“I am glad to hear my countrymen are resolved to act like men. We are seeking nothing but the rights of our forefathers – liberty is not worth having, if it is not worth fighting for” James ‘Purlie’ Wilson 1820
In 1822 it was suggested by the Scottish literary giant, Sir Walter Scott, that unemployed weavers who had taken part in the Radical War of 1820 but had neither been executed or transported should be set to task building the pathway which exists to this day under Salisbury Crags on Arthur’s Seat. It is pretty much agreed by the few historians who have commented on this event that this was in no way offered as any sort of conciliation or clemency but more as a punishment and a lesson for those
“Tough work to pay for an uprisin’. Mind it’s a bonny view, right enough”
The sun moved in a bleak, grey sky. The clouds in Scotland were converted Presbyterian’s and felt it their collective duty to hide any sign of solar gaiety and/or warmth rather like a pinny disguises the voluptuous shape of womanhood.
Still, McCulloch thought ruefully as he rested on his cutting blade, at least it had stopped raining. A fellow could slide fifty yards down this bloody big bear-hill when the grun was wretched muddy and glistening wet like an auld dug drookit in a burn.
He could get poetical like this. He’d read his Burns and his Fergusson. Even auld Wattie Scott whose idea it was that it should be they - the radical and seditious -the malcontents – who would build this road in the sky. This road ‘neath the Crags for the likes of him and his loyal tory chums to stroll and meander and flirt and look across the Firth to Fife, like they were walking on the very backs of their labour.
Auld Wattie who this very day was escorting a bloated German-English king around the streets of Scotland’s capital. What a game that was. Sometime in the future all would be would be tartan gonk shops all up the Royal Mile wi’ bagpipes blarin’ oot Songs from the Shows. And it would all be that gimpy wee sods fault. Like it was his fault a gang of west of Scotland weavers were building a scenic walkway around Arthur’s Seat. Sir Walter Scott. Next they’d have them building some gothic space rocket in his honour in Princes Gardens.
He’d been addressing no-one in particular regarding his wonderment at the view but his friend Archie Taggart had picked up on his winsome tone.
“You know Andrew; I never even knew this bloody mini mountain even existed until I was told to be digging in to it. For a’ ah knew it could have been in Timbuctoo”
“Maybe we could all have been in Timbuctoo” He thought of friends of his consigned to penal colonies half way around the world. He thought of Baird and Hardie, and Wilson down in Strathaven who’d been executed for ‘high treason’.
April fool’s Day 1820.
Andrew McCulloch had been a mere boy of 24 years, though married to Elsie who had borne him three bairns. Now, as he gazed over at a castle on an even higher rock than the one he toiled on, he felt like he was a thousand years old. Somehow, he’d gone from one state of affairs, a simple weaver trying to scrape a living for his family to being part of a chain gang digging a path a hundred feet above central Edinburgh.
April fool’s Day.
Elsie: Life changes imperceptibly sometimes. You don’t notice decline when it creeps up on you year on year, bit by bit. You make do and mend as wages get lower and work is harder to come by. The bairns will maybe only get good meat or fish the once in a week when before there’d be mutton or pork and maybe a roast on a Sunday. Clothes get darned to death instead of replaced until, before you know it, your man’s trews are aw darn and naethin’ else.
Imperceptible!
When I married my man I was but eighteen years old and green as the Campsie hills. I was quite a looker and deserved to marry a weaver. A good weaver could work his own wage in his own time. A good weaver could provide a warm wee cottage for his family. A weaver counted for something. And ma Andrew was a good weaver and a fine looking man to boot. Plenty lassies laid their plate at him but he’d tell me often in our early amorous days that I was the apple of his eye. In truth, we were mad for each other and it was a wonder I only had the three weans by the time all this trouble started.
Our poverty was a slow descent it seemed but looking back it was actually quite quick. One week Andrew had more work than he could handle the next he was almost begging for it. The world was changing and fast. The city was becoming crowded and the ways of weaving was changing.
Machiines! That was all the talk. Machines! They could use machines to weft the cloth quicker and cheaper and they didn’t require the same level of skill. Any keelie or cottar fae the fermtouns could do it and would do it willingly and cheaply because they had families to feed as well. Not that we didn’t resent them. We did. They were taking food out of our mouths. Human nature being what it is you tend to blame the apparent enemy although Andrew didn’t see it this way, though it would have been better for him – and us – if he had. He said it was the system. He said it was the bosses after profit on the backs of the working man. He said he could understand progress but it didn’t have to be done brutally. It could be done gradually and so that all could benefit. A tax on the power looms was all the talk among Andrew and his friends.
Ma Andrew is a good Presbyterian. He believes in self-improvement. He taught the bairns words and numbers soon as they could crawl. It may be that he educated himself that little bit too much.
McCulloch: We were all members of Book Clubs or the local Mechanics Institute, we were no fools. We were literate hard-working men. We read Tom Paine and Rousseau : our own David Hume and Adam Smith. This was what they now call the ‘Scottish Enlightenment’, only they didn’t like us sharing the wonder of it. Astronomy, philosophy, geology. And politics, always politics. The way it all worked. And economics. Political economy. In a way it had more relevance to us than to anyone else as we seemed to be more and more at the brunt of it. We needed explanations of why things had turned so much against us. And solutions. We wanted to help ourselves: to improve our lot. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do? Yet everyway we turned they shut us down and refused to listen.
And we’d read The Bible as well though there was some more devout than others. They cried Purly Wilson an atheist at his trial but that was all part of the black propaganda aimed at us by the press and the powers that be to make us out as devils and traitors.
Was not the Encyclopaedia Britannica born in Scotland? Indeed Social Science itself – the study of human nature and societies – was a Scottish invention. Lord Kames, Smith, Hume, Hutcheson, Adam Ferguson. Scottish Protestantism preened itself over its high literacy rates and educational inquisitiveness. But, maybe not for the likes of us.
The ganger-men on their mules were more like guards; carbineers with rifles. They patrolled the rough-hewn pathway and kept the men working. One of them, Doughty, seemed to find it hard to confine his thoughts to himself and considered it the greatest wonder that these ‘scoundrels fae Glesga’ should be subjugated to hard-labour in Auld Reekie. Doughty had fought Boney at Quatre Bras and had been drinking on the fact ever since. McCulloch pitied the beast that had to bear his weight. His Black Watch tunic which was no longer legal for him to wear was, at any rate, almost unrecognisable slobbered as it was with accumulated mud, grub and dust from his basement High Street dwellings.
“Slackin’ again, McCulloch? Jings! Ye jist cannae help yourself, eh?”
Down below the fanfare and pageantry had started in earnest. There was the blowing of bugles and the cheering of folk. The royal regalia flew high on The Royal Mile.
“Christ! Napoleon will have risen from the dead again by the time this road is built if it’s to be at your rate o’ graft. Mind, that widnae bother a traitor like you, eh McCulloch. Ye’d take up arms and join ‘im”
The wind blew bitter gusts and there was a cold snell which sprayed on them constantly. August it may have been but it was as dark and dank as any January.
An’ who would you be fightin’ for, Doughty. That corpulent German galumph ridin’ aboot in his daft klit doon there?
“Ye’d think ye’d have learned to mind yer tongue by now, McCulloch, given how much you’ve come down in the world”
McCulloch looked around him expansively “Would ye no’ say, Doughty, that I seem to have come considerably up in the world?”
McCulloch’s work-mates sniggered at his cheek and how he always seemed to be too quick for Doughty’s slow jibes. In Doughty’s mind there was a rage and total lack of comprehension at the idea of McCulloch owning this quick intellect. McCulloch was a prisoner, and a treasonous one at that. He should be abject and subordinate, not witty and clever. And certainly not making jokes at his jailer’s expense (Doughty saw himself a s a jailer as well as an over-seer)
“Ye’ve aye to be the smert-erse, McCulloch. Is it no’ you diggin’ oot rock for your herrum-skerrum ways oot shootin at sofjurs at Bonnymuir?”
“Aye, militia-men. Lackeys and spies like yourself. And you the one wi’ so much self-pride aboot it. To me you’re nothing but a disgrace. You’re the traitor, yet you’re too glaikit in the brain to ever see the truth in that”
McCulloch spoke with venom and fire. He’d come too far down the line to pull his punches now. Doughty had been at Bonnybridge, he was sure of it, on the side of ‘law and order’. He’d been a spy. An agent provocateur. A great many of ‘the radicals’ had been ex-forces men, dumped out of the army after the war with France and left to rot on the high streets without work and full of rage at the system that had betrayed them. Doughty had posed as one of these but really he’d been a sneak and an informant probably for Mitchell of the Glasgow police who would in turn inform the Home Secretary in Westminster about plans to ferment. Sure, it was the likes of them that had provoked the rising. Locked up the leaders and manipulated the rest to take up arms.
April Fools Day.
Elsie: The men were ‘aw surprised but not ‘aw o’ them up for the fight. There were laws noo about sedition and some notable reformers had been transported already. Ye weren’t allowed to drill with arms or hold meetings and demonstrations far less swear oaths of allegiance. In Manchester the year before there were folk shot and killed by militia and in Greenock only the previous Autumn there had been cavalry used to quell a crowd in Greenock. Protesting about politics and wages came at a high price if you got involved. Suddenly the whole thing was supposed to start. The men didn’t know that their leaders had been locked up the week before, then on Saturday 1st April there was a Proclamation that the strike should begin, so on the Monday men stayed home from work in their thousands, their tens of thousands, all across the west.
Taggart: We were aw duped: smoked out into the open. Efter the Committee had been locked up spies started fomenting the strike and troops turned up everywhere we went. The boys at Srathaven, the lads at Port Glasgow, and aw us at Bonnybridge. We were divided and we were nabbed. Waiting for us they were. Either that or we have psychic forces at work among our military and polis.
Doughty: Just doing our bit for King and Country….!
Taggart: Treated us like we were for insurrection and I guess it must have appeared that way. We’d been betrayed over a minimum wage in 1812 and they’d proved that they weren’t gonnie listen to our reasoning. Maist o’ us were just aggrieved aboot wages and oor basic standard of living, but of course they wurnae gonnie change ony o’ that withoot a fight and it was the fight that they were scared of. They were afraid of what would happen if we all had the vote. You see, if they hudnae managed to manipulate and divide us; the rising may well have spread into something very big indeed. Our own wee French Revolution.
McCulloch: ‘Aw us men walked fae Glasgow to Condorrat in the pouring rain, urged on by the duplicitous Englishman, King, or whatever his name actually was. He gave Andrew Hardie half a card saying it’s matching half could be found with Baird and his men in Condorrat, and from there we would march on the Carron Steelworks at Falkirk. We were like a walking Luggie Burn, soaked and bedraggled and only twenty-six of us in total. Sure enough we were met by Baird and his five men. We were urged by King to march on Carron as we’d pick up support on the way but all we met was a troop of Hussar’s at Bonnybridge. They arrested nineteen of us after a short exchange of gunfire. But, in other places in the west, there were other risings….
James Wilson: The spies spread word to Strathaven that a great rising was afoot in Glasgow and beyond so we started marching for a gathering on Cathkin Braes. Half way there I smelled a rat and returned home. They arrested me anyway on four counts of treason and I was found guilty of “compassing to levy war against the King in order to compel him to change his measures”. They hung me and beheaded me on Glasgow Green in front of twenty thousand. I said to my executioner on the way there “Thomas, did ye ever see sic’ a crowd?” I was sixty-three years old…
McCulloch: There were troops and police everywhere we went. Yeomanry and Hussars. In Bridgeton, a drum beat a call-to-arms which raised 200 radicals with pikes and blunderbusses. In Tradeston a bugle was used for the same purpose. In Duntocher and Paisley; Stirling and Portpatrick and in many other areas where there were struggling weavers and their families. But, not just them. There were shoe-makers, cabinet makers, tailors and blacksmiths. All who were struggling to earn a crust never mind buy a whole loaf and saw a better world through intelligent reform.
In Greenock the crowds turned on the militia who were trying to take strikers to jail. The soldiers shot eight dead and badly wounded many more
McCulloch looked down from the high ridge of the half-built path-way. His colleagues – his comrades – were all hewing and digging, pick-axes were causing flint-sparks in the damp air before dusk lay over the grand old city. The New Town for the wealthy more than half built to the north and The Mound all filled in and providing access to the grizzled Old Town leading up to the Castle Rock. The royal visit – the ‘plaided panorama’ - was nearly over and the fat, gouty king – George the Fournicator - would soon make his way to Dalkeith. Scotland was, to him, a country of wealth, whisky and tartan pageantry while in the north the Sutherland Clearances were favouring sheep over the lives of humans and the Corn Laws were making folk into hungry, desperate animals. This was no king for the people. This was smoke and mirrors. This was bread and circuses without the bread and only the circus. But, how long could it last?
McCulloch knew that the rising of 1820 had let the genie out of the bottle and no royal patronage would put the cork back for long. He thought of Hardie, Baird and Wilson who’d made the ultimate sacrifice. He thought of the nineteen transported to God-knows-where. He hoped their families would be allowed to join them. He thought of his own family, his Elsie and the wee one’s barely surviving in the new slums of the east end of Glasgow where once they’d lived a fairly prosperous, honest life in their wee cottage in Calton.
He looked down over the quieting city and knew he was on the side of what is right and hoped that history may have learned from their example.
Doughty: You can understand it though, eh? I mean, we’d just fought the French and their revolution. Bloody wars where good men had died. And were they – we – just going to stand back and let it happen here? The country in the hands of a group of disenchanted handloom weavers and cobblers? Grow up for God’s sake. Some men are meant to lead and some men are meant to weave cloth and that’s the end of it. These men up here on this hill are carving the path they deserve to carve; with tools and graft. They’re a perfect example of what happens to a man when he fills his head with books and political clap-trap. The Rights of Man. There is no right except what is right. A natural order. How things are meant to be. You wouldn’t have great men like Wellington or Castlereagh – God rest his poor soul – or Sir Walter Scott out in the fields picking spuds or sweating in a factory. No. They are men suited to their positions.
Take the royal procession today. The people were out in their thousands cheering and toasting the great and good displayed in their finery. The king in his Stuart tartan, Sir Walter, the Duchess of Sutherland. All the honours of Scotland.
This hill is our punishment and our lesson and the rain is incessant to remind us of both. How foolish we were to be tricked when our leaders were already in prison by that first day of April: April fool’s day. How disorganised not to have realised that fact. Yet, how desperate and committed we were.
It rained that day like it rains today: hard and solid, like sheets. Guid Scottish rain that would freeze the face aff ye.
Aye we had muskets and aye we had pikes. We’d been trained to use them on Glasgow Green as had been reported to the policeman Mitchell. Turner the spy had given Hardie his half sheet and told us the other half would be with our brother-in-arms, Baird in Condorret. King was running about all over rousing us all into action. He seemed to pop up everywhere and everywhere we went there just happened to be Hussars.
The moon is large in the sky above Arthur’s Seat and the rain still falls. Like the skilled men they are they want to make a good job of this wide path-way. They are aware that it may stand for centuries as a commemoration to the men who built it.
