No-Man's Land
Remembering John Buchan's chilling tale of Pictish horror in the heart of the Galloway Hills
Galloway has often been defined by authors who come from other places. As a written landscape, we’re probably best known from Sir Walter Scott’s Guy Mannering, or as the setting for John Buchan’s celebrated The Thirty-Nine Steps. Scott and Buchan are fine Scottish writers, but they’re from the Borders - and while that doesn’t seem to mean much to people from other places, it’s a world of difference to Southron Scots. Dorothy L Sayers came from Oxford to set her celebrated The Five Red Herrings in Kirkcudbright and the most famous Galloway poem Blows the Wind Today was written by in Samoa by Robert Louis Stevenson (who was from Edinburgh). You could argue in support of work by local writers like SR Crockett - he sometimes wrote well and truly, but he’s never remembered so clearly as writers who came to Galloway from elsewhere. In this context, it sometimes feels like we’re a place to be looked in at and thought about from a distance - a place where memories are made and then taken away again.
John Buchan was a passionate Borderer. His focus always lay to the east and the hills around Tweedsmuir, but he returned to Galloway several times in his writing, usually reflecting on time spent fishing in the Galloway Hills when he was a student. There’s no mention of the word Galloway anywhere in his 1901 short story “No-Man’s Land”, but it’s clearly the focus of his attention. He skips around the specific geography and deliberately muddles distances and reference-points, but as he describes the fictional “Scarts of the Muneraw”, he’s very clearly describing the hills above and around the Silver Flowe, either on the bad western faces of the Rhinns of Kells or in the desperate rubble of the Dungeon Hills.
The premise of No Man’s Land is simple - an academic at Oxford University is tickled by the idea of a fishing holiday in the hills above Allerfoot, which sounds an awful lot like the high Glenkens. Staying in a shepherd’s bothy, he is immediately intrigued by a local superstition in which sheep are mysteriously stolen and lambs found mutilated with strangely inexplicable wounds. As the plot unfolds, it turns out that these far-flung “Galloway Hills” contain a population of ancient Pictish people, driven underground by thousands of years of persecution.
Being fair to Buchan, we don’t know much about the Picts. The margins for imaginative riffing are a mile-wide, but he manages to push them all the same. His Picts aren’t just a culturally separate gathering of tribes. After centuries of inbreeding, they’ve become catastrophically bestial - small, sheep-eating cavemen with sharp teeth and nasty minds. Illustrated in 1949 by the artist Alexander Leydenfrost (above), the effect is ramped up to a fever pitch; they’ve become bloodthirsty ape-men, intent on murder and mayhem. The plot is secondary to some of the descriptive language, particularly in Buchan’s description of a Pictish elder “like a foul grey badger, his red eyes sightless and his hands trembling on a stump of bog-oak”. It’s all great fun, even though the action explodes into a multitude of daft and immediately predictable angles.
It’s no wonder this story has vanished from popular consideration over the last century. If you aren’t from Galloway, it’s just a gently entertaining bit of ghoulishness... but there is something inexplicably hair-raising about the transposition of horror and fantasy to the Galloway Hills. It’s a profoundly moving place, particularly in the last spark of evening when the sun falls abruptly down behind Craignaw and several square miles of ancient bogland fall to sudden darkness. It’s cold and waukrife in the dungeon lanes, and nothing can stand for long without screaming in the screes which tumble down the Wolf Slock. I’ve often felt uneasy out there, but it’s never been easy to explain precisely why.
It took an outsider like Buchan to sketch out these places because there are no native voices in the massive, monstrous hinterland of the Southern Uplands. Descriptions cannot come from inside a void, and even a lifelong inhabitant is only passing through. Maybe it’s a matter of smouldering dissatisfaction for modern writers in Galloway that we’ve never really nailed our own homeplace for ourselves - but we have to remember that our homeplace also includes vast and frightening spaces which don’t belong to anybody. In that sense, they’re free to be occupied by whoever wants to claim them - and maybe it’s a matter of pride for us that they’ve drawn the eye of great writers, no matter where they’re from.
And in the meantime, I wonder if I’ll ever be able to sleep in the bothy at Backhill of Bush again, or whether I have the nerve to pitch my tent on the slow stoop towards Mullwarcher. I’ll be too busy listening for the knapping of flints, the gulping of blood and the quiet, unintelligible mutter of dark, malevolent Picts.
No-Man’s Land has been reproduced in a few places over the last thirty years. Find it in “British Weird: Selected Short Fiction, 1893-1937”, edited by James Machin and published in 2020. There’s some other good stuff in there too...
First published BM&P November 2024