A History Maker

POSTSCRIPT BY A STUDENT OF FOLKLORE

WHEN FEDOR HAKAGAWA WAS recording folksongs of the Irish vagrants in Donegal several years ago he encountered the following rhyme:

O Wat was a nasty old tinker,

And Meg was his nasty old wife,

They hated none more than each other,

They lived in contention and strife.

He battered her when he was sober,

She kickit him when he was drunk,

The broken-nosed toothless old gangrels

Yelled, fought, fornicated and stunk.

He glowered at each look that she gave him,

She spat at each word that he uttered,

Each hated the other so hotly,

They didnae think other folk mattered.

Hakagawa noticed that rhythm, diction and sentiments were more Scottish than Irish and was told it commemorated a couple of travellers who had lived in dens and sea caves round the northern shores of Scotland and Ireland, drifting with the currents across the strait between Kintyre and Antrim in borrowed or stolen boats. They were noted for almost total silence when forced into the company of others by hunger, foul weather or accident. They were also noted for being violently quarrelsome when they thought they were alone.

Researchers in Scotland have learned the couple had been known (though only to other gangrels) as far north as Caithness and Sutherland, as far east as Buchan and Fife, as far south as Clydesdale, but had always avoided the Scottish — English borders, a region most travellers like for its fertile commons and hospitable homesteads. This was also the region where Wat and Meg’s affair had become a popular legend of love that had shaken the world. A version of the song recorded near Freuchie, in Fife, has a verse not known in Ireland.

When one broke their neck in a tumble,

(It doesnae now matter just which)

The tither, with naebody else to detest,

Starved to death in the very same ditch.

All four crude verses are now added to Wat Dryhope’s and Meg Mountbenger’s intelligence archive with a question mark following it. They were probably composed after the couple described got buried in unmarked graves. Nobody can be sure they were the hero and villain of this tale, but such an ending for Kittock’s son and daughter seems as likely as murder and suicide, and more in keeping with modern notions. We prefer the comic to the tragic mode.

Altrieve Cottage,

home of James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd,

looking toward Mountbenger

around 1820