For the love of wisdom
It only takes a few steps off the beaten track to discover the wonders of Scotland’s wild places and remind ourselves that not all those who wander are lost
Once, about a thousand years ago, we were the camp followers of a wonderful man named Nicholas Ashford who was an old school newspaperman, respected worldwide as a foreign correspondent. My mother, a rather exotic Neapolitan woman, had met him on a hike in the Drakensberg mountains of South Africa where he had been Southern Africa correspondent for The Times for 22 years. Nick was enlightened, erudite, understated and attracted to and fascinated by everything that could not be found in the UK.
Thankfully, my mother and he fell absolutely and completely in love. I say thankfully as my father James Grieve, from a long line of colonial Scottish Presbyterian Reverend surgeons, was not an ideal dad. However, he was a philosopher at the Witwatersrand University, where I believe a philosophy prize is now named after him, loved Greek dancing, was a fruitarian, gave legendary lectures and was almost certainly a rampant alcoholic. He was also from the unhappy generation of homosexuals who had to get married.
Nick became our rock and we followed him to Washington DC where he ran the Times office and married my mother. I wished I could have called him my father. He was a wonderful stepfather and in the short time he was with us until a misdiagnosed cancer killed him at the age of 47, he taught me how fatherhood should look and how a well ordered and happy household should feel.
I have been lucky enough to remember this and apply it to my own fathering of two sons who are now fine young men. But the reason for this diversion is a memory that came back to me from that time. I used to walk about a mile from our home in Chevy Chase to a rough city school where I was beaten by children of all creeds and colours. Nick used to tell me; ‘Big boy, don’t dawdle on your walk to school today please.’ How did he know me so well? Routinely my walks would meander off in every direction except school and more than a few times I would opt for a day of exploring the alleyways and parks of the city rather than the tumult of school politics.
I have never stopped thinking of Nick. I do so daily and I always will. I’ll never stop dawdling either. To dawdle is everything. So much is missed if we obsess about getting from A to B. The whole point, surely, is to winkle out everything which rests between our start and end point in life?
Recently, I was driving down the A1 and just outside Haddington my eyes fixed on Traprain Law, which rises not far from the village of East Linton. The wandering urge took over and I turned quickly off the road and parked beside a strange outcrop of rock which stands looking wild and out of place in the midst of well ordered fields and neatly pruned hedgerows.
Ignoring the signposted trail I pulled myself up to the top grabbing at handfuls of tough, deeprooted grasses as I climbed. It was a clear day and I was rewarded with a fine view out to sea on one side and towards the Lammermuirs on the other.
‘I found a little nook, sat down and let my imaination wyú
As with so much of Scotland, Traprain Law is yet another aspect of our haunted wilderness. The history of the rock is as rich as the farmland around it. I found a little nook, sat down and let my imagination fly. What lives once existed here? There is evidence that the Law has been occupied since 1,000 BC. Now the view is a patchwork of fields and farms but then it must have been out over dense forest. Wolf calls would have been heard and there were brown bears, beavers and lynx, and of course the red deer, the great survivor.
In the 1st century the Romans recorded the Votadini as the main tribe in the area and the Law was their capital until later they found another rock to base themselves where now Edinburgh castle stands. Legend has it that the Romans looked up at the place and the powerful tribe that resided there and quickly paid for safe passage. In 1919 this legend became fact as the largest Roman hoard from anywhere outside of the Roman Empire was found on Traprain Law. I laid back in the sunshine and tried to imagine it all grateful that, although he was flawed, my true father had left me with a philosopher’s ability to dream.