Board 3

Our Lady of the Woods — A Castle Douglas Silver Birch

In his later boyhood in Castle Douglas, Crockett came under the spell of a silver birch at Carlinwark. It had a name: Our Lady of the Woods. He and his friends — almost certainly including the young painter William MacGeorge — sketched it, wrote poems to it, argued about it. It was a site of shared meaning, a fixed point in the social geography of their youth.

When a clogger looked at the same tree and observed that it would make fine clog-bottoms, Crockett did not mock him. He understood. The tree meant something different to different people, and all of those meanings were legitimate. That generosity of observation — the ability to hold multiple truths about a place simultaneously — is one of the things that makes Crockett worth reading.

The birch fell in the great windstorm of 1883. Crockett connected its loss to the eruption of Krakatoa the same year — the volcanic dust drifting across the atmosphere, altering the light, contributing to the ferocity of the storm. A local grief mapped onto a planetary event. One named tree, one small Galloway town, one catastrophe felt round the world.

It is a characteristic move: to insist that the particular and the large are connected, that the loss of one named tree matters in the same register as the forces that brought it down.