Weird Yarns

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30348, 25 January 1964, Page 3

Weird Yarns

Dark Encounters. By William Croft Dickinson. Harvill Press. 192 pp. This is Professor Dickinson’s last collection of weird stories, for he died shortly after correcting the proofs. Scottish historian and archaeologist and professor of Ancient Scottish History and Palaeography at Edinburgh University, who better than he to tell these ghostly tales? Those acquainted with the dour and more forbidding aspects of Scottish history, with the lonely castles and cruel dungeons, the perils of storm-swept bens and craggy coasts, and the grimness of ancient clan feuds will find themselves travelling familiar ground, but with the addition of a past resurrected into a supernatural present.

Most of the stories are told in or originate from the staff common room of Edinburgh University and are related with scholarly restraint. This gives them credibility, and periodically one has to recall the mundane present and that these legends simply cannot be true. But inevitably doubt creeps back. So we find ourselves cringing in the dark under the walls of Dunross Castle with ,® bos *- s ®f the immured Macleods, having an unnerving encounter with a man 400 years old, becoming involved with ancient and tangible dog wraiths, and listening to the Sweet Singof the 51st Psalm float mysteriously on the evening air at North Berwick.