3 Days in Scotland

Pretty Peg

As I gaed up by yon gate-end,
When day was waxin' weary,
Wha' did  I meet come down the street,
But pretty Peg, my dearie!

Her air sae sweet, an' shape complete,
Wi' nae proportion wanting,
The Queen of Love did never move
Wi' motion mair enchanting.

Wi' linked hands we took the sands,
Adown yon winding river;
Oh, that sweet hour and shady bower,
Forget it shall I never!

Scotland

First Impressions

We arrived in Edinburgh on a flight from Boston at about 8 o’clock in the morning.  There was not much to see at the airport as it is a distance outside of the city.  We go to the Hertz rental office and wait in line for our rental car.  I have been designated the driver.  So without having slept and being in a strange country, I get into a car with the steering wheel on the wrong side.  I think,  “I can do this.  I just have to remember to stay in the wrong lane”.  However it was a bit more complicated than I thought.  There are roundabouts every few miles and the cars which are driving on the left come at you from the right when you enter the roundabout.  My long ingrained habit is to look to the left.  So, in addition to stay in the wrong lane I would have to add “look the wrong way, or else”.  Thirdly, I am used to the bulk of the car being on my right, not on my left.  So, as a consequence, I was constantly driving too close to the left.  The car had an automatic warning system that made a horrible vibration if I got too close to the left.  Unfortunately no one had explained this to me before we took the car.  I did not know it was a warning system at least initially.  This propensity for hugging the left came to a bad end in a small town on the highway south to Sunderland when, squeezing between parked cars and oncoming traffic, I clipped the front tire of a brand new electric drive BMW which had its wheels turned to pull out of its parking spot.  Here, with my head spinning in shock, is where I had my first encounter with a Scotsman.

The driver whose name was Craig was delivering the vehicle to a buyer and had been on the road all day.  He showed me that the wheel was no longer turning as it should.  Our car had no damage on it as it had only nicked the rubber of his car, but something was messed up in the steering mechanism of his.  He was gracious, saying the only important thing was that no one was hurt, and that was why they have insurance.  I probably had ruined his day, along with mine, but he was not angry but courteous and gracious.  We were in front of a convenience store run but a Pakistani Scot who was also courteous and gracious and told me not worry.  Nevertheless, I had visions of having to buy a new BMW.  I was sick to my stomach and unable to focus on anything that was happening.  But we managed to get all the paperwork exchanged. I asked if we should call the police and file an accident report but no one else thought that was necessary.  It took me a couple days to feel right again.  We tried to contact Hertz to let them know, but could not get through.  We parted that little town not having notified the police or the owners of our car, and when we turned it in 9 days later we told them at the desk what happened but they had no notice of it in their paperwork.  Apparently insurance did take care of it.

The landscape of northern England and southern Scotland driving south from Edinburgh was open farmland and rolling hills.  It was easy to see how this land had been fought over for so long by so many different peoples.  The climate is mild, and cattle and sheep dot the green hillsides as they have done for thousands of years, despite being at the same latitude as icy Labrador.  It seems less rocky and less forested than New England but time and again I was reminded of scenes from home Connecticut in places, New Hampshire and Vermont in others, and along the coast it looked like Nova Scotia.  We got into the Highlands but not to the far north.  I never saw the windswept heath covered hills drenched in cold rain that I had imagined the whole country being like, but perhaps in another season or farther north it is like that. 

The buildings are mostly made of stone.  Edinburgh in particular is a city of gray sandstone.   It is a durable natural material, although drab and grey and everywhere.  The buildings in the city are built joined together all up and down the streets, each with its own little garden space in front.  The only break in the houses is when they arrive at a crossing street.  The older city streets are the same although downtown Edinburgh has its share of modern buildings mixed in with the grey sandstone. 

Edinburgh castle is truly impressive, built on a massive volcanic plug looking down on the city and the Firth of Forth it is a harsh, rugged reminder of the battles that were fought here.    One side of the rock that it is built on is a sheer cliff and the opposite drops gently away from the great entry gate complete with moat below.  The famous Royal Mile is the walk down this slope to Hollyrood Palace where the Queen of England still comes once a year to perform her royal duties.  Mary Queen of Scots lived here as well.   We toured the castle and walked the Royal Mile stopping to eat on the way.  The street is cobblestone, the buildings grey sandstone and it seems there are a hundred shops selling wool sweaters.  We were there at the time of the Fringe festival when performing artists converge on the city for three weeks. 

The next morning we left our rooms early from the Murrayfield hotel and headed in town to take a bus tour of the Scottish Highlands.  Our driver’s name was Duncan, a tall man of about 40 wearing a kilt.  He said he had been a truck driver before but now really loved his job as a tour bus driver.  He said he often went into the mountains of the Highlands to fish.  He regaled us with stories the whole trip, telling us about Dumfermline and how Andrew Carnegie was a boy there, and telling us about the 3 bridges over the Firth as we crossed on the newest.   He brought us to our first stop which was Dunfeld by the river Tay.  We have a few minutes to walk into the woods to get close to the ancient church behind the town.  Then we stop at the Hermitage where the Duke had a hunting lodge and his own personal hermit for entertainment.  There are towering Douglas fir trees on the woodland path to the site of the hunting lodge which were planted by the Duke over 200 years ago. 

Then we stopped at Pitlochry, a charming village dead center in the heart of Scotland and a famous vacation spot for royalty and many others.  We ate at a little Italian restaurant and then walked around town.  I stopped in the John Muir Wildlands Trust shop.  I had forgotten that John Muir was born in Scotland.  I bought some wildlife calendars and notebooks which I think I left in the Hotel in Edinburgh.  Then we resumed our journey stopping at the Queen’s view, a scenic outlook over Loch Tummel.  There was a Chinese family from New Jersey with us on the trip and I got to talk to them a little bit, trying out my Chinese.

After the Queen’s view we went to Aberfeldy to see the Black Watch statue and, more importantly, the  Dewars Distillery of which we had a tour and a sample of their Scotch straight out of the barrels.

  From there it was a long ride back to Edinburgh for a late night meal at the Murrayfield hotel restaurant, and up early the next day to catch the plane back to Boston.

Baeda

Across from the Roker Hotel there is a walkway above the beach.  Going north there is an open grassy area and on the street side is a memorial to Baeda with a tall cross carved with images and Latin text set on a base with the inscription:

            To the glory of God and in memory of his servant Baeda the Venerable

            Who was born between Wear and Tyne DCLXXXIII

            And died at Jarrow DCCXXXV

It was to me a bit of a mystery that someone born over a thousand years ago would have his writings carved in stone and set in a prominent place.  I knew nothing of Bede, but I set about first from Wikipedia and then ordering his most famous book ‘The Ecclesiastical History of the English People’ from Amazon, which I am reading now.

Bede wrote the history of the English people from a vantage point of life at the tail end of the Anglo Saxon invasion when much of what was known was fresh in the minds of living people.  He  wrote in Latin and he wrote before the Viking attacks and before even than Beowulf who I have usually thought of as emerging from the darkness of English pre-history.  

Bede writes clearly of these times and of the conversion of England to Christianity.  Some of the stories of Christianity are uncannily like the stories of Paul’s journeys in the New Testament with prayer, and fasting, of conversions and miracles.  The book begins with the arrival of people to England.  I realized that for Bede people had spread throughout the world from Eden and would have of course had to cross in ships to settle England.  He could not have been aware that the North Sea had been dry land for several thousand years after the ice age and people who arrived did so by walking.  He follows with the Britons, the Picts and the Irish living on the island when the Romans arrive, he tells the history of Roman legions in Britain and then after their departure the arrival of the Anglo Saxons.  The heart of the book is the story of the introduction and spread of Christianity throughout the island.

Saint Peter’s Church

St. Peter’s church in Sunderland sits above the banks of the river Wear.  We were introduced to it by the MacKnights who are active parishioners of the church.  They brought us there after services on Sunday, gave us a tour and told us its history.

In the 7^th century AD, a wealthy noble named Benedict Biscop after traveling in Europe and visiting Rome, decided to give his life to Christianity and build a monastery and a church.  The story of monasteries in Europe in the Middle Ages is a fascinating one and poorly understand by the average person, including myself.  Biscop sent to Gaul for masons and glazers to come and build the church in the manner popular on the mainland.  The year was 674 and the church has stood on this site since then although once or twice destroyed by Viking raiders, added onto, remodeled, burned, and rebuilt, some of the original stonework is still there. 

The Venerable Bede or Baeda who is called the father of English history was from the Monkwearmouth area and was a member of this monastic community.  I will have more to say on him later.

For our purposes, Baron Hilton direct ancestor of the Hilton family line of which my wife is one lies in a sarcophagus in the back of the church, a life size stone figure of a knight, strangely missing its legs lies over his remains.  The Hiltons, at least from the Norman Conquest were the chief family in the area. 

Sunderland England and the MacKnights

We were introduced to Sunderland by Doris and Keith MacKnight.  My brother in law had contacted Keith while researching Hylton Castle.  The castle was scheduled to be opening after its transformation into a visitor’s center around the time of our trip to England, but it was not ready.  The MacKnights met us at the castle and gave us a pre-opening tour.  They had grown up in the shadow of the castle and were instrumental in securing the funding for its restoration.  Doris served on the city council and also served a term as mayor of the city.  As such, we had a tour of not only the castle and its grounds but on three occasions they took us on tours of the city of Sunderland and its environs including Raby Castle, a bar and restaurant at the base of the limestone cliffs called The Grotto, the city shopping mall called the Bridges, and the ancestral Washington Home in nearby Washington town.

Sunderland itself is a former industrial giant located at the mouth of the River Wear in Durham county.  Millions of tons of coal were shipped through here, and it was one of the foremost shipbuilding cities in the world for over 100 years.  It had a glass industry that is now gone but the National Glass Museum and a knowledge base of glass technology remain at the University of Sunderland.  Coal production has been shut down due to environmental regulations and the move to cleaner fuels, the shipbuilding and glass manufacturing moved to Asian countries where labor was cheaper and infrastructure newer.  It is a lot like the cities that I know around Boston that have had to reinvent themselves replacing heavy industry with service and high technology.

Tyneside General Hospital

When we were in England, my wife needed unexpectedly to see a doctor.  I asked at the desk of the Roker Hotel how we should go about getting to see a doctor.  The woman at the desk told us to dial 999, which we did.  We were connected to a woman who asked us a series of questions about our problem, determined that we need to see a doctor right away, and made an appointment for us at Tyne side General Hospital.  She said to be there before 11am.  It was about 8:30am.  We called a cab and were there in about 25 minutes.  Going in, the desk was already aware of our appointment.  It was not much different from an emergency room in the US., but less crowded, smaller, and more plain than we have here.  Within 20 minutes we were seen by a nurse who took vital signs, scheduled tests, and took our information. We were very worried that we would not be able to use our insurance.  We had gone to Mass General in Boston once for a similar incident and had been charged over $10,000. for an overnight with supervision,  Our insurance had temporarily lapsed.  At Tyneside they told us there would be no charge unless we had to be admitted.  We had blood tests done, saw a doctor, were given a diagnosis.  The issue was not as serious as we thought.  And there was no charge.
   
It was clear they had no system set up for taking money or insurance information.  That there was no charge was remarkable to us, but what was most remarkable was the efficiency and speed that we were moved through the system.  It was an emergency room with no waiting.  In America, if you cannot see your doctor right away, you go to an emergency room without an appointment and wait, usually for hours, and then are slowly moved through the system.  It is usually an all day or all night process.  We were out of Tyneside General in time to catch up with the rest of our party at the Sunderland Glass Museum in the early afternoon.

I have heard warnings about the British system; that one had to wait months for an operation or for a hearing aid.  There must be some disaffection with the system, although we were not aware of what it was during our visit.  We did see posters around the hospital admonishing patients not to abuse the doctors and nurses.  I am not sure what that was about; but it implies that doctors do not have the same unassailable social status they have in the US, and, the one we saw, seemed equally as competent and professional.  From my own limited first hand experience, I think I would choose their system over ours.

Dawn

My first experience as a carpenter was in the fall, my first impressions of this work were under the heady blue sky of an October morning. This time of year up until then was a the beginning of school and therefore the absolute worst time of year. The change of seasons and the weather has always been the source of greatest pleasure for me, but it is especially October that does me in.

Magnesian Limestone

Our first day in England we visited Hilton Castle in Sunderland and received a private tour, as my wife and brother in law are direct descendants of the Baron Hilton who built the castle.  Our tour guides were the former mayor of Sunderland and her husband.  Having an interest in construction I was curious about the stonework, in particular the type of stone that had been used to build the castle.  It was yellowish and mottled, almost as if with fossil impressions, which it was not.  The mortar joints were relatively large and some blocks had what appeared to be chisel marks on them.  Later I found out that this stone is called Magnesian limestone and occurs in a band from the area on the mouth of the river Wear to Nottingham in north-central England.  It is used in thousands of buildings in the area, including the oldest like Saint Peter’s church built in the Anglo Saxon period and the most complex like Durham cathedral built in the Norman period.

Not only was it the major component in many buildings, the coastline between the two rivers, the Tyne and the Wear, is made of it in cliffs about 50 feet high.  At the water’s edge are concretions called cannoball limestone and algae covered rocks also made of the same stone.

Durham

This is a view looking down from the main tower at Durham Cathedral.  The bend in the river Wear is visible beyond.

We drove to Durham from Sunderland in a rented car guided by GPS which drove us into the heart of the pedestrian city.  Fortunately it was early in the day and we managed to find a safe place to leave the car.  We walked through the plaza, which was full of vendors selling things to tourists and then we walked up the hill to the cathedral.  We toured the cathedral and afterwards walked to a pub called Ye Olde Elm and had a pint.

There is so much history on the grounds and buildings of this cathedral that I cannot begin to do it justice.  The principal story is of the founding of the monastery at Durham in 875 AD by monks fleeing repeated Viking attacks on their original location on the Island of Lindisfarne.  The legend is that they found the site of the cathedral on a peninsula in the Wear river after following a maroon cow and being unable to move the bones of their patron Saint Cuthbert once they had arrived.

Roker Pier and Lighthouse

My wife, her brother and our daughter recently traveled to Sunderland England to see my wife's family's ancestral castle in Sunderland England.  I would like to write a few blog posts about what we saw.

We stayed at the Roker Hotel overlooking the North Sea and the Roker Pier and Light house.  The Pier is a curving ribbon of granite ending in a two-toned granite lighthouse.  It is an amazing feat of engineering and took 18 years to build.   It stands against the ferocious winter storms protecting the mouth of the Wear river  which, at the time it was built, was the sight of great industries, coal shipments and shipbuilding.  It was started in 1885 when England was at the height of its imperial power and finished in 1903.  There is an opposing curved pier on the south side which was built after World War I.  The opposing pier is not as well done, a shabby sister to this one, perhaps symbolizing the ridiculous bloodletting of the war that undid Britain.

3/8/2019

We went to Brockton City Hall today to check on the zoning status of a house we were interested in.  Brockton is a city that today is principally known for its drug dealers and street shootings.  But the City Hall recalls a day when it was a prosperous, proud community, the capital of America’s shoe industry.  During the 1980s and 90s Dominican drug dealers carried on a lively trade in cocaine from the City of Brockton.  Today the immigrant community is largely dominated by Cape Verdeans who are generally hardworking and ambitious.  They may be the salvation of the city if it can be saved.  The geologic feature that gave birth to industry here was the small river that powered the shoe factories.  The river seems to barely exist today.  It is not a great transportation hub or desirable city center for food, restaurants and theaters so until something changes it may be destined to be a holding place for the poor.

We climbed the stairs to the Mayor’s office off the central rotunda, and then another level, all was in disarray.  The elevator was being rebuilt, there were a few workmen, a few office workers.  Usually in town and city halls most employees have gone home late on a Friday afternoon.  We were going to the top floor for the Building Department where a woman helped us find the information we needed.  Going up the stairs, first we came to the main floor where the mayor’s office is located.  Here, around the rotunda are the names of Brockton men who were killed or died in the Civil War.  There are marble reliefs of marching armies with generals at their head. And to the left, opposite the Mayor’s office is a hallway with grand pictures of scenes from the Civil war.  It is an imposing and awe-inspiring room which gives you the feeling of the importance and centrality of that war to the people of Brockton only a few generations removed, and it gives you the feeling of the vitality of the city at the time. 

I was introduced to Brockton in 1978.  I was 22 and I began working for a young carpenter, the same age who lived in Duxbury but had graduated from Brockton High.  The city was going to the dogs he said and they had moved east toward the coast and out of the city.  His family had immigrated from Sweden for work in the shoe factories.  His grandfather was a carpenter and had worked a lifetime in the city and taught him enough so that he could start his own business barely out of his teens.  His father had gone the public service route, probably beginning in construction and then becoming the building inspector and finally retired as the Postmaster General of Brockton.  My young employer went on to become a successful designer in Santa Fe, New Mexico.  I, having just left the liberal institution of Umass Amherst was horrified at his attitude to the poor people on welfare who were moving into the city.  The last of the shoe factories were closing down then but many of his friends had jobs or were just losing jobs at shoe factories. 

I mentioned my Brockton experience to another friend and he recounted how he had been doing survey work within sight of city hall when a police officer came up to him and demanded to know where his ‘detail’ was.  It sounded as if the officer was shaking him down for money, he said.  The officer told him he had to have a f—ing detail and that just the other day a man had been shot to death on the bar on the corner of the street.  My friend begged off getting a detail but he remarked that the lot he was working on was littered with spent hypodermic needles.  He re-emphasized, “in sight of City Hall”. 

I have a few other memories of Brockton.  I was a substitute teacher briefly at Brockton High School.  It was the most highly regulated school I have ever been in, and probably for good reason.  I also have bad memories of a long ago divorce battle and the court house is something of a nightmare to pass by.

Driving through downtown the first thing you notice is that so many of the buildings are empty.  Many ex-industrial cities have become cultural meccas with trendy shops, restaurants, galleries and theaters.  No such thing is evident on a drive down Main Street Brockton.  Over regulation, high taxes, corruption, lack of good transportation into and out of the city, lack of a pool of educated workers, lack of safe, clean neighborhoods to live in and most of all lack of commerce and industry to create jobs all contribute to the demise of a once great city.  I do not know what can be done, but there is the potential to bring the city back to life if the right steps are taken and enough people are determined to make it happen and I know there are people who still believe deeply in Brockton and are proud of the city

A Legacy of Service

My grandfather was born in 1878 in Watertown Massachusetts.  He started out as a young man working as a plumber but at a relatively early age, around the turn of the century, he began a career as a fireman on the Watertown Fire Department.  Following him, my uncle Jim, my uncle Tom and my uncle John also became life-long members of the fire department.  Two other uncles, Ed and Bill were on the Police Department, housed slightly behind the Fire Department off of Main Street.

 My father's dream as a boy was to also be on the fire department.  He was intimately involved with the doings of the department throughout his childhood.  He went with my grandfather to the Brant Rock fire in Marshfield in the 1930s when a strip of grand hotels along the seawall burned to the ground.  He would even take me as a boy to see the big fires that were happening in town.  But my father was injured as a child and became legally blind in one eye.  He had to return three time to the army recruitment office before someone turned a 'blind eye' and let him in, but even then he was assigned to Graves Registration.  He never could pass the physical for the Fire Department, which he often told me was the greatest disappointment of his life.

Last week on FaceBook someone posted a newspaper clipping from 1940 of several firefighters being injured while searching a burning house for a child they thought was inside.  One of those injured was my uncle Tom, who I only remembered as an old man dying of emphysema in the 1960s.
I also remember my father telling me how one of his brothers had pulled a boy who seemed dead from the Charles river and had worked at resuscitating him long after he was told it was useless.  The boy revived and whenever that boy would walk past the fire station my father said his brother would break into the biggest smile.

Here is the clipping.