Scottish Ghost Stories by James Robertson
Posted in James Robertson, Reading Reviewed at 12:00 on 23 November 2022
Sphere, 2009, 268 p plus vii p Introduction, i p Contents, i p Acknowledgements and 4 p Bibliography.

This is not, as a cursory glance might have suggested, a collection of fiction. It is instead an enumeration of numerous instances of hauntings, apparitions, weird noises, poltergeists etc recorded in Scotland, some of them relatively recently.
It is also a swift trip through the country’s history and there is a noticeable concentration of such tales belonging to Covenanting times – which were of course bloody enough but were they any more so than at other times of conflict? – many of them focused on the deeds of James Graham of Claverhouse, or Tam Dalyell of the Binns. There is also an interesting two pages on the peculiarly unfortunate history of the lairds of Glamis.
Only occasionally does Robertson cast doubt on any of these accounts of the supernatural for the most part seeming to take them at face value but is it perhaps a result of that intimately Scottish embrace of a harsh religion for a harsh environment that led to people having – or at least recounting – such strange experiences? In the light of these tales it is perhaps no coincidence that many pieces of Scottish literature deal with meetings with the devil.
There is one lighter moment in all this where Robertson relates the tale of a woman accused of witchcraft – well aware of the usual outcome of such denunciations – cannily threatening to bring punishment on the wives and daughters of her accusers by saying she would implicate them as also taking part in her supposed misdeeds.
Pedant’s corner:- Inverary (Inveraray,) staunch (as in blood flow, x 2, ‘stanch’,) span (spun,) “after the death Lord Glamis” (death of Lord Glamis,) “from the that church” (either ‘the ‘ or ‘that’, not both,) “what loked like” (looked like.)