Last updated 21:50, Wednesday, 26 March 2008

AS I drove up through the Borders towards Edinburgh one day last week, I couldn’t help but notice how devoid of litter the verges of the A7 were all through the region.

Hugh MacDiarmid

I had driven from Langholm to the edge of our own region looking at an unsightly mess of paper, cans and bottles littering the roadsides; and again, as I left the Borders region and entered the Lothians, the same eyesores were everywhere.

Had Borders folk been out as volunteers to clean up the A7? No, it was the council workmen who were hard at work picking up all the mess and putting it in black bin bags which were then left every 200 yards or so ready for collection. I spotted a van with the lettering SB Local standing nearby.

Does Dumfries and Galloway have anything to match this? It makes such a good impression of your region when motorists see neat, tidy verges. To add to this there were long stretches of roadside crocuses between Hawick and Selkirk.

As I drove through Gala, there were several different coloured and well-filled, rubbish bags outside almost all the houses, encouraging house owners to recycle. Well done the Borders.

AFTER reading my article on the planned rescue of the Stone of Destiny from Westminster Abbey by, among others, Langholm’s Christopher Grieve, Billy Ewart was telling me a story he’d heard about the same attempted heist. And this version made me smile.

Billy had heard that the plan had been aborted not, as was reported, because the security had made the task impossible but because the money collected for the trip to London and back had been spent on the participants enjoying a few convivial get-togethers. Yes, they’d drunk the money and the kitty was empty. This wouldn’t surprise me. given MacDiarmid’s reputation.

Billy had tried to authenticate this story by contacting Hamish Henderson, the Scottish poet and a contemporary of MacDiarmid. If it had been true, he’d have passed it on to Billy Young to be included in his book A Spot Supremely Blest.

But Henderson died before Billy had the chance to question him and so it’s still a myth but a good story and one that might so easily be true.