Forth Bridge

It was, I think, in 1973, towards the end of the summer, when I was first by the Forth Road  Bridge. It was nine years old then, and it impressed me so much that I wrote a song about it. In 2007 I rediscovered the song and added to it. During the years I lived in Scotland I passed over the bridge many, many, times. The video and photographs were taken by me and as I have not the resources of the BBC I realise they are but a feeble attempt to show the magnificence of Alba-Scotland. However, I hope my enthusiasm for the land in which I lived for a decade shows through in the song. Scroll down the page for the words and notes etc....

The Forth Bridge Song

A Asus4 A                                                                                                       

I carry the road to the north standing tall in the Firth of Forth

D                                               G                                

I’m strong against the wind and I’m high above the sails

Bb                                             G

Of the yachts that pass beneath this Bridge

D              G                D                G

*Oh Oh where do you go oh oh where do you go

D              G                D               G

Oh Oh where do you go oh oh where do you go

I bring them back from the South standing tall in the Highland mouth

I’m high against the stars and I’m small beneath the Grampians

That roll north of this bridge

I link the Highland to the low my roadway way arched like a bow

I’m strong against the weather and I stand in the heather

That grows around this bridge

Macbeth, Wallace, Prince Charlie, Caledonians, Picts, Cruithne,

From Sterling to the Estuary Linthgow through the centuries

The rocks beneath this bridge

The Tropics of Inverasdale, Peterhead the Doric Herring for sale

Aberdeen and the oil Caithness to the border

The people the life of this bridge

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The song is also available from other download suppliers -itunes, Napster, Rhapsody, Emusic etc You can also find it on Almond Greenway's album 'I Say You're Beautiful 

Notes

'Oh Oh where do you go ?' History, calamity, lack of financial security, oppression and 'The Clearances' have scattered Scottish people across the globe. In the song the bridge is a symbol for this. It is also a symbol for the bridging of the Highlands and the Lowlands of Scotland. For Centuries the first dry crossing of the Forth was up stream at Sterling. Sterling was a point of defence against invading armies. Canute (Knut) and Malcomb Forranach the Distroyer had a stand off there, for example, in 1034. Malcomb realised that Knut had won control of the Lowlands of Scotland and he paid Fealty (Tribute) of One Serf, One Cow, One Horse and One Bushel of meal to Knut a seperation of the Highlands - Alba and the Lowlands had occurred and this had consequences through the next six hundred years of Scottish history.

The Grampian Mountains, take my breath away on every visit, wild, windswept and snow covered. I have been there on hot summers days and come home with a sun tan others have only achieved by visiting the Canary Islands.

Two songs run around my head whenever I think of Scotland 'Lizzy Lindsey' and 'Wild Mountain Tyme'. Go, some time, into the hills, climb up to the top and look down on the 'bonny purple heather' - (A line from 'I Love a Lassie) - and in your imagination watch the beautiful Lizzy holding onto Lord Ronald MaDonald, as she sits behind him on his great black horse......May be a little too romantic for some of you.

There are so many famous Scottish persons who are remembered and who have changed the world. The Scots, like every group of people on earth, are an amalgam of many groups cobbled together over time.

Macbeth links to Shakespeare>James VI of Scotland who became the first Scottish King of England>The Devine Right of Kings>Mary Queen of Scots was James mother so if you scratch the surface you will find a spiders web of history back through Henry the VII and VIII to Linthgow 'The Rocks Beneath this Bridge'. Macbeth also links back in the time-line of the song as he was a Grandson of Malcolm the Destroyer. The rocks of geology are here too, you may be aware that the 'top part' of Scotland once floated in tropical oceans. So not only the peoples have been cobbled together but the actual land mass as well.

Wallace is a potent symbol in the history of English aggression towards the Scottish people. Edward I (Longshanks) of England ruled with an iron fist. You may recall history lessons of the Ragman Roll when 17000 people were killed in the town of Berwick upon Tweed, the border town which has changed it's nationality a number of times in history. So the line 'I bring them back from the south' is apart of the Wallace story as well. In the video you can see the railway viaduct at Berwick-Upon-Tweed.

Bonny Prince Charlie, 1745, Culloden the banning of the tartans, the Scottish languages, the bag pipes. The beginning of the clearances and the invasion of the English arostocracy, bought to Scotland by the 'Butcher of Cumberland', to suppress, once and for all, the troublesome Jacobites. I met a Scottish man, who was the same age as me, he told me   that when he was been a young school boy he had been beaten, by his teachers, for speaking Doric, a Scottish language/dialect, in school time. That would have been in the 1960's 220 years after the infamous last battle fought on British soil.

The Gulf Stream flows to the west of Scotland and at Inverewe there is a beautiful garden which thrives because of the tropical warmth carried by the Gulf Stream. Inverasdale is a village near to Inverewe, I took a photograph of a sign at the beginning of the village, in the early 1990's, it warned of the strict observance of the Sabbath (Sunday or Saturday for Jewish People) which was, the sign said, The Lord's Day.

There were stories that when Lord Mackay of Clasfern, was the Lord Chancellor of Great Britain, he had been obliged to attend the funeral of a Roman Catholic. There were people who did not like this and some Clergy, who supported Lord Mackay, were locked out of their churches. So the depth behind this takes us to the Calvinist Reformation and it's impact on Scottish life and the echo of the use Henry VIII made of the reformation, for his own ends, driven by the fear that a Scottish King could one day sit on the Throne of England.

We cross the country to Peterhead, along this coast the accent changed from village to village, when I lived near there in the 1980's. The day of the Herring had long since past but the Fishermen were still there with nets and stories and battles with the European Union. Down the Coast to the Texas of the East Coast where oil and gas flipped the North East into the modern world and to Caithness where spent Nuclear Fuel is managed.

It could go on and on of course no one song could ever encapsulate the whole of what it is to of Scotland but I hope that my humble efforts offer something pleasing to some. No part of Scotland is excluded except by my inability to incorporate every aspect of Scottish life.

I am not Scottish but I have two children who were born there and another who was educated there. I lived and worked in Scotland from 1987 until 1999. 

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