04/09/2026
🌾 Between the Grampian foothills and the sea there is a wide shallow basin of some of the best farmland in Scotland. The old people called it the Howe of the Mearns. Howe simply means hollow.
It is Kincardineshire, and it produced the greatest novel ever written about Scottish country life.
James Leslie Mitchell was born on the thirteenth of February 1901 at Hillhead of Seggat in Auchterless, Aberdeenshire. When he was seven the family took the croft of Bloomfield at Arbuthnott, down in the Mearns, and that landscape got into him and never left. He hated the work. He was a bookish, argumentative, difficult boy on a farm that needed hands, and he got out as soon as he could, into journalism and then the forces and then England.
And then, living in Welwyn Garden City, hundreds of miles away, he wrote Sunset Song. It came out in August 1932 under the name Lewis Grassic Gibbon, taken from his mother's side of the family. 📖
He set it in a place he called Kinraddie, which is Arbuthnott with the names changed and other parishes folded in. He gave it a girl called Chris Guthrie who is torn in two, half of her wanting books and the world, half of her belonging to the land so completely that leaving would kill something. Anyone with a farming family anywhere understands her immediately.
And he did something nobody had done. He wrote it in English that moves and sounds like the Scots speech of the north east, so that the rhythm of how his people actually talked survives inside a book.
He finished the trilogy and then he died, on the seventh of February 1935, of a perforated ulcer. He was thirty three years old. Six days short of thirty four.
His ashes were brought back and laid in Arbuthnott kirkyard that same month, in the ground he spent his life arguing with.
There is a kind of Scot who has to leave in order to see the place clearly, and who then spends everything they have writing it down. 🏴
Most families have one.
