The Clogger and the Silver Birch: S.R. Crockett’s Comedy of Perspective

In Raiderland, (1904) Crockett writes:

Carlinwark is hardly a loch. I have heard it called a duck-pond. Well, if so, blessed be the ducks that swim in that pearl of ponds. I have crossed Ladoga, and seen less of beauty than you may see by walking open-eyed from the foot of the Lovers’ Walk to the Clachan of Buchan. Open-eyed, I say. For all depends on that.

There was a tree, a silver-birch, which grew upon a point near the little grassy islet which fronts the Fair Island on its eastern side. We, the boys of twenty-five years ago, loved it. We sketched it after the manner of MacWhirter. We wrote odes to it. Mine I even printed. It was Our Lady of the Woods. One day it chanced that the wandering trio who did all these things, came on a fourth youth also regarding the beautiful white birch. There was a kind of reverent joy on his face. Our hearts warmed to the fellow. Hitherto we had not thought highly of his mental powers. Perhaps, after all, we were mistaken.

That’s a bonny tree, he said, seeing us also gazing up at it. Yes, we cried, rejoicing as the angels do over a soul saved, we think it is the loveliest thing all about the loch. Aye, he said, I was just thinkin’ the same it wad make grand clog-bottoms. He was a clogger! And, alas, he cast the evil eye on Our Lady of the Woods. To clog-bottoms she came at long and last. She was laid low in the great windstorm of December 1883, just at the time when the dust from the Krakatoa outburst was reddening the skies of the world. Then I wrote another ode upon her.

In less than 300 words he is able to evoke all kinds of pictures and emotions in his reader – all based on the significant/insignificance of one silver birch tree.

Let’s look at what he does:

Crockett’s defence of Carlinwark against those who dismiss it as a mere duck-pond is characteristically witty: ‘blessed be the ducks that swim in that pearl of ponds’. This establishes more than local patriotism—it announces his artistic manifesto.

By invoking the vast Russian Lake Ladoga only to insist that the walk from Lovers’ Walk to Buchan Clachan contains greater beauty, he inverts conventional hierarchies of landscape appreciation. Scale means nothing; seeing truly is everything. And that crucial qualification—’Open-eyed, I say. For all depends on that’—reveals his entire writerly method in a single breath. For Crockett seeing truly requires not just eyes, but openness—an active, receptive attention to the world.

This principle of active, receptive attention governs what follows. The silver birch that once stood near the grassy islet wasn’t merely a tree to young Crockett and his youthful companions of twenty five years in the past. To them it was ‘Our Lady of the Woods’, worthy of sketches, odes, even ‘publication’. The phrase captures both genuine devotion and, with gentle self-mockery, the grandiose sensibility of romantic youth. Crockett tells us they sketch in the manner of MacWhirter (a Pre-Raphaelite artist). That even as a boy, he had pretensions of publishing – he printed his odes.

Then comes the comedy, timed to perfection. A fourth youth appears, also gazing at the tree with apparent ‘reverent joy’. The trio’s hearts warm immediately: here is a fellow spirit, someone whose appreciation of beauty has been underestimated. The dramatic irony is perfect. Readers sense the punchline approaching even as the narrator remains innocently hopeful. ‘That’s a bonny tree,’ the newcomer observes—so far, so promising. The boys eagerly confirm it’s the loveliest thing about the loch. Then comes the deflation: ‘Aye, I was just thinkin’ the same—it wad make grand clog-bottoms.’

Crockett’s handling of this moment demonstrates his comic skill. The revelation arrives in the clogger’s own unhurried dialect, followed by that single devastating sentence: ‘He was a clogger!’ The exclamation mark carries the full weight of dismay. Here is no fellow aesthete, no kindred soul who sees in the birch’s white bark and delicate form a manifestation of natural beauty—just a tradesman calculating board-feet of good birch wood suitable for clog manufacture.

The humour works on multiple levels. There’s the obvious comedy of mistaken assumption and romantic deflation. But Crockett is laughing at himself and his youthful pretensions without dismissing them entirely. The clogger’s perspective isn’t wrong—it’s simply different. Where the poets saw transcendent beauty, he saw practical utility. Both were looking at the same tree, both found it ‘bonny’, but ‘open-eyed’ seeing, it turns out, produces strikingly different visions.

The sketch’s darker turn—the clogger casting his ‘evil eye’ on their Lady—half-seriously suggests that naming a thing’s fate might summon it. When the great December 1883 windstorm (coinciding with Krakatoa’s dust reddening the world’s skies) felled the birch, the clogger’s prophecy prevailed over the poets’ dreams. ‘To clog-bottoms she came at long and last.’ The phrasing carries mock-heroic solemnity, acknowledging defeat with wry grace. It also roots this fiction firmly in fact.

And the final sentence rescues something from loss: ‘Then I wrote another ode upon her.’ The ambiguity of the preposition ‘upon’ is exquisite. Does he write about the fallen tree? Or literally upon some object made from its wood—perhaps wearing the very clogs it became whilst tramping those same lochside paths? Is he courting a sweetheart in footwear that was once poetry’s inspiration? Crockett refuses neat closure, leaving us suspended between possibilities.

What appears as simple reminiscence is sophisticated commentary on perspective and competing ways of valuing the world. The tree became poetry; the tree became clogs. Both outcomes, Crockett suggests, justify its brief existence beside Carlinwark’s waters. Neither the romantic nor the practical vision holds absolute authority. This even-handedness—honouring youthful idealism whilst acknowledging material reality, finding genuine humour in their collision—demonstrates the mature writer’s capacious understanding. It all depends, as Crockett reminds us, on how open our eyes truly are.

The sketch works because Crockett maintains affection for all his characters, including his younger self. He doesn’t elevate the poet above the clogger or vice versa. Instead, he invites us to see both truly, to hold multiple perspectives simultaneously—to be, in his terms, genuinely open-eyed. That silver birch served beauty and utility both, and the writer who can recognise this double service, who can find comedy in the gap between visions without diminishing either, has learned (and demonstrated) something essential about his craft and his world.