My childhood was spent in Galloway. Its hills, rivers, and tidal flats formed my understanding and love of the natural world. The biblical stories I learned before I could read mixed freely with the tales and legends I learned about the land around me to the point that Galilee and Galloway were one and the same. Was it the boy David who confronted Goliath at Loch Trool, or was it Robert the Bruce who faced the Philistines on the banks of the Jordan? When I learned about Saint Ninian landing at the Isle of Whithorn, bringing Christianity to our heathen forefathers, I assumed he was one of the Apostles and that he had just sailed across that Sea of Galilee. As for Tam o’ Shanter, was he Old or New Testament?
At the age of 11, my family moved away. But that heady brew of wild landscape, biblical stories, poetry, a sense that one was put on earth to do the right thing, and the temptations of the flesh—which were always at hand—has infiltrated and informed everything that I have done or attempted to do since. And then, of course, there was the work ethic.
And on the subject of work, everything I have done since the late 1990s has been framed within the context of The Penkiln Burn. This, in one sense, is an old-fashioned publishing house and, in another, an online brand as an artwork. The Penkiln Burn is also a small river that rises in the Galloway Hills and flows down into the River Cree at Minnigaff. It was on the banks of the Penkiln Burn that many of my boyhood adventures took place, a place that still fires my imagination to this day.
I am aware that if I had spent my teenage years in Galloway, my sense of it would be totally different, and that I would probably have viewed it as a cultural backwater that I could not wait to escape. But that was not the case.
As for Dumfries, that was another country altogether.
By Bill Drummond, 3 October 2012.
