William Blake

The Michael Scot trail continues to lead in all sorts of amusing directions. I believe Scot's prominence in history, beyond academic treatises on medieval science, stems largely from his visibility in Dante's Divine Comedy. The Divine Comedy in turn gained quite beautiful illustrations at the hands of William Blake though sadly this project was left unfinished when Blake died. So when my wife and I found ourselves planning a trip south of the border a stop in Cambridge for William Blake's Universe at the Fitzwilliam Museum seemed obligatory. It would have been even without Scot.

The exhibition was a revelation, illuminating the radical humanitarianism underlying his visionary art. It sent me back to this long-neglected book where I lingered over the tale of little Tom Dacre who is sold to be a chimney sweep by his father when his mother dies. His life is miserable but he has a wonderful visionary dream of liberation in which an angel tells him that if he's a good boy, 'He'd have God for his father and never want joy.' The next morning:

And so Tom awake; and we rose in the dark,
And got with our bags and our brushes to work.
Tho' the morning was cold, Tom was happy and warm;
So if all do their duty they need not fear harm.

Blake would improve Tom's material lot but he's already in a better place spiritually.

Our world is very different from Blake's and most of us nowadays do not share his religious belief. In the world we've created for ourselves, doing your duty is no defence against great harm, maybe cast aside in some global restructuring exercise or suddenly finding ourselves guilty of some unimagined bureaucratic sin. Why should people buy into structures where you can do your duty and come to harm nonetheless?

K-Pop

I was fascinated by this account from the BBC: How jealous 'super fans' try to dictate their idols' private lives. Fans of the K-Pop group aespa are outraged to discover that singer Karina has a boyfriend. Karina has compounded the offence by apologising publicly rather than on a private, fans-only forum. She's only a girl in a band. Can't she have a personal life like everybody else?

A bizarre tale but it's the background that holds the attention, the personal involvement of the fans in the capitalistic project of the band.

"Fans put in labour to ensure the group's success. They consider the idol a product. And if you want to see the product on the stage for a long time, the artistes, the fans, and the management will all have to put in hard work."

We learn of "fan labour": streaming their idols' music, even at night while sleeping, to move them up the charts; studying the voting rules of the several fan polls; dividing their voting efforts to get their group as far up the rankings as they can; responding to negative comments in online forums.

Karina is not 'like everybody else'. She is a component of a corporate entity, filling a role that precludes a personal life. Her reality has to be that perceived by the corporate organism, not the human one she grew up with; just as other human components of such organisms need to abandon their human moral values to fulfil their functions. The striking K-Pop innovation is to transform the super fans from consumers to constituents. They also must embrace the reality perceived by the corporation, 'put in hard work' alongside artistes and management to help it optimise its position in the landscape it perceives, of money, charts, prizes. They don't need it for insight, balm, enlightenment, support... they need it to succeed. Its success, on its own terms, is their success. What a wheeze!

---

Karina image: 티비텐, CC BY 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Green banks

Greenbank Garden is a National Trust for Scotland property on the very south edge of Glasgow, actually in East Renfrewshire council area. It's a couple of miles from my house and I pass there quite often on walks; a liminal territory, suburbs shading into farmland. The house and garden both date from the 18th century but it's the garden that's the real draw, lavishly stocked and creatively laid out. Also there's a café!

No doubt Greenbank's garden sees thousands of visitors each year. It would probably lose a fame contest, however, to Green Bank, West Virginia, USA. The Green Bank Observatory has operated since the late 1950s and has played host to several large instruments, including now the Robert C Byrd Telescope, the largest fully steerable radio telescope in the world.

In the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), astronomers look for radio signals from extraterrestrial civilisations, perhaps incidental to the normal conduct of their business, perhaps sent out deliberately to say, "we're here!" to anybody who might be listening (for a sense of this work, see the film Contact, science fiction of course but realistic in its depiction of SETI research). Green Bank has been central to these efforts: in Project Ozma (1960), Project Phoenix (1995-1998) and currently in Breakthrough Listen. The chances of success are small but the implications would be enormous, comparable in importance to the Copernican revolution. SETI inevitably catches people's imaginations far beyond the professional community so Green Bank is a pretty famous place.

Meandering past I wondered if there is any connection between the two 'green bank's? Greenbank Garden has played no role in SETI or indeed any science other than horticulture. I'm sure Green Bank Observatory's grounds are well maintained but I doubt the shrubs and grass attract visitors.

Many Scottish place names have been reused in the former colonies. Could Green Bank be one of them? The name is mundane, likely to occur independently to many people for local, topographical reasons. There are several 'Greenbank's across central Scotland. In West Virginia we learn that the name was given in Civil War times, 'from a little green bank on J Pierce Woodell's land beside the stream.' Nonetheless we can look a little closer.

The phone snapshot at left is very poor but possibly gives some sense of how atmospheric Greenbank House is at the end of the day. It was built in 1763 by Robert Allason. Mr Allason started out as a baker in Port Glasgow but diversified to become rich from transatlantic trade. His half-brother William established a store in Falmouth, Virginia. Robert sourced goods for William's store which were exchanged for tobacco, a valuable commodity on this side of the Atlantic. The Allasons had farmed for generations at Flenders, just south of what is now Clarkston. We might imagine some degree of pride and satisfaction when Robert was able to buy Flenders Farm and other parcels of land and build Greenbank House. After the American Wars of Independence he went bankrupt, however, and he had been forced to sell Greenbank by 1784.

From an excellent Inverclyde local history blog we learn that William Allason travelled 'extensively' in Virginia before establishing the store in Falmouth. It does then seem possible that William passed through the very country that would come to be called by almost the same name as his brother's mansion in Scotland. Could he have bequeathed the name? That doesn't seem likely. The account referenced above places the naming of Green Bank a century later. So all we probably have is the most ethereal of resonances, feet that knew one Greenbank treading the earth of the other. Perhaps, in an obscure way, a barely perceptible trace of the sort that will eventually reveal the existence of extraterrestrial life.

The Allasons traded also in the Caribbean and owned property there. I've seen Robert Allason described as a 'slave trader' and he definitely profited from plantations where slaves carried out the work. Yuck. But look also at the full address of Green Bank Observatory. It's in 'Pocahontas County, West Virginia'. Both green banks also bump us against the brutality of colonialism.

Ending on a milder note, here's my wife Margaret in the beautiful woodlands surrounding Greenbank, after a working day.

Gerald Balfour; H P Lovecraft

This splendid portrait by G F Watts shows Gerald William Balfour, 2nd Earl of Balfour (1853-1945). Balfour was a Conservative MP from 1885 to 1906, occupying various Cabinet positions; his elder brother Arthur was Prime Minister from 1902 to 1905. Gerald also followed his brother as President of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). I'm not a political historian. I came across the Balfours when I read Archie Roy's great book, The Eager Dead. Archie, a past SPR President himself, tells a detailed tale from the early years of the Society for Psychical Research, drawing on previously unseen Balfour family papers he'd been given access to. It's an amazing story! Gerald Balfour plays a central role which particularly caught my imagination.

In very brief summary: Gerald and his lover, Winifred Coombe-Tennant conceived a child. Mrs Coombe-Tennant had had difficult experiences giving birth and did not relish the prospect but both of them believed they were being directed to do this from beyond the grave by the founding fathers of the SPR, Frederick Myers, Henry Sidgwick and Edmund Gurney. Their child, guided by the deceased eminences of the SPR, was meant to grow into a sort of messiah who would lead mankind into a new golden age. While Henry Coombe-Tennant had an unusual and remarkable life, it was lived largely away from the limelight. He spent his last 29 years as a Benedictine monk, perhaps a big disappointment to the dead founders of the SPR.

I was particularly struck that people at the heart of government could believe such things and act on them. I found myself wondering what people at the heart of government now might believe - well, apart from the obvious.

Andrew Conway told me about The Lovecraft Investigations, an updating of the stories and themes of H P Lovecraft in the form of a fake podcast from the BBC. I love it! Many films have started from Lovecraft's stories and few of them do him any sort of justice. By far the best adaptation I've seen is The Call of Cthulhu, an ultra-low-budget production of the H P Lovecraft Historical Society, a black-and-white, silent movie, the sort of film that would have been made at the time the stories were originally written. Short on gloss, long on atmosphere, it really catches the feel of the original story. We can't call it an updating, though, it's more like an attempt to fake an artifact from Lovecraft's own time.

A cinematic or televisual updating would demand images, CGI stuff, that would leave nothing to the imagination; even worse, would compete destructively with your own imaginings. The podcast form is utterly contemporary but doesn't suffer from this problem at all. Conversations and sounds can build atmosphere in a truly Lovecraftian way while leaving any amount of room for the listener's own mental images. Since they are gathering material the podcasters leave their microphones on all the time and provide narration for the listener. Recording machinery may of course prove more sensitive than the human ear.

All sorts of updatings become possible that don't break the Lovecraftian essentials. I just loved the detailed histories that blend almost imperceptibly into the real world so you start googling names to work out who's real and who's imagined for the story. It seems absolutely correct that followers of Nyarlathotep would be found at the heart of the British establishment, that the Esoteric Order of Dagon would melt into the British Union of Fascists.

I was amused also to discover that Kennedy Fisher, one of the two (fictional) podcast hosts, has her own blog. It leads in many disturbing directions, one of them the Wikipedia biography of Oswald Mosely. There in turn it was surprising to learn about Mosley's involvement with organic farming in Britain, the origins of the Soil Association and ... someone called Lady Eve Balfour. Yes, from the same Balfour family, one of the six children Gerald had with his wife, Lady Elizabeth Bulwer-Lytton. Henry Coombe-Tennant was her illegitimate half-brother.

There's no suggestion Eve Balfour had any fascist sympathies whatsoever. She lived for 50 years with another woman and may have been a sort of person the fascists would have preferred to stamp out. She and Mosley come together only in their shared interest in organic farming. But I was slightly spooked to follow a trail from these early 20th century psychical researchers and bump up against a famed British fascist, a real-world mirror of the sort of trail Dr Eleanor Peck would have drawn out so convincingly.

Michael Scot in Walter Scott's 'Lay of the Last Minstrel'

How many people nowadays would read a long narrative poem? Students of literature, compelled by reading lists? Maybe people interested in history? Seems likely such poems are a minority taste nowadays but when Walter Scott published The Lay of the Last Minstrel in 1805 it was an instant best seller. With the further poems that followed it generated wealth and fame on the scale of a bestselling airport novelist nowadays.

We studied some poetry in school, of course. I enjoyed Tam O'Shanter but The Lay of the Last Minstrel is much longer. I don't believe I've ever read such a long story in rhyming form before - quite a new experience for a scientist. However it's the starting point for much of the more modern Michael Scot lore so I felt more or less obligated. A visit to the Old Bank Bookshop in Wigtown yielded a lovely old volume of Scott's poetry and I was set to go. There are digital versions available online but a physical book seems much more ... amenable. And look at that beautiful gothic font!

The Lay of the Last Minstrel tells a story of romance and conflict in the 16th century Scottish Borders, with added supernatural elements. It borrows heavily from real events and characters so Scott provided detailed notes fleshing out the historical underpinnings. I believe these notes have become a Michael Scot starting point for many people. They also include Scot stories and legends of the Border country. Some of these lack any written source. Where exactly Scott knew them from is unclear, at least to me. Perhaps they were stories everybody knew at that time, or that he heard from old people. I guess he may have invented some of them himself. I believe he was eager to see this renowned character as a forbear. Perhaps he wasn't above embroidering the historical tales in a way that suited his purposes.

In James Hogg's novel, Three Perils of Man, Scot is a major character, physically present, malign, powerful in magic, scary. In The Lay of the Last Minstrel, set a couple of centuries later, he's less a character, more of an all-pervading presence. He has two well-defined appearances. The first occurs fairly early when he is more or less dead, lying in 'a secret nook' in Melrose Abbey. We shouldn't open any coffin but his is particularly forbidding:

Within it burns a wondrous light,
To chase the spirits that love the night:
That lamp shall burn unquenchably,
Until the eternal doom shall be.

In the Notes Scott recalls old tales of such 'eternal lamps, pretended to have been found burning in ancient sepulchres.'

Dead for centuries, he is nonetheless remarkably well-preserved:

Before their eyes the Wizard lay,
As if he had not been dead a day.
His hoary beard in silver roll'd,
He seemed some seventy winters old;
A palmer's amice wrapp'd him round,
With a wrought Spanish Baldric bound,
Like a pilgrim from beyond the sea;
His left hand held his Book of Might;
A silver cross was in his right;
The lamp was placed beside his knee:
High and majestic was his look,
At which the fellest fiends had shook,
And all unruffled was his face:
They trusted his soul had gotten grace

Michael Scot - the real Scot, not the 'wizard' - first appears unambiguously in history in Toledo, Spain. He had joined the group of scholars translating works of classical Greece from Arabic into Latin and thus making them accessible to Christendom. Perhaps his garb here makes contact with this historical reality, hinting at years spent acquiring esoteric knowledge on mainland Europe. In the poem he is supposed to have died within living memory, an impossibility that Scott freely admits in the Notes: 'By a poetical anachronism, he is here placed in a later era.'

Why trouble this long-dead mage? His 'Book of Might' has been buried with him to keep it safe from all prying eyes, 'save at his Chief of Branksome's need.' The coffin is opened by the Abbott and the knight Deloraine to retrieve this book, at the request of the Lady of Branksome who believes it will help her divine the outcome of the forthcoming conflict. Here Scott is connecting Michael Scot to his personal family mythology, of the Border Scotts. It seems likely that 'Michael Scot' is just 'Michael the Scot', his origin distinguishing him from other Michael's among the scholars and savants of his time. There is no sound reason to believe he is related to anybody in Scotland with the surname Scott, or indeed that he would have regarded any high Lord or Lady in Branksome tower as his 'Chief'.

Anyway the scenes in Melrose Abbey are spectacular. Nowadays we might suspect Scott of writing with the film adaptation in mind. Deloraine takes the book from the dead wizard - 'He thought, as he took it, the dead man frown'd' - and it is free to play its role in subsequent events.

Michael Scot's second appearance, late in the poem, is equally insubstantial but also accompanied by dramatic scenes, thunder and lightning, apocalyptically dark clouds and blackness - a substantial damper on a happy wedding celebration.

It was not eddying mist or fog,
Drain'd by the sun from fen or bog;
Of no eclipse had sages told;
And yet, as it came on apace,
Each one could scarce his neighbour's face,
Could scarce his own stretch'd hand behold.

Gilpin Horner, the Earl of Cranstoun's mischievous goblin page, has sneakily taken possession of the Book of Might earlier in the tale. He is now zapped by a lightning bolt, heard across the whole of the Border country, and disappears completely. Some wedding guests think they glimpse an insubstantial presence:

Some heard a voice in Branksome Hall,
Some saw a sight, not seen by all;
That dreadful voice was heard by some,
Cry, with loud summons, 'GYLBIN, COME!'
And on the spot where burst the brand,
Just where the page had flung him down,
Some saw an arm, and some a hand
And some the waving of a gown.

The knight Deloraine glimpses beyond doubt the same wizard from whom he had taken the book in Melrose Abbey; a chilling experience. Poor Deloraine, implacable warrior though he is, doesn't have a good poem.

(An aside: I was sure some bored student of Scottish literature would have created a 'Gilpin Horner' internet presence. The malevolent goblin page is amusing, possibly even a role model for some anarchic characters, and I felt sure he would have caught somebody's imagination. But there is no Gilpin Horner on Twitter even although most Harry Potter characters, for instance have accounts; there are several Vanessa Ives; etc. Cthulhu of course is all over the place, a cult no longer. Facebook and Instagram are similarly Horner-free. I think this confirms my feeling that these long narrative poems of Scott's are very little read nowadays.)

There's less to say about Michael Scot than for Three Perils of Man because there is much less of a characterisation. There's no interaction with this Scot; he has more of the character of a feature of the natural world, something bigger than humans and with untameable power. Nonetheless his appearance in this - hugely popular - tale clearly caught many people's imaginations, no doubt contributing to an awareness of this medieval scholar, skewed possibly, that persists to the present day. The Notes certainly underlined this awareness. The folk tales are fun, even if their origins are obscure. They show how famous Scot still was in Scotland hundreds of years after his death. But Scott confounds the astrologer Michael Scot (~1175 - ~1235) with Michael Scot of Balwearie who flourished later in the 13th century and, unlike our Michael Scot, played a significant role in Scottish affairs.

I was wary of this tale but I mostly enjoyed reading it. Some of the most atmospheric scenes gain greatly from the poetic retelling. Again, what we learn about the real Scot is strictly limited, provisional, but I think it would make a great cult movie!

Michael Scot in Hogg's 'Three Perils of Man'

Regular readers - yes, both of you - will have spotted my current Michael Scot obsession. I'm intrigued by this medieval Scotsman who became one of the leading intellectuals of his time, renowned across Europe. Almost as intriguing as the reality of the man are his many appearances in fiction and the folk tales from which these emerged. Do we glimpse in these some of the long-forgotten reality, albeit filtered and refracted by centuries of imagining and recounting?

With such thoughts in mind I'm revisiting James Hogg's 1822 novel Three Perils of Man: War, Women and Witchcraft. I read it many years ago, when I knew nothing about Scot, and had forgotten most of the details. The siege of Roxburgh Castle in 1314 forms the starting point but principal actors are changed, real people turn up at times and in places they didn't, major new themes are added (the knights besieging and defending the castle are competing for their preferred princesses). In case any reader still suspects Hogg of historical realism there is a very large dose of the supernatural, centring particularly on 'the wizard' Michael Scot.

Hogg makes Michael Scot a feared presence in the Scottish Borders, a household name among the farmers and shepherds, invoked whenever something slightly uncanny happens. We learn (p.323) that the hardy Borderers are used to the ways of fairies and the several sorts of supernatural being that go by night, but 'these were the natural residenters in the wilds of the woodland, the aboriginal inhabitants of the country.' Appropriate precautions for warding off these gude neyboris were understood and practiced.

But ever since Master Michael Scot came from the colleges abroad to reside at the castle of Aikwood, the nature of demonology in the forest glades was altogether changed, and a full torrent of necromancy ... deluged the country all over - an art of the most appalling and malignant kind, against which no fence yet discovered could yet prevail.

'the colleges abroad' is a rare point of contact with the real Michael Scot. He certainly spent time in Toledo, Bologna, Palermo, possibly Paris, but there is no solid evidence he ever came back to Scotland. At the very end of the book we learn that 'he has not only kept the world in awe, but in dreadful agitation for the space of thirty years'. He died about 1235 and the siege of Roxburgh was in 1314 so 'thirty years' doesn't make much sense but there is little point agonising over chronology - Hogg's treatment of history is 'permissibly cavalier' says Douglas Gifford, in the excellent notes to this edition.

Aikwood Tower is his stronghold, a 'great gousty castle', a 'douth and an awsome looking bigging'. Aikwood certainly belonged to the Scott family (who probably weren't really connected to Michael but never mind) but it didn't exist until 1535.

Master Michael Scot the 'renowned magician' is a forbidding character, cold and cruel. When he first appears in person we have already met his few companions, the seneschal Gourlay and the imps Prim, Prig and Pricker, and seen with what malice they meet peaceably intended visitors. The Master's very first appearance etablishes what sort of person he is:

"Gourlay, what is the meaning of all this uproar?"
"It is only Prim, Prig and Pricker," said he, "making sport with a mendicant friar and his ass."
"Are they killing him?" enquired his Master, with the greatest composure, and without lifting his eyes from a great book that lay in front of him.
"I wot not, sire," said Gourlay, with the same indifference.
"Ay, it is no matter," returned the Master; "It will keep them in employment a little while."

The imps have great magical power but are barely controllable. They do Scot's bidding but only under certain rules; overuse may, and probably does, have terrible consequences. They are extremely mischievous and love chaos, even when it involves their master. If he summons them they must be given tasks, at risk of a heavy price:

Work, Master, work; work we need;
Work for the living, or for the dead:
Since we are called, work we will have,
For the master, or for the slave.
Work, Master, work. What work now?"

They're great fun, they could have a book to themselves but it would be a bit full-on, just unrelenting gleeful malice, chaos, torment. Back to Michael Scot. We're told of his most essential, nocturnal pursuits:

At such hours as these his capacious mind was abstracted from all worldy concerns, such as other mortals busy themselves about. If any thing sublunary engaged his studies and calculations, it was how to make the living die and the dead to live - how to remove mountains out of their places, to turn the sea into dry land, and the fields into a billowy and briny ocean, - or in any way counteract nature in her goings on.

There is a physical description:

He was a boardly muscular man, somewhat emaciated in his appearance, with a strong bushy beard that flowed to his girdle, of a hue that had once been jet black, but was now slightly tinted with grey. His eyes were uncommonly bright and piercing but they had some resemblance to the eyes of a serpent. He wore on his head a turban of crimson velvet, ornamented with mystic figures in gold, and on the front of it was a star of many dazzling colours. The rest of his body was wrapped in a mantle or gown, striped with all the hues of the rainbow, and many more.

(That's not a typo, by the way. The handy Scots glossary in this edition tells us 'boardly' means 'stalwart'.)

Generic cartoon wizard, really, isn't he? At least to our modern eyes.

Scot is opposed with an itinerant monk, the 'gospel friar', a mysterious figure who is gradually revealed to be Roger Bacon. In their magical contest Bacon uses scientific means to spectacular ends while Scot despatches Prim, Prig and Pricker to reshape the Eidon Hills, an action that (I think) leads the devil himself to take an active part in events, to Scot's ultimate detriment.

Born about 1214, Bacon's life barely overlaps with Scot's; more duff chronology. He seems to have been a pretty curmudgeonly character, commenting waspishly on many of his predecessors. He notes Scot as a translator of Aristotle and of Averroes' commentaries on him, but also considers him superficial, a pretender to knowledge, a plagiarist possibly, maybe even ignorant of Latin. None of this is in Three Pillars of Man but it does make him an interesting figure for Hogg to have woven in.

The friar is devoutly Christian while Scot has given himself over to the devil. A debate between the two (p.197) offers some origin story for the dark, wizardly Michael Scot met here:

(the friar) considered the Christian Revelation as the source of all that is good, wise or great among men. The other (Scot) had disbelieved it from his youth upward; and, not being able to come to any conclusion from ought he could learn among men, he had sought communion with the potent spirits of the elements; and, after seven years of unparalleled suffering, such as cannot be named, had attained what he sought. He had entered into a league with them, renouncing, for ever and ever, all right in a Redeemer, and signing the covenant with his own blood.

Exactly nothing is known about Scott's early life, where in Scotland he was born, what sort of people he lived among, how he was educated. All of this is Hogg's imagining, writing, after all, six centuries after Scot passed away.

Scot believes he can stand up to the Devil himself. Unsurprisingly things don't go well for him. The closing sentences link this book to others' Michael Scot stories:

They went, and found him lying as stated, only that his eyes were shut, some of his attendant elves having closed them over night. His book was in his bosom, and his wand in his hand, from either of which no force of man could separate them, although when they lifted the body and these together, there was no difference in weight from the body of another man. The King then caused these dangerous relics to be deposited along with the body in an iron chest, which they buried in a vaulted aisle of the Abbey of Melrose; and the castle of Aikwood has never more been inhabited by mortal man.

This brings us to Walter Scott and The Lay of the Last Minstrel; probably a much more substantial source for Hogg than any historical fact but that will be another story.

I enjoyed reading this book years ago and I equally enjoyed revisiting it. It's an unusual blend of couthy tales of Borders country folk, medieval battles, and wizardry and the supernatural. It's occasionally slightly garrulous for modern readers, as are the voices of the unsophisticated Borderers, and the archaic Scots words they use might be a further obstacle, but I feel it's entertaining and unjustly neglected. It should have an audience of beanied young people with purple hair, the sort of people who devour Harry Potter and ther Lord of the Rings. I'd love to see an illustrated edition. It tells us pretty much nothing about Michael Scot, except for how large he has loomed, over the centuries, in the imaginations of Scottish writers.

The Michael Scot trail: Melrose

Did Michael Scot ever actually visit Melrose? Nobody knows for sure. There is a tradition that he lived at Aikwood Castle, only twelve miles away by modern roads, but there is no telling where it came from. There is a tomb in Melrose Abbey but it was certainly erected centuries later and it is doubtful if his remains actually lie there. Nonetheless many old tales connect him with this corner of the Scottish Borders and they've been renewed and enlarged by Walter Scott, James Hogg, even the makers of Shoebox Zoo. He definitely spent time in Toledo, Bologna and Palermo; alluring destinations all but Melrose is a MUCH easier trip. So we'll start there. It's a very famous place but I had never visited before.

The Abbey was of course our first port of call. Stonework repairs make the interior inaccessible for now and temporary fencing additionally keeps you away from some sections; half-price entry fee in consequence. "There's a stone here for Michael Scot, is that right?" I asked the lady on the desk. "Is that the wizard?" she replied, adding that his tomb was inside the church, out of bounds for now. The lady from the back office joined in, producing an old picture of the tomb. She told us that the stone head from that tomb, supposedly a representation of Master Michael Scot himself, can still be seen in the upstairs floor of the Abbey museum.

The back office lady was at first quite definite that Scot himself was buried in the tomb inside the church but as we discussed this she added a note of scepticism - "maybe an invention of Walter Scott". The Abbey church seen now dates from after 1384, when the original church was sacked by the English. Scot had already been dead for 150 years by then. I doubt very much that he is buried in Melrose Abbey. There is no convincing evidence that he came back to Scotland. A person of so very long ago, many details of his life long forgotten, becomes fair game for all sorts of imaginings, fancies, fantastic literature. Personally I would like to work toward as much sense of the real person as we can manage, at this enormous remove, but that doesn't mean we can't also enjoy the stories. Just don't believe them.

We spent a lot of time enjoying the Abbey church. We were very lucky to have such beautiful, sunny weather for our visit, even if it was pretty raw and cold. The south side is elaborately decorated with all sorts of gargoyles, heads, creatures - quite a medieval bestiary. The church is now a ruin, of course, having fallen into greater disrepair after the Reformation, but an extremely beautiful one. We have to deal with the building we find now, with all the extra layers of meaning it has acquired since its time centuries ago as a working church. Even if the connections to Michael Scot are nebulous it serves as a bridge to his time.

The Abbey museum is housed in the Commendator's House, a building originally constructed in the 1400s. It contains a wonderful collection of artefacts from domestic life in the Abbey and several architectural fragments.

Sure enough, on the first floor there are a couple of stone heads removed from the church building, one of which looks exactly like the pictures online of the 'wizard's tomb'. Did Michael Scot look anything like this? Dante, placing him in the eighth circle of hell, provides the only words anywhere that come close to a physical description, calling him 'spare in the flanks' - skinny. Dante probably didn't mean these words literally but as a comment on Scot's character (see J Kay, 1985, Dante Studies no. 103, pp 1 - 14). So, even in the unlikely event we consider this a plausible likeness of Michael Scot we shouldn't worry if it seems inconsistent with these words of Dante's. Perhaps we can be proud of our countryman, the only Scot to have attained the necessary level of infamy to merit a mention.

For those in pursuit of Michael Scot, Melrose offers only phantoms. But they're entertaining phantoms so let's continue to chase them.

The Eildon Hills are not big mountains, even by Scottish standards, but they tower over Melrose. There are three summits. Eildon Hill Mid is the highest, 422 m above sea level. It's the rightmost summit in this picture which looks over the Tweed from just north of the town. Eildon Hill North is at left. From the town itself you only ever see two at most but the three-peaked range is a famously pretty sight from spots not far away. In the notes to his epic poem, The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Walter Scott recounts a tale. Michael Scot was trying to keep a troublesome demon occupied by setting it tasks. One of these was to cleave the single conical summit of the Eildon Hills into three. Sadly this occupied the demon for only a single night so Scot had to find further tasks for it but the Eildons were left as we see them now.

The day after visiting Melrose Abbey we enjoyed a walk over the Eildon Hills in brilliant, sunny, but still very cold weather. I've spurned most of the lovely views to include this photo, taken from the summit of Eildon Hill Mid. It shows Eildon Hill West, the third summit, the one invisible from the town below.

From the Mid hill we retraced our steps for a bit then climbed to the top of Eildon Hill North. Continuing on downhill we were met by these vistas looking north and east. Note the cultivated fields between the village of Newstead and the viaduct, to the upper left. These are the site of the Roman camp which was occupied here from about 80 - 180 AD, a major outpost at the far northwest edge of the Roman Empire.

The Romans named their fort here 'Trimontium' from the form of the Eildon Hills. 1,000 years before Michael Scot they already had their triple-peaked appearance. After all I guess he played no role in shaping them.

Trimontium was one of the locations listed by Ptolemy in his book Geographia, a compilation of the geographical knowledge of the 2nd century Roman Empire. Ptolemy was certainly one of the greatest scholars of his time. His books on astronomy and geography remained influential for centuries. However the great works of antiquity, of e.g. Aristotle, Ptolemy, Galen and the knowledge and thinking they represented lived on through the Middle Ages not in Europe but in the world of Islam.

Standing by Trimontium, known to Ptolemy, I thought of Michael Scot. More than 1,000 years after Ptolemy, in a time when his brilliance had been forgotten, young Michael set out to mainland Europe, possibly from this very part of Scotland. By 1217 he had joined the Toledo translators, a group of scholars translating the great texts of antiquity, Ptolemy's among them, from Arabic into Latin, reintroducing them to European thinking. What potent historical resonance there is in this landscape, even once we discard the tales of wizardry.

We were in Melrose for just three days. We'll certainly be back - still so much to enjoy. But on the Michael Scot trail, it's next stop: Toledo!