i SOURCE
Daer Hass, a seepage
swollen by lispings
in peat and tussock:
from mossy outcrops
cascade sibilances
pure as bell-notes;
purled stone-slap
and hollow water-clop
adding to a vocabulary
refined over millennia;
a thesaurus of cadences
and assonances embracing
diminutive mill-race,
glutinous glottal-stop.
ii UPSTREAM
Clydes Burn, Daer, Potrail,
true source in dispute;
Elvan, Midlock, Wandel
adding their tribute . . .
Forces thus joined,
we'll stick together
all the year round,
best and worst of weather.
Over sand and gravel,
skirting mill and quarry,
for us it's downhill
all the way to the sea.
iii FIRST LIGHT
Near Nunnerie, where Daer and Potrail meet,
highstepping it through early morning mist:
a troupe of llamas; one brown, four white,
their heads-erect posture midway between
goat and camel, last thing we dreamt we'd see.
Approaching the bank, they stop in unison
and stand motionless, maybe in contemplation
of their near perfect reflections, or simply
for a good nostrilful of us, then move on;
all but the largest, who gazes quizzically
as if asking, ''Do you fear we don't exist,
other than as some mutation of the spirit
of the place? Have it as you please''.
Dismissing such philosophical fripperies
he turns and splashes through a hoop of light.
iv TINTO IN WINTER
Approaching from Wolfclyde Motte,
cross Thankerton Bridge, keep to
the red scree track past the site
of the fort, skirt Totherin Hill
and blattered by sleet, complete
the short last lap: turtleback Tinto,
its Bronze Age cairn, orientation plate
and stone circle in which to shelter.
Like as not, to be hailed by an old boy
clutching a battered Thermos, able
to reel off the names of the encircling hills --
Ochils to Scald Law; due west, Goat Fell.
Asked whether Arran, in clear weather,
really is visible from here, he'll retort,
''I've been coming yince a month for years:
aw I can say is, I've no seen it yet.''
v VOICES
These rounded-up Kirkhope shearlings,
impervious to our amateur tup-glowering,
have been dipped a warm caramel-brown
so their black and white faces are best shown.
Drawn to Lanark Sheep Sale next day
I relish the voices round me, variations
within constancies of accent and speech-pattern
rich as clotted cream. As such jealously
to be guarded, not discarded by some jejune
education secretary or other pedant:
such undermining of tradition
and identity, part of a wider impoverishment.
vi WAR MEMORIAL
She lives not far from the War Memorial.
Two boys running past, kicking a ball,
spark off memories; how going to school
her brother hid his boots in a hedge for fear
his classmates would resent a wealth not theirs,
and punch it out of him. And how years later,
his personal diary became hers,
as next of kin; among its entries,
''One sign things are getting serious,
platoon football put under lock and key'';
and ''Today found my boots missing, lucky
to obtain another pair, in the vicinity . . . ''.
Between, the telegram: the realisation
it was all over; that they'd never again
cartwheel in the spray of Corra Lynn.
vii NEW LANARK
Approaching from above enables us to look down
on this marriage of energy and Socialist vision:
former counting-house, homes for mill-workers,
the Institute for the Formation of Character,
New Buildings topped by their bell-lantern.
Today the gravel court and mill-lade totally
overrun by school parties, spilling like confetti
from the cafe, seeking the ''stairheid cludgie'' --
unlike Owen's girl dancers circling in the hall,
white-clad, animal posters above them on the wall.
So visitors from Salem, Ohio to Newry, Co. Down
embark, to a taped background of Scottish reels,
on the new, spellbinding Annie McLeod Experience:
through lasers and holograms, back to the 1820s;
one Age's Utopia, another's Tourist Trail.
viii ORCHARD COUNTRY
Far from French groves, all gnarl and sun-glow,
Crossford's clay haughs none the less thrive;
swagged branches bearing not grape or olive
but a more northerly fruit, whose bloom no-one
expects will take the light like a model's skin.
Abundance lessening, still set in due season
not under the azures of the Glasgow Boys'
southern travels, but the no-nonsense skies
they left and returned to: whites and greys
in gurly cloud-clusters, unkempt tresses . . .
ix CONTRASTS
A reverberant monument to pomposity and pride,
Hamilton mausoleum housed the sarcophagus
El Magnifico saw as his last resting-place:
despite their chiselling Egyptian basalt out,
for his insertion, sledge-hammers needed.
On the skyline, the pink pavilion-towers
of Chatelherault, the ducal ''Dogg Kennells'';
Adam's charred interiors ornately restored,
combination of parterre and Cadzow cattle
contributing to the air of a film set.
From such lavishness, we leave the main road
at a sign (easy to miss) pointing the way
to a small church, its loft and spire simple;
a neat row of weavers' cottages opposite.
Dalserf's passenger ferry long-since obsolete
we sit as though marooned, history's shadows
sifting and lengthening; looked down on
by an obelisk to ''the Rev. John McMillan,
Covenanter of Covenanters''; an eleventh-century
hogback gravestone adding its memento mori.
x FROM THE AIR
Brochures offer trips, no effort spared,
by Hot Air Balloon, over the Clyde Valley;
sustaining basketry, the roar generated,
enabling you to look down on the vastly
variegated patchwork below, and see
glinting in watery sunlight the glasshouses
of a dwindling economy, orchards under
threat; beyond, the unprettified mass
of derelict steelworks, abandoned pits,
alongside the scars of opencast; and wonder
as the remnants queue up for benefit
or redundancy, or cough fluid from lungs
rotted by silicosis, how soon fibreglass
shafts and slagheaps will emerge complete
with a reconstructed workforce of miners
and smelters, once backbone and sinew
of this Central Belt. The last straw
in usurping sacrifice: some future balloon
expending its hot air over a giant Lanark
Industrial Disney-Land and Theme Park . . .
xi DISCLOSURES
Hard to detect at ground level
what aerial shots can reveal
of Neolithic and Iron Ages;
Rome's imperial rule.
Road, rampart, and keep;
fort and souterrain, to repel.
Pict and Scot: barmkin wall;
a legacy of influx, bloodied soil.
Derivations from Celtic and Saxon,
interknit. Where today, cheek by jowl,
thrive harmoniously Ristorante
Italiano, Star of India, Dragon Pearl.
xii ENVOI
Howking out rocks for a new generator,
an earthmover muddies the water at Blantyre weir.
Alongside, a fish-ladder. The flow cleared,
will the damage outweigh benefit to Nature --
or salmon reappear, thrusting upriver,
where none was seen for 60 years or more?
A stroll away, the ruins of Bothwell Castle
on their greensward peninsula, walls
coalescing in sunshine with the browns
and russets of autumn beeches, demolition
and reconstruction a test of fortitude;
its donjon a bulwark to the Upper Clyde.
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