Bog Myrtle & Peat

Travelling around the British Isles with an eye on ecclesiastical artefacts, I’ve seen a lot to thrill me over the last year. Perhaps I’ve seemed easily pleased by small details, but I can’t help but wonder how far my delight is simply a response to novelty. I’m thrilled by religious “things” because my own culture has none.

There’s a powerful legacy of Christian belief in Scotland’s south west. Few places in Europe embraced Calvinism with such enthusiasm, and if Scotland became a bastion of Protestantism, Westland whigs from Galloway were the most fanatical puritans of all. There’s no obvious reason why the Reformation should have raged so powerfully here, but perhaps at least part of our fanaticism was derived from a sense of rebellion. Protestants came into being as an oppositional force; a popular rage directed against the perceived corruption of the Church. Despite serving as the birthplace of Christianity in Scotland, Galloway has always been slightly peripheral and independent of mainstream affairs. It’s possible that we embraced Protestantism with such zeal because it seemed to reject centralised hierarchies founded on wealth and power.

When the Reformation came, we smashed every last vestige of our High Church tradition. That wasn’t hard; we never had a tremendous weight of religious paraphernalia here anyway. When the smashing was done, there was no move to replace the broken churches with updated furniture or iconography to reflect the new beliefs. There was no space for incense or candles in the faith we had chosen – there was nothing but the Bible, and so in this sense the Reformation meant the wholesale abandonment of all religious hardware. From that moment on, our theology was internalised; rendered permanently portable as psychological scar tissue.

Calvinism offered to democratise religion, but it span to a strangely tyrannical climax in Galloway. Every man was offered a new kind of communion with God, but the change drove us to a heavily skewed sense of personal responsibility. In shedding the shackles of an oppressive church, Scotland became a nation of miniature oppressors, in which each man was driven to enact his own version of the Bible’s truth by any means necessary. At times, the nation came close to anarchy. Puritanical clerics even attempted to abolish the secular state entirely, replacing every civil institution with a hard-line religious equivalent. Here lay the foundation of the Covenanters, and it’s really not straining the point to make direct comparisons between seventeenth century Galloway and modern Afghanistan under the Taliban.

Much later, the Victorians reinvented the Covenanters as plucky democrats who were brave enough to resist corrupt authority. They re-entered the national consciousness as nationalist freedom fighters, and while this entire period of history has become extremely blurry for many people, there’s still an indistinct impression in Galloway that Covenanters were “goodies” fighting Government “baddies”. They are to Lowlanders what Jacobites have become to the Highlanders, and it’s ironic that when we talk of Scotland’s shared history, we reach for two such diametrically opposed archetypes. All we can say for sure is that if an eighteenth century Jacobite and a seventeenth century Covenanter were allowed to share their views on social media today, both would have the police chapping on their doors in less than ten minutes.

During “The Killing Time” when the Restored Catholic monarchs persecuted Covenanters in Galloway, religious ceremonies were transacted in wild places, away from legal scrutiny. These “conventicles” were dangerous. Government dragoons had orders to kill anybody they found in the hills, so meeting places were designed to secretive and inconspicuous. Some sites became habitual places for worship, and one of these lies on the hill beyond my grandfather’s farm, high up on the edge of the heather. In 1678, three thousand Covenanters gathered here to worship according to their faith. But even at the peak of its use, it was never more than four parallel rows of uncut boulders where older members of the congregation could sit. That’s the full extent of this place; just rocks in a bog.

It’s telling that whenever Catholics have been persecuted, they also hid and performed their services in secret. That sense of defiance is not unique to the Covenanters, but when the laws were relaxed, the Catholics were glad to return to their churches. Covenanters returned to normality too, but with a sense of nostalgia, as if things would never be so good again.

The Victorians raised a monument to the commemorate the site, and this confers a small and unwarranted sense of grandeur. Remove that marker and you’re simply standing on your own in a massive bowl of heather and grassland. You could say that this far-flung spot is ideally suited to commune with God, but our modern understanding of nature is very recent. Seventeenth century covenanters would have been repelled by it, making a warped fetish of 1 John 2:15 “Do not love the world, nor the things that are in the world“. They were hardwired to ignore God’s creation, treating any notion of natural beauty with suspicion and contempt. This location was selected because it was safe and simple. It’s merely a coincidence that we would nowadays regard it as beautiful. 

Years go by and generations pass. There are no Covenanters now, but key threads of Calvinist thought still persist in Scotland, often sublimated into secular use so that it’s hard to recognise them as theological residues. Here in Galloway, Calvinism persists in a hyper-developed awareness of gloom and humility, parsimony and self-repression. It’s wonderfully evoked by the example the poet Alastair Reid gave of a conversation he had with a woman in New Galloway who he’d hailed with a comment on the beautiful weather. “It’s beautiful”, she agreed, adding “but we’ll pay for it”.

I was not brought up in or around the Church of Scotland, but it turns out that I’m soaked in cultural expressions of Calvinism all the same. Coming from this background, material expressions of religious culture strike me like a fever-dream. I am magnetically drawn to English churches and Irish stone carvings, not just because they are valuable in their own right, but because in a desire to touch something more than the pessimistic practicalities of life, I have been starving to death since the day I was born. So if I seem giddy at Gloucester Cathedral, or drunk with enthusiasm for misericords, remember it’s because I was raised on rocks in a bog.

Picture: A former site of conventicles above Threepneuk, Shawhead – 19/4/22