Kin

I walk towards the old church with a tattered plant clasped in my right hand, The chilled air gnaws the tips of my fingers and I squeeze the knotted roots tighter, giving warmth to my palm.

A row of silhouetted sycamore and oak stand behind the Kirk, big, broad, all stripped bare of summer. I walk alone through skewed tombstones, tilted and timeworn by centuries of rain. Under the shadow of the church branches explode and hundreds of rooks take fright. Peppering the colourless sky, they flare and fade over the tops of worn epitaphs. Their jarring Kraa kraa kraaing bursts the absolute silence and makes the bones within me shudder.

‘Fuck me’ I say, heart pounding.

Then realise I’m standing outside a holy place and God can hear me even if the oak doors are bolted shut. I tip my head to the sky and nod to the heavens, and say

‘Sorry’.

Whithorn priory is old, and it sits on top of even older pious ruins. Christianity was set in stone right here when the Candida Casa (translated as White House - now Whithorn) was constructed. Founded by Saint Ninian in the fifth century, it is believed to be the first church to be built from stone, probably greywhacke, in Scotland. ‘The Cradle of Christianity’ was born in Whithorn, and where Saint Ninian died and rests now. My Great Granny Milroy and Great Grampa Milroy are buried here in the kirkyard just yards from Ninian.

Phat names in history have travelled to Whithorn on pilgrimage to Ninian. A sleepy town, with a handful of shops where the shopkeepers still dress in brown shop coats, it’s perhaps a leap of faith to imagine its religious importance. Though stand still long enough within the old market town, you’ll still feel its fiery heart.

Robert the Bruce came looking for a miracle for his rumoured leprosy. A more recent conversation, still ongoing, asks whether Richard the III, who hand wrote a prayer for Ninian in his personal prayer book, might have, just maybe, possibly travelled here also. Mary Queen of Scots risked life, and an even more premature limb, by visiting during the August of 1563 and a time when John Knox and his reformation church forbid such pilgrim worshipping.

And here I am now, on a pilgrimage of my own.

Would you call it a lightbulb moment or a penny that dropped moment? Perhaps it’s six and two threes, but recently it dawned on me that I knew nothing but tiny splinters of Mum’s family tree. There was of course familiarity with the family names of Ambrose, Milroy and Briggs, but I didn’t understand how they, we, fitted together. Time had felled our family tree, snapping its branches on its landing. But all the pieces were there but just needed some grafting to fix it back together.

I am a Ryman and proud to be my father’s daughter. I inherited the family name, but I think I also inherited a greater weight of Dad’s family history in comparison to Mum’s. Mum took Dad’s name when he took her hand in marraige. Agnes Jane Briggs became Mrs Ryman, losing her name in a patriarchal history.

Women’s identities, stories and lives are smudged, harder to follow. Mum and Mum’s Mum, Granny Kirkcudbright, are no exception.

Peggy to her pals, Maggie to her husband, her mother and father christened her Margaret Ambrose Milroy. She was a mother, grandmother, an auntie and a great auntie, but all her family called her Granny. She was born on Primrose day, April the nineteenth. Primula Vulgaris, the soft petalled plant became a favourite to her. It was and will be ever associated with my granny. Dainty yet hardy, both blossomed in the darkest of days, often so others could thrive.

Granny was a star. We picked tart, red raspberries from her garden then she’d turn them to jam, only for us to slather it thick onto pancake after pancake, scone after scone. Homemade of course, she baked for us with her own fair hands using an age old family recipe. Packed with self raising flour, caster sugar, love, milk and butter, it’s the same recipe Mum uses today. Granny baked in abundance for us up until she died in her eighty eighth year. But my mouth was too full of cake to ask her about herself.

I pinged Mum a message:

What was grannies mum and

Dad called?X

Hi it was James and

Margaret Milroy. Your

Granny was Margaret

Ambrose x

And then the phone rang. Mum.

‘Yer Granny had four brothers and two sisters’.

‘Uncle Fergie, Uncle John and Uncle Jim, they never married’.

‘Alexander died when he was four. Euphemia died when she was about eighteen - I never met them’.

Mum continued,

‘And Auntie Tote- Agnes Jane Milroy- I was named for her’.

We sat on the phone to each other for over an hour. From one single question, bridges were formed, allowing me to travel between the houses of Kerr, Milroy and Harkness with fewer wrong turns. Embers of our family were stoked, so too the connection between Mum and myself.

‘They’re buried in Whithorn’.

‘Whithorn?’ I questioned.

‘Aye-behind the church’.

I was set back on my heels a little. Whithorn is just seven miles from where I live, and I was disappointed in myself for not giving it a thought sooner. Granny is buried about twenty five miles away in St. Cuthbert’s churchyard, Kirkcudbright, so maybe I just put two and two together and came up with five. More than likely though, I simply hadn’t given it a thought.

I clutch the plant as if I were clutching the delicate hand of a child and continue walking to the north side of the church. Lost among other peoples memories, I walk methodically and respectfully between each headstone. Looking for the familiar in rows of chiselled names and carved letters; looking for the eyes in a crowded room that would smile back.

With no clatter of ceremony, I find it. A simple, yet beautiful, granite grey headstone sits under an oak tree, on the side of the Ket Burn, engraved with a Celtic knot.

The knot has no beginning and no end; a symbol of the cyclical nature of life. It reads:

James Milroy died at Tonderghie

1st Sep 1948 in his 78th year.

Margaret Ambrose his wife

Died at the Isle of Whithorn 9th May 1953

Alexander, Euphemia, John,Jim and Fergie - Agnes is buried just a few graves down. They’re all here bar one, Margaret, Granny.

I scrape a little hole at the base of the headstone with my fingertips. The earth smells warm and coils together with the crisp clean air. Something inside me stirs, grows even. A once dormant seed, is now setting roots causing my heart to swell. I set my parched plant, a wild primrose - Granny’s flower, into the scrape. Poking the tangle of roots gently into the damp soil I whisper,

‘Good luck’.

Curled sycamore leaves skiff the grass pushed along by October’s chill. They birl and dance like sprites between the headstones. Some leaves collect by the exposed roots of the tree from which they fell. Some get caught in a breeze and pushed further afield. But they all return back to the soil eventually. We all do. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.