at supper,
while he and his hollow-eyed children watched through the night
with empty bellies and cold feet.
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