Written specially for The Stove:
GALLOWAY & ME
My childhood was spent in Galloway. Its hills,
rivers, tidal flats formed my understanding and love of the natural world. The
Biblical stories I learnt before I could read mixed freely with the tales and
legends learnt about the land around me to the point that Galilee and Galloway
were one and the same. Was it the Boy David who confronted Goliath at Loch
Trool or was it Robert the Bruce who faced the Philistines on the banks of the
Jordan? When I learnt about Saint Ninian landing at the Isle of Whithorn bringing
Christianity to our heathen forefathers, I assumed he was one of the Apostles
and that he had just sailed across that Sea of Galilee. As for Tam o’Shanter, was
he Old or New Testament?
At the age of 11 my family moved away. But that
heady brew of wild landscape, Biblical stories, poetry, a sense that one was
put on earth to do the right thing and the temptations of the flesh were always
at hand has infiltrated and informed everything that I have done or attempted
to do since. And then of course there was the work ethic.
And on the subject of work, everything I have done
since the late 1990s has been framed within the context of The Penkiln Burn.
This in one sense is an old fashioned publishing house and in another an online
brand as artwork. The Penkiln Burn is also a small river that rises in the
Galloway Hills and flows down into the River Cree at Minnigaff. It was on the
banks of the Penkiln Burn that many of my boyhood adventures took place, a
place that still fires my imagination to this day.
I am aware that if had spent my teenage years in
Galloway my sense of it would be totally different, and that I would have
probably viewed it as a cultural backwater that I could not wait to escape. But
that was not the case.
As for Dumfries, that was another country
altogether.
Bill Drummond 3 October 2012
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| Truly memorable film of Parton to Kirkcowan by way of Newton Stewart aboard a steam train way back in 1965 - accompanied by the track Madruga Eterna |
