WE wear sackcloth now, yet once we wore fine raiment. We were a fortress town, and kings laid charters at our feet. We wore the diadem of Royal Burghs, and where our shadow fell, men walked freely and without fear. For a thousand years of history, Scotland scattered her dreams and bloodstains around our Mercat Cross.
Dreamers, fighters, and lovers . . . Wallace standing in chains; Brus attacking our castle; Mary (with eyes to make a world to dote) leading her Host to Langside; and rebellion; and those Covenanters, riding towards Drumclog. In the quiet of the setting sun, I see them yet . . . moving silently into Eternity . . . ''Dear Auld Ruglen''!
Strange, isn't it, that a town such as this should be thrown away as worthless, all its past expunged, its name, and all its charters, abolished? Yet this was accomplished by a Machiavelli strutting in the guise of Lord Wheatley. With the scratch of a pen, everything was lost! From being a Royal Burgh we became a flung district of Glasgow. We became a Gaberlunzie town.
Today we have different masters. But the song they are singing has the same cuckoo refrain. They are going to give us the Moon. From Hamilton money is growing on council trees. They boast of spending millions to offset the past neglect. But should we insist on the restoration of self-government and the regality of our name and privileges, they become dumb, or insolent.
Yet . . . soon we will have a new Parliament in Edinburgh. Has Dewar the sword to cut this Gordian Knot of local government? Will this national assembly honour what the treaty of 1707 guaranteed - that the Royal Burghs, our Law, and our Religion would remain untouched and sacrosanct?
Or do we remain forever the Gaberlunzie town?
Matthew Finlay Nicholson,
136 Main Street, Rutherglen.
May 22.
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