Essays of Travel Tale 7 - A Winter's Walk in Carrick and Galloway

Robert Louis Stevenson (0:00)

Section 7 of Essays of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 4, A Winter's Walk in Carrick and Galloway, a fragment, 1876

At the famous bridge of Dune, Kyle, the central district of the Shire of Eyre, marches with Carrick, the most southerly. On the Carrick side of the river rises a hill of somewhat gentle confirmation, cleft with shallow dells, and sown here and there with farms and tufts of wood.

Inland, it loses itself joining, I suppose, the great herd of similar hills that occupies the center of the lowlands. Towards the sea, it swells out the coastline into a protuberance, like a bay window in a plan, and is fortified against the surf behind bold crags. This hill is known as the Brown Hill of Carrick, or more shortly, Brown Carrick.

It had snowed overnight. The fields were all sheeted up. They were tucked in among the snow, and their shape was modeled through the pliant counterpane like children tucked in by a fond mother.

The wind had made ripples and folds upon the surface, like what the sea in quiet weather leaves upon the sand. There was a frosty stifle in the air, and a fusion of coppery light on the summit of Brown Carrick showed where the sun was trying to look through. But along the horizon, clouds of cold fog had settled down so that there was no distinction of sky and sea.

Over the white shoulders of the headlands, or in the opening of bays, there was nothing but a great vacancy and blackness. In the road, as it drew near the edge of the cliff, seemed to skirt the shores of creation and void space.

The snow crunched underfoot, and at farms all the dogs broke up barking, as they smelt to pass her by upon the road. I met a fine old fellow, who might have sat as the father in the cotars Saturday night, and who swore most heathenishly at a cow he was driving, and a little after I scraped acquaintance with a poor body tramping out to gather cockles. His face was wrinkled by exposure. He was broken up into flakes and channels, like mud beginning to dry, and weathered in two colors, an incongruous pink and gray. He had a faint air of being surprised, which God knows he might well be, that life had gone so ill with him. The shape of his trousers was in itself a jest, so strangely were they bagged and raveled about his knees, and his coat was all bedoubled with clay, as tough he had lain in a rain-dub during the New Year's festivities. I will own, I was not sorry to think he had had a merry New Year, and been young again for an evening, but I was sorry to see the mark still there. One could not expect such an old gentleman to be much of a dandy or a great student of respectability and dress, but there might have been a wife at home who had brushed out similar stains after fifty New Years, now become old, or a round-armed daughter, who would wish to have him kneed, were it only out of self-respect and for the ploughman sweetheart when he looks round at night. Plainly, there was nothing of this in his life, and years and loneliness hung heavily on his old arms. He was seventy-six, he told me, and nobody would give a day's work to a man that age. They would think he couldn't do it. Indeed, he went on with a sad little chuckle. Deed, I doubt if I could. He said goodbye to me at a footpath and crippled wearily off to his work. It will make your heart ache if you think of his old fingers groping in the snow.

He told me I was to turn down beside the schoolhouse for Dounure. And so when I found a lone house among the snow and heard a babble of childish voices from within, I struck off into a steep road leading downwards to the sea. Dounure lies close under the steep hill, a haven among the rocks, a breakwater in consummate disrepair, much apparatus for drying nets, and a score or so of fisher's houses, hard by a few shards of ruined castle overhang the sea, a few vaults in one tall gable honeycombed with windows. The snow lay on the beach to the tide mark. It was down onto the sills of the ruin. It roosted in the crannies of the rock like white seabirds. Even on outline reefs, there would be a little cock of snow like a toy lighthouse.

Everything was gray and white in a cold and dullerous sort of shepherd's plaid. In the profound silence, broken only by the noise of oars at sea, a horn was sounded twice, and I saw the postman, girt with two bags, pause a moment at the end of the klachen for letters. It is perhaps characteristic of Danur that none were brought him.