Just in case anyone was wondering, by and large I had a good time at Ramble last weekend.

They had one dealer there with a lot of interesting books. One Saturday I bought

1. A biography of Hugh MacDonald, the first Catholic Highland Bishop after the Reformation.
2. Martin Martin’s Description of the Western Islands of Scotland, c. 1695
3. A history of the Lordship of the Isles, and the subsequent downfall of the MacDonalds.
4. A textbook on Scottish Gaelic.

I thought about going back there at the end of the day on Sunday, just before the show closed, but the Captain posted me on duty at the Weapons table. For this my bank account thanks her.

I was on guard duty for an hour on Saturday. I adopted a pose that was a cross between de Gheyn’s “order your pike” and “The proper position of a soldier”, from Grant’s New Highland Military Discipline. One of the patrons complemented me on looking like a “good Jacobite”. Well, my Clann cockade is a somewhat pale yellow, and could be taken for a dirty white. Some of the ordinary Jacobite fighters were probably armed with pikes at Killiecrankie in 1689 or Prestopans in 1745 (By Culloden the following spring they had been rearmed with French muskets). However, my jerkin, while perhaps marginally possible for 1689, really would not do for half a century later.

A little later I was seated at our front table. A small boy approached with his mother. He pointed at the large sword in front of me, and asked “Is that a bastard sword?” The look on his mother’s face was priceless! So I carefully explained about single hand, two-handed (the particular sword in question was one of those), and hand-and-a-half swords, otherwise known as bastard swords. Perhaps I saved the kid from a spanking!