Notes

There are no entries for places on the map on p.vi but most are treated in notes to the Canongate Classics editions of Sunset Song and Cloud Howe.

p.1 Windmill Place. ‘Duncairn is no imaginary city; Duncairn is plainly and visibly the Aberdeen that Grassic Gibbon knew as a reporter in his early working days, the Windmill Steps the very ones he lived at the top of in digs no doubt very like Ma Cleghorn’s, the mile-long Union Street nearby the Royal Mile of Duncairn, Footdee and Footforthie conveniently in the right place, the Commercial Bank and the statue at the end of Union Terrace and Wool-worth’s and all the familiar landmarks which make Duncairn instantly recognizable as Aberdeen. Granite is quarried in the outskirts: Hazelhead and Rubislaw are not mentioned as such, but they could not be more clearly hinted at’ (Ian Campbell, ‘Lewis Grassic Gibbon and the Mearns’, in A Sense of Place, ed Graeme Cruickshank, 1988, p.18).

p.2 Mounth. The great SE spur of the Grampian mountain system.

p.6 the Broo. From ‘Bureau’—unemployment exchange.

p.7 MacDonald. J. Ramsay MacDonald (1866–1937), the prime minister. See note in Cloud Howe, p.219, Canongate Classics edn.

p.9 War-horse out of Isaiah. Perhaps Robert had used a large Bible with coloured illustrations.

p.14 Howe of the World. The Howe of the Mearns. See the map on p.vi.

p.18 Dunedin. The Celtic form of Edinburgh.
Tory Pictman. Cf the Scotsman, ‘Scotland’s National Newspaper’—now far from Tory in the narrow party sense.

p.30 Shaw. George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950), the dramatist, essayist and pamphleteer.

Wells. Herbert George Wells (1866–1946), novelist, utopian polemicist and popularizer of science. Both Shaw and Wells had enormous influence on Gibbon in his early years.

p.31 MacGillivray. J. Pittendrigh MacGillivray (1856–1938), poet and sculptor (he made the statues of John Knox in St Giles’ and Byron in Aberdeen Grammar School). He experimented in mild pastiches of Middle Scots.
Marion Angus (1866–1946) has been judged by Roderick Watson to be ‘within her chosen range, technically the most accomplished [poet in Scots] of her generation’.
Lewis Spence (1874–1955), anthropologist, poet, and general writer. Miss Murgatroyd may have been referring to The Mysteries of Britain; or, the Secret Rites and traditions of Ancient Britain restored (1928).
Hugo MacDownall. A joke at the expense of Christopher Murray Grieve (‘Hugh MacDiarmid’, 1892–1978), to whom the novel is dedicated and with whom Gibbon collaborated in this very year in writing The Scottish Scene. See also the note in Cloud Howe, p.219, Canongate Classics edn. Synthetic Scots was to be a deliberate creation, using words and syntax from the past and from all dialects of the Scots language.

p.32 Edgar Wallace. Wallace (1875–1932), an English writer best known for his crime novels.

p.38 The Slug. The Slug Road runs from Stonehaven to near Banchory on Deeside, and climbs to a height of 757 ft.
Dunecht. An Aberdeenshire village some twelve miles w of Aberdeen.
Montrose. James Graham, Marquis of Montrose (1612–50), Scottish general, supported Charles 1 after 1644 and took and pillaged both Aberdeen (1644) and Dundee (1645).