The Farmer of Liddesdale

I. A Year of Loss in Morvern: The Widowed Farmer Bargains with a Stranger

MacDougall opens with the bare prose of West Highland tradition: in Liddesdale, in Morvern, on the rocky south coast of the Argyllshire peninsula that looks across the Sound of Mull to Tobermory, there dwelt a Gaelic farmer who in the space of a single twelvemonth lost his wife, his children and the ploughman who had served him through the previous winter. Wife and children died — in MacDougall’s terse Highland register, that is all we hear of them, and the sentence does the same heavy lifting as the opening of a ballad. The hiring-markets of Lammas and Martinmas had already passed when the ploughman quit his service, and there was no other man to be had in the parish: in nineteenth-century Argyll the spring sowing-time was a hard ceiling, with neighbour-farmers already turning their first furrows and the new oats waiting to go in before the lengthening days raced away from them.

The Farmer’s despair has a specific Highland edge. By the 1860s, when MacDougall’s informants would have learned this tale at the fireside, the great Highland Clearances had stripped much of Morvern of its Gaelic-speaking tenantry; the Argyll Estates and the Sellar improvers had emptied entire glens to make room for blackface sheep, and a man losing his ploughman in the new economy could not simply walk down the road and find another. Out of that pressure the Farmer makes the rash speech which sets the whole machine of the story in motion: he will engage the first man who comes his way, whoever he should be. In the moral physics of the Gaelic supernatural tale, an oath like that is a small bell rung in the Otherworld; a stranger appears at the door before the words have settled. The price the stranger names is impossible-sounding only if you do not know the Highland custom: as much of the corn at harvest as I can carry off in one burden-withe — a single twisted band of green wood used to bind a back-load of straw or hay. To a Highland labourer, that is a few sheaves; to the Devil, as MacDougall’s listeners knew at once, it is the entire field.

II. The Three Stakes and the Furrow that Out-Ploughs the Parish

The bargain made, the new ploughman walks out to the three fields the Farmer means to sow, but does not begin work. Instead he goes into the wood, cuts three stakes, and drives one into the ground at the head of each field. Then he goes home and remains idle. Day after day he is idle. The Farmer presses him — the spring is escaping, the neighbours have half-finished their work — and the Ploughman answers with his strange refrain: “Oh, our land is not ready yet. I know it by the stakes.” This stake-test is a remarkable piece of Highland weather-magic, and one that MacDougall’s source community would have recognised as the trace of an old practice rather than a fairy-tale invention. Country wisdom in Argyllshire and Skye long held that ground was fit for sowing when a wooden peg drawn from the soil bore on its tip the smell of fermenting grass-roots: fàile na talmhainn, “the breath of the earth.” The Devil, in MacDougall’s tale, has merely systematised it. He pulls each stake, sniffs it, shakes his head, and replaces it; he tries them at dusk; he tries them at dawn.

On the third morning the test passes. The Ploughman flings his stake away and sprints home for the horses, the leather traces and the plough; he drives the team to the head of the first field, thrusts the share into the ground, and chants the famous shouting-couplet of MacDougall’s text: “My horses and my leather-traces, and mettlesome lads, the earth is coming up!” Between sunrise and sunset he has ploughed, sowed and harrowed not one field but all three — an impossible day’s work in the pre-tractor Highland economy, where a single man with a foot-plough and a pair of garrons could expect at most an acre by daylight. The neighbours, MacDougall makes a small careful point of, had only got half their work in: the Devil’s idle-then-furious sowing day puts the Farmer level with the parish at a single stroke. The reader who knows the Argyllshire countryside hears in the line a faint echo of an old proverb, “Cuir an siol an aon là agus tog e an aon là” — “Sow it in one day and lift it in one day” — the proverbial extreme that the Faustian helper here makes literal.

III. Harvest and the Withe: The Bargain Comes Due

Through the long summer the Ploughman is everything a Highland farmer could wish for. He is quick, biddable, steady at the byre and at the peats; the bond between master and man is friendly, even comfortable. The trouble of the bargain has been comfortably forgotten when, on a warm day after the corn is reaped and stooked, the Farmer remarks that the grain is dry enough to be put into the barn. The Ploughman tries a sheaf or two between his palms — the Highland test for over-dry rather than ripe oats — and answers, with the same patience he has shown all year, that it is not yet ready. A few days later he says it is. “Then we will begin putting it in,” says the Farmer, and the Ploughman names the price he had not yet drawn: “Not until I get my share out of it first.”

What follows is the central image of the tale, and the one in which MacDougall’s Gaelic background shows most plainly. The Ploughman walks into the wood and returns with a single siaman — a Gaelic burden-withe of green hazel, scraped and twisted with the simple two-handed motion every Highland labourer learned as a boy. He stretches it out on the field. Then he begins to lift sheaf after sheaf and lay it across the withe. The withe does not fill. He keeps laying sheaves down. Sheaf after sheaf goes onto the band, and the band still does not fill, until at last the whole reaped harvest of the three great fields lies along the green hazel withe, and the Ploughman is shutting the binding round it. The Farmer asks what he means by that. “Thou didst promise me as much corn as I could carry with me in one burden-withe,” says the Devil, “and here I have it now.”

IV. The Three Màrts: A Prayer that Breaks the Spell

Faced with ruin, the Farmer of Liddesdale does not bargain or curse. He prays. MacDougall preserves the prayer in metrical form, in a verse-shape Highland readers will recognise as a òran-rann, a charm-rann, with three parallel lines and a turn:

“‘Twas in the Màrt I sowed,
‘Twas in the Màrt I baked,
‘Twas in the Màrt I harrowed.
Thou Who hast ordained the three Màrts,
Let not my share go in one burden-withe.”

The Gaelic word here translated Màrt is the old Highland month-name for the agricultural early year — March in the modern calendar, the season of sowing in Argyll — but in folk usage the Three Màrts have become a triad of working-times within the year: the Màrt of sowing (Màrt a’ chura), the Màrt of baking the seed-bread (Màrt a’ bhristidh aràin), and the Màrt of harrowing (Màrt na cleithidh). The prayer’s economy is exquisite: in calling on the One who ordained the three Màrts — that is, the Christian God who gave the year its sown-and-reaped pattern — the Farmer asks that the work of three seasons not be carried off in a single hellish bundle. The cosmic frame snaps tight. The withe gives way with a report that, MacDougall tells us, “echo answered from every rock far and near”; the corn flies back across the field; and the Ploughman vanishes “in a white mist in the skies, and was seen no more.” It is the perfectly judged Highland sky-departure of the Faustian helper, neither fire nor brimstone but the quiet uncoupling of the supernatural from the natural at the moment a holy word is rightly spoken.

V. The Withe, the Place-Name and the Variants

Three small things in MacDougall’s text repay closer scholarly attention. The first is the siaman, the burden-withe, which the Ploughman cuts and twists. In Highland farming a siaman was a green hazel or birch rod about the thickness of a man’s thumb, peeled, twisted lengthwise so that its fibres separated, and looped: it was used for binding loads of straw to the back of a labourer or pony, and for tying together rough fences. A finished siaman could be wound around a back-load of perhaps fifty pounds of dried oats. The Devil’s siaman in the tale, by contrast, holds the entire harvest of three large fields — a comic-grotesque inflation that the Highland audience would have grasped at once, and which has its closest folkloric parallel in the Norse tale The Master and the Pupil, where the magician’s binding-band similarly stretches to hold an impossible load. That MacDougall preserves the Gaelic technical term in his English translation (rather than substituting some bland word like “rope”) is one of several small marks that he was working close to a real informant rather than retelling from memory.

The second is the place-name. Liddesdale-in-Morvern, in Gaelic Lios Dàil (“the meadow of the enclosure”) or in some sources Liosa Dail, is a small wooded coastal valley running south-east toward Loch Aline on the Morvern peninsula in north-west Argyll. It lies south of Duror, where MacDougall served as Free Church minister, and the tale was almost certainly collected within a day’s pony-ride of his manse. Jacobs’s parenthesis “in Morven” is therefore not a mere scholarly tic but the necessary geographical correction without which the English-speaking reader, schooled by Walter Scott on Liddesdale-in-Roxburghshire, would have placed the story two hundred miles south-east in the Anglo-Scottish Borders, in an entirely different language community and folkloric tradition.

The third is the parallel Jacobs notes from Campbell of Islay’s Popular Tales of the West Highlands, “The Master and the Man” (vol. III, pp. 288-292, 1862). In Campbell’s version the Devil is engaged not as a ploughman but as a herd, and the breaking-prayer takes a slightly different metrical shape, but the core triad — impossible bargain, perfect service, and the dissolution of the contract by a country invocation — is identical. The two together establish the type as native to West Highland Gaelic tradition, well attested across at least Argyll, the Inner Hebrides and the southern Lochaber mainland, with a likely date of formation in the late mediaeval Christianised re-fashioning of an older Otherworld-helper story (the kind of helper attested in the Each-Uisge and Bòcan beliefs that survived into MacDougall’s day).

Moral

“Thou Who hast ordained the three Màrts, let not my share go in one burden-withe.” The moral of the Liddesdale farmer’s tale is the moral of every Highland Faust-story: a contract made in heat with a stranger whose name is not asked is a contract that may never be kept on its own terms, and the only safe escape is to step outside the terms altogether by appealing to a higher law. The Farmer does not haggle. He does not try to outwit the Devil with finer words. He invokes the Maker of the seasons, and the bargain unravels because it was never legitimate to begin with. In MacDougall’s quiet Highland Calvinist register the lesson is double: do not swear rash oaths in distress, and when you have, remember Whose year it is.

Why The Farmer of Liddesdale Has Lasted

The tale has lasted because it does the small, exact thing the best of MacDougall’s Argyllshire stories do: it sets a perfectly ordinary moment of rural anxiety — a widowed farmer staring at empty fields he cannot plough — against the cold geometry of a supernatural bargain, and lets the resolution arrive not by violence or trickery but by the speaking of a true word about the working year. Joseph Jacobs, choosing it for More Celtic Fairy Tales in 1894, recognised that it stood beside Goethe’s Faust and Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus as a folk-form of the same plot — he calls the Ploughman, in his Notes, “the rustic Faust” — but with a moral economy quite particular to the West Highlands. The Devil here is not a flamboyant Mephistopheles; he is a man with a dark coat and a steady hand on the plough, and he is defeated not by Margaret’s love nor by the Final Hour but by the country prayer of a man who knows what month it is. Children read the tale for the burden-withe and the white mist; adults read it for the rann of the three Màrts; folklorists read it as MacDougall’s careful Argyllshire variant on a tale-type that runs from Iceland to the Mediterranean; and Gaels themselves read it as a small, true picture of the year their grandfathers worked, with the Devil offering, as he always does, to take the harvest off their hands in a single burden, and the Highland answer, as it has always been, that the harvest is owed to the One who ordained the three Màrts and to no one else.

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