“is one of the great ‘makars’, or poets, of medieval Scotland. A lowland Scot, he is a mysterious figure, but it seems likely that he was enrolled at the University of Glasgow in 1462 and died in Dunfermline no later than 1505. His poetry is one of the finest literary achievements of the Middle Ages, the author and critic C.S. Lewis claiming that there was no English writer in the fifteenth century who could compete with Henryson and his fellow Scots makars.

The thirteen animal tales that make up the Fables are perhaps Henryson’s best known works. In them we find a world in which bird-brained roosters strut in the farmyard, where lions and unicorns are brought to life from the heraldry of medieval Scotland, and where little mice have nests ‘as warm as wool’. The fables also depict sheep literally ‘fleeced’ in a world in which the wolves and foxes have a natural advantage and where an end to the troubles of small creatures most usually takes the form of a swift bird of prey.

Fables need to have a moral and each tale is provided with one. However, there is often a mismatch between the story and its moralising conclusion. The world, it seems, cannot be so neatly tied up and explained. For Henryson nothing ‘is’, it only ‘may be’, as he offers an explicit invitation to challenge the very moral he is delivering. In his hands, the animal fable disrupts the natural order and the reader is asked to question the easy answers. The very first story instructs us to ‘go seek’ the jewel that the Cock rejects, and find our own wisdom.

Each of the stones features a quotation from one of the Fables in the original Scots. The largely oral culture of medieval Scotland means that a great deal of literature has been lost and monuments in Older Scots are very rare. Johnny’s Way is, therefore, one of the few monumental works in the world to feature the language of lowland Scotland as it was written in the Middle Ages.”