Waverley Railway Station
Scot Monument
keep the lower orders in their place, are not, however, atractive qualities, and should not be swept under the (tartan) carpet. Yet some unwitingly praise them. In the Abbotsford visitor centre, there’s a video screen on which various celebrities give their views on Scot. In Kirsty Wark’s contribution she stresses how, in ecclesiastical terms, Scot was a ‘moderate’ who ‘opposed religious extremists’.
That’s a remark designed to provoke approving nods from modern secularists. Scot was a moderate - in fact, hardly even that as religion meant litle to him - but he showed all the qualities you associate with ‘moderates’ of the time. They defended patronage, the system whereby local grandees had a say in the appointment of ministers, they espoused Toryism, they opposed democracy in kirk and society and showed a visceral dislike of political reform. Scot viewed political radicals in the 1810s as sourly as he and other moderates viewed Covenanters in the 1670s.
And so from the visitor centre to the house itself; larger than I remembered but with only certain rooms open to the public. Hi-tech audioguides are available now and the whole operation is slicker and more professional than it was in 1982. The house still strikes me as a gloomy place, heavy with dark panelling and leather bindings in the study and library. Scot’s library, incidentally, is complete as he leſt it and the catalogue can be viewed on the Faculty of Advocates’ website. The brightest and most atractive room is the dining room (where he died on September 21, 1832) owing to a decorative scheme introduced in the 20th century which the audioguide and guidebook are apologetic about. I think we should be grateful. It’s said that Scot’s ghost sometimes lingers in the dining room, but that sounds too much like a scene in a novel he didn’t write.
Scot’s writing could be as heavy as his taste in interior
décor. The opening chapters of Waverley are as dense and sluggish as a heavily-polluted river, but even so they are in some ways very modern (or post-modern) as the authorial voice muses about identity and the writer’s role. Other novels are more easily begun; Ivanhoe is English historical tosh, but entertaining and relatively sprightly. And there are the verse epics, in strict metre and so lacking the flabby flesh of the Waverley Novels. If you’re a teacher, try enthusing your students about Scot by geting them to recite The Lady of the Lake to a basic hip-hop beat;
The stag at eve had drunk his fill Where danced the moon on Monan’s rill
And deep his midnight lair had made In lone Glenartney’s hazel shade.
All right, the vocabulary is hardly Eminem, but try it anyway. It does work.
It’s said that Scott’s ghost sometimes lingers in the din- ing room
The continued existence of Abbotsford and its visitor centre, the fact that thousands of people go there, shows that Scot still exerts a strange fascination. Some people are still reading the books, although they may be shame-facedly hiding this from their loved ones. Scot is long dead, is oſten derided, but he isn’t finished with us yet.
February 2016 59
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