The 1724 Galloway disturbances have come down in history as the ‘Levellers’ Revolt’ since the aim of the protesters was to ‘level’ the dykes of the large cattle parks which had been developing in the region since the late seventeenth century. The disturbances were unique in scale and intensity. Armed gangs of small tenants and cottars, sometimes over 1,000 strong, roamed the countryside at night breaking up the dykes of enclosed parks and fields which were believed to have resulted in the eviction of peasant families. So alarmed were the local landowners that they had to call for six troops of dragoons from Edinburgh. But even their arrival did not immediately bring peace and stability to the affected parishes.
The disturbances came to national attention. They were condemned by the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, attracted the attention of the Duke of Roxburgh, the Secretary for Scotland, and even came to the notice of King George I himself. The national press brought the story to a wider audience. Indeed, it was the leading Edinburgh newspaper, the Caledonian Mercury, which first reported on outbreaks of levelling in April 1724:
We are credibly informed from Galloway and other places in the West that a certain Mountain Preacher, in a discourse he had in that District not many days ago, among other Things, so bitterly inveighed against the Heritors [landowners] and others of that County, for their laudable Frugality in Inclosures etc. and (as he term’d it) making Commonty [common grazing land] Property, that next Morning several hundred arm’d Devotees, big with that ancient Levelling Tenet, in a few Hours rid themselves of that Grievance, to the great Detriment of the Gentlemen in the Neighbourhood.1
Kelton Hill Fair, near Castle Douglas, was the location of the great annual summer gathering for the people of Galloway in the early eighteenth century. It was one of many held throughout the Scottish countryside where, in a society of humdrum routine and few entertainments, they provided a release for the country population. Many were notorious for drunkenness and sexual excess and regularly condemned by the church and local authorities alike for ‘riot and dissipation’. In June 1723, Kelton Hill was the usual scene of cattle and horse trading, stalls selling food and liquor, dancing and carousing:
Here are assembled from Ireland, from England and from the more distant parts of North Britain, horse-dealers, cattle dealers, sellers of sweetmeats and of spirituous liquors, gypsies, pick-pockets, and smugglers … The roads are for a day or two before crowded with comers to the fair. On the hill where it is held tents are erected, and through the whole fair day one tumultuous scene is here exhibited of bustling backwards and forwards, bargaining, wooing, carousing, quarrelling amidst horses, cattle, carriages, mountebanks, the stalls of chapmen, and the tents of the sellers of liquors and cold victuals.2
It was at Kelton that some disaffected tenants first came together to discuss a response to the displacement of families caused by the continued expansion of enclosures and cattle parks. Notices to quit tenancies at Whitsun had already been served on sixteen households in the area and rumours were rife that up to 300 farmers would also face eviction later. Documentation is scarce but so far as is known future tactics and a campaign of resistance against the evictions were discussed. No action was taken at that point, however, and the area continued to remain quiet until early 1724. By then the parishes around Kelton Hill became the centre of the disturbances. All of the levelling activity which occurred in the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright in the period between March and June 1724 took place within a twelve-mile radius. Fourteen of the twenty-eight parishes in the Stewartry lay within this area, which occupied over 330 square miles and contained around 50 per cent of the population of the district in the early eighteenth century. The Levellers especially drew on the communities of the parishes of Twynholm, Tongland, Kelton and Crossmichael in their attacks on the dykes which took place in the spring, summer and autumn of 1724.
It was not until January or February of that year that a secret bond was drawn up and widely circulated to those prepared to resist further evictions. It is clear that considerable planning and preparations for the levelling had taken place. The organization of the groups of dyke breakers was to be managed by ‘captains’ in each parish. This practice of recruitment in the area dated back as far as the early 1640s, when ‘captains’ were appointed to supervise the raising of volunteers to resist the monarchy of Charles I during the Wars of the Covenant. At a later date, anti-Jacobite cadres had been raised in the same way during the Rising of 1715.
Moreover, the Levellers sought to gain sympathy for their cause by posting several manifestos, justifying their actions, on the doors of churches in Tongland, Borgue and Twynholm parishes in April 1724:
Therefore in order to prevent such a chain of miseries as are likely to be the consequences of this unhappy parking we earnestly entreat the assistance and aid of you the loyal parish of Borgue in order to suppress these calamities and that we may either live or die in this land of our nativity. We beg your assistance which will tend to your own advantage in order to which we desire you to meet at David Low’s in Woodhead of Tongland where we expect the concurrence of Tongland and Twynholm [parishes] upon Tuesday morning, an hour after the sun rise which will gratify us and oblige yourselves.3
The manifesto was composed in English rather than Scots. The writer was probably a local clergyman who was most likely sympathetic to the Levellers’ cause.
It is clear from other evidence that the Levellers were not simply conservative supporters of the status quo and hostile to all agricultural innovation. Their opposition was to the large-scale enclosing of cattle parks and the effect this had on the common grazing ground and arable lands of the small tenants. Thus, in their Account of the Reasons of Some People in Galloway, their meetings anent Public Grievances through Inclosures, the Levellers stated their willingness ‘to take up the lands which were parked as they were set formerly, and further to pay the interest on the money laid out in enclosing the ground’.4 They were far from being a mindless mob intent on opposing all improvements. Again, in their ‘Letter to Major Du Cary’, the Levellers asserted:
The Gentlemen should enclose their grounds in such parcels that each may be sufficient for a good tenant and that the Heritors lay as much rent on each of these enclosures as will give him double the interest of the money laid out on the enclosures. If he cannot get this enclosure set to a tenant whom he may judge sufficient, he may then lawfully keep that ground in his own hand till he finds a sufficient tenant taking care that the tenant’s house be kept up and that it may be let with the first opportunity and that a lease of twenty-one years be offered. This will considerably augment the yearly rent of the lands and the tenant will hereby be capable and encouraged to improve the breed of sheep and black cattle and the ground, which without enclosures is impossible.5
Dyke breaking first occurred on 17 March 1723 at Netherlaw near Kirkcudbright. Significantly, the cattle park there was not new but had been established some decades before, in 1688. This suggests that the attacks were meant to form a collective resistance to the entire development of parking and enclosures since the later seventeenth century and not simply to the new additions which threatened evictions in the 1720s. By the beginning of May the disturbances had achieved considerable momentum. Large bands of 500, 1,000 and even up to 2,000 strong roamed Galloway during the spring and summer nights. After the loose stones were pulled down, poles between six and eight feet long were pushed into the foundations of the dykes until they were levered to the ground. Tools which were used to build them were also removed or destroyed. Another common practice was cutting the hamstrings (‘houghing’) of the cattle which were grazing on the parks, especially if they were suspected of having been imported illegally from Ireland.
James Clerk gave a memorable eyewitness account of what happened in a letter to his brother, Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, dated 13 May 1724:
On Sunday 10th instant they caused public proclamation to be made at doors of eight Parish Churches, ordering all men and women upward of 15 to repair to the Main of Bomby.
I saw them yesterday between the hours of 8 and 12 in the morning coming in bodies from all quarters … making in all a body upwards of 2000, half of which were armed with good effective firelocks upwards of 400, and pitchforks and clubs; the other half being the workmen had long poles for prizing up the seams of the dykes for quick despatch.
About 12 of the clock Mr Basil Hamilton’s [a local landowner accused of being a ‘parking laird’] servants with about two or three of this town, advanced to them in order to make a Treaty. They were quickly enclosed, dismounted and taken prisoner, and instead of coming to any agreement they were with much difficulty dismissed. The mob fired three shots upon them in retreat then gave the word ‘Down with the Dykes’ upon which they fell vigorously to work to Mr Hamilton’s large dyke, for the space of three hours they levelled to the ground seven miles of stone dyke in length.
… there were a great many lusty young women among them who performed greater wonders than the men. It cannot be well doubted that perhaps there were several venereal conjunctions among the lads and lasses, which appears being transacted in the proper posture dykewards might very much contribute to the carrying on in throwing down the work. I left them still at work about 5 in the afternoon.6
If accurate, several points of interest emerge from this account, apart entirely from the evidence that levelling seems to have provided opportunities for amorous activity among ‘the lads and lasses’. Clearly the gang was armed to the teeth, not only with clubs and scythes, but also with firearms. However, apart from a few shots being fired the confrontation with the servants of a landowner did not end in violence. Indeed, attacks against persons seems not to have been employed by the Levellers. The targets were the property of the landowners in general and their cattle parks in particular. The numbers involved in this example of levelling were impressive, as was the boldness of those who took part. This was not a clandestine or midnight operation but one carried out in broad daylight, with several witnesses present who observed what took place. Also worthy of note is that levelling had become a collective act undertaken by entire communities. The menfolk were joined by women, young adults and, as some other sources pointed out, also by children.
Other methods were employed in combination with physical destruction of the dykes in order to encourage support for the ultimate objective of bringing ‘parking’ to an end. A propaganda war was launched with public declarations and pamphlets outlining grievances and calling for support. One example was the Account of the Reasons …, cited above. Another anonymous polemic acknowledged the legal right of the landowners to carry out improvements to their estates but condemned the destructive effect that some of them were having on society. Using evidence from the scriptures at length, the author contended that wholesale dispossession threatened not only public order but the ruin of God’s creatures. The religious theme ran through several of the printed protests. The oppressed tenants and cottars, it was argued, had a God-given right to be supported by the fruits of the earth.
Even after only a few weeks of disturbances and agitation, some members of the landed élite in Galloway feared that the local structures of law and order were under acute pressure and increasingly unable to cope with the excesses of the Levellers. The sheriff and baron courts and Justices of the Peace were usually enough to suppress and punish petty criminality. But they had difficulty confronting what was, in some parishes of Galloway, a revolt driven by entire communities. What made matters worse was the position of the Church of Scotland and that of individual ministers. Arguably, the church was the main bastion of moral and civil order in the eighteenth-century countryside. Its hierarchy of church courts, ranging from the General Assembly, through synods and presbyteries, down to local kirk sessions, made it a powerful force for stability and influence. In this structure, the parish sessions were the most crucial. The minister and his elders could be counted on to maintain disciplined surveillance over most aspects of the lives of the parishioners.
The General Assembly in Edinburgh and the Presbytery of Galloway did denounce the levelling in no uncertain terms. An Act of the Assembly was passed in May 1724, vigorously condemning those who levelled the dykes for their sinfulness. All ministers in the Synods of Dumfries and Galloway were enjoined to warn the people from their pulpits about the threat to their eternal salvation caused by such criminal behaviour. But at the local level the church was far from united against the Levellers. Some ministers refused to read out the Assembly proclamation while others were accused of actively supporting the destruction of the dykes and siding with the plight of the dispossessed. Indeed, at least one Church of Scotland minister, the Reverend William Falconer, was arrested in July 1724 and sent to Edinburgh for trial with another man, having ‘unlawfully convocated themselves with other accomplices, demolished several enclosures in the Stewartry [of Kirkcudbright], and continued to the number of twelve or more in a riotous manner after Proclamation against riots had been read to them’.7 Clearly, even the reading of the Riot Act was having little effect.
It now seemed that only the forces of the crown brought in from outside Galloway could control these serious disturbances. Thus did the Earl of Galloway write to his brother-in-law, Sir John Clerk, in May 1724, in somewhat alarmist terms, urging government action:
you would hear the insolences of ane sett of people that have drauen together and destroyed the whole encloasures in the Stewartrie, and if we have not the protection of the Govert by allowing troops to march in the countrie for our assistance, I doe relie believe the whole gentlemen of Galloway will be ruined.8
The concern about the continued breaking of the law, combined with an expression of sympathy for the plight of the evicted, prompted the Duke of Roxburgh, himself a leading Border magnate, and Secretary for Scotland, to authorize a public enquiry into the grievances of the Levellers. This met in August 1724 and was chaired by John McDowall, Steward Depute of Kirkcudbright. No trace has survived either of its proceedings or conclusions. Earlier in the summer, troops, mainly drawn from the Earl of Stair’s Dragoons, had intervened in the disturbed region for the first time. Eventually, in June, a further six troops of dragoons were reported to have left from Edinburgh, ‘the better to level the Levellers’.9 A combined force was then brought together under the command of Major Du Cary. Even before that, several of the leaders of the protesters had been tracked down and arrested and committed to prison in Edinburgh. Despite this early success the military did not entirely intimidate the Levellers or cause them to end their campaign against the hated cattle parks. Indeed on 12 and 26 May, after the arrests had been made, large bands of dyke breakers, reckoned to be up to 2,000 in number, confronted the authorities on Bombie Moor and Kelton Hill. They then dispersed from these gatherings to mount successful levelling raids across the neighbouring countryside.
On 2 June two troops of horse and four of dragoons, under Du Cary, in addition to several local landowners and their servants, came face to face with a tiny group of Levellers, a mere fifty strong, at Steps of Tarf. They were easily dispersed and several were taken prisoner. But, despite this reverse, there was still no end to the dyke breaking in Galloway. The local people knew the hills and valleys of the area intimately and when confronted by the forces of law and order were able to disperse from the incident and fell the dykes elsewhere by night. As the Caledonian Mercury reported on 16 June:
We hear the Levellers began again to peep out since the Forces are retir’d to their Quarters; and lest the work should not be regularly carried on, they in the Night-time detach some chosen ones into the Country, who soon remove all Objects of Offence, and bring all to a beloved Party.
We see here handed about a very scriptural printed Three-halfpenny Apology for these Men, pretending to justice this their Procedure with the Square of the Sacred Texts.10
The references to support from Holy Scriptures for the Levellers’ cause is significant. Earlier, in May, proclamations had been read out twice in some parish churches seeking the support of the people for the Levellers. On the first occasion this was done in eight parishes, and on the second twelve. This suggests a degree of sympathy, if not support, from some local ministers. Since the traditional sources of authority were not always on the side of the ‘parking lairds’, officers of the crown, such as Du Cary, had to deal with the Levellers with some sensitivity rather than draconian force. There is also evidence of a degree of sympathy for the dyke breakers among some merchants and lesser landowners not directly involved in the creation of the large cattle parks.
The rising had not been finally crushed by the end of the summer months. Incidents of levelling continued to be reported well into the autumn in both Kirkcudbright and Wigtown. Even after the last stand of the Levellers took place at Duchrae in Balmaghie parish, which was followed by many arrests, sporadic disturbances still went on. Brigadier Tom Stewart of Sorbie could report as late as mid-November that ‘they have not been soe violent upon the dicks [dykes] in genll’. Nevertheless, as he went on:
but the spirett keeps upp amongst them. They one Wednesday night last, mett in a considerable body near Whithorne with sythes, pitfforks and other weapons, killed and houghed Wig’s cattle in the inclosure they lately throen doun, but being advertised from the town that the dragoons were mounting to march upon them they dispersed and severall of them threw away their wepons which have been since found. They have broke to pieces severall of my brother’s big yetts [gates] upon highways, leading through his inclosures to Whithorne, and they breack and destroyed almos all the carriages and tools Broughton had for making up his inclosures.
They have likewise a practice in sending their emissaries in the night time to the country people houses, threatening them that iff they doe not join them to burn their houses and meal stacks.11
The tenants and cottars who had been imprisoned stood trial at the Tolbooth of Kirkcudbright for their offences in January 1725. Facing them on the bench were the representatives of local landowners sitting in judgement upon the malefactors who had destroyed their own enclosures or those of their friends and kindred.
The accused had in their favour that, although large-scale depredations against property had occurred, no one had been killed or seriously injured during the disturbances. The acknowledged sympathy on the part of some leaders of Border society had also to be acknowledged and taken into consideration. In addition, the attitudes of the eighteenth-century judiciary towards plebeian riot and disturbance were frequently complex. There was often a tendency towards leniency in order to restore good relations within the local community as quickly as possible. Heavy sentences imposed on the accused in such circumstances might simply lead to more unrest. It is significant, for instance, that in October 1724, when over 200 Levellers confronted a force of dragoons at Duchrae, the troops were ordered to use minimum force. In response, the Levellers put up only minimal resistance. Many were arrested but almost all were allowed to escape on the march back to the town of Kirkcudbright. For those who were eventually tried, no capital sentences were passed, or of transportation across the seas to the colonies. Significantly, also, those who were arraigned were tried under civil rather than criminal law. Instead, large fines and compensation payments were levied on those found guilty of damage to property. Even then the punishments might seem harsh. Yet, from another perspective, they could be seen as merely symbolic. Impoverished small tenants and cottars would simply be unable to pay the fines handed down by the court.
The history of the Levellers is well documented in some respects but in several others the evidence about them is patchy and obscure. This is especially the case when trying to answer the most intriguing question of all: why did these disturbances actually occur in south-west Scotland in the 1720s? On first consideration the answer might seem obvious. They were triggered by the reality or the threat of peasant dispossession in Galloway because of the onward expansion of cattle ranching leading to the annexation of small farms. On the surface, that explanation appears plausible and convincing. After all, the tactics of the people in levelling the dykes surrounding the large cattle parks seemed to confirm an absolute connection between initial cause and final effect of their actions. Yet, arguably, though indeed a necessary part of an overall explanation, this in itself is insufficient, as elsewhere in the Borders at the time, and later throughout the Lowlands, the removal of small tenants and cottars was a commonplace. But only in some parishes of Galloway in 1724 was eighteenth-century landlordism confronted by a popular revolt of such threatening magnitude that it could be eventually subdued only by military force. Moreover, the timing of levelling is puzzling. ‘Parking’ had been going on since the 1680s, a quarter of a century before the disturbances began. Why only in the 1720s did the anger of the peasantry boil over into violent and armed resistance?
Part of the answer might be found in the economic sphere. By the early eighteenth century the big cattle farms were beginning to encroach on, and enclose, open or common grazing grounds, the ‘commonties’ referred to earlier in the chapter. That process would have proven a serious threat to peasant communities which were not subject to direct eviction. They would have experienced profound problems from strategies which menaced the tight margins of their household economies. The slender balance between subsistence and shortage might have been squeezed by the annexation of common lands. Again, there is evidence that not only landowners but tenant farmers had tried to exploit the new post-Union market opportunities in the cattle trade. Some had invested in more stock because of those possibilities. Now, however, as ‘parking’ intensified, they stood to lose the vitally important access to the common grazings for the livestock they had purchased at great risk. For them and their families, descent into penury and beggary might follow.
There was also the economic context of the Galloway clearances to be considered. As argued in Chapter 4, in parts of the central and eastern Borders, the dispossession of small tenants and cottars to make way for larger sheep runs was paralleled by the growth of cottage industry and employment opportunities for the displaced in the towns of Kelso, Hawick, Selkirk and Jedburgh. But these alternatives were not available to anything like the same extent in Galloway, where woollen working and other manufactures were much less developed. It is likely, therefore, that the poorer rural communities in the western Borders were faced with a much narrower set of options: acceptance of ‘parking’ and eventual likely eviction, or violent resistance in an attempt to reverse the transformation of the old agrarian society.
By May 1724 it was reckoned by James Clerk, Collector of Customs at Kirkcudbright, that the Levellers ‘have already thrown down 12 or 14 gentlemen’s inclosures and are still going on’.12 But a new development had occurred. They were also systematically slaughtering any cattle illegally imported from Ireland in contravention of the Act of Parliament of 1666. They alleged that this illicit trade in the bigger and more valuable Irish stock was a prime influence on the larger-scale development of the cattle parks in the early 1720s. Undeniably, there were some close personal and family links between landlords in the western Borders and Ulster. Nonetheless, the allegations remain unproven, though they must have further angered the local people in Galloway. In a missive addressed to Major Du Cary, the commander of the troops sent to subdue the Levellers, they asserted:
understanding that there were a considerable number of Irish cattle in the Parks of Netherlaw, we did, in obedience to the law, legally seize and slaughter them to deter the gentlemen from the like practice of importing or bringing Irish cattle, to the great loss of this poor country as well as the breeders in England, too much the practice of the gentlemen here.13
By such allegations, they were able to maintain pressure on the authorities’ attempt to unite the landed classes and occupy the moral high ground as defenders of the law.
In addition, however, we also need to probe the complex world of west Border political and religious history in order to provide a comprehensive explanation for the Levellers’ Revolt. Arguably it is there that the distinctive origins of the disturbances can be found. Several aspects of the recent Galloway past are relevant to the analysis. The long Covenanting tradition of south-west Scotland was important. The restoration of King Charles II in 1660 led once again to the rule of bishops in the Presbyterian church. This action was thought heretical and oppressive by many pious communities and their ministers, and in open conflict with the sacred Covenants between Christ and his church established during the civil wars of the 1640s. As a result, many clergymen left their parishes and held alternative open-air services or conventicles. These were soon outlawed by the state as treason and the army then enforced the will of the King, often in a particularly brutal fashion. This period, known as the ‘Killing Times’, is still marked in the countryside around Wigtown, Kirkcudbright and Dumfries by the many memorials to the martyrs who defied the civil authorities and faithfully clung to their ideals despite savage state oppression. Galloway remained a hotbed of Covenanting activity despite the draconian policies of the monarchy.
Not surprisingly, the majority of the population were therefore enthusiastic about the removal of the Stuart king, James VII and II, in the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688–9. But then the Jacobite Rising of 1715 rekindled the old fears of a Stuart counter-revolution. Bitter memories were revived, not simply of the Killing Times, but also of the many years of Presbyterian struggle between the signing of the National Covenant in 1638 and the Revolution of 1688. Old wounds were reopened especially because of the class fissures in the local communities. The people may have been overwhelmingly anti-Jacobite but several of the landowners were not only sympathetic to the Stuart cause but joined the Jacobite forces of the Earl of Marr in 1715. There were also Roman Catholic lairds in the parishes of Pantien, Kirkpatrick, Durham and Buitlle, including the Maxwells, earls of Nithsdale. Another prominent figure with similar loyalties was Sir Basil Hamilton, the largest single landowner in the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright.
During the disturbances, the estates of these families became prime targets of the Levellers. Rumours abounded in 1724 of an Irish-inspired Jacobite rebellion and that the enclosures were part of a Jacobite plot. In their public statements the Levellers were wont to stress their absolute loyalty to King George and the House of Hanover. Thus did old grievances and memories add fuel to the fire of economic discontent. These political and religious factors were specific to the western Borders in the 1720s and they help to explain why protest on the scale of the actions of the Levellers did not take place in later decades. They, as well as the impact of enclosure, were the catalyst for the disturbances and they were not replicated in any other locality in the second half of the eighteenth century.
The story of the Galloway Levellers lived on in local tradition over several generations. In 1838, a century and more after the dykes were levelled, John Nicholson wrote a play about the disturbances. S. R. Crockett, the Victorian Scottish novelist, himself born in Duchrae, parish of Balmaghie, in the shire of Kirkudbright, used tales from his birthplace to write The Dark o’ the Moon (1902) about the Levellers. It was a sequel to his most famous novel, The Raiders (1894). Yet, by that time no trace remained of the runrig fields of the small tenants and cottars of the 1720s, or indeed of the large cattle parks which had caused them to rise in protest. By the later eighteenth century the agricultural revolution in Galloway had taken a different course. By then the region was exporting grain from arable farms as well as selling cattle. Not unlike the pattern in some parts of the Highlands, clearances in the Borders seem not to have left a legacy of bitterness or an enduring folk memory of dispossession.
Some scholars argue that the Galloway landed élites had been given a real fright by the depredations of the Levellers and that the expansion of ‘parking’ slowed for a time as a result. Others contend that what happened in the south-west of Scotland helped to shape the agricultural revolution throughout the Lowlands. It is argued that one of the reasons why there were fewer disturbances later in the eighteenth century was partly because the Galloway levelling activities had so alarmed the authorities that they took care to ensure that popular resistance would be avoided in future. Landowners in the second half of the eighteenth century are also said to have implemented policies designed to prevent opposition by the people as agrarian change gathered pace.
Perhaps, but no evidence has so far come to light in landed archives or contemporary comments of any such causal connection in later decades between the nature of the agrarian revolution in the Lowlands in the second half of the eighteenth century and events in Galloway in 1724. As will be argued later, the displacement and redeployment of small tenants and cottars was dictated by a nexus of economic and demographic factors at the time and not by any lingering awareness of events nearly half a century before in the south-west Borders.14
The Fields That Once were Homes
On Airieland Farm’s a field called Meadow Isle
enclosed by fat, well-fed dykes of local stone.
Who’d guess that once this field was home
to saddler, cobbler, cutler, chandler, horner,
that Galloway teemed with such living fields
of cottars? Their names are all but lost
to OS maps and local deeds, preserved
occasionally as woodland, little hills
or streams, not in anything so crudely, surely human as ferm toun or croft.
Records show Meadow Isle long abandoned
by 1800, a new farmhouse built
that year, the failing gable ends a camp
for dykers hoying up brand new enclosures,
longer, higher, wider. Their final act –
demolishing its walls for use as stones
to build the last new stretch of dyke.
From out this field that once was home and more
80 years before walked John McKnaught armed
with gavelock, intent on levelling
the future. What he left behind’s
lush pasture now, a ready grazing ground
for cattle, archaeologists and those
we’ve built the longest, highest, widest dykes around.
[gavelock – iron crowbar]
Stuart A. Paterson, Looking South (Indigo Dreams Publications, 2017)