BACK in the 1970s, an extraordinary children's book sparked off an extraordinary phenomenon – not to mention a controversy. The English artist and children's writer Kit Williams was commissioned by his publisher, Jonathan Cape, to create a unique book, Masquerade, its beautifully detailed paintings concerning the adventures of a hare.
At the same time, Williams fashioned an 18-carat-gold and bejewelled hare on a filigree pendant, which he sealed within a ceramic casket and buried – witnessed by the TV presenter Bamber Gascoigne – in a secret location "somewhere in the UK".
The
clues for finding this exquisite creation were concealed within the Masquerade book's beautifully painted illustrations and resulted in amateur treasure hunters energetically digging up suspect plots of ground, public or private, across the country.
Now Joe Gibbs, organiser of the Belladrum Tartan Heart festival – which cuts loose on his estate near Beauly in August – and a long-time admirer of the Masquerade concept, is launching a new treasure hunt, Bequest, in association with his festival and The Scotsman.
This treasure hunt celebrates the current Year of Homecoming with a suitably bardic theme, with its clues concealed in "newly discovered" letters attributed to Robert Burns that put a dramatic new twist on his famous correspondence with Agnes "Clarinda" McLehose. The prize – buried in a ceramic container to foil unscrupulous wielders of metal detectors – will reflect one of Burns's most famous poems, taking the form of a beautifully crafted gold and diamond-studded mouse.
Far removed from the "Wee, sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous beastie" of Burns's poem, this particular mouse is a beastie well worth trapping, a handsome example of goldsmith's art, worth in the region of £10,000. Fashioned of white and yellow gold, and inset with natural champagne, cognac and pale pink diamonds, the mouse is the work of Highland goldsmith and enameller Susan Plowman (an eminently suitable name, given the subject matter), who uses traditional techniques in producing contemporary jewellery from her studio in Fortrose (
www.studiojewellery.com).
The clues to finding the mouse will be contained in the letters, and also in a key painting, all of which will be gradually revealed on the treasure-hunt website (
www.burnsbequest.co.uk), with the last instalments announced at the Belladrum festival on 7-8 August, and published in The Scotsman the following Monday.
"I'd always wanted to find a way of doing something like Masquerade," says Gibbs, the 52-year-old proprietor of Belladrum, where the Tartan Heart festival has presented a spectacular and idiosyncratic range of music, poetry and other activities for the past five years, "and it occurred to me that it would be interesting to build it around the festival to some degree". Gibbs discussed the project with his friends and near neighbours at Belladrum, John Keiller, a computer consultant, and Michael Forbes, an artist and creator of the festival's surreal and Sgt Pepper-ish website.
Keiller has devised the "hitherto undiscovered" letters, which purport to throw intriguing new light on Burns's Clarinda correspondence. Bardic scholars may raise a quizzical eyebrow but, according to Keiller's intriguing fiction, the poet's famously passionate but never consummated postal affair with Agnes McLehose, which threatened his relationship with his long-suffering wife, Jean Armour, continued after the platonic affair had appeared to peter out. In four coded letters, Burns revealed to "Clarinda" the locations of a precious gold mouse he had been given by an unnamed earl, which Burns wanted her to have in order to ease her financially dependent situation (possibly in the hope of rekindling the embers of their relationship). During one of his peregrinations through Scotland with a friend, the pair met with mishap and Burns buried the valuable mouse, with a view to keeping it safe. He then wrote the four letters to McLehose, in which he encoded the treasure's location, in case he failed to return.
In the event, according to Keiller, Burns did return and, perhaps improbably, gave the letters to his wife to post. Jean, realising who they were for, didn't dispatch them; neither did she open them, respecting her husband's privacy, but hid them in her armoire, where they stayed for two and a half centuries, until the wardrobe recently came up for auction, and the coded letters were discovered – or so Bequest's creators claim.
Burns's ill-fated jaunt took him and his companion from Edinburgh and the Lowlands into the Highlands and Islands, and then back by a different route to Dumbarton. He could have buried the treasure anywhere along the way. And there it remains.
But if the story is ingenious fiction, the bejewelled gold mouse is fact, and its hiding place can be discovered through the coded clues within the four letters, and within Forbes's painting which, along with the secret letters, will be gradually revealed on the Bequest website.
"The clues are encoded in a number of different ways," warns Keiller, "so there's not going to be just one particular solution method. Both letters and painting will provide clues, but also red herrings."
The Bequest website has just gone online, with a £10 charge to register, enabling the treasure-seeker to log on and start perusing the tell-tale letters. In the meantime, Belladrum Tartan Heart – fondly described by aficionados as a miniature version of what Glastonbury once was – announced this year's music programme earlier this month, with headline acts including Editors, Ocean Colour Scene, Shed Seven, the Saw Doctors and British Sea Power, as well as roots and Celtic music acts such as Alabama 3, Seth Lakeman, Peatbog Faeries and Lau.
Once again, the Co-operative Verb Garden will provide a focus for poetry, comedy and performance, with journalist and Edinburgh University rector Iain MacWhirter chairing debates and interviews. The Verb Garden will also be the focus of "campus" including a writers' workshop tent; a fringe area engagingly christened "The Screaming Adverbs", and an "Eco-Sheiling" offering solar-powered showers and mobile-phone chargers, among other things. Appropriately, given Bequest's preoccupations, there will also be a "Burns Unit", featuring the poet's work.
Gibbs, who is also a partner in the Rock Ness Festival in June, started the Belladrum event five years ago, partly a legacy, he says, of his misspent youth, when he enjoyed festivals such as Glastonbury, but also as part of his ambition to restore the estate's Italian gardens, which form a setting for much of the festival's music. His mother's family owned Belladrum from the 1850s, but in the 1970s sold it to Dutch owners. In the 80s, Gibbs started buying back the estate, including the former dower house, Phoineas House, where he and his wife Leonie now live – his grandfather had been forced to demolish the old Belladrum House after the war.
Gibbs reckons Bequest, which has the support of EventScotland and Highland Council as well as The Scotsman, "should be quite a brain-teaser", though doesn't envisage the kind of scenario that developed in Masquerade, with car-loads of rival treasure-hunters converging on certain areas. "At least, I hope not," he laughs. "I reckon John's clues will be sufficiently testing, so it'll be unlikely that everyone's going to go for the same place. But you never know."
As the treasure-hunt website makes very clear: "The mouse is not buried in public or private gardens, or grounds surrounding a public or private building. If you do decide to start excavating your way across Scotland, you will have to shoulder the responsibility if you are digging someone's garden up. Of course, if it is in a vegetable patch, the owner may even be quite happy, but we wouldn't bank on it."
In the early 1980s, after Williams's book had sold a million copies and he had been deluged by some 30,000 letters as treasure-hunters ranged the country, the Masquerade competition was tarnished by scandal. The hare was unearthed in 1982 in Ampthill, Bedfordshire, but the apparent winner was found to be a friend of a former girlfriend of Williams. The hare was auctioned off to an unknown buyer for £31,900 in 1988.
No such machinations are likely to taint Bequest. Gibbs and Keiller, however, do describe their puzzle as "Byzantine" and, as Burns himself famously observed in To A Mouse, "The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men, / Gang aft agley."
Burns wrote his poem after turning up a field mouse's nest while at the plough. Whoever cracks the clues in Bequest, however, will turn up something rather more than a small and terrified rodent.
• For the Bequest clues, see www.burnsbequest.co.uk The final clues will be announced at Belladrum Tartan Heart festival, near Beauly, on 7-8 August and will be published in The Scotsman on the subsequent Monday. For festival details, see
www.tartanheartfestival.co.uk• For the Bequest clues, see www.burnsbequest.co.uk The final clues will be announced at Belladrum Tartan Heart festival, near Beauly, on 7-8 August and will be published in The Scotsman on the subsequent Monday. For festival details, see
www.tartanheartfestival.co.ukThe full article contains 1543 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
