1: When I was young my grandad used to take me on his knee,
And tell me of his homeland so far across the sea;
He made me promise to return to his wee croft some day,
‘You'll never have true peace of mind until you do,' he'd say.

2: He told me of his father who was killed in a foreign war,
He fell advancing with the men still playing his old phiob mhor,
And his mother who died while trying her best to fight the raging flames,
When the landlord and his murdering gang set fire tae their hames.

3: He wis just sixteen when he came over here and cleared the virgin soil,
And set aside his grief and settled down to years of toil;
But ne’er forgot old Scotland, though three score years and ten,
And the only sadness that he had: he never got home again.

4: So now I’m back in Scotland just as my grandad wished,
I’m looking down into the pool where as a boy he fished,
And up the hill the rowan tree still guards the pile of stone,
And that is all there is to see of what had been his home.

5: I’m looking to the point of land from where he sailed away,
To leave the country that he loved until his dying day;
Now a big stone from that hillside pile is sailing o’er the wave
And when I return tae Canada I’ll place it on his grave.