WAY The spirits of slain warriors
WE REVISIT DEREK PARKER’S RAMBLES THROUGH RENFREWSHIRE
Mine of information
Darkness descended and the setting sun sank to its crimson cradle beyond moorland peaks as I made my way past the lonely lochan below
Walls Hill where Iron Age
Celts lived in mud-and-wattle huts protected by wooden stockades 2,000 years ago.
Bracken-mantled slopes and rush-robed marshes half hid rocky ruins of medieval homesteads where farming families tended livestock and cultivated oats and kale in a remote realm which has changed little during the centuries.
Suddenly, through the grey gloom, I heard an amazing sound which has echoed over Walls Hill and the desolate tarn, high on the Gleniffer Braes above Paisley, since the dawn of time.
It was the eerie echo of the
Winter Spirit incarnating itself in the trumpeting call of hundreds of migrating geese on their annual pilgrimage from summer haunts in Iceland and Scandinavia to winter homes in south-west Scotland, where
Derek Parker knew many of Paisley’s secrets – the grimy and the good.
He wandered every corner in search of the clues that would unlock Renfrewshire’s rich history.
These tales were shared with readers in his hugely popular Parker’s Way column.
We’ve opened our vault to handpick our favourites for you.
they’ll feed on grain, grass and clover in fields, as well as molluscs and worms in mud on tidal estuaries.
Then they will return to their Arctic breeding grounds next spring.
In the incipient darkness, I watched shadowy skeins of the great grey geese fly in V-formation and listened to their wild wails as they flew on an annual journey which crossed the North Sea and evoked fear in the hearts of men, women and children in bygone days.
Travelling through darkness and mist, the phantom flyers were regarded as avian embodiments of slain warriors whose spirits roamed winter wastelands until the final fight between the forces of good and evil on Judgment Day.
Migrating geese were also identified with Gabriel’s Ghosts and Odin’s Hounds, who came in howling hoards to claim the screaming souls of people destined to die and dwell eternally in dark and desolate domains.
Mothers kept children indoors and farm-workers fled from fields when the ghostly geese flew overhead lest they never see their loved ones again after being spirited away by the baying birds to certain death.
It is many years since Iron Age Celts and medieval farmers lived at Walls Hill and beside the tiny tarn but the spirits of these long-dead human inhabitants of the hills and moors live on today in timeless travellers flying overhead in the fearsome form of migratory geese.