Smitten by the swan:Writers and poets have long been inspired by the beautiful bird
Nature writer reflects on 30 years of his fascination with the
It was all of 30 years ago now that I published a book called Waters Of The Wild Swan.
In my own assessment of my writing life, it was a bit of a landmark, my first out-andout wildlife book and a kind of consummation of my lifelong fascination for swans that continues to this day, undimmed.
I am not much of a fan of revisiting my early work. Self-scrutiny is fine, even valuable, when I am at work on a new book. But looking critically at something I wrote 30 years ago is rarely life-enhancing.
My final staff job before I slipped the moorings of newspaper journalism in 1988 was as a feature writer on the Edinburgh Evening News, and in the previous year I had written a feature based around a new book of poems by Tessa Ransford, founder of the Scottish Poetry Library (SPL).
It was called Shadows From The Greater Hill and it took the form of a kind of diary, a year in the life of Arthur’s Seat and Holyrood Park that filled the view from the front windows of her Edinburgh flat.
My copy is beside me as I write, open at a short poem about three swans. Swans infiltrated the whole book, not least because the two small lochs on Arthur’s Seat and a nature reserve at Duddingston Loch on the far side of the hill have put the flight of mute swans all across the ancient skyline of central Edinburgh. For Tessa Ransford, the sight – and the unforgettable sound – of mute swans in flight was forever filling her living-room windows, and the poet delighted in them.
But why revisit all this now, so long after the event, and seven years after the poet’s death?
Because recently, at a Scots Magazine event in North Berwick, I was approached by two women. We talked about nature writing, then one of them mentioned Waters Of The Wild Swan and the poem by Tessa Ransford, and it turned out she was Tessa’s daughter. I kept thinking about it, so I dug out the book.
It was a heady, bittersweet time for, although I was completely caught up in my new life as a full-time nature writer and found the work exhilarating, I was soon as near to broke as makes very little difference.
With Waters Of The Wild Swan, at least the work turned a corner. It is not surprising that the opening chapters were centred on swans in Edinburgh, because I had become so familiar with them and their story while I worked there, and because I was enchanted by them.
The book opened with a level flight of eight swans wingtip to wingtip and filling the entire breadth of the canyon walls of a street of tenements, at the far end of which was the entrance to Holyrood Park. There, the disciplined flight suddenly burst apart and angled down to a series of chaotic landings on St Margaret’s Loch, scattering lesser fowl to every compass point.
So it was inevitable that Tessa Ransford’s Shadows From The Greater Hill would touch on the swans and in, accordance with tradition and folklore, the swans became ambassadors of the human psyche as well as that isolated fragment of nature’s domain. The poem I quoted in the book was this one:
The theme resembles the Norse legend of the Three Nornes, in which Past, Present and Future are linked by three intertwining swans. When I wrote to Tessa, asking permission to quote the poem, I asked her about her choice of imagery.
She responded by letter, “As far as the ‘compost’ for the swan poem is concerned, I think it was to do with my work for the library and my family life. (Compost is how Graham Greene described what goes into writing which you are hardly conscious of and later forget about). I started working for the library when my youngest was only 11. Later, when I was living on my own with her, in 1984 and after, she was a bit neglected because it was non-stop for me keeping the SPL going.
“The arrow made by the three swans flying through filmy cloud was like my purpose for the library spearheading the flight but being sustained by the steadying emotion, and reason/common sense keeping the balance patiently. I wasn’t consciously invoking any myths but I suppose swans do seem to reflect something of our own imagined desires. I used to look out of my window in 1985 and wonder if I was right to be giving up everything for the library, yet knowing I had no choice. I was already in flight in that respect and to come down would have been disastrous for everyone.”
In such a way a life can be touched by swans. To this day, people come a long way to feed the swans on St Margaret’s Loch. I have seen up to 80 swans there in winter, and 80 swans hanging on your every gesture is not an experience to be taken lightly. I wonder how many of the swan-feeders are oblivious to the fact that they are guardians of a tradition, a relationship between city and swans which is at least medieval in origin, possibly older.
When the Old Town was all the Edinburgh there was, a tapsalteerie rough and tumble of human life crammed into the Castle Rock, the northern cliff of the rock brooded over the Nor’ Loch. Its population of swans was protected by various civic laws. A payment of 50 shillings for oats to feed the swans was recorded in 1589, and the same year a man who shot and killed a swan from the window of his house was outlawed and ordered to replace the swan with another one. The story is infuriatingly incomplete. I imagine the fear on the swan-shooter’s face as he contemplated his punishment. It was December. Did he succeed? We don’t know. Did the captured swan inflict vengeful injury over its murdered kin? We don’t know.
So when I say that it was 30 years ago now that I wove Edinburgh’s swans into a book, and five years before that when Tessa Ransford wrote her poem that caught my admiration – and still does – it was all a footnote to hundreds of years of tradition. If you are inclined to respond to the tug of history and crave the chance to be a bit-part player in its relentlessly rolling pageant, why not arm yourself with a bag of suitable food, take yourself to Holyrood and let yourself be smitten by swans.
I never lived in Edinburgh. I think perhaps if I had my attitude towards Arthur’s Seat would have been more embedded. As it is, I was ambivalent and wrote my own short poem about it:
On Arthur’s Seat Edinburgh breathes easy here where a kestrel dances down the air and sea winds are compulsory. Sometimes it’s such a free place, others it’s a mountain in a prison called Edinburgh, and I fear
I’ll never again imprint the snows of far Schiehallion.