Newsletter 53

1.  Marchmont Visit

• Only 9 places remain for our privileged visit to Marchmont House on 2^nd August.

Reserve your place by emailing
ana@gwayre.co.uk 
to confirm attendance. (Send a cheque for £20 a head payable to the project to secure your place.)

Something ‘bubbly’ will be available on arrival, followed by both the ‘Tale of Marchmont’ and a tour & talk about the recent restoration.

Starting at 6-30, it will last about 2 hours. places are limited to a maximum of 32. places are  allocated on a first come first served basis.  Email
ana@gwayre.co.uk 
to book or for more details.

The Tale of “Sir Patrick Hume: A Tale of the House of Marchmont”  was written by Wilson.  It relates the story of Sir Patrick Hume in 1665, and the trials of those days. You must come along, or read the story, to find out how it ends!

Marchmont House details  are here The interior at Marchmont is arguably one of the finest in Scotland, and the house retains many of its original features, including the magnificent George II period plasterwork by Thomas Clayton, the pre-eminent plasterer of the time.

In 1914 the then owner Robert Finnie McEwen commissioned Sir Robert Lorimer to enlarge the house.

One hundred years on, and the house has just undergone a thorough and sensitive three-year restoration which was described by Country Life magazine as ‘outstanding’.

Previously his Tale The Doom of Soulis was included in Middle Unearthed: The Best Fantasy Short Stories 1800-1849 (Best Short Stories Book 6), edited by Andrew Barger and published by Bottletree Books LLC. The former put him in the company of Kipling, Auden and Bunting, while the latter put him with Mary Shelley, Dickens, and Washington Irving. Quite an achievement for the son of a Sawyer from Tweedmouth!

Amazon  is selling the ’10 best Fantasy Stories 1800 – 1849′
You can buy the print or digital edition here:-
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Middle-Unearthed-Fantasy-Stories-1800-1849/dp/1933747536
(Quoting from their blurb)  These 10 excellent stories were uncovered from old magazines and forgotten journals. Andrew provides a list of the stories considered and includes background introductions to each story and author, where available. But his treatment of some of the earliest stories gets even better with annotations which allow readers to peek behind the stories.

In February 1832 John Mackay Wilson informed his friend John Everett that he intended to accept the post of Editor of the Berwick Advertiser because “health – and home are powerful magnets to draw me to the North and keep me there”. He became an outstanding Editor and a hugely successful writer of Historical, Traditionary and Imaginative Tales of the Borders, but, rather than enjoying a long, healthy life in his home town, he was dead at 31 years of age just over three years later.
Following a biography of Wilson, Mike discusses the wider political, business and literary contexts in the early nineteenth century, before focussing on Wilson’s extraordinarily productive period of literary and political writing between 1832 and 1835.

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