Seamus Perry
speaker
386 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 31 Aug
Seamus Perry’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 2.
Appearances
And Coleridge is very clever, isn't he?
Both are introducing that wedding reception frame in the early stanzas, but he also reminds us of it at various strategic points as the poem goes on.
So we never quite forget that what we're listening to isn't simply a story.
What we're listening to is someone telling a story.
Hello.
We begin with an encounter in late 18th century Scotland.
Francis Grose was an artist, an antiquary, and a spendthrift, as well as being a soldier, a captain in the Surrey Militia, and everyone called him Captain Grose.
Robert Burns happened to meet him, very far from Surrey, at Friars Cass, a grand baronial house in Dumfries in the summer of 1789, which was quite close to where Burns was living at that time.
Grose was there because he was collecting materials for one of his great projects, the Antiquities of Scotland.
and the two men hit it off at once.
I have never seen a man of more original observation, anecdote, and remark, Burns wrote to his wealthy admirer, Francis Dunlop, or, as he put it rather more characteristically in a poem, a fine, fat, fudgel-white, or stature short, but genius bright.
That's he.
Burns asked that when Captain Grose came to do the Ayrshire section of his book, he should include the ruined Kirk at Alloway, which was, as it happens, the burial ground of Burns's father.
And Burns added as a further incentive that the church was the setting for many good stories about witches and spooky apparitions, which was, he could tell, just the sort of thing that Captain Grose would like.
So, Grose obligingly agreed to include the old church in volume two of his Antiquities, though in truth, the Kirk was a fairly insignificant building, and there wasn't really that much to say about it.
Grose kept the main point to a footnote.
This is what he says.
This church is also famous for being the place wherein the witches and warlocks used to hold their infernal meetings or sabbaths and prepare their magical unctions.
Here, too, they used to amuse themselves with dancing to the pipes of the muckle-horned deal.
Diverse stories of these horrid rites are still current, one of which my worthy friend, Mr. Burns, has here favoured me with in verse, Tamashanta, a tale.
Showing 281–300 of 386 · page 15 of 20
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