"Now," said he, "there is a little clachan" (what is called a hamlet in the English) "not very far from Corrynakiegh, and it has the name of Koalisnacoan.
So when it comes dark again, I will steal down into that clachan, and set this that I have been making in the window of a good friend of mine, John Breck Maccoll, a bouman[26] of Appin's."
George's reminding him of his last penitential moments in the lane, and of that King of Glory whose name had echoed ever since in the saddest corner of his memory; and the gutters where he had learned to slide, and the shop where he had bought his skates, and the stones on which he had trod, and the railings in which he had rattled his
clachan as he went to school; and all those thousand and one nameless particulars, which the eye sees without noting, which the memory keeps indeed yet without knowing, and which, taken one with another, build up for us the aspect of the place that we call home: all these besieged him, as he went, with both delight and sadness.
(6) Nearby was 'An Clachan', an evocation of a Highland village, while there were also commercial pavilions, such as those of the German Potash Syndicate, the Canadian Pacific Railway and the Royal Scottish Arboricultural Society, bandstands and restaurants.
(11) Both the financial importance of the Entertainments section and the apparent incompleteness of the Palace of History at its opening (12) may attest to this attitude, though the location and nature of 'An Clachan' and the 'Auld Toon' were more ambiguous.
The fountain is therefore a metaphor for the tension between contemporary dynamism and romantic nostalgia that pervaded the Exhibition, (35) or as Eyre-Todd described Glasgow, 'the magic of its modern achievement and the charm of its storied past.' (36) The placing of 'An Clachan' was also important, being among established woodland next to the river and with a painted backdrop to separate it from the rest of the Exhibition.