Angus M’Diarmid, a Scottish hunting guide whose first language was Gaelic, wrote a local guidebook, describing in animated and inane English the rugged Highland landscape. PHOTOGRAPH BY ERICH HARTMANN / MAGNUM

It is an occupational hazard of poets laureate that, however far they flee the public, rustic local books will be shyly pressed into their hands. But when the British laureate Robert Southey was passing through the Scottish Highlands in 1819, literary discovery came from the simplest act of any tourist: he idly picked up a local guidebook from a table. “Striking and Picturesque Delineations of the Grand, Beautiful, Wonderful, and Interesting Scenery Around Loch-Earn,” the title page announced, by one Angus M’Diarmid. The rugged Highland landscape that the book described was, Southey marvelled, rivalled only by the prose itself from “the first sentence—if sentence that may be called which hath no limitations of sense or syntax.”

The book’s dedication to a local noble, the Earl of Breadalbane, though wildly self-abasing—“With overpowering sentiments of the most profound humility, I prostrate myself at your noble feet”—is at least written in recognizable English. But after M’Diarmid expresses his “tumid emotions of heart-distending pride,” he commences with this extraordinary opening line:

Of the different remarkable curiosity flowing from the excellencies of the cataract at Edinample, which partly perspicuously to the view of the beholders; its finitude confined between high wild rocks of asperity aspect, similar to a tract of solitude or savageness; its force emphatically overflowing three divisions; but, in the season of the water dropping from the clouds, its force increases so potently, that these divisions, almost undiscovered, at which its incremental exorbitance transcended various objects of inquisitiveness, peradventure in manuscript, in such eminently measure, that its homengeneously could not be recognish at the interim, except existing in emblem to the waves of the ocean in tempestuous season.

The sentence occupies—overthrows is more like it—the entire first paragraph of “Striking and Picturesque Delineations,” and its massed armies overrun and conquer every page thereafter. Southey had discovered no common guidebook. As it now quietly celebrates its two-hundredth anniversary, Angus M’Diarmid’s slender 1815 masterpiece belongs to that same rare class of unintentional humor as “English as She Is Spoke”—the would-be reference work, written by an author whose second language was English, that achieves a strange linguistic greatness.

Angus M’Diarmid had, at first glance, a decidedly unrequited love of the English language. A “gillie” or hunting guide, on the Highland estate of the Earl of Breadalbane, M’Diarmid’s first language was Gaelic, with English a distant second. This was not unusual in Lochearnhead; though thirty-six miles north of Glasgow, it was a world away, on the other side of the Highland boundary and surrounded by mountains—a place one contemporary termed “a small, straggling village.” Gaelic remained the first language of most of its residents, as it still did throughout rural Highland districts.

The area’s fine grouse-shooting and fishing, though, attracted enough cosmopolitan visitors that M’Diarmid’s ambitions with English soon vaulted over creag, loch, and ben. Fired by his fascination with the language and a much-abused dictionary, he undertook a guidebook for outlanders to Loch Earn and what he called “your Lordship’s delicious estate.” The book’s backer was apparently a visiting colonel taken with the author’s monologues, and its publisher explained its language thus in a preface: “Like the torrent shooting impetuously from crag to crag, his sentences, instead of flowing in a smooth and equal tenor, overleap with noble freedom the mounds and impediments of grammar, verbs, conjunctions, and adverbs, which give tameness and regularity to ordinary compositions.”

Here, for instance, is M’Diarmid on an echoing gorge:

The foresaid high Grampian mountains abounded with spasmodiac opening, or excavated parts, that if a loud cry made at accomodious distant, they would sounded the same in such miraculous manner, that one apt to conceive that each parts of those spasmodic rocks imbibed the vociferation which is depressing gradually the sonorific sound to the expiry thereof.

In stirring accounts of castles, moors, and local feuds and massacres, we are informed that “they daggered the piper, and throwed him in a hole,” and told of “womens bewailing over the deprivation of their correlative husbands.” (One unfortunate is “seized of no less than nine arrows: Which occurrence in lower degree would enforce many to retire.”) Robbers, mystifyingly and yet somehow suitably, are repeatedly referred to as “men of incoherent transactions.”

M’Diarmid’s prose has had an underground of fans among writers and linguists ever since. Vladimir Nabokov, no stranger to the alchemy of second-language writing, even has his “Pale Fire” narrator suggest “Finnegans Wake as a monstrous extension of Angus MacDiamid’s ‘incoherent transactions.’ ” The book went through four different editions between 1815 and 1879, though a fifth, promised in 1897 by the head of Oxford’s Bodleian Library, never materialized. Copies of the guide fetch over two hundred pounds at auction—but, thankfully, it can now be read online.

But who, exactly, was Angus M’Diarmid?

Southey, it turns out, was not quite the first visitor to take notice of this strange little volume. Writing fifty years later to the Victorian miscellany Notes & Queries, the contributor “R.S.A.” recalled visiting Lochearnhead in 1815, the year of the book’s publication—and meeting Angus himself.

“I saw the book at the inn, and was also introduced to the author, then a fine athletic young man . . . manifesting abundantly the enthusiasm which prompted him to compose his Delineations,” he recalled. Notes & Queries promptly received a second recollection, by “J.Ss.,” who had been in a Breadalbane shooting party soon afterward. “I was very soon made acquainted with the talented Mr. Angus M’Diarmid,” he recalled, “. . . We became purchasers of his work, and got him to read it to us—to the great amusement of his fellow gillies as well as ourselves. They constantly called him the poet.” Suitably enough for a poet in the time of Keats and Shelley, M’Diarmid eschewed local plaids to dress in black. Equally suitably, he was poor: “He was, I remember, the worst dressed of all the gillies,” J.Ss. recalled; he wore stockings “not very sound at the heel.”