CHAPTER XII WOMEN OF LETTERS IN the ... - Electric Scotland

SCOTTISH MEN OF LETTERS
tinsel playing the tambourine and singing songs while her partner played his
juggling feats and tricked the weaver lads, “the brawest woman that had ever been
seen to step in leathern shoon.” [Stenhouse’s Lyric Poetry of Scotland.] She tramped by the
weary dusty roads, or draggle-tailed trode the moorlands, and slept in the open on
summer nights, or in sheds in evil weather, till she died on her wanderings through
Ireland in 1801 at the age of forty-two. One song she left for folk to sing when her
voice was silent - a song which she, in the glee of happy vagrancy, had composed:
Over the moor and among the heather
Down among the blooming heather,
By sea and sky ! she shall be mine,
The bonnie lass among the heather.
This ditty, which Robert Burns took down from her singing, is no great thing truly,
yet it is a fresh voice that sings out of the sordid vagabond soul.
It is to the keeper of a poor alehouse in Ayrshire, Isabel Pagan, the song, “Ca’
the yowes to the knowes,” to which Burns added some verses, has been ascribed.
High-born ladies did not disdain to sing to harpsichord in the best company in
Scotland verses due possibly to the ugly, deformed, ill-favoured, ill-tongued,
drunken keeper of a shebeen near Muirkirk, in Ayrshire, where she sold smuggled
whisky to customers, who laughed at her coarse jokes as they took their illicit
mutchkin. [One is sceptical as to her authorship. The collection of her verses published in 1805 is chiefly doggerel;
and it is strange that Burns, who first heard the song from a clergyman, should know nothing of the claims of
a woman who lived in his own county (Contemporaries of Burns, 1840, p. 116).] The Muse kept more
orderly company with clever Mrs. Grant in the Highland manse at Laggan, when
she was writing her favourite “Where and O where is your Highland laddie gone”;
and with another Mrs. Grant, at Carron on Spey, who wrote her brisk and spirited
“Roy’s Wife of Aldivalloch” When Englishwomen were writing dramas and
histories and treatises, their Scottish sisters were quietly writing songs.