Cullen Skink

The Secret behind Barney’s Boulder…

Barney the forest goblin was the ancient legend of Carbeth. For many years, most people thought he was just a scary story, made-up to frighten children and tell them of the dangers that can lurk, in the cold, dark Carbeth woods.

The legend of Barney the evil Goblin was thus: Barney Broon was once a normal schoolboy who went to school, just like any normal kid. But when Barney became 10 years of age, strange things began to happen to him. He changed, horribly. He became horribly disfigured and troll like and a strange evil began to lurk within him.

Soon, he became quite unlike any other boy in Strathblane. By the time he has 12, the other children became so scared of him that his frightened parents disowned him. One day, he left after a furious row ended in his house being burned to the ground. He began a long, lonely hermit’s existence, in the deepest valleys of the Scottish hills.

Soon, Barney had learned to live in the wild, like an animal. He gorged on raw venison liver and wood pigeon, and lived primordially, in a huge, deep, undiscovered cave. Barney slept in a rough, bracken nest, lined with deerskin and owl’s feathers and lived a nocturnal existence.

He’d never been seen, simply because he lived, hunted and eked-out his weird and lonely existence but always under cover of darkness.

Eventually, he developed into an adult, but he grew to only three feet tall, However, he was also three feet wide. He had the strength of four and a half horses and thick, wiry hair covered his whole body and reached right down to the ground. It was unnaturally strong, like steel hawser and on contact with other human skin it would cut it badly, which explained why he couldn’t live with ‘normal’ humans. His teeth had developed into ugly, yellow fangs and his long, gnarled fingernails were so strong, and he could carve terrible and horrible pictures directly, into the stone walls of the cave. Barney lived by the light of one tiny, dim, evil-smelling candle, made from wood-pigeon-fat.

So, that was it, simply a local legend, that was…until 100 years ago when strangely and very disturbingly, local babies and the babies of the very first Carbeth Hutters started to go missing…

As people were to find out, many years later, Barney was very, very real, because it was him, A VERY REAL Barney who was taking the children.

So how was he able to do it, so close to Glasgow and right under the noses of so many people? His secret was simple. His horrible mutation meant as well as being immensely strong and squat, Barney could also see clearly, even on the darkest, blackest night. After midnight, he’d ride swiftly and silently for mile after mile through the woods, on the back of a freakish, giant, albino stag, which he’d bred, especially for its unnatural stamina and its ability to also see in the dark.

At night, whilst the hutters slept, Barney would ride round on his white stag, capturing children from the dark, slumbering site. He’d gag the screaming children, hang them off the antlers of his mount and ride off to his secret cave, deep in the Campsie hills.

He’d hold them captive in his cold, dank, stone prison. The secret was kept for decades, hidden deep in the pines, behind a massive lump of ancient Scottish stone, which we now know as ‘Barney’s Boulder’.

The captured babies grew into children, fed on a horrid diet of strange-shaped mushrooms, rabbit’s ears, sour berries and cold, dead frogs. The bedraggled, hungry, scared and filthy children would only have one treat, every year. On Michaelmas morning, Barney would roast whole hedgehogs on pointed sticks, over a dismal, meagre, peat fire. All the children could have a tiny roasted hedgehog leg, washed down with acrid, rowanberry gravy. Some children went very hungry…

For years, the growing band of cold, straggly and unkempt children remained, hidden, behind Barney’s massive boulder but one day, they decided they had to do something.  As they had now remained hidden in the secret Campsie cavern for many years, even the small babies had grown into children and were becoming bigger and stronger. As they’d all been taken from their homes as babies, they hadn’t learned to speak English but they’d developed their own language strange language, like a primeval Gaelic, which Barney couldn’t understand. It allowed them to plan, in secret, when Barney went on one of his eerie, midnight forest or frozen, hilltop rides.

Slowly, the children began to plan their escape… over the months and years they managed to weave some of the remnants of Barney’s unnatural steely hair which littered the fetid cave, into a strong cable-like rope. One frosty and moonless night, when Barney was riding out, with a joint and an almost superhuman effort, the small, dirty, dishevelled but very courageous children managed to fashion a crude sling and began to move the giant mass of Barney’s Boulder. Slowly, it groaned and the surrounding branches bent and creaked but after hours of work and a lot of skinned knuckles and tears, they were free! Cold, fresh mountain air poured into the entrance of the deep cave and as the pathetic peat fire burst into life, the children could hug each other and laugh properly, for the first time ever.

Time was short though and after the initial excitement, it was time for action. The brave kids knew that even if they ran away, and made it onto the moors, Barney would come looking for them and his amazing night vision would mean he would easily be able to hunt them down, like scared wild rabbits!

They had to stop him, forever…

Barney soon returned from his spooky night gallop and returned with a bracken bag of cold, dead frogs for the children to scavenge. However, as Barney leapt from his giant, white Monarch of the Glen, he could clearly see, even in the dead of night, that Barney’s Boulder, the thing that had kept his twisted secret safe for so many years, was gone. Barney’s boulder was missing and the eerie, black cave, for so long the pathetic home to a growing band of straggling and frightened feral children, was empty.

Now that Barney had noticed his behemoth of a boulder was missing and his empty cave was open, for all to see he got desperate and it was only by using his superhuman sight, he could see the large boulder now sat at the very top of the hill. How it got there he didn’t know but Barney moved quickly, he was determined to get the boulder back to keep his horrific secret in place and then…find and extract his terrible, terrible revenge and find the band of his captive but now escaped, children.

Barney started his strange, gangling stride up the hill to retrieve the gigantic cave blocking boulder which, until this black evening, only HE had ever had the superhuman strength to be able to move….however, he was never to get there. Hiding behind the boulder, after completing an amazing effort to haul the giant stone up the mountainside, were his former captives, the children, by now enriched by the air and spiritually uplifted by their new-found freedom, they were even more determined to extract their terrible revenge on him and it made them stronger and more determined than ever!

Using all their combined weight, and gaining strength from breathing cold, fresh Scottish mountain air, after years of living in fetid dank cave atmosphere, all the children heaved, and pushed and rolled the lumpen boulder down the steep brae.

Barney ran but he was too slow, the boulder quickly gained unstoppable momentum. Ten seconds later and ten years later for the children, his terrible reign of terror was over. In the dark ,the children could see nothing but The grinding of ancient stone against ancient stone and a cacophony of breaking branches meant the massive obelisk was gaining speed as it rumbled quickly down the mountain.

Suddenly, a blood-curdling roar, followed by a high pitched scream filled the valley.

Barney the Goblin was dead, horribly, squashed like a fleeting mayfly, against the walls of his cavernous and poisonous prison. His tryrannical rule over a frightened bunch of ten year olds was over!

Barney was crushed flat. So much so that the hole dug for his grave was only required to be one centimetre thick.

And that’s where the story ends. The children returned, to tears and smiles, to learn all the things they’d missed, mince and tatties, Playstations , the X Factor, all the things all other boys and girls take for granted.

Barney’s grave is covered by a smaller, ‘Barney’s Boulder’ which still stands at Carbeth to this very day. It’s there to make sure no-one ever forgets the strange tale and the dark days, when Barney the Goblin stalked the Campsie Glens and the Carbeth woods…