MY PRICKLY ENCOUNTER WITH THE BURRYMAN
One volunteer. Hundreds of spiky seedheads. And a day spent drinking whisky in an outfit which defies comfort breaks. Welcome to Scotland’s oddest 900-year-old ritual...
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LL morning, people have been asking Andrew Taylor how he is doing. To which, in the circumstances, the only appropriate response might be: ‘How does it look like I’m doing?’
The 37-year-old City of Edinburgh Council employee might reasonably elaborate: ‘I am covered from head to toe in 7,000 burrs from Scotland’s stickiest, scratchiest bush. I’ve been on my feet for five hours, and there are still five more before I can sit down.
‘Comfort break? That’s a laugh. They’ve sewn me into my underwear! I’ve no alternative but to hold it in until they unstitch me –and everywhere I go they make me drink whisky.
‘Did I mention that I can’t lower my arms? If I do, my suit of plant heads will come apart and the day will be ruined. To top it all, it’s been bucketing down all day. I’m soaked to the skin – large areas of which are now red raw from these bleeping burrs... and you’re wondering how I’m doing?’
But instead a voice from somewhere inside the foliage replies simply: ‘Oh, fine’ and says not to worry. He has, after all, some experience of this most bizarre of endurance tests. This year marks Mr Taylor’s eighth outing as the Burryman.
His predecessor managed 13 of them. Another South Queensferry local did 25 Burryman stints before deciding the ‘honour’ should pass to the next generation – as it has done now for centuries. Indeed, some say that this quite bonkers ritual – little mentioned or even heard of outside one Edinburgh commuter-belt community – has been going on for some 900 years.
What on earth does it mean? Why cover every inch of a blameless local in the fruit of the burdock plant and parade him through the streets like some abominable bush man, plying him with perhaps 20 whiskies from 9am on? Can it possibly be safe? And by what devilish means are victims coerced into being the Burryman?
I wondered all those things and more as I arrived on a sodden Friday morning at a South Queensferry pub where, in a back room, a man standing in his long johns was about to be turned into a walking hedgerow. It was not yet 8am but the place was abuzz, the floor bedecked with rectangular slabs of burrs, stuck together like Velcro and soon to find a home on the body of the strangely calm fellow in the underwear.
Has he... how should I put this... made preparations?
YES, I’ve... been,’ he confides as lady helpers stitch the top of his long johns to the bottom of his T-shirt. ‘That’s me until six o’clock.’ Hmm, and has he seen the weather? ‘That’s all right. My skin’s waterproof.’
We will never know how the Burrymen of previous centuries felt about this part of the day – or whether they knew any better than Mr Taylor the origins of this weird observance.
One theory relates to a tale of King Malcolm III giving English troops the slip in the 11th century by covering himself in burrs.
Folklorists point to the scapegoating rituals of bygone ages when, following a poor crop or a disappointing catch, a local farmer or fisherman would be singled out for humiliation.
According to Devon-born Doc Rowe, 74, who has been a fixture of Burryman Day for decades, scapegoating was a familiar practice in north-east fishing towns such as Buckie and Fraserburgh.
‘They would grab one of their own and throw a net over him and drag him through the streets, and the people would throw things at him – burrs and rubbish and dog s***, whatever they could find... and then, of course, the catch would be revived.’
There are even those who view the Burryman as a Wicker Man-esque sacrificial offering – some half expect him to be set ablaze on the nearest beach at the conclusion of his journey through the town. But if that is
where the ritual started, it has evolved in a very different direction. Today, the Burryman is cherished like the town’s favourite teddy bear – only, for obvious reasons, cuddled rather more gingerly.
‘See you again at six,’ Mr Taylor says to his wife Claire, 38, and gives her a kiss just before the balaclava goes on. The woollen headgear is then stitched to his T-shirt and burrs attached all over his face save for the mouth and eye holes.
Finally, the hat – a bowler, festooned with brambles and roses – and the transformation is complete. Andrew Taylor, minutes ago a mild-mannered environmental warden on his day off, the Burryman.
And, yikes, he’s on the move. Helped by friends Andrew Findlater and Duncan Thompson, he edges like a topiary exhibit come alive out of the room, down a few steps and into the pouring rain.
‘Hip, hip, hooray, it’s the Burryman Day!’ booms a burly figure in a kilt as he clangs a large hand bell. It is 8.50am, lashing with rain, and a green monster and his mates are holding up the rush-hour traffic.
I peer through car windows for rolling eyes and impatient sighs, but see only smiles as motorists roll down windows to put coins in the Burryman Day charity collection tins.
‘Hip, hip, hooray, it’s the Burryman Day!’ Louder this time. Bell ringer Cameron Forrester will repeat this ancient call roughly every 30 seconds for the next nine hours. His bell hardly stops either.
A few yards behind him walks the green vision with a splayed gait to avoid displacing burrs on his inner thighs. But the real challenge is his arms. To keep them away from his sides, the Burryman carries a leaf rake in each hand, decorated with flowers and Lion Rampant flags. Hi attendant ‘pole-bearers’, Messrs Findlater and Thompson, help bear
their weight and stop Mr Taylor’s hands from sliding down the poles. All three are eight-year veterans of this choreographed shuffle through their local byways.
They know by now that the traditional first stop is the house of the late James Milne, last provost of South Queensferry’s before the town was subsumed into Edinburgh.
Each year his granddaughter Donna travels from her home in Belfast to give the Burryman his first drink of the day – a nip of Grouse, imbibed through a straw.
Ten minutes later another neighbour, 82year-old Mary Hamblin, is proffering some Old Pulteney (60.3 per cent by volume) which promptly disappears through another straw into the foliage. Her mother, she tells me, greeted the Burryman with a glass of whisky every year until she was 101.
FROM a house across the street, a man with a Mohican emerges and asks what the commotion is all about. ‘It’s Burryman Day,’ I tell him, somewhat superfluously, for Mr Forrester the bell ringer has been telling everyone the same thing, at some volume, for quite a while now. ‘What? Who’s getting buried?’ ‘You’re not from around here, then?’ I say and he shakes his head: ‘Naw, I live in Stockbridge.’ And he wanders back inside, having
learned something new about the place where his girlfriend stays.
The parade moves on and I start to acquaint myself with the Burryman’s supporting cast, starting with his wife Claire. ‘Do you worry about him?’ I ask her.
‘Yeah, absolutely. He can’t sit down and he’s got to drink all that whisky. Yeah, you do worry, but you know when he’s a bit on the low side because the shoulders and the head drop a bit.’
She says the burrs are picked at the nearby Dalmeny Estate and dried indoors for several days before being arranged into slabs.
‘We decorate the hat differently every year. This year we’ve got brambles, berries, roses and a mixture of flowers and burrs.’
And what is her understanding of the Burryman’s origins? She shrugs. ‘There are so many stories out there. But I think the Burryman is meant to ward off evil spirits. He comes once a year and brings good luck. You take a burr off the Burryman and it’s meant to be lucky.’ At 22, Mr Forrester has been a bell ringer on the annual parade since he was 12, the same age his schoolboy apprentice George Hardie is now.
‘Hip, hip, hooray, it’s the Burryman Day!’ cries the Queensferry High pupil, his unbroken voice echoing his mentor.
In a few years George will surely be the principal bell ringer. A few years after that, who knows? Perhaps they will let him be the one they cover in burrs.
‘That would be brilliant,’ says he, heedless of the downpour and drink combining to make this year’s parade the sternest of endurance tests for its central character.
Burryman Day has survived down the centuries because successive generations pass on its rituals before bowing out. In a town dominated by three of Scotland’s longest bridges, a fourth, invisible bridge stretches from nearly a millennium ago into the future, supporting the Burryman all the way. t HE last one was 45-year-old John Nicol, a graphic designer who stepped down partly to escape the whisky and partly to ensure the baton was passed on in good time. He says: ‘I got to the point where there was kind of an assumption it would be me who was doing it, but in some ways it’s irrelevant who does it. The more important thing is that people are continually pulled into the tradition.’
Mr Taylor, who used to work in the Staghead bar where the Burryman’s day begins, was Mr Nicol’s chosen successor and, when he in turn decides it is time, he will likely have the casting vote on who comes next.
‘If I was asked and I was accepted I would definitely do it,’ says Mr Forrester, a British Gas analyst now living in Edinburgh. ‘But there’s other people, Queensferry born and bred like me, who could also throw their hat in the ring.’
But who would want to spend the day as a human burdock plant under a cloudburst?
‘It’s the tradition,’ he says. ‘It’s one of those things that everybody in Queensferry, old or new, knows about.’ How else to explain the love of where you are from, the reverence for customs that feed your very sense of self?
It is Doc Rowe, a folklorist and, for the last two decades or so, the Burryman’s unofficial dresser, who gives the most convincing explanation of what the day is really about.
‘Essentially, it is a community celebrating itself,’ he says. ‘And done without embarrassment.’ At 6pm, the parade complete, the burrs come off, the stitches are unpicked and the balaclava removed. Does the man who emerges from the mad green suit make a beeline for the nearest loo? No, he hugs his two attendants.
‘I know then I’ve come through it,’ he says. ‘It’s another year we’ve managed it, and that always feels pretty good. It’s always quite a special moment.’
The Burryman is away and, standing in his place, South Queensferry’s answer to Clark Kent, sore but smiling.
Catch him again in early August 2020. Catch him, if you are very young, next century.
The Burryman predated all three Forth bridges, you know. And he shows every sign of outliving them, too.