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A memorial plaque for Hugh MacDiarmid can be found on the wall of a residential building, at the junction of North Back Road and Crown Rig.
Hugh MacDiarmid was a Scottish poet, journalist and essayist, who was also recognised as the founder of the Scottish literary renaissance. He was a resident of Brownsbank Cottage in Candy Mill, near Biggar, where he lived with his wife Valda Trevlyn. They were allowed to live in the cottage rent-free by the farming family who owned it. Their home had no running water nor an indoor toilet but it became a place for him to continue his work. Since then, the cottage had been lived-in by several other “artists in residence.”
Hugh MacDiarmid was the pen name of Christopher Murray Grieve, who was born on 11th August 1892 in Langholm, Dumfriesshire. He later became a teacher and a journalist. After he served during World War I, he briefly held jobs in political offices. He lived and worked in Montrose where became the editor and reporter of the Montrose Review. Grieve was deeply involved in local politics and he also edited and published three issues of Northern Numbers, a collection of contemporary Scottish poetry.
From August 1922, he issued editions of the Scottish Chapbook and was a regular contributor of poetry, where he bceame a part of the Scottish Renaissance literary movement centred in the town. His poetry included a celebration of Scotland’s natural beauty, its people and its history.
Writing under the name Hugh MacDiarmid, his first volume of poetry, titled “Sangschaw,” was published in 1925. It was followed by First Hymn to Lenin in 1931. In that same year, his first marriage ended in divorce. Grieve would soon marry his second wife, Valda Trevlyn and in 1933 the Grieves moved to Shetland, where they would live for the next nine years.
In 1934, writing as Hugh MacDiarmid, he published three books: Scottish Scene, At The Sign of The Thistle and Stony Limits. In 1939 he published The Islands of Scotland, which was a collection of his wrirings about the Hebrides, Orkney, and Shetland.
Grieve and his wife moved to Candy Mill, near Biggar, in 1951 and lived there until his death on on 9th September 1978.
On the plaque are some his words of wisdom, “Let the lesson be to be yersels and to mak that worth bein.”
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