Robert Louis Stevenson and Mark Twain admired her. He called this collection A Garland for Marjory Fleming and it included the poem about the dead turkeys. Some of her poems were set to music in the 1930s and in 1969 the late Sir Richard Rodney Bennett composed songs to five of them for soprano and piano. Of the Bible, she wrote: 'I like the old testament better than the new but the new is far more instructive'. She was incredibly well-read, referring in her journals to the Bible, Shakespeare, Gray, Pope and Swift, among others. These two poems show a good appreciation of history. This was a mischievous rhyming device she sometimes got up to. The latter included, of James the Second, the lines: She wrote a long, 215-line, epic poem on Mary Queen of Scots, revealing a remarkable tenacity of purpose. Indeed the rats their bones have cranched Three turkeys fair their last have breathed On the killing of three young turkeys (bubbly-jocks) by rats at Braehead: Her poetry is usually little more than doggerel but no less impressive in someone so young.

What is certain is the evidence from her journals and notebooks, which she kept between 1810 until her death, of an exceptional ability to record and reflect on her daily activities and life in general, in prose and verse. In reading about her, it's sometimes a little difficult to separate fact from legend. He affectionately called Marjory, 'Pet Marjorie', and this name stuck.

Amongst other activities, he wrote the first instructional book on golf, The Golfer’s Manual, under the pseudonym 'A Keen Hand'. Marjory's short life was first recorded in 1858 by a Fife journalist, Mr H B Farnie, a fascinating man himself. There's an adjacent old stone trough where some of Marjory's animal friends might have assuaged their thirst. Her spelling is partly corrected, cocks is missed out, and her ampersands, which she used a lot, replaced with 'and'. It is on the left, going downhill to Old Cramond Brig. It is this quote from her remarkable journals, kept in the NLS, which is engraved on the plaque in Braepark Road. Here, she describes wandering '… in rurel filicity festivity & pleasure – a delightful place, Breahead by name… where their is ducks cocks hens bublyjocks 2 dogs 2 cats & swine & which is delightful'. They lived in North Charlotte Street from which she was taken to visit friends in Cramond at Braepark House. She spent most of the last three years of her life with her cousin's family in Edinburgh.

SR's Word of the Month, bubbly-jock, reminded me of the plaque put up in Cramond decades ago in memory of Marjory Fleming, the little girl with the extraordinarily precocious literary talent who is said to have sat on Walter Scott's knee, delighting him with her talk and recitations.īorn in Kirkcaldy on 15 January 1803, she died of measles, possibly complicated by meningitis, on 19 December, 1811, just short of her ninth birthday.

Marjory's Book by Marjory Fleming