“Herried Oot” by John Quinn

A poem arrived from across the ocean that carries the weight of centuries in its few short lines. Herried Oot by John Quinn tells of a Highland family evicted from their home in Tongue, Sutherland. It was the year 1855, a moment within the Highland Clearances that reshaped not only Scotland’s landscape but the destinies of those who sailed to Canada.

Written in the Scots language, Herried Oot gives voice to the voiceless. To women, children, and communities uprooted without mercy. Its rhythms echo the cries of the dispossessed, its words shaped by the very soil from which those people were torn.

John Quinn, a Dundonian poet, playwright, and guide at the Verdant Works Museum, has devoted years to preserving the stories of Scotland’s working people: mill workers, weavers, and the forgotten. Here, he turns his compassion northward, toward the Highlands and the long shadow of exile.

Reading Herried Oot aloud, one feels the ache of language itself, the strength of endurance in every syllable. John Quinn restores dignity to those who had none in their final moments on the land they called home. The Scots language here does more than tell a story. It keeps memory alive. It reminds us that heritage is not static; it breathes in the words we choose to remember.

HERRIED OOT

By John Quinn

(Published in Poetry Scotland, 2025)

Bairned times three
fower was dree*
no affy weel
affy no weel
should be abed
gart tae be redd*
awa like stour*
trauchled an puir
bum-bailies* staund
midgies on laund
hoose dichtit* oot
lick ma dowps telt
thare’s nae shame felt
nae ruif nae ruit
happed in a sheet
cowpt in the peat
Sutherland’s glaur
fae naur tae faur
man said na na
howdie* an a
deifies get slung
sic* fowk are dung
on tae the neist
for an unbeast*
barn wis bield*
fae nicht in field
Guid sauf the quean*
for aye unseen.

Glossary

• dree – suffering

• redd – tidied out

• stour – dust

• bum-bailies – sycophants

• dichtit – wiped

• howdie – midwife

• sic – such

• unbeast – monster

• bield – shelter

• quean – young woman

About the Poet

John Quinn is a Dundonian poet, playwright, and long-standing volunteer with the Dundee Heritage Trust. For over a decade, he has served as a guide at the Verdant Works Museum, where he shares the intertwined stories of Dundee’s people and the jute industry. His creative work, including the play O’ Halflins An Hecklers A Weavers An Weemin’, performed in the historic High Mill, honours Scotland’s industrial past and the everyday lives that shaped it. His poetry, often written in Scots, seeks to preserve both language and memory, capturing the resilience of those whose stories are too often lost to time.

For those who would like to hear more from John Quinn, I had the pleasure of speaking with him on Tea, Toast & Trivia about his play O’ Halflins An Hecklers A Weavers An Weemin’. It’s a conversation that brings history to life through storytelling, humour, and the enduring spirit of Dundee’s people. Listen to our conversation on Tea, Toast & Trivia

John Quinn on the Play, “O Halflins an Hecklers an Weavers an Weemin’” – Tea. Toast. & Trivia.

Some stories endure not because they are easy to hear, but because they must be remembered.

Until the next page turns,

Rebecca

#Dundee #HerriedOot #JohnQuinn #Poetry #PoetryInTheMorning #Scotland

The Way Through the Woods by Rudyard Kipling

This was my first reading of Rudyard Kipling’s The Way Through the Woods, and it felt less like discovering a text than stepping into a presence—something waiting, insistent, profound.

It tells of a road, closed seventy years ago, now hidden beneath trees, anemones, and the quiet lives of doves and badgers. The forest has reclaimed what human hands once cut open, and time itself has buried the memory.

The Way Through the Woods

by Rudyard Kipling

They shut the road through the woods
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again,
And now you would never know
There was once a road through the woods
Before they planted the trees.
It is underneath the coppice and heath,
And the thin anemones.
Only the keeper sees
That, where the ring-dove broods,
And the badgers roll at ease,
There was once a road through the woods.

Yet, if you enter the woods
Of a summer evening late,
When the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools
Where the otter whistles his mate,
(They fear not men in the woods,
Because they see so few.)
You will hear the beat of a horse’s feet,
And the swish of a skirt in the dew,
Steadily cantering through
The misty solitudes,
As though they perfectly knew
The old lost road through the woods.
But there is no road through the woods.

On the surface, it is a poem of erasure. There was once a road; now there is no road. Yet Kipling shifts the ground beneath us. If you enter the woods on a summer evening, he writes, you may hear hoofbeats and the swish of skirts—the sound of travelers who still ride the old path. It is as though memory itself lingers in the air, haunting the present with its unseen presence.

Kipling knew loss. By the time this poem appeared in Rewards and Fairies (1910), he had already faced grief, and more would come—the devastating loss of his son in the First World War. The road in the poem feels like an image of memory itself: once clear, now overgrown, yet still alive with whispers. The ghostly riders are not frightening; they are tender reminders that what we lose does not vanish entirely. It moves differently through time.

What makes the poem all the more powerful is its recognition of nature’s steady triumph. The woods outlast the road. Rain and weather undo human plans. In the end, it is the trees and the night air that remain. Nature both conceals and heals, folding human absence into her vast endurance.

The Way Through the Woods invites us to hold two truths together: that we are haunted by what is gone, and that life continues in its own rhythms beyond us. In that sense, it is not just a ghost poem or a meditation on memory—it is also an ecological vision. Kipling reminds us that human marks are temporary, while the earth carries on, resilient and self-renewing.

To walk into the woods at dusk is to enter that mystery: to know that loss is real, yet so is continuity. There is no road through the woods, and yet—if we listen—we might still hear the sound of passing riders, steady and sure.

May we walk gently, listening for the whispers of the woods.

Rebecca

Postscript: Rudyard Kipling’s name often brings to mind empire, adventure, and the rhythms of marching verse. Yet The Way Through the Woods, first published in 1910 in Rewards and Fairies, reveals another voice: quieter, haunted, more attuned to absence than conquest.

Rewards and Fairies was itself a curious and beautiful creation—a mixture of short stories and poems, intended as a sequel to Puck of Pook’s Hill. In both books, Kipling draws on the figure of Puck, the mischievous sprite of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, to conjure ghosts of England’s past for two children, Dan and Una. Each story is followed by a poem, almost like an echo that lingers after the tale.

The Way Through the Woods was paired with the story “Marklake Witches.” That tale, set in Sussex during the Napoleonic Wars, tells of a French émigré doctor and the suspicion surrounding Ollyett, a young woman branded a witch for her healing knowledge. It explores superstition, memory, and the endurance of old beliefs. The poem serves as a companion piece, shifting the focus from haunted human stories to the haunted landscape itself. Just as superstition lingers in the story, so too do ghostly hoofbeats linger in the woods where a road once lay.

Seen in this light, the pairing is deliberate: Kipling was exploring how the past never fully disappears. Whether through human memory and myth, or through the land itself, we live among echoes of what came before.

Here, Kipling becomes less the bard of empire and more the poet of impermanence. He gives us a vision where nature is stronger than human memory, and where the past lingers as sound and shadow rather than as solid ground. For readers today, this may be his most enduring legacy: not the imperial storyteller, but the writer who understood how loss and healing, time and memory, all move through the woods together.

#poetry #poetryInTheAfternoon #poetryInTheEvening #poetryInTheMorning #poetrySalon #rudyardKipling #theWayThroughTheWoods

September Morning in Nebraska

Nebraska is my mother’s birthplace, a state of wide skies and endless fields. My own visits there remain vivid—especially September mornings when the air carried both warmth and a slight chill, as if the land itself was pausing between seasons.

When I came across this poem by C. M. Barrow, I felt as if someone had captured those memories in verse.

A September Morning in Nebraska

by C. M. Barrow

The sun has not yet risen, but his golden glow,
Lights up the misty portals of the far off east;
The wavering shadows o’er the prairies come and go,
And all the eerie sounds of night have ceased.

Nature’s own songsters, from the cotton trees,
Fill all the languorous air with melody.
The corn fields rustle in the gentle morning breeze,
And from the coming dawn the night-mist flees.

For me, this poem is more than a description of a landscape. It is a return to memory. Nebraska mornings, my mother’s voice recalling her childhood, my own fleeting visits where September shimmered with both promise and farewell.

My grandparents were farmers, and their home stood on a ridge overlooking a valley that seemed to stretch endlessly to the horizon. I remember the smell of grass in the early morning and the sound of birds settling into the dusk when we walked at night. Standing on that ridge, I felt both small and infinite—at one with nature, part of a world that was larger than myself, yet deeply familiar.

September mornings remind me of the rhythm of change, of how beauty resides in transience. The prairie teaches me to pause, to notice the shimmer of dew before it evaporates, to welcome both warmth and chill, knowing each has its season.

Until the next page turns…

Rebecca

Postscript: I searched for more information about C. M. Barrow, the poet of A September Morning in Nebraska, but very little can be found. His name doesn’t appear in standard poetry anthologies or library archives, which suggests he may have been a local or regional writer whose work was shared in newspapers or community collections rather than in widely published books.

Perhaps this is part of the beauty of poetry—it can live quietly, carried forward by a single poem that speaks across time, even if the poet remains in the shadows.

#Autumn #CMBarrow #Poetry #PoetryInTheAfternoon #PoetryInTheEvening #PoetryInTheMorning #PoetrySalon #SeptemberMorningInNebraska