Travels in Galloway: Memoirs From South-West Scotland by Donald Macintosh

Author:Donald Macintosh [Macintosh, Donald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: history, Europe, Great Britain, General
ISBN: 9781906476700
Google: tTs4AAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Neil Wilson Publishing
Published: 2011-09-14T23:24:01.700949+00:00

Chapter 11

THE MILESTONE INSPECTORS

Some of my earliest memories go back to the days of the travelling people, or tinkers, as we called them then. I had won a prize book for something or other at Garlieston School when I was seven years of age. Already an avid reader, I was fascinated by the main story in the book, a tale about the adventures of a little boy kidnapped by gypsies. This, I decided, was the life for me. When, during the summer holidays that followed, I came upon four caravans of them pulled up in the roadside enclave of a strip of woodland near to our home, I must have thought that they had been sent there by a sympathetic providence. I hung around those caravans during every daylight hour possible, to the scandalization of my mother and the intense amusement of my grandfather, who had been well used to all kinds of travelling folk on his native Isle of Mull.

Travelling folk love children, and I ate and drank things with them and listened to tales from them that would have further scandalized my mother, could she have been eavesdropping on us, for the children of travelling folk know most about the baser facts of life from a very early age. When I arrived at the site one day to find the caravans gone and nothing left to indicate that they had ever been there but the cold ash of their fires and the flattened grass and weeds where their caravans had been parked, I was devastated. I never saw them again, and I was inconsolable for days. I never forgot them, and the brightness of their caravans and their clothes and the music of their tin whistles and mouth organs and the warmth of their hospitality to a wee ‘cottar bairn’ remain with me to this day.

‘They might have taken you away with them,’ remarked my mother uneasily. ‘No bloody fear of that!’ parried my father with true parental affection. ‘The tinks have more sense than to try to steal him. They have enough problems of their own to contend with!’

I had another, less pleasant, encounter with the tinkers some years later, when I was about ten years old. I was on summer holiday at the home of my great-aunt Christina MacDonald, in Blairgowrie, Perthshire. I know nothing of the Blairgowrie of today, but it was then an important raspberry-growing area, most of the produce going to the jam factories in Dundee and elsewhere. Raspberry picking in those days was traditionally the work of the travelling people, and each summer they descended on the Blairgowrie fields like clouds of quelea birds descending upon the rice fields of far-off Africa. To those farmers whose stock included largish flocks of poultry, they were just about as welcome as were the queleas to the tribal rice farmers, too. The ‘tinks’ had a well-established reputation for thieving, and they had a particular predilection for domestic fowl. But they were fast and tireless berry pickers, and the berry farmers were glad to see them.

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