In December 1898, a story by S.R. Crockett appeared in The Lady's Realm, a popular illustrated London monthly. It ran to fourteen pages, carried five illustrations, and was set in the Galloway hills in the summer of 1531. A disguised king, a shepherd-farmer with a hackbut, a corrupt court favourite, and a sharp-tongued farmhouse wife — the ingredients of a historical romance with a great deal more going on beneath the surface.
Then the magazine moved on to the next issue. The story was never reprinted and never collected into any of Crockett's books. For over a century it sat in the holdings of university libraries in the original bound volumes of a periodical that hardly anyone still reads. Until now.
'The Goodman of Ballangiech' is available in this museum in full, for the first time in accessible form. This exhibition is its introduction.
The title of the exhibition works in several directions at once. 'No Small Stories' is partly a description of this particular story — substantial, historically grounded, technically ambitious, anything but throwaway. But it is also a statement about the writer who produced it. It speaks to the dismissal of S.R. Crockett over the past century. This exhibition, and the articles it draws on, offers an argument for reappraisal and rehabilitation into a recognised place in Scottish literary history.
The museum's approach is simple: make the evidence available and let the reader judge. The story is here. So are the arguments. Start wherever you like.