Category Archives: Scotland

Gang yir ain Gait

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Jack just makes it in time this week – –

The heading translates from old Scots as ‘ Go your own way’ or even ‘do it your way’.

So a gait or gate might be an actual physical barrier but often just a path or street or alley leading somewhere. In my hometown of Dunfermline there’s a street just outside the Norman Abbey called the ‘Kirkgate’ and at the Southern entrance to the town is another one called Nethergate.

Shifting to our backyard but still with a Scottish connection – –

Many of the crofts in the highlands have two areas of ground attached to the house – the ‘in-by’ and the ‘oot-by’. In other words the nearest patch (usually for growing vegetables), and the outer patch where a cow or a pig would be raised.

Our back yard is divided into an in-by and an oot-by. We grow tomatoes in raised beds in the inner part and our chickens live in the outer part where we also grow vegetables (no cows or pigs!). So we have a fence with a gate and that wooden gate was getting pretty old and saggy.

I started by putting two 4×4 posts in and hinging the old gate to one of them, but it still sagged and twisted. So it was time for a new gate to the oot-by! We debated and searched the local hardware stores but everything was very heavy and very costly. Then Wendy suggested using lightweight PVC pipe with plastic netting stretched over.

So that’s what we did. Wendy crocheted the netting onto the pipe frame using special string and we hinged it to the post with gardening twine stapled in place. So far it isn’t sagging but we now have to think how it will be more permanently hinged and how we’ll latch it.

‘We did it our way’ or ‘gaed oor ain gait’ – – –

Monday Book – The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)

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This week’s guest reviewer is Wendy’s husband Jack Beck –

As Wendy was completing her best-selling memoir The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap, we took a road trip through seven states visiting other small used-book stores. We took recorded books with us to listen to on the way and one was Brown’s most famous novel.

I think we had already seen the movie, so this was mostly to ‘compare and contrast’. 

I had already toured the south of France a number of times with my folk band ‘Heritage’ and was familiar with the Cathar and Knights Templar history of the region. Also, Wendy and I had visited Rosslyn Chapel a few times, so we knew the Holy Grail legends as well.

Of course the central part of Brown’s book concerns the legends about Jesus and Mary Magdalene having a child and that family line continuing to the present.

We both thought that the mystery and adventure thread throughout the book worked well and we were prepared to go along with the various questionable historical assumptions that Brown incorporated, even those that had excited people about Jesus having sex and such.

That was until the ending –

I mentioned above that we had visited Rosslyn Chapel and so we are familiar with the caretaker’s house that sits alongside it. Remember also that the site is just outside Edinburgh in the east of Scotland. 

Towards the end of the book Robert Langdon and Sophie Neveu knock at the caretaker’s house and she opens the screen door – we both shrieked! No one in Scotland has a screen door – least of all near the North Sea! Then she offers them coffee – we shrieked again! Nobody in Scotland drinks coffee – they drink tea. That’s when we stopped listening!

As a footnote – The last time I visited Rosslyn Chapel, as the leader of a small group tour of Scotland, I sat inside as a chapel guide addressed us and various other tourists. Her address covered the history of the building and the family that built and still own it. I could sense a growing impatience as she neared the end and finally she said “I know, I know – you want to know what’s buried below the floor and whether it’s the Holy Grail”. She continued “The best theory I’ve heard is that it’s Elvis Presley”.

However, this is meant to be a book review. As long as you understand that it’s a novel and not intended to be taken as historical fact, then you will be carried along by the excitement of the chase and the unexpected twists.