Board 7

The Bogle Thorn — When a Story Becomes a Place

The Bogle Thorn stood on the road between Laurieston and the Duchrae, a landmark Crockett passed every day as a child walking to school.

"Its branches bent by the furious blasts from the loch, stands at an angle of the road, the famous Bogle Thorn." (Raiderland)

We may speculate that the boy Crockett made up stories about it. As an adult he told his own children the story of the ‘Little Green Man’ who lived inside it, complete with bark-shuttered windows, a carpeted floor, and  monkey with a curling tail glimpsed through the knot-hole. He complained that the story had to be told the same way every time. Vary a detail — omit the monkey's tail, mentioned once, a year ago — and the child caught him. The story was already as fixed as the geography.

Later, Crockett published the story in Sweethearts at Home. The Bogle Thorn is not a grand tree. It is a massive thorn bush of the kind that accumulates in a Galloway hedgerow without anyone particularly noticing. Crockett noticed. He made it significant. He kept it alive in story long after the tree itself was gone.

Which invites a question: how many such trees stood, unrecorded, until someone turned them into a story? The Bogle Thorn survives because Crockett was there, and because he understood that a story told often enough becomes inseparable from the place it inhabits. We should thank him for that.