Peggy and I spent Easter break driving around Scotland with my English cousins. We had plotted this last fall, but after my father died, a pilgrimage to the auld sod seemed especially apt.

Hadrian's Wall

Peggy always wanted to walk on Hadrian’s Wall, and this seemed a particularly Imperial year to do it, so we started our pilgrimage in Northumberland. A raw country still, on a gray day in April, and I was impressed that the Romans had developed in-floor hot-air heating, which we saw the remains of at the site of a Roman fort. All the comforts of Rome. Isn’t it wonderful what an Empire can bring to the great unwashed? After admiring the frontiers of civilization, and examining the ruins, we plunged in among the wild Caledonians.

Caledonia

Ostensibly we were searching for Muir family roots, but we’d never been to Scotland, and our cousins had charted a compleat itinerary: Highlands, Lowlands, Moorlands, and Urbs. It was a grand tour, with great company and much laughter.

And more

We got an eyeful. From Castle Hill in Edinburgh to the blooming heather below Ben Nevis. We skirted Ness without spotting Locky, and drove along the Bonny Banks without raising any ghosts. (I was always told I had been conceived beside Lock Lomond.)

Ben Nevis

In Fort William we stayed in a B&B run by an artist (David Wilson) and his wife, where we were knocked out by his work. Wilson is a sailor and mountain climber who will sail to Greenland to climb some peak and then paint the experience. Stunning work, half way between representational and abstract, with all the power of both.

David Wilson at Sea

Hard not to be a painter in the Highlands. At least on a sunny day. And they were all smiling for us. Much to the dismay of the locals, for whom a dry spring was a fire hazard.

Colors Galore

My grandfather George James Muir was born in Clonmel, shortly before his father had to leave the Emerald Isle. It seems that Great-grandfather George, who was a baker, insisted on parading the family on St. Patty’s Day in suits of Orange, thus alienating his trade, and running himself out of yet another town. The family ended up in the Canadian border town of Beebe, where they could dodge across into the US at need.

Royal Post

This much I knew by word of mouth. From a distant cousin Bryce I had a rough geneology of our common kin, which traced George Knox’s line back into the 17th Century, and included the names of the family farms in the 17 and 1800s. (There was a Bryce in each branch of the Muirs, as if they kept trying to get it right.) We arrived in Beith with the Bryce Codex and a copy of the local Ordinance Survey map on which three of the farms were identified.

Streets of Beith

Beith itself is a shabby backwater in the industrial lowlands, southwest of Glasgow. Like so much of the UK, it has been swallowed by the automobile and the mass culture. It seemed cramped and tawdry. We might have been looking for the family castle, but all we found was the Beith Palace, a low-rent tandoori.

Looking Downhill

Just south of town we turned off the roaring A-road and followed a byway along the brow of a hill, looking down onto the Granock river valley. A section of the terrain was identified as Auchingree Farm, and there was a clutch of old stone buildings which might have been the family holdings in another age. The Kers lived here from 1205, and one of the Ker girls was my great-great-great-great-grandmother.

Auchingree Farm

A stones-throw along the ridge was an abandoned stone cottage. If you squinted just right you might believe a family ghost was peering out the unglazed window.

beside the Road

Half a mile further on Kersland Farm, another family stronghold, was marked and we drove along a winding lane which dead-ended in a cluster of stone farm buildings. Still a working farm all these years hence. But farming wasn’t the only local pursuit. Looking into the valley, and across to the hillsides beyond, powerlines and industrial complexes filled the view, surrounded by rolling housing estates. There were ghosts of the old life still visible in the landscape, but you had to squinch your eyes to see them.

Lane to Kersland

We backtracked to the high road and tried to find our way through the next village, Dalry, where my great-great-great-great-grandfather William Muir had lived in a place called Drakemyre. Duckmuck, you might say. But you can’t get there from here in Dalry, and we chased our tail around the maze until we lit in a parking lot behind St. Margaret’s Church, in the middle of town. My cousin Terry suggested we look in the churchyard for signs of Muir.

What a sad spot.