W
riters and photographers
don’t waste ‘material’ so,
after decades of exploring
Scotland, I had a fair
collection of ‘the weird and wonderful’
encountered and it seemed natural to
turn this into a book. I already had done
a study of Scottish gravestones for the
same reason. Not a few of the oddest of
oddities proved to be in kirkyards.
I’ve twice-recorded people dying on
April 31 and one (Kirkwall Cathedral)
on February 30 – an error of the month
it proved. And what of the lad George
Ramsay whose stone by the Elephant
Rock near Montrose notes, ‘Born
1859. Died 1840’? The humour can be
unintentional. In Perth a lady put the
words ‘Rest in Peace’ at the top of her
husband’s stone then, at the foot, after
his details, ‘Until I come.’ (I assume it
was unintentional!)
I had heard of the Boys Ploughing
Match in Orkney so made a point of
landing in St. Margaret’s Hope on
a third Saturday in August. On the
Sands o’ Wright miniature ploughs
see the sands turned by boys in fierce
competition. What was not expected
was seeing the competition of the girls:
dressing up as Clydesdale horses.
Off the north shore of the Blackwater
Reservoir strong walkers will find a
4 Outdoor focus | summer 2018
Orcadian girls dressed as Clydesdale horses
Celtic cross, marked as monument, the
map (OS Landranger 41: 265613). This
very remote spot made the monument
a real puzzle. I wasted many hours not
finding out. Years later in a glory hole
of a shop in Stromness in Shetland I
came on a book where his story was
told in execrable doggerel, worthy of
McGonagall. (When I reached the end
of stanza seventeen I found it was by
McGonagall.) ‘Friends of humanity,
of high and low degree, / I pray ye all
come listen to me; / And truly I will
relate to ye, / The tragic fate of the
Rev Alexander Heriot Mackonochie’.
The poor man had had some sort of
breakdown and was visiting the Bishop
of Argyle when he disappeared when
out on a walk. Quite a story of searching
the wilds – in 1887.
Crimond is a village on the A90
Fraserburgh to Peterhead road and
is most famous for the tune to which
Psalm 23 is often sung. The oddity
however is the kirk’s clock, inscribed
‘The hour is coming’ which takes on
some irony as the face shows an hour of
61 minutes. The last 5 minutes marking
was inadvertently given 6, and when
corrected in 1949 there was such an
outcry the mistake was reinstated.
When I lived in Kinghorn it was in
a part of the town with the old River
Are we nearly there yet? Ferry slip
milestone in Newport