Lewis Grassic Gibbon

He was never really one of them in life, a changeling almost, seemingly more interested in what was going on between the covers of a book than the down-to-earth preoccupations of the close-knit farming and crofting community in the Howe of the Mearns. The man we know as Lewis Grassic Gibbon died in exile, but his ashes lie among his own people in a corner of Arbuthnott's little churchyard, the simplest of stones in the form of an open book marking the grave of one of Scotland's greatest writers. It is an eerie and hauntingly beautiful spot. The gurgling of the Bervie Burn and the distant cooing of wood pigeons are the only sounds to disturb the stillness.
With the mist shrouding the tall ghostly hedgerows and the overhanging trees, it is easy to persuade yourself that this place is alive with the spirits of generations who worshipped in the ancient kirk.

Enter the 13th-century chancel and you will see the stained glass windows representing Faith, Hope and Charity,- mocked by the locals in Sunset Song. Grassic Gibbon saw the best of folk, but also the worst of them. Although his countrymen may not have understood him, quiet and introspective as he was, he certainly understood them far too well for their liking,- witness their indignation when he exposed their foibles to the world in A Scots Quair. Even his own mother demanded, "Laddie, what did you want to write that muck for? It's the speak of the place." It has fallen to their children and their children's children to appreciate the man's stature. Today, local people are busy raising money for a Grassic Gibbon heritage centre and fighting plans to extend the steading at his childhood home.

Born James Leslie Mitchell in 1901 at a farm called Hillhead of Seggat, in Buchan, Gibbon's moved with his family to the Mearns when he was seven. His parents toiled hard to farm the bleak Kincardine soil that gave them such a meagre livelihood. Grassic Gibbon might have been describing his home when he wrote in Sunset Song, "Out of the warld and into Blaewearie they said in Kinraddie, and faith! it was coarse land and lonely up there on the brae." It is still a place of harsh winds, this exposed hillside a couple of miles above Arbuthnott where the croft of Bloomfield lies.

Grassic Gibbon wrote of red-clay land that could be harsh, demanding a lifetime of back-breaking toil and draining the joy of life out of a human being. Yet he also had words to express the loveliness of this land of rolling hills, of fertile fields and foaming seas, of too, the
ancient symbols and standing stones that so fascinated him. The life and history of the place truly excited Grassic Gibbon. Grassic Gibbon eventually found life in his native Kincardineshire stifling and he emigrated south to England, where he published Sunset Song in 1932, followed by Cloud Howe and Grey Granite at yearly intervals. These formed the trilogy A Scot's Quair.  From his home in Welwyn Garden City, Grassic Gibbon breathed a kind of magic into the Mearns with his writings and it is impossible now to see it other than through his eyes, to listen for the peesies wheeping, to hear in your mind the music of his words. No matter that the world the young Leslie Mitchell grew up in at the beginning of the century has largely gone for good, a peasantry replaced by machinery, crofts assimilated by farms, houses and cottages occupied by those who commute to work in town or city.

He died tragically young in 1935, aged only 34, but he captured for future generations another time, another place, and taught them to see and understand the land they might otherwise have taken for granted.  And for others, the world over, the Mearns is Grassic Gibbon country in the same way as the Lake District belongs to Wordsworth.