The work of James Leslie Mitchell, better known of course by his famous pen-name of Lewis Grassic Gibbon, has been a consuming passion in my extensive academic life; in the course of forty years of dedicated study I’ve produced three major works on him. The first was my PhD, a blissfully self-indulgent five years of research funded with a SED studentship, the product of which subsequently was published by Aberdeen University Press in 1984 as A Blasphemer & Reformer: A Study of James Leslie Mitchell/Lewis Grassic Gibbon. After this, with the assistance of Mitchell’s daughter Rhea Martin I embarked on my second major project, to collate an annotated miscellany of his uncollected writings: correspondence, essays, notebooks, drafts and fragments. Having steadfastly brought this MS to completion fifteen years later, following the centenary of Mitchell’s birth in 2001 it struck me that first and foremost he needed a full, up to date critical biography. Rhea and her brother Daryll were hugely supportive, and I told them boldly the draft would be finished in six years. After all, Niger, the vibrant Gibbon biography of Mungo Park from 1934, took just fifteen months from signing of contract to publication.
Admittedly I’m a slow worker anyway, but very quickly it became apparent that there was a huge amount of new material to be added for every chapter of Mitchell’s short life – and the book has seventeen chapters. Following several bumps on the road, including my first publisher going to the wall a third of the way through the final edit, finally in May 2025 Jetstone Books published History of a Revoluter: The Life of James Leslie Mitchell/Lewis Grassic Gibbon.1 My editor at Jetstone, Dr MacDonald Daly, is also systematically bringing out authoritative, fully annotated editions of Mitchell’s rarer titles, with Three Go Back the last published, and Jetstone are also scheduled to publish my Mitchell miscellany within the next year.
The writing of the biography has been challenging but absolutely revelatory. My emphasis moved from academic analysis of features and techniques, essentially from what he wrote and how he wrote it, to what he did and thought, what he wrote about it, and why. As the biographer, I’ve now seen Mitchell’s works through fresh eyes, and I should like here to consider one of the most pertinent ways in which Mitchell’s biography has informed his literary achievement – focusing on the place setting of his masterpiece, Sunset Song.
When in my early postgraduate days I asked Ray, Leslie Mitchell’s widow, about the inspiration for her husband writing a Scottish novel (actually his seventh book), this is what she wrote:
Regarding Leslie considering writing a Scots novel his brother John had been urging him to write such a novel in the 20s and many of us hoped he would. […] his story of the Reisk he knew and I can vouch for many incidents.
2
Clearly the place name of the Reisk was referring to the particular area of Arbuthnott where Leslie and Ray, born Rebecca Middleton, were both brought up. You pass Reisk Croft on the single-track road north from the centre of Arbuthnott, which gave the immediate microcommunity its name, up to Bloomfield, James Mitchell’s smallholding, closely followed by Robert Middleton’s farm of Hareden just across the road. And Blawearie’s lofty location in Sunset Song – ‘out of the world and into Blawearie’3 – is well known to have been taken from Bloomfield, half-way up the Reisk. The etymology of the proper noun ‘reisk’ is startlingly revealing. The Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue gives the following definition of the word: ‘Moorish or marshy ground, covered with coarse grass or sedge; unproductive land.’4 The social impoverishment visited on the poor crofters condemned to farming there, then, was flagged up in the topographical moniker that it earned.
To delve more deeply into the Mitchell family’s farming background, father James Mitchell’s first attempt at crofting, at Leslie’s birthplace of Hillhead of Seggat outside Turriff, was absolutely disastrous. The factor’s log shows that alarmingly Mitchell’s predecessor had left just three years into his nineteen-year lease. The smallholding constituted extremely poor land, high up, with a dilapidated farmhouse; and from 1900 James Mitchell limped bravely on, falling behind year on year to pay his rent. Eight years into a wholly unworkable tenancy he invoked the option in his lease of a mid-term break.5
After a brief spell regrouping in Aberdeen, in May of 1908 James Mitchell took a punt on the smallholding of Bloomfield in the Mearns. It seemed like a good move: with thirty-one acres of arable land, Bloomfield was over two-thirds of the acreage of Hillies, but at fifteen pounds, it commanded less than half the annual rental. Only ten years in, though, when Arbuthnott Estates had become mired in financial difficulties in the wake of the First World War, the survey they commissioned of their landed assets concluded:
The class of [the estate] land varies very much, some of it being fairly good, some fair, but a good deal of it very poor. This latter remark applies more particularly to all the land in the Reisk quarter of the Estate, which is very poor indeed.
6
To turn to Mitchell’s original setting for his trilogy, the striking map of ‘The Land of A Scots Quair’ appearing in the endpapers to the first edition of Grey Granite followed iconic graphics for Kinraddie in the endpapers to Sunset Song and for Segget (sic) in Cloud Howe, all based on the author’s own sketches. The last one actually shows all three of his fictional settings, neatly boxed off, distributed throughout the Mearns. Duncairn, his Mearns city positioned on the coast midway between Aberdeen and Dundee, is furthest south. It’s a fictional composite, with bits of Aberdeen, a Royal Mile pinched from Edinburgh, Grand Central Station imported from Glasgow, and so on. Segget, inland to the west between Drumlithie and Auchinblae, is squarely based on Inverbervie, the old mill town lying just five miles down the road from Bloomfield. Mitchell has wheeched it inland to provide fictional distancing. Kinraddie is the northernmost setting, to the northeast of Segget.
Mitchell’s original formulation of the setting for his trilogy was set out visually on a finely detailed map by John Bartholomew tipped in to a solid historical tome from 1914, James Crabb Watt’s The Mearns of Old.7 The book itself was precisely the kind of dry history from above parodied in the Prelude to Sunset Song, but Mitchell carefully removed the map to establish his place settings. And there they are, marked in ink on the original map preserved with his personal library at Edinburgh University Library Heritage Collections, just as they appeared in the published endpapers (although here Duncairn was first called Dundon).8 Scrutinised closely, though, Kinraddie is strategically placed. The dog-leg of the Reisk road, climbing ‘fair on up’ four miles from the heart of Arbuthnott past Bloomfield, midway, and skirting Bruxie Hill, culminates – finally – in Kinraddie. Kinraddie, then, is a geographical extension of the Reisk. It’s not the Reisk itself. It’s not Arbuthnott. Kinraddie is an aesthetic construct; it’s the idea of a place. And yet this fictional setting is greatly beholden to the author’s own impoverished background. It’s certainly no romanticised Drumtochty; this is grim realism.
Now, Sunset Song is a classic novel that has a truly extraordinary, wide-ranging appeal. Younger readers have most probably first come to it as a bildungsroman of tremendous immediacy dealing with the pains and pleasures of adolescence – a narrative that has incredible potency for helping young folk to negotiate the fiendishly awkward half-way stage in between childhood and adulthood. It’s also a gripping family saga, vivid rural realism, historical fiction, visceral anti-war protest, enlightened feminist fiction. And it’s the gift that keeps on giving, being hailed as more sophisticated fiction forms, of Scottish epic, socialist realism, postcolonialist revisionism, experimental modernism, most recently inspirational ecofiction celebrating the human bond with nature.
As his biographer, I would acclaim Mitchell’s multifaceted masterpiece now as a magical example of what is known as autofiction. This eminently practical term coined by French critical theorist Serge Doubrovsky in the 1970s describes imaginative writing in which the author creates fiction by engaging with profoundly personal thoughts, feelings, ideas.9 Countless authors seek creative recourse to their own experiences in their fiction, particularly early on in their canon – and indeed Mitchell’s first two novels, Stained Radiance and The Thirteenth Disciple, draw heavily on events in his earlier life. However, autofiction describes an imaginative work (usually a novel) that doesn’t simply witness the re-creation of autobiographical experience as fiction fodder but that presents a novel in which the author’s accessing of the features of fiction releases, and engages with, deeply personal aspects of their personality. As the book of a lifetime, Sunset Song is a supreme example of this subliminal alchemy of self-discovery. The creation of the alter ego of Lewis Grassic Gibbon itself opened up a gateway to a host of splendid new possibilities – and the creation of Grassic Gibbon’s signature narrative voice had a marvellously liberating effect. The deployment of a female protagonist – which he dabbled with repeatedly in his English fiction, with limited success – was also key in affording expression to the innermost elements of Mitchell’s being. And his ‘story of the Reisk’ – note ‘story’, not ‘study’ – also was the fictional vehicle for the author’s passionate denunciation of the acute social hardships inflicted on his family, on his community, on the peasantry of the Northeast, by a repressive feudal system of land ownership that had endured in Scotland for over nine hundred years. These were defiantly independent folk who historically, to their own bitter cost, were unmoving in their refutation of political activism.
Robert Colquohoun puts this vividly localised autofictional narrative into a grand global context in the beautifully crafted sermon at the unveiling of the war memorial at the end of the book. There he sums up the powerful moral mandate presented by the preceding paradigmatic ‘story of the Reisk’ to seek urgent political change for all ordinary people. As is very much the case with our own twenty-first century world, though, Mitchell showed subsequently in Cloud Howe and Grey Granite that the questions so eloquently posed in Sunset Song, pitted against ‘greed of place and possession and great estate’ and ‘the new oppressions and foolish greeds’,10 struggle to find definitive answers.
Yet there is a happy ending of sorts to be found here, as Leslie Mitchell’s supreme work of autofiction has, belatedly, borne fruit. In May of 2023 Scottish and Southern Electricity Network proposed plonking a humungous electricity substation (the size of seventy-nine football pitches) slap bang in the middle of the Reisk, directly across from Bloomfield. This provoked outrage amongst the contemporary inhabitants on the Reisk, and fierce objections were fired in by Arbuthnott Community Council, the Grassic Gibbon Centre, the Mitchell Literary Estate, and countless individuals and groups from around Scotland, the UK and beyond – including academics from all over the world. The heady scent of revolution engulfed the uplands of the Reisk! And this united voice of protest convinced SSEN to reposition their sub-station, one of the chief reasons they gave for their change of heart being their failure to appreciate the iconic cultural significance of the location.11 Leslie Mitchell would have been astounded. And he, and Ray, would have been so proud too at this practical demonstration of how, as a lifelong political influencer, the very name of Lewis Grassic Gibbon, with ‘his story of the Reisk’, resonates so powerfully today.
History of a Revoluter: The Life of James Leslie Mitchell/Lewis Grassic Gibbon is available from Jetstone Publishers.
End Notes
- William K. Malcolm, History of a Revoluter: The Life of James Leslie Mitchell/Lewis Grassic Gibbon (Jetstone Boooks, 2025). The present article is a revised version of a paper presented at ‘For I Will Give You The Morning Star’: A Celebration of the Life and Work of Lewis Grassic Gibbon, held at the Scottish Storytelling Centre in Edinburgh on 7 February 2025.
- Letter, Ray Mitchell to the present writer, dated 1 May 1978.
- Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Sunset Song, ed. William K. Malcolm (Penguin, 2007; first published in 1932), p. 31.
- The telling derivation of the common noun ‘reisk’ is given in A Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue, in Dictionaries of the Scots Language online, at https://dsl.ac.uk, retrieved on 17 June 2017.
- Robert Gordon’s College Lands Rental Books, Rental of the Estate of Towie Barclay, 1900-1907, Robert Gordon’s College Archives.
- Arbuthnott Estate Papers, Estate development, construction and sales 1796-1928, ‘Report upon and valuation of the Estates of Arbuthnott in the County of Kincardine’ by A. Agnew Ralston, Lindsay Howe & Co., February 1919, Aberdeen University Library Special Collections MS.2764/2/3/7.
- James Crabb Watt, The Mearns of Old: A History of Kincardine from the Earliest Times to the Seventeenth Century (William Hodge and Company, 1914). Mitchell’s own copy of the book is contained in his personal library at Edinburgh University Library Heritage Collections, EUL, Gibbon.169.
- The detailed two miles to one inch scale map that Mitchell cut from the original book for his annotations for the trilogy, titled ‘For the Mearns of Old: Map of Kincardineshire and its Borders, by John Bartholomew, F.R.G.S, 1914’, is held in Edinburgh University Library Heritage Collections, EUL Gen.2188/1/1.
- Serge Doubrovsky (1928–2017) is credited with coining the term autofiction in relation to his novel Fils (Galilée, 1977) to describe the fusion of autobiography and fiction undertaken in search of self-knowledge.
- Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Sunset Song, p. 261.
- See Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks Transmission, ‘Fiddes 400kV Substation Report on Consultation, November 2023’, which stated: ‘From extensive work completed already we are aware of the cultural heritage designations and assets within the area of substation site options, and in particular the association of the area around Site 5B with the author, Lewis Grassic Gibbon. Seeking to minimise impacts on cultural heritage assets and values was a key factor in the decision to extend the site selection exercise and, subsequently, in the identification of the proposed site at Hurlie in Fetteresso Forest.’