It’s time to head home for a while and maybe visit the grave of Archibald Warwick though my mum can no longer accompany me.
21st July 2021
On Friday next we’re heading up the M1 from St Albans – that’s me, Victoria and an Airedale terrier pup named Hugo. We should arrive in the English Lake District about Four on a hot July afternoon to stay overnight with my sister, then on the Saturday we will head north-west for the car-ferry from Cairnryan to Belfast.
For me that road between Cumbria and the Galloway ferry terminal is well-trodden. Time and again I have enjoyed each landmark on the way, whether coming or going. Not least I have enjoyed seeing the Rutherford obelisk at Anwoth, overlooking the Solway Firth. When I was a boy, and we made our first trips across the North Channel, my father’s desire was always to stop at this location associated with his spiritual hero.
I guess my clergyman father’s interest was in Rutherford’s letters, which reveal a piety focused on prayerful communion with the person of Christ. When I came as a man to investigate the writings of this 17th century divine, I became more interested in Rex Lex, Rutherford’s covenanting assault on a monarch’s inherited right to rule.
I have often referred to this text as a proto-Republican document. The presence of such thinking in Scottish 17th century culture helps explain the genesis of the Enlightenment Republican ideology that shaped my own Presbyterian ancestor Archibald Warwick as he returned from Glasgow University in the 1790s to fight and die in the Ards beneath a United Irish standard.
On one occasion I found time before the ferry left for home waters to drive south from Cairnryan to Portpatrick, where the 18th century packet boat would have landed, carrying young Warwick from Donaghadee harbour to Scotland. He would have walked all the way to Glasgow to commence his studies, stopping off at farmhouses on the way in hope for a bed for the night and a bowl of porridge. I won’t go as far south as Portpatrick this time but maybe I will in future. It is a place that holds many ghosts.