CUNNINGHAME GRAHAM, ‘INTRODUCTION’ TO SCOTLAND FOR THE SCOTS: SCOTLAND REVISITED, BY MORRISON DAVIDSON (1902)

Scottissimus Scotorum – Surely to no one more than to the author of ‘Scotland Revisited’ does the above phrase apply. A Scot of Scots! although he apparently imagines that he has recently revisited Caledonia, I cannot think that he really left it for an hour.

Born in Buchan, perhaps to refute the saw, ‘there’s rowth o’ a’ thing in Buchan haud awa’ freet’ – he carries Buchan with him everywhere he goes.

What is it that makes your true Scot, him I mean of the perfervidum ingenium, so intensely national? It is, I think, because of those very qualities, the decay of which the Author bewails in his present book.

I remember once, in South America, having gone out to look for some strayed horses, and not having found them, that I ascended a little hill and sat me down to smoke. Below me rolled the Pampean ocean of brown grass: grass, grass, and still more grass: grass which the breeze from the south-west had set in motion in long waves: grass which, where rivers in the middle distance crossed it, was cut by strips of ‘Argentina,’ looking like silver bands: Grass in which deer and ostriches passed happy lives, so happy that the Gauchos knew the former as the ‘desert mirth’: Brown waves of grass in which roamed cattle and sheep innumerable, and over which the Tero-Teros flew uttering their haunting cry.

And as I sat and smoked –

Upon a thin old chestnut horse, with a torn English saddle, over which a sheepskin had been laid, a man of about fifty years of age appeared. Dressed in a suit of Scottish homespun, such as our farmers wore, but twenty years ago, before the looms of Bradford and of Leeds had clothed them all in shoddy, with a grey flannel shirt without a collar, and the whole man surmounted by a battered, flat straw-hat, which might have made an indifferent strawberry pottle4 I at once descried a brother Scot. Dismounting and hobbling his horse, he drew a short clay pipe out of his pocket, capped with a tin cover that workmen in the North used to affect, in the pre-briar-root days, and greeting me in a strange Doric5 Spanish, he sat down to smoke.