[Kelso]
> And the other two or three occasions on which the entire town appears to
> have burned down - but no songs. I can't remember if the next fire was
> in the very late 1700s, but for whatever reason, most of the town centre
> is circa 1790-1810 and whatever they rebuilt in the 1600s either burned
> down again or was demolished and remodelled in continental (northern
> French, Dutch and Venetian) styles. Result, Kelso looks totally unlike
> any of the other Border towns in layout and architecture.
Haddington has a Flemish design too (floods as much as fire, though I
doubt the Earl of Hertford's visit did it much good).
There are some amazing incidental notes in Walter Bower's "Scotichronicon"
about fires. He just notes in an offhand way, "in this year Aberdeen,
Dundee and Glasgow burnt to the ground"... "in this year St Andrews,
Montrose, Aberdeen and Edinburgh were totally destroyed by fire" and so
on. As ho-hum as the announcement of winning lottery numbers on the news.
> There seem to be just about zero real songs about the place
I have a pencil copy somewhere of a broadside from 1789 which is a rhymed
catalogue of Edinburgh prostitutes who would be available at that year's
Kelso Races (dozens of them - where did they all practice? There must
have been a whores' tent city at the racecourse or something). It's not
particularly well adapted to any Scottish tune but you could do a talking
blues to it. It was a bit like a one-page edition of the Daily Sport,
complete with the obligatory editorial content to provide an excuse for
the ads (in this case "French Revolution breaks out").
=================== <http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/> ===================
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