Board 2

The Double Landscape — Real and Fictional Galloway

Crockett was a writer who fictionalised his landscape as a matter of habit. Castle Douglas becomes Cairn Edward. Little Duchrae while named plainly in Raiderland, has many other names in his stories and novels. While transformed it is clearly recognisable. The hills keep their shape; the roads keep their directions; the trees stay rooted in their actual ground. Only the names change, and not always those.

He called himself a 'romancer', a word he used with Scots self-deprecation, but his fiction is also rooted in precise geography. Readers who know the land will recognise every road and ridge. Those who don't will find, by the end of a Crockett novel, that they have learned it. The places teach themselves through the stories.

"Nowhere, to my thinking, is the world so gracious as between the green woodlands of Earlstoun and the grey Duchrae Craigs." (Raiderland)

When a tree appears in his fiction, it is often a specific tree in a specific place, with a history that predates the story and continues after it ends. The fiction adds emotional and narrative depth without disturbing the map. It enriches what is already there.

Inevitably over more than a century, much of the Galloway landscape Crockett knew has changed beyond recognition. Trees have gone; the ground has been altered; what he saw is no longer there to see. His writing becomes, in that sense, a form of vision: a way of looking at a present landscape and perceiving, through his pages, what once stood in it. He does not simply describe a vanished world — he gives his readers eyes for it.