Download "The Fergus Faire" (mp3, 3.7 MB)
"The Fergus Faire" by Ronald J. Brown
I passed my early childhood in the village of Fergus, Ontario. Every year I'd attend the Highland Games and wander about watching men in kilts tossing the caber and listening to the thrilling sounds of pipes and drums. Often I would listen to men practising their cantors on their back stoops during summer evenings. To this day, Scottish pipes and drums fill me with images of my rugged defiant ancestors, stirring my blood, and firing my imagination.
The title is a pun on the word "faire" ("fayre").
The calligraphic ornament above is based on a fourteenth-century design detail appearing in Plate No. 11 of W. R. Tymms, The Art of Illuminating as Practised in Europe from the Earliest Times ... (London: Day and Son, 1860.) The roundel frames above were derived from a fifteenth-century illuminated manuscript depicting the "Vision of Isaiah" attributed to Girolamo Da Cremona, now housed in the Libreria Piccolomini, Duomo, Siena.
