commentary on ‘Quarantine in the Borders’ – Mary Gilliland

Lucky me—a month at Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers in 1995. Situated on the brink of the River Esk, on a ravine twice as deep as the gorges of New York’s Finger Lakes region where I live, the castle grounds give the impression of wildness even though it’s located just 7 miles south of Edinburgh. In Scotland my feet found a homeland. It’s the first place I’ve inhabited where nobody asks how to spell Gilliland. And I got to sit quietly across the river in Rosslyn Chapel as often as I wished, before the chapel was remade with placards pointing out the Green Man etcetera and a tea room for the busloads of tourists that stop there now. I wanted to visit the Roslin Institute for a peek at Dolly, the first cloned sheep, but access was denied. It seemed a wonder to me that two buildings a stone’s throw from each other housed the mythic past and the technological future.

I longed to return to Hawthornden, as much to write as to push further afield and walk the Pentland Hills. So I did, in May 2001. Shortly before I left the States, Britain’s foot-in-mouth epidemic began, and I arrived to find that walking in any grassy area in Midlothian and the other counties of the Borders, indeed in all of Britain, was prohibited.

The government’s response was, I felt, far worse than the disease itself: mass extinction of livestock and in many cases of a life’s work. The Scotsman reported that farmer suicides were averaging one per week. Trenches were excavated to bury the killed animals, or massive pyres were ignited. Working class people with whom I spoke believed it a collusion with developers to extinguish small holdings as a way of life and bring in agribusiness. In England, where there were so many more farms, dwellers in the countryside stuffed towels and blankets around their houses’ doors and windows to lessen the sickly smell of burning flesh.

At home later that year I watched BBC World News report that as many as 4,000,000 animals had been slaughtered, while acute but usually non-fatal confirmed cases of the disease totaled 337.

This was the backdrop to ‘Quarantine in the Borders.’ Among the poems that emerged from that stay in Scotland, this was one of those written in a deliberately disrupted form.