Growing up in Scotland in the 1950s and 1960s, Scots was, unsurprisingly, the language I was most likely to hear when I set foot outside the family home. This was the Scots of rural Perthshire where we lived, one of numerous regional variations and quite distinct from the Scots of, say, the streets of Glasgow, the farms of the Northeast, or the fishing communities of Orkney. 

It was very different indeed from the received pronunciation, sometimes described as the Queen’s English, spoken within my family and wider social circle. Even so, it was present in our daily lives. 

On Sundays we might have a gigot (leg) of lamb; my mother would have bought it when she went to the village for the messages (shopping); my father, who had one weak leg, the result of polio in his youth, would hirple a bit when he was tired; the itinerant tattie-howkers lifted the potatos in the fields around us; and after a glass too many, a grownup might become fou, or even, to the delight of us children, fou as a puggie (monkey).

The Scots leid (language) is warm and humorous and earthily poetic, and to me as a country child it had something embracing about it that seemed to come directly from the surrounding land and landscape. Today, as an adult and a writer, I appreciate it for its richness and versatility. It can be tender and abrasive, hilariously funny, deeply reflective and expressive, abundant with imagery and musicality.

What I didn’t know back then, because I was privately educated, was that local children of my age were more or less bilingual. At home they spoke Scots. In the classroom they spoke standard English and could be punished for speaking Scots. (The tawse, a leather strap with one end split it into three thongs, applied to the open palm of the hand, was only banned officially in 1987.)

But Scots, to be clear, is not simply bad English. Technically it’s a sister language to English, closely related and sharing some of the same origins. But it has a unique grammar, syntax and vocabulary (Norse and French are among the more readily identifiable elements of its etymology). And this very week, on St Andrew’s Day (30 November), it received legal recognition by the Scottish Languages Act, alongside Gaelic, as as an official language of Scotland.

Few things are more fundamental to national identity than language, and the stigma is lessening. But it’s still there. In this same week a Scottish journalist wrote in the Daily Telegraph that Glaswegians are handicapped by their native tongue – a deliberate insult by someone who knows better, in a newspaper from which this is only to be expected. Yet it remains sadly true that life prospects are poorer for Scots who don’t speak standard English.

Against this backdrop I recently took part in a project by the writers’ collective 26 to write a poem about a bridge, with the constraint of 100 words, the last three echoing the first three. I chose the bridge which links my community of Birnam with that of Dunkeld on the other side of the River Tay.

The seven-arched bridge was built by the civil engineer Thomas Telford between 1802 and 1809. It spans the point at which, previously, drovers from the north of Scotland took their cattle across the river en route for the lowland trysts at Crieff and Falkirk. In those pre-bridge days, a swimming cow could be hired to lead the herds through deep water.

I’ve known that story for a while and have always been tickled by it. For the poem I imagined a scene in which the bridge is still just a glint in Telford’s eye, yet the owner of the cow, who is doing a brisk trade with the drovers, senses that time is no longer on his side.

I wrote it first in standard English. Then, perhaps because I had just been invited to contribute to an anthology marking the centenary of publication of the poet Hugh MacDiarmid’s Scots language masterpiece, A Drunk Man Looks At The Thistle, I began to wonder how it would be in Scots. A little nervously, I asked ChatGPT to translate it. The result was nae bad. I did some more work on it, consulted a couple of prominent Scots poets, and here it is.

The Tay at Dunkeld, 1802

Jouglin an stompin
They clart the shallas
Drouthie dugs dodgin hooves
It’s been a lang road

Fetch McGregor!
The drover’s laddie 
Runs tae the inn

Ower the watter
At a tripod
A chiel in a stovepipe
Peerin scrievin

McGregor rid-een’d
Taks the drover’s coin
Unhitches his beast
Leads her tae the watter
Gies her a skelp
An aff she gangs heid high

Ane by ane then aa thegither
The ithers clatter in efter her

McGregor eyes the chiel
Wha’s the lum hat?
Telford the reply
Thon’s Thomas Telford
The nem means nocht
But McGregor kens
His thochts jouglin an stompin

clart the shallas – muddy the shallows; drouthie dugs – thirsty dogs; chiel – man; scrievin – writing; rid-een’d – red-eyed; skelp – smack; lum – chimney (lum hat – top hat)

Hear it here: