{"id":426,"date":"2026-06-17T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-17T09:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/srcrockett.scot\/thereadingroom\/?p=426"},"modified":"2026-06-17T14:54:11","modified_gmt":"2026-06-17T13:54:11","slug":"when-the-king-comes-to-galloway","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/srcrockett.scot\/thereadingroom\/2026\/06\/17\/when-the-king-comes-to-galloway\/","title":{"rendered":"When the King Comes to Galloway"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Published once in a magazine in 1898, never collected, and long overlooked, &#8220;The Goodman of Ballangiech&#8221; is one of S.R. Crockett&#8217;s most accomplished short fictions. This close reading makes the case for its reconsideration. Working simultaneously as historical romance, political comedy, social commentary, and dialect literature, the story deploys a disguised King of Scotland against the landscape and people of Galloway to expose, with precise irony, the gap between social rank and moral worth. The court favourite is the villain. The shepherd and his sharp-tongued wife are the story&#8217;s true exemplars. The outlaws are desperate rather than wicked \u2014 created, and destroyed, by the King&#8217;s own justice. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Crockett draws on real Galloway family names, including the Macmillans of Glenhead, and on the full resources of Scots dialect, including a celebrated footnote on the pronunciation of Esconquehan that reveals a writer enormously proud of his native place. This article argues that those who have claimed Crockett used Scots improperly \u2014 or not at all \u2014 have simply not read carefully enough. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Now available in full in the S.R. Crockett Online Museum. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">An article from the Reading Room of the S.R. Crockett Online Museum.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-buttons is-layout-flex wp-block-buttons-is-layout-flex\">\n<div class=\"wp-block-button\"><a class=\"wp-block-button__link wp-element-button\" href=\"https:\/\/srcrockett.scot\/reading-room\/articles\/WhentheKing.pdf\">Read full article<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What happens when you actually sit down and read &#8216;The Goodman of Ballangiech&#8217;? A personal response to the story \u2014 its humour, its inverted social hierarchy, its vivid domestic comedy \u2014 and one footnote about a Galloway place name that tells you everything about Crockett&#8217;s relationship to his native ground.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6,52,10,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-426","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-exhibitions","category-literary-analysis","category-mythbusting","category-serials"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>When the King Comes to Galloway - Reading Room<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/srcrockett.scot\/thereadingroom\/2026\/06\/17\/when-the-king-comes-to-galloway\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_GB\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"When the King Comes to Galloway - Reading Room\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"What happens when you actually sit down and read &#039;The Goodman of Ballangiech&#039;? 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