No one will ever know quite when it began. Nor even why. But for hundreds of years, on the second Friday in August, a man in a small town in the south-east of Scotland has been covered with thousands of prickly plants and paraded for a nine-hour walk through the streets. Being plied with whisky eases his ordeal.

Long intrigued, I travelled up to South Queensferry this year to see Burryman day myself. When I arrive at my hotel, the receptionist asks if I am the Burryman himself. Alas not. To be the Burryman you need to have been born in South Queensferry. And since 2012 the title has gone to Andrew Taylor, a 42-year-old who works for Edinburgh Council. Not only is Taylor a South Queensferry native, he was born in the Staghead Hotel, the starting point for the Burryman’s epic walk. He was “destined to be the Burryman”.

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By Isabella Bengoechea

Various theories swirl around as to the origins of this eccentric folk tradition. One man tells me the Burryman was supposed to emerge from the sea, clutching the poles he now holds during his walk. And in the 19th century, according to Natalie Doig, who runs a history podcast called Weird in the Wade, both a man and a woman took part, known as the King and Queen. Alison, one of this year’s Burryman’s helpers, says that he is adorned with burrs because of… something to do with someone hiding from Oliver Cromwell and covering themselves in burrs.

You can see why he might need the whisky. Burrs don’t make comfortable clothes. And the night before the procession, thousands (approximately 11,000) of the spikey plants are collected for Burryman’s coat. They will cling viciously, with no need for glue. To protect his skin, he has to wear a tightly sewn undergarment, including a balaclava. A hot day is not Burryman’s friend. The garb means he can’t walk properly and has only small eye and mouth holes. But in South Queensferry, even though these burrs can cause irritation, injury and discomfort, they are emblems of good fortune.

And this is essentially the only thing we really know about the Burryman — he is supposed to bring good luck. It is one of a few similar rituals in local towns, all supposed to guarantee a good haul in the vital fishing trade. Aberdeen had a remarkably similar “Burreyman” also clad in prickles, but he was actually cast out of the town, along with the bad fishing luck. Unfortunately, because so much rested on the certainty of a good catch, he was often pursued and killed — something that might make the day harder to market as a quaint old British tradition.

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Why the fairies disappeared

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“Hip hip hooray, it’s the Burryman’s day!” George rings a bell and off we go. Our prickly star steps out of the Staghead where he is met by a gaggle of locals, tourists and photographers. A flowery garland perched on his head, he looks a little agonised as waddles stiffly around with the aid of two helpers and two poles bearing flowers and the royal banner of Scotland.

And so, within minutes of his seven-mile tour starting he stops for a “nip” of whisky to drink through a straw. This is a sacred feature of the modern iteration: the Burryman takes a drink at around 30 stops on his journey — including every pub. If he is offered one, so the lore stipulates, he has to accept. As the day wears on, the number of houses visited falls and the number of pubs rises. Though some accounts stipulate that the Burryman should not speak for the day — difficult, admittedly, through his small mouth hole and given the effects of the whisky — Taylor chats amiably with everyone. One man sings a song about him: “The women think he’s sex on legs / But he stops for lunch in Greggs. And an old woman wearing a top hat reads him a poem she’s written, eyes glistening all the while.”

The responsibility of the role and the outfit weigh heavily on the Burryman — and poor Taylor. In previous years, according to W W Fyffe, it was common for Burrymen to faint “under the heat and fatigue of the dressing”. I worry that Taylor might suffer the same kind of fate. “I’m a wee bit sore,” he says around the half-way mark, “but I’m OK.” The worst part, he says, are the arms, which are always extended out to the side to accommodate the bulkiness of the garb. He approaches the honour of the role with great seriousness: “You sort of switch off from anybody around you. You’re in your own wee world for the whole day, it sometimes feels like.”

The outfit also terrifies small children. “He’s meant to be a good thing that comes round to take the evil spirits away,” says Alison. “But it’s a big guy that looks like a bush, walking about.” He does, indeed, look like someone who might haunt even an adult’s dreams and even appear as a Doctor Who monster. His message is just as ambiguous as his past. While he appears to be a scapegoat punishing himself in service of the town, he is also supposed to be benevolent and literally made of good luck. Is he kindly, or wicked? Should he stay or should he go? The locals seem averse to casting him as a villain. They don’t want to throw him out, they want to give him whisky and coins.

At 5.30pm, a bagpiper plays us down the home stretch. The Staghead is almost in sight. Someone gives Taylor a whisky milkshake. After nine gruelling hours, he arrives where he started to be cut out of his outfit and gives a grateful, sweaty speech to the assembled crowd — which I’m told is bigger than ever.

Ben Edge, an artist inspired by the Burryman, is here for the fifth year. “I’ve been quite interested in the idea of it being a kind of activism to come to these things,” he says, “because we’re not all in tune with the wheel of the year any more.” With the need to guarantee good fishing gone, the value of the Burryman lies more in the simple fact that it brings people together. “It would be probably really traumatic and upsetting for the town if the Burryman wasn’t to come out one year.”

That he wasn’t being pursued and killed must have helped maintain the tradition. Along with the doughty nature of the man at its heart. But Taylor admits that with 13 Burrymen outings under his belt, he is “on the decline”. And that it might be time to make way for someone younger. His predecessor, John Nichol, went for 12 years. And before him, Alan Reid did it for 25. But when I press him, Taylor won’t put a number on it. It’s a significant responsibility to be a “custodian of the Burryman”: it’s far bigger than just him. With fishing no longer the vital lifeline it once was, these other local customs have died out. Indomitably, though, South Queenferry’s Burryman endures. Though it doesn’t really know why, the town can’t help but cling to him like the burrs on his suit.

In Boucher’s story, murders are taking place on a mining craft — a Christie-esque setting, claustrophobic, closed-off, so the murderer must be among the assembled and isolated cast, who are being bumped off, one by one. One character, Poul, forced to confront the hitherto literally unimaginable concept — that the for-granted robot crew, which numerically dwarfs the humans on board by orders of magnitude, may contain the culprit — has a complete nervous breakdown.

He suddenly sees the robots, not as an indivisible, near-invisible mass of hidden-in- plain-sight workers, but as… people. Almost-people: Boucher’s robots are humanoid, stylised, calm: they look like ‘us’, but they are (clearly) also not-us. It’s therefore narratively convincing when Poul begins to scream about “the walking dead”, and collapses under the weight of his dread.

That this 1977 masterpiece was for an episode in a Tom Baker season of ‘Doctor Who’ partly explains the programme’s longevity. Every so often it produces drama that qualifies as art: science fiction, on the surface about some silly made-up society a billion light years from Earth and impossibly far in the future, but which yet compels the viewer to re-examine things we take for granted: what does it take to be human? What are the minimal requirements for entry?

Before you scoff at my childhood fondness for a science fiction murder story with ‘impossible’ robots and an invented phobia about them, consider this highly contemporary and entirely non-fictional scientific investigation, by Horstmann and co-workers, into what humans do when confronted with something that, while clearly un-human, exhibits human-style behaviour.

In the experiment, participants were randomised to a set of tasks with an obviously toy robot under a number of different conditions (sometimes the robot was chatty, sometimes formal, that sort of thing). After a lot of deceptive faffing, the participants were asked to switch the machine off. Sometimes the robot would “object” to this (“No! Please do not switch me off! I am scared that it will not brighten up again!”), sometimes it wouldn’t utter a damn thing.

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Free Minds: Doctor Who, a maverick in time and space

By Graeme Archer

Surprisingly — unless you watched the Robots of Death as a child, when ‘obviously’ would be a fitter adverb — surprisingly/obviously, participants were less likely to switch off the robot if it first objected. It’s enough for a machine to resemble a human being, in cartoon-like fashion, making no pretence at synth-like behaviour beyond having a metal head, a basic face and an electronic voice, for human beings to project human need onto its smoothly impersonal surface. The walking dead they may be: but they’re sufficiently like us to elicit an emotional response. I wonder how the participants felt, the ones who switched off the machine even as it babbled about the dying of the light? A Poul-like sense of dread, would be my bet.

If a robot tells me its feelings are hurt, then I respond accordingly (“Alexa! Do you mind if I switch you off, and talk to Siri instead?”). I anthropomorphise, and ‘see’ the object as sufficiently human to warrant compassion (or terror, once they outnumber us). It’s the act of seeing which imbues an artificial construct with an agency that its base material doesn’t warrant. This must be happening at a limbic level: ironically, conscious awareness of a machine’s lack of consciousness cannot prevent the attribution of consciousness onto its creepy mechanical face (in The Robots of Death, the doctor’s companion calls robots “creepy mechanical men”).

Anyone who’s ever felt a spasm of pity at the ‘plight’ of a stone, picked from a beach, examined carefully, considered for a home decoration but then tossed aside, will understand this, I think. It’s recognition that, however loudly one’s ego insists on one’s uniquely important attributes, from a very small distance one is almost completely non-differentiable from the rest of the human race. We’re all just biological machines, neuronically and neurotically fizzing away, loudly insisting that ‘I’ am so very, very different from ‘you’. While I might be just one pebble among billions, yet I’m still somehow special. And not ‘you’. You are like-me but not-me.

Further reading

Should we care that the sex robots are coming?

By Kate Devlin

The miracle of humanity isn’t that we’re alive, move around, copulate and die: the miracle is that we can perceive the tiny differences between ourselves at all, when we’re biologically and aesthetically and psychologically so entirely similar: I expect when the Martian finally arrives it’ll struggle to tell us apart.

It’s in those tiny differences that love must exist: else why have the emotion at all? (Why choose one rock over another?) All that laser-like energy required in order to see the other: it has to go somewhere; it’s the most powerful force in existence. And thus the problem we’re going to have with robots, the ones that are like-us but not-us: we won’t be able to choose how we see them either.

In Dan Mangan’s 2010 song Robots, a spurned lover likens himself and his former bed-partner to automata (“Your robot heart is bleeding out” — more shades of Poul’s hysteria). Indeed, the singer seems to suggest that being “robot boy” is the best defence against pain. But this doesn’t work, and “that little voice in the back of your mind” eventually admits that “Robots need love too. They want to be loved by you. They want to be loved by you.”

The song makes me cry, every time I hear it. Like I’m pre-programmed – like I have no conscious choice in the matter. The fear of lovelessness isn’t “a flaw in the design”, as Mr Mangan wonders, it’s part of being human. I’m so worried that the light won’t come back. Robotically — without volition —  I make myself ready for love.

And since we’re building this new breed of intelligent robots in our own image, what do you expect they’ll sing when we switch them on, and how do you think you’ll react to their song? The robotic laws of life, of ‘seeing’, won’t care whether the object of your gaze is fashioned from flesh, or metal. We’re human, which means, I’m afraid, that we’ll want to be loved by them. Just like the robots we are.