Wild Geese in Angus

[jennyblain]

Please forgive a bit of nostalgia in this post.

I have spent part of the last two days following my Dundee ancestors. My great-grandmother left Dundee in the 1850s or 60s - my parents moved there in the late 1920s, incomers, and that is where I was born and grew up: but I've been away for a long time now. A bit of sentimentality and remembrance has kicked in, and I also spent part of today re-reading my father's book, Witch's Blood, as a refresher on the social history, movement and change of the place.

But then this evening - I was watching in a desultory kind of way the Autumnwatch programme I'd saved on Friday. And it had a bit about the wild geese; these were barnacle geese on the Solway Firth... My memories are of the pink-foots and grey-lags flying out from the red autumn sunsets over Dundee and over to the fields by the Tay estuary, the Angus plain, and the Montrose basin.

Do any of you know the poem by Violet Jacob, on The Wild Geese? That takes me back... and also the children's stories by the Swedish author Selma Lagerlöf, who has the wild geese calling to each other, 'Here am I, where are you?' - the constant communication which maintains the skeins.

Jenny

[Currie]

Hello Jenny,

Here are the words of the Violet Jacob poem:
http://www.rampantscotland.com/poetry/blpoems_geese.htm

And here it is sung to music: (or most of it)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ar31r5Ofzcg

Very nice,
Alan

[jennyblain]

Thanks for the sung version.!
I think my favourite, that I've heard (or done) is spoken slowly with a flute or a fiddle behind... tear-jerker.

Jenny