The Herald - The Herald Magazine
Author and Galloway farmer Patrick Laurie on the balance between loss and preservation
GALLOWAY has been rebuilt over the last 30 years. This small, frequently overlooked corner of
Scotland has been trained to produce staggering amounts of renewable energy and timber products, not to mention around half of Scotland’s milk. This boom represents an extraordinary leap of progress, but it has also taken a heavy toll on the culture and heritage of an ancient and distinctive landscape.
It’s clear what Scotland gets from Galloway; we can measure our productivity in gallons and megawatts, but it doesn’t always feel like a two-way street. There are few jobs for young people in the south west. Investment in local infrastructure seems to melt and crumble every year. In the face of accelerating development, local communities frequently lodge notes of concern and protest, but these are routinely overturned or ignored by government ministers in Edinburgh.
Our commercial outputs have gone through the roof, but it often feels like we’re being left behind; disempowered and ignored.
The campaign to designate Galloway as a National Park was recently met with a resounding “no” from Holyrood. In 2014, a massive hoard of Viking treasure was unearthed by a metal detectorist in Galloway. It was whisked away to Edinburgh so quickly that it made our heads spin.
All this might read like gripe or grievance, but the south west has been on the back foot for decades.
Even as a child growing up in Galloway, it was always very clear that I lived in a fine, mighty place. I never wanted to leave, but young people find it incredibly hard to get started here. I was lucky to have been brought up in a farming family, and it seemed obvious that I should work with cattle. Cows have been our currency here since before history began, and Belted Galloways are an internationally recognisable trademark for southern Scotland.
Working a number of jobs and saving up a few pounds, I finally invested in a small number of hairy Galloway cows in 2015. Almost immediately, I was swallowed up into a culture and sense of continuity which was dazzling in its clarity and intensity. I never really left south west Scotland, but agriculture gave me a compelling connection to the place where I belonged.
Hill farming is slow work. Starting with four heifers, it has taken five years to build a herd of 30. Each beast has its own character and attitude, and together they work as part of a system which created these old moorland places many thousands of years ago.
Check on cattle at dawn or dusk and walk between their heavy bodies; it’s a transportation to a different epoch. But life in this landscape is changing.
Commercial and industrial pressures are forcing our ancient places into fresh, untested new shapes. Galloway is famous for its granite foundations, but this place has begun to move so quickly that nothing is certain anymore.
I have always been fascinated by birds. More than any other species, curlews seemed to represent the rough, endless Galloway landscapes that I had known as a child. However, many of these places have simply vanished over the past 20 years.
Come down into Galloway through Carsphairn nowadays and you’ll pass through 100 square miles of commercial forest plantation, electricity pylons and wind turbines. That used to be curlew country; a place where the birds were so numerous that naturalists could hardly be bothered to count them. But curlews have declined by almost three quarters since 1994, and it seems likely that they could soon be gone altogether.
Curlews depend upon wide, moorland habitats which are created and maintained by old-fashioned agriculture. As I worked with traditional cattle over several years, I steadily sank into a way of life that is now facing extinction. Galloway cows produce excellent beef, but their carcases are small and slowgrowing. Supermarkets prefer to work with faster breeds of cattle, and the financial case for farming in the hills gets slimmer every year.
No matter how carefully I herded my cows and drove them out to the moors, money remained tight and fewer curlews
returned to breed each year.
As farming and forestry have intensified, curlews have been pressed out of existence. It’s fair to reckon that they have now declined too far to recover here. Huge new forest creation targets mean that thousands of acres of their habitat continue to be be ploughed and planted every year; a forester friend confessed that the industry now has a simple goal; to plant up the places they missed in the 1970s.
It’s not clear where this leaves Galloway. For all that I mourn the loss of curlews, their decline is simply part of a much bigger shift in culture, heritage and communities in the south west. I find meaning and value in the old farming ways, but I can’t deny that I am fretting over the remains of something that is already dead. I’m tortured by the realisation that we have lost so much, but as I sank deeper into keeping and breeding Galloway cattle, I was ever more tantalised by the realisation that powerful fragments of the old ways remain.
There is something very human in the culture of this place which nothing can erase. Most people find Galloway strangely enigmatic. We’re just part of “Dumfries and Galloway”, and it’s not always clear to outsiders where the line lies between these two component parts. Many people say it doesn’t matter, but try saying “Galloway doesn’t exist” to a pub full of folk in Castle Douglas or Newton Stewart.
It’s not always a pretty place or an easy existence; life in these hills can be desperately isolated and lonely, but the hardships are often more formative and interesting than days when the moors tremble with smiles and sunshine.
It turns out that my style of farming calls for a difficult balance between loss and preservation. The way things have gone in Galloway, we have not been able to choose what we are allowed to keep and what has been taken from us.
My grandfather would have said that it was unimaginable to think of Galloway without curlews; the birds seemed to serve as an icon for the place. But as curlews begin to slip out of sight, there’s still hope in the discovery that some things can never be lost.
Native: Life in a Vanishing Landscape by Patrick Laurie is published by Birlinn (£14.99) and is shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing. The winner is announced on September 9.
AT 7.52pm on July 5, 1973, Margaret McLaughlin left her parents’ home in Carluke to catch the train to Glasgow. The station was only minutes away, across a wooded patch called Colonel’s Glen. Her body was found the next morning a short distance from the path with 19 stab wounds.
Six days later a suspect was charged. George Beattie, who was known in the town as a fantasist who had been kept back for two years in primary school, was tried, found guilty and served 20 years.
David Wilson, the criminologist, grew up in Carluke. He remembers George Beattie, and can still conjure up a mental image of him standing on a railway platform taking down train numbers. Like many people from the town, he has always harboured serious doubts that Beattie was guilty.
Wilson went on to become England’s youngest prison governor, later founding the Centre for
Applied Criminology at Birmingham University. His autobiography, My Life with Murderers, was shortlisted for the Saltire Prize in 2019.
But, throughout his life, the case of George Beattie has nagged at him. Margaret’s murder, followed by Beattie’s conviction, sent a double shockwave through his home town, and finally he has brought his criminological skills to assessing the crime. Wilson admits he’s strictly an amateur on this case (“I cannot gain access to the records of the original investigation”), but he investigates to the best of his ability, going through all the available evidence for signs of a miscarriage of justice.
He finds many, and they lead back to one man: Detective Chief Superintendent William Muncie, who was himself from Carluke and took charge of the investigation. Muncie was by this time dubbed “Scotland’s top detective” and had become convinced that he had a special intuition for sniffing out the guilty. Wilson builds up a strong case that Muncie’s faith in his instincts left him particularly vulnerable to confirmation bias, and that, having fingered Beattie as the culprit, he refused to back down for fear of losing face.
Having demolished the case against Beattie, Wilson attempts to work out who the actual culprit might have been, tramping the streets of Carluke and holding meetings in the town’s Bake House Café with residents who remember the case.
“They became the heat that brought this cold case back to life.” His enquiries throw up a name, which presents the ethical quandary of what to do with this information. Wilson doesn’t name his suspect, “but, of course, if the police ever want to re-open this case all of my research is available to them”.
There’s an elegiac quality to Signs of Murder which can’t just be attributed to the length of time that has passed since Margaret’s murder and its prominence during the author’s teenage years. Time and again, Wilson returns to the widespread feeling in Carluke that
Beattie had been wrongly convicted but no one dared express their misgivings publicly. He sees the justice system’s failure of George Beattie as symptomatic of an elite which closes ranks and refuses to admit mistakes, and this is reflected in the inability of “a community to find its voice and express itself in defence of the common good”.
Wilson sees value in solidarity and collective action, lamenting how it has been eroded and how small towns have been overlooked. “What happened in Carluke,” he writes, “is simply a microcosm of what happens in towns all over the UK; a creeping dismantling of community and those who once served it.”
Not only an enthralling and very personal account of the pursuit of justice, Signs of Murder is a moving testimony to the value of communities and the tragedy of their decline – a book that will leave true-crime readers with a lot more to ponder than they bargained for.