05/05/2026
THE LIFE AND TIMES OF JAMES HYSLOP (as featured in the KKS News)
Part Two: The Muirkirk Shepherd
As James Hyslop grew older, his years at Nether Wellwood in Muirkirk became one of the most important chapters in both his life and his development as a poet. He worked there from around 1812 until 1816, years that took him further away from formal schooling but deeper into the habits of self-education that would define him. Long after he had left the district, he still signed some of his work ‘The Muirkirk Shepherd,’ including contributions to the Greenock Advertiser. Although some later felt he should have been remembered instead as the ‘Kirkconnel Bard,’ the ‘Bard of Crawick’ or the ‘Nithsdale Shepherd,’ it was the Muirkirk title that Hyslop himself chose, and that choice says much about the mark the place had left on him.
His time at Wellwood mattered not only because he earned his living there as a shepherd lad, but because it was among these hills and moors that his imagination was truly formed. The countryside around him - Airsmoss, Wardlaw, Cairntable and the valley of Glenmuir - was steeped in beauty, memory and history. These were landscapes closely bound up with the story of the Covenanters, and especially with the death of Richard Cameron at Airsmoss. The setting itself, with its lonely mosses, streams, heather and high ground, offered the young Hyslop a world full of atmosphere and meaning. Later, those places would reappear in his poetry not simply as scenery, but as part of the emotional and spiritual world from which his writing grew.
Though his daily work was demanding, Hyslop did not give up on learning. Like so much of his education, it had to be won in spare hours and quiet moments. At Wellwood he continued to read and reflect while tending his flocks. During these years he found an important companion in John M‘Cartney, a fellow shepherd several years older than himself, who also had a love of study and poetry. The two young men appear to have been of real help to one another. They read together, discussed ideas and shared an interest in literature that was unusual in their surroundings. One later recollection tells of them reading Ossian on the braes beside Palwharnie Burn and wondering over its form and music. Hyslop later looked back on these years with affection, remembering the green fields where they lay reading while their lambs grazed nearby.
M‘Cartney himself was remembered as a gifted and lively character, full of imagination and known for his fondness for argument, verse and local stories. Hyslop’s later account of him suggests both admiration and amusement. Their friendship mattered because it gave Hyslop something more than companionship: it gave him another enquiring mind beside his own. In the solitude of shepherd life, that kind of friendship must have been invaluable.
The Muirkirk years also brought Hyslop into close contact with the area’s rich traditions of superstition and religious memory. The grave of Richard Cameron at Airsmoss stood near Wellwood, and the stories attached to that place seem to have remained with him for life. One tale, told to him by M‘Cartney, concerned a strange fiery appearance seen near Cameron’s grave - something like a chariot of light moving through the mist. Whether explained as imagination, natural phenomenon or deeply felt vision, such stories fed Hyslop’s sense of the unseen and helped shape the vivid imagery that later appeared in The Cameronian Dream.
The countryside around Wellwood also sharpened his feeling for the blend of nature, faith and folklore that would become one of the distinctive features of his work. Here were the moorland sounds of plovers and sheep, the mists over the mosses, the memory of martyrs, and the old stories still alive among country people. Hyslop absorbed all of it. He was not simply living in the landscape; he was storing it in memory, turning it over in thought, and slowly transforming it into poetry.
By the time he left Wellwood, Hyslop had gained more than experience as a working shepherd. He had deepened his education through his own persistence, found encouragement in companionship, and drawn lasting inspiration from one of the most historically and spiritually charged landscapes in the south-west of Scotland. In that sense, Muirkirk gave him much more than employment. It gave him a literary identity, a world of images and associations, and the title by which he would long be remembered - The Muirkirk Shepherd.
