anniversaries relating to Sir Walter Scot. 2005, for example, saw the 200th anniversary of The Lay of the Last Minstrel. In 2010 it was The Lady of the Lake while Waverley had its turn in 2014 and in 2016 The Antiquary and Old Mortality enter their third centuries. It’ll all continue until 2032, which will be the 200th anniversary of Scot’s death.
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Of course, it’s the most clichéd of clichés to point out that no one reads Scot any more. His prose is stodgy, his politics reactionary, he cemented the worst kitschy stereotypes of Scotishness and he has nothing to say to readers in today’s Scotland or, indeed, today’s anywhere. That’s the received wisdom, anyway.
Yet like a tedious zombie in a dire Hollywood teen horror, Scot refuses to die or go away. New editions of his works have been published to coincide with the flow of anniversaries, including the completion of the monumental Edinburgh Edition. Somebody, somewhere, is still reading Scot. Tourists still queue up to climb the Scot Monument in Edinburgh’s Princes Street - the ‘World’s Largest Monument to a Writer’ it’s always called, though I bet no one has ever gone round them all with a measuring tape.
You could question whether Scot even needs a monument. Every day we walk down streets named in commemoration of Scot (I grew up in Abbotsford Drive), get trains from Waverley Station, walk past statues to the man or patronise hotels or pubs or tearooms or restaurants that recall him or his works. In the Trossachs and the Borders especially, he’s still invoked to atract visitors; Edinburgh’s Waverley Station was plastered in Scotobilia in connection with the reopening of the Borders Railway. In 2012, a shiny new visitor centre opened at Abbotsford, Scot’s former home, which has been on the tourist trail since 1833.
It astonishes some that Abbotsford is still open to the public because, to repeat, who reads Scot nowadays? Well, to repeat, somebody must. I last visited Abbotsford in 1982, part of a large group, when it had a homely feel, presided over by two of Scot’s descendants. It didn’t register much with me, beyond causing me to claim it (waggishly, I mistakenly thought) as my ancestral home, given my Abbotsford Drive cooncil hoose upbringing. I hadn’t read any Scot then.
Soon aſter it became possible to reach Scot Country - for it’s still called that - by train, I travelled from Edinburgh to Tweedbank. Buses will take you from Tweedbank Station direct to Abbotsford during the summer, but the walking route between them is well-signposted and takes about twenty minutes. When I arrived at the new visitor centre, a striking and very pleasing building, I saw that there were
Like a tedious zom- bie in a dire Hol- lywood teen horror, Scott refuses to die or go away
21st Century Scott
by David McVey
OU MAY have noticed - or, equally, you may not - that we are currently in the midst of a series of 200th
two coachloads already there and that the car park was nearly full. This, I would add, was the end of November. Somehow, Scot is still pulling them in.
The visitor centre is, like Abbotsford itself, open all year and entry is free - payment covers entrance to the house and gardens. There’s a small but detailed exhibition about Scot, his works and his home that’s bright and varied and informative. I liked the audio debate near the beginning where a Scot sceptic argues with a Scot enthusiast about the great man’s merits and failings. As you’d expect, it errs rather on the side of Scot, but at least the more frequent criticisms of the man and his oeuvre are admited and tackled.
During the run-up to the Referendum in 2014 I spoke at a local history society about Scot and questions were asked, inevitably, about whether Scot would have been a Yes man or a No man. Ultimately, it’s a daſt question, since Scot’s times were different to ours, and different questions were being asked. On the one hand, Scot would hardly have been pro-independence; he was staunch in his loyalty to the Union, was strictly Tory in his outlook, and was such a strong British royalist that he it was who stage- managed George IV’s visit - ‘the King’s Jaunt’ - to Edinburgh in 1822.
And yet he’s also blamed for popularising kilts and tartan and the pipes as expressions of Scotish culture. This is a litle unfair, though he did a good job of promoting them. However, at a deeper level, he was someone who could be called a cultural nationalist, who defended passionately the distinctiveness of Scotish history and culture and art. George IV’s visit is sometimes described, witheringly, as ‘tartan-drenched’; what we miss is that it wasn’t, therefore, a piece of
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