Montrose Enlightenment

Trip to Montrose and Stonehaven - 'I'll hae nae halfway-hoose, but aya be whaur/ Extremes meet.'

I visited Melrose museum which has some Celtic and Pictish relics – and the lady gave me a pamphlet on Montrose’s most famous son – the poet Hugh MacDiarmid - she said he had began a Scottish Enlightenment, a new Scottish Renaissance

He is one of Scotland’s leading contemporary poets and a founding member of Scotland’s national party. MacDiarmid grew up over a library. There were other writers in Montrose then such as the poet Edwin Morgan and Montrose became an artists colony and a  magnet for other artists, poets and writers. 

Christopher Grieve, the young reporter who arrived in Montrose in 1920, wanted to start a modern revolution in Scottish literature. 

Dunnottar castle

I also visited Stonehaven and took the walk along to the historic Dunnottar castle which sits on a rocky outcrop in the sea. The weather was beautiful blue skies. The castle was remote and practically impossible to penetrate and Cromwell, William Wallace and others stayed here. The castle was used to films such as Hamlet.

Stonehaven is a small picturesque fishing town. Here I visited a Celtic music shop where I bought a book on Burn’s songs. The harbour has several top rated hotels and restaurants. 

Also - Melrose’s golf course is one of the oldest and there its one of the best beaches in Scotland.  And The Cheviot and the Stag and the Black, Black Oil is being performed by the Dundee Rep.

Hugh MacDiarmid

His fascination with language inspired experimentation with Scots and Hugh MacDiarmid was born. Hugh MacDiarmid is remembered for his fiery and contradictory personality - his modernists and nationalist views and his long poems. He was the father of the Scottish Renaissance.

In the 1920s an important cultural Renaissance happened in Melrose. An Authentic cultural Scottish identity - creatively distinct.  MacDiarmid wished to create a Scottish cultural renaissance with a distinct Scottish art and cultural identity.

One that looked to the new rather than to the past traditions and to place Scottish culture in an international perspective.  Later during the 1930s the Scottish Renaissance was centred in St Andrews. The Scottish independence movement rejected the fascist nationalist movements in Europe. 

What began in Montrose in the 1920s Inspired a confidence for artists and writers to be Scots – a confidence which has helped to give Scotland a unique voice in the world. Our Scottish Renaissance.

Christopher Murray Grieve (1892 – 1978), known by his pen name Hugh MacDiarmid, was a Scottish poet, journalist, essayist and political figure. He is best known for his works written in 'synthetic Scots', a literary version of the Scots language hat MacDiarmid himself developed. 
After the war he continued to work as a journalist, living in Montrose where he became editor and reporter of the Montrose Review as well as a Justice of the Peace and a member of the county council. In 1923 his first book, Annals of the Five Senses,followed by 'Sangschaw' in 1925 and 'Penny Wheep' and his most famous poem 'A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle' in 1926.

Stonehaven

Poet Robert Fergusson

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Robert Burns wrote of Robert Fergusson - 'My elder brother in misfortune, By far my elder brother in the muse.'

When Burns first arrived in Edinburgh in 1787, after two days pony ride, he went to find Fergusson's grave in the Canongate graveyard and he found there was no grave for his poetic mentor and so he paid what money he had to lay a commemorative stone of his own design on his grave.  When Burns first read Fergusson’s poems in the Scots dialect, he realised that he too might write in this way.

In a recent TV documentary author Andrew O'Hagan said that - ' without Burns we might never have known about Robert Fergusson and without Fergusson there might never have been our national bard Robert Burns.'

Unlike Burns, Fergusson was well connected and highly educated.  Fergusson was tutored at home and at fourteen he gained a bursary to a Dundee Grammar school. After which Fergusson attended St Andrews university to study Maths and Philosophy. Scotland believed in offering all a good education as a route out of poverty and so boys could read and interpret the Bible.

When he returned to Edinburgh, at the height of the Scottish Enlightenment, he worked as a legal copyist and he was part of the literary circle in Edinburgh called the Cape Club.  He began to write poems about the Edinburgh people and he wrote some poems in the Scottish dialect.  He had poems published in Walter Ruddiman's Weekly Review. His masterpiece is a poem entitled Auld Reekie.

He had his one poetry book published in 1773. Then his poems stopped and after he had a fall he was committed. Shortly after he died at the young age of 24.   

Fergusson is one of 16 poets depicted on the Scott Monument and he appears beside Robert Burns.  Several of Burn's work has traces of the impact of Fergusson's work - 'Leith Races' was a model for Burn's 'Holy Fair'; 'On Seeing a Butterfly' has similarities to 'To a Mouse'.