Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of Tables
- 1 The Cast List
- 2 Three Islands Compared
- 3 Scots Catholic Growth
- 4 The Irony of Catholic Success
- 5 Scotland Orange and Protestant
- 6 The Post-war Kirk
- 7 Serious Religion in a Secular Culture
- 8 From Community to Association: the New Churches
- 9 Tibetans in a Shooting Lodge
- 10 The English on the Moray Riviera
- 11 Scots Muslims
- 12 Sex and Politics
- Addendum: Scotland's Religion, 2011
- Statistical Appendix
- Index
9 - Tibetans in a Shooting Lodge
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of Tables
- 1 The Cast List
- 2 Three Islands Compared
- 3 Scots Catholic Growth
- 4 The Irony of Catholic Success
- 5 Scotland Orange and Protestant
- 6 The Post-war Kirk
- 7 Serious Religion in a Secular Culture
- 8 From Community to Association: the New Churches
- 9 Tibetans in a Shooting Lodge
- 10 The English on the Moray Riviera
- 11 Scots Muslims
- 12 Sex and Politics
- Addendum: Scotland's Religion, 2011
- Statistical Appendix
- Index
Summary
The Dumfriesshire village of Eskdalemuir sits in all the parts of its name read in reverse: the muir of the dale of the Esk, or to be more precise, two Esks – the White and the Black – which unite at the southern end of the parish and flow via Longtown to the Solway sands. The main valley is a quarter of a mile wide and 500 feet above sea level. It rises on each side of the White Esk to gloomy hills, the bleak uplands where the Edwardian upper classes shot grouse and John Buchan's fictional hero Richard Hannay fled in The Thirty-Nine Steps. In 1949 almost all the land was rough sheep-grazing with each farm having a few fields on the valley floor where grass and corn were grown for feed. The few houses are scattered but maps distinguish between Eskdalemuir, the site of the parish church and the school (which closed in 2005), and Davington, a few miles north.
In the early 1950s James Littlejohn, an anthropologist from Edinburgh, spent the university vacations studying sheep farmers and foresters in the area, which he anonymised as Westrigg. As a site for observing change in Scotland's religious climate, Eskdalemuir does not immediately seem promising. It does have an heroic past, of which a neglected gravestone in a field just north of the village offers a poignant reminder. It reads: ‘Here lyes Andrew Hislop Martyr shot dead upon This place by Sir James Johnstone of Westerhall and Sir John Graham of Claverhouse for adhering to the Word of God’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Scottish GodsReligion in Modern Scotland 1900–2012, pp. 157 - 173Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2014