It was a spring afternoon when I first visited the church at Croick, on a river-bend where Strath Cuileannach joins the wider, greener floor of Strathcarron. There was still snow on Diebidale Ridge above dark braes of bracken and heather, and the air was noisy with the cold sound of hastening water. The twisting glens of Cuileannach, Alladale and Calvie are talons on the extended arm of Strathcarron, clawing at the mountain hide of central Ross. They are also narrow airways down which winter-visiting greylag come to the alder-woods and farmland fields along the Dornoch Firth. A northward skein was returning to Iceland when I reached the church-yard wall, and I watched them until they were lost against the leaf-brown hills. I remember them clearly, and not only because they recalled a boyhood memory of wavering arrow-heads in a prairie sky. I remember them because of the native greylag which James kept on the shore of the firth, and because the book that took me to Croick also brought me his friendship.
I went to Spinningdale at his invitation three months after my account of the Clearances was published. I went in December and by train from Inverness. There were leaden snow-clouds upon Ben Wyvis, hoar frost like dusted sugar on the Muir of Ord and the furrowed fields of Cromarty, but at Bonar Bridge the sky was clear, roses and lupins flowered in a cottage garden, and the warm hills were glazed in sunlight. I was the only passenger to alight, the carriage door held by a porter who told me that Dr Robertson-Justice had just arrived to collect me. And there he was with an outstretched hand and a welcome in Gaelic, tweed cap and cape, and a swathe of red Clan Donnachaidh tartan about his waist. At Spinningdale, which he reached with skilful speed in a Mini, he took me first to the oak-wood that marched with his policies, naming plant, bird, lichen and insect with encyclopaedic brevity. With two pointers and Irena’s Jack Russell at our heels we went to the ruin of a cotton-mill above the inlet. It was built by an improving Dempster laird in 1791, inspired by Richard Arkwright’s mills at New Lanark. It was never a success, and when fire destroyed its timbers it was abandoned, time and erosion changing it to the ancient fortress most travellers presume it to be. I asked if it explained Spinningdale’s name, and James’s answer disturbed the rooks above us. “Spanzidaill… not Spinningdale!” The word is Norse, meaning a place for spinning, perhaps, but we later agreed that another derivation was more to our taste – spanntng-daill the vale of temptation.
That night we talked until first-light touched the head of Struie across the Firth, and a silent tide ebbed from silver to gold. We built walls of reference-books at our feet – Brewer, Roget and Burke, Ruvigny’s Jacobite Peerage, Haydn’s Dignitaries and Cruden’s Concordance, gazetters, dictionaries of etymology, place-names and quotations. We talked of the clans and the Clearances, of falcons and the marital fidelity of greylag geese, of moths and butterflies, Bach, Mozart and Robert Louis Stevenson, salmon, seal and seine-netters, London before the war, journalism, socialism, brave soldiers and their obscene trade, the Spanish Civil War and Belsen. We discovered a mutual pleasure in serendipity, and decided that it was not so much a faculty as a faery gift. We shared an admiration for Alexander Mackenzie from Stornoway, the first white man to cross the Canadian Rockies, and we decided to visit his grave not far away at Avoch on the Black Isle, but we never did. We talked of the white-lipped bay of Calgary on the west coast of Mull, and the redcoat Mounted Police Commissioner, James MacLeod, who gave its name to a settlement in Alberta, not long before he and his small patrol took Sitting Bull and the Sioux nation under the protection of the British Crown.
We also talked of Croick Church which he had never seen although we went there together in later years. Plain-walled, rectangular and functional, screened by a wind-break of fir, it is one of a hundred and more Parliamentary Churches built by Thomas Telford. At the beginning of the last century it served the ninety people who lived in Glen Calvie, tenants and subtenants of William Robertson of Kindeace. They were able to support a poor teacher for their children’s education, albeit in English, and until many of them joined the newly-established Free Church their spiritual needs were answered by a sympathetic minister, Gustavus Aird. In 1842, two years before his death, Robertson decided to clear them from the estate and offer it on lease as one farm, leaving the troublesome details to his factor, James Falconer Gillanders. This resolute man was the third generation of a family of factors who rose in station and wealth by the leases they took upon the land they cleared for their employers. The first was George Gillanders who managed Lord Seaforth’s estate on the Long Isle, where the people endured epidemic fevers, recurrent crop failures and predatory raids by emigration agents. Gillanders’ factorship gave him a trading monopoly in black cattle, white fish, grain and meal, and he increased this comfortable income by selling back to the people any surplus of the firing they were obliged to collect for his use. He conducted his own affairs as prudently as he managed those of his master, and soon accumulated a capital of £20,000 with which he bought an estate at Highfield in Easter Ross. When he retired to this, his son Alexander succeeded him in Seaforth’s employ and did so well at the tenants’expense, it was said, that he became richer than many Highland proprietors. The grandson James was the most successful of the three, and like Patrick Sellar he was respected by his superiors, admired by his peers, loved by his family, and hated by the people.
James has shown by his nature
that he is a brutal chamberlain
like his grandfather before him,
wasting and stripping the poor.
He is a poor creature without responsibility,without honour, understanding or shame.
An unpleasant boor, he will be
doubly judged for driving
away the Rosses of Glencalvie.
Writs of eviction were issued against the Glencalvie people at Whitsuntide in 1845. Before they were executed, concern for the distress and destitution they would cause prompted some northern gentlemen to establish a relief fund. When The Times was asked to publish their advertisement appealing for subscriptions “to cheer the sufferers amidst their cloudy prospects”, John Delane recognised that there was more to this matter than a modest source of advertising revenue. The anonymous correspondent he accordingly sent to Ross was probably the legal writer Thomas Campbell Foster, an ardent and compassionate man who later reported the Irish Famine for The Times. Witnessing the removal of eighteen families from Glen Calvie, he wrote one of the most vivid accounts of eviction, with a precise understanding of the suffering and responsibilities involved. His first dispatch, written at the inn of Ardgay on the evening of his first day in Ross, began as angrily and as trenchantly as it continued.
Those who remember the misery and destitution into which large masses of the population were thrown by the systematic “clearances” (as they are here called) carried on in Sutherlandshire some 25 years ago under the direction and on the estate of the late Marchioness of Stafford1 – those who have not forgotten to what an extent the ancient ties which bound clansmen to their chiefs were then torn asunder – will regret to learn that the heartless course, with all its sequences of misery, of destitution, and of crime, is again being resorted to in Rossshire.
That morning Gustavus Aird had taken Foster to Glen Calvie. All the cottages were now empty except one in which Hugh Ross, an old military pensioner, was dying. The people were standing on the open hillside, “the women all neatly dressed in net caps and wearing scarlet or plaid shawls, the men wearing blue bonnets and have their shepherds’plaids wrapped about them.” When the Times man arrived they were singing the 145th Psalm, The eyes of all things wait on Thee, the Giver of all good. Two days later they moved to the churchyard at Croick, making tents from tarpaulins, blankets and plaids, “the poor children thoughtlessly playing round the fire, pleased with the novelty of all around them.” There were twenty-seven children, all under ten, and seven were ill. There were also some young and unmarried men and women, but most were married and over forty. When Aird told them why Foster was there they gathered about the Times man, shaking his hand. “Their Gaelic I could not understand,” he told Delane, “but their eyes beamed with gratitude. This unbought, spontaneous and grateful expression of feeling to you for being their friend is what their natural protector – their chieftain – never saw, and what his factor need never hope for.” Why, he asked, were the Highland people reduced from comfort to beggary?
I confess I can find no answer. It is said that the factors would rather have one tenant than many, as it saves them trouble. But so long as the rent is punctually paid, as this has been, it is contrary to all experience to suppose that one large tenant will pay more than many small ones or that a sheep walk can pay more rent than cultivated land. Now, no doubt there is an object in driving off the people – namely fear of the New Scotch Poor Law, compelling the heritors to pay toward the support of those who cannot support themselves.
He was wrong in believing that sheep were not more profitable than cultivated land, but he was right to accuse Highland proprietors of being unwilling to pay their share under the Poor Law. The lairds of Kindeace, he said, “never gave one farthing, the poor supported their own helpless poor, the wealthy let them do so unassisted.” Major Charles Robertson, the new proprietor, was not in Ross to answer this charge, or watch the energy with which Gillanders cleared his estate, and I know of no record of his thoughts and feelings at this time. Like other proprietors, he was protected by his factor who no doubt willingly accepted all the hatred and obloquy that Kindeace and his father should have shared.
The leaders of the Glen Calvie community, those named as tenants in the writs of eviction, were a teeming family described as “Ross alias Greishich”, a variant spelling of greusaich, a shoemaker. On the day following my first visit to Croick I found the writs in the Tolbooth at Tain, in a high tower room above the cells of the old gaol. It was used to store burghal documents and was now rarely entered. Yellow columns of papers, tied with pink tape, were shrouded in dust-heavy cobwebs upon which black spiders hung like beads of shining jet. There was a rough order in the storing – if only that those papers nearest the door were the latest in time – and it was not too difficult to find the writs I wanted and read the fine cursive handwriting that required the Shoemakers
… to flit and Remove themselves, Bairns, Family, servants, subtenants, Cottars and dependants, Cattle, Goods, and gear forth and from possession of the said Subjects above described with the pertinents respectively occupied by them as aforesaid, and to leave the same void, redd and patent, at the respective terms of Removal above specified, that the Pursuer or others in his name may then enter thereto and peaceably possess, occupy and enjoy the same in time coming.
Within two weeks of the eviction, the people of Glen Calvie were gone from the cold shelter of the churchyard. Gillanders claimed that he had resettled six of the families, and the Times man followed them. David Ross Greishich Senior, David Ross Greishich Junior, and Alexander Ross Greishich “got a piece of black moor near Tain, twenty-five miles off, without any house or shed, out of which they hope to obtain subsistence.” The other three families were given turf huts near Bonar Bridge, but “the rest are hopeless, helpless.” The short-lived Society for the Protection of the Poor, inspired by the northern gentlemen’s concern and by Foster’s reports, could do little to aid them or prevent further evictions on the Kindeace estate, and they were soon gone to the south and ultimately, perhaps, to Australia. There is nothing now on that piece of black moor to show that the Shoemakers settled there, and for some years I believed that they too had left the land of their birth. But not long ago, in a kirkyard near the tidal flat of Edderton sands, I found some of their graves. They had not lived long after their eviction.
Before they left Croick, a few of the Glencalvie people scratched their names and sorrowful messages on the eastern window of the church, the most moving evidence of the Clearances that I know. This was what I came to see that Spring day twenty-two years, ago, walking over the long yellow grass of the grave-yard, by stark headstones and glass bowls of skull-white porcelain flowers. The diamond panes of the window were thick with grime, and even when I wiped them clean with my hand the oblique fall of the afternoon light made reading difficult. A woman I had not seen in the churchyard now came round a corner and offered me face-powder from her hand-bag. I rubbed it on the window, and immediately the writing became clear, slanting across the glass. The messages are in English, for although the people were Gaelic speakers none of them had been taught to write in their own tongue.
Glencalvie people was in the church here May 24 1845 … Glencalvie people the wicked generation … John Ross shepherd … Glencalvie people was here … Amy Ross … Glencalvie is a wilderness blow ship them to the colony … The Glencalvie Rosses …
Since I recorded these inscriptions in my book a protective grating has been placed over the window, too late to prevent some unthinking visitors from adding their own names, and for that I feel a sad responsibility.
In 1854 James Gillanders, now married to Kindeace’s daughter, cleared the Greenyards estate in Strathcarron, and this time the people did not submit without protest. When a Sheriff-Officer brought the writs of eviction they were torn from his hand and burnt, and a crowd of women and boys stripped him and his companion of their clothes and drove them from the glen. Three weeks later the Sheriff-Substitute and the Procurator-Fiscal came with new writs, and escorted by thirty-five constables who had drunk “several bottles of ale, porter and whisky” at the inn of Midfearn. Entering the strath shortly after dawn they heard firing and whistles blowing, but Sheriff Taylor put his head out of his carriage and told the constables to be of easy mind, this was the Rosses’usual method of warning. As they came through the wood at Greenyards they found the road blocked by sixty or seventy women with red shawls over their heads. Behind them were less than a dozen men and boys. All were dispersed by a savage baton charge. “The police struck with all their force,” wrote the advocate journalist Donald Ross,
… not only when knocking down, but after the females were on the ground. They beat and kicked them while lying weltering in their blood. Such was the brutality with which this tragedy was carried through, that more than twenty females were carried off the field in blankets and litters, and the appearance they presented, with their heads cut and bruised, their limbs mangled, and their clothes clotted with blood, was such as would horrify any savage … Dirty work must be done by dirty hands, and a cruel business is most generally entrusted to cruel hearts and ferocious dispositions.
Four women and a boy, whom the Sheriff described as “ringleaders in the riot and mobbing”, were dragged to Tain and locked in the Tolbooth below the room where I read the Glencalvie writs. One of the women and the boy were later brought to trial at Inverness, and upon the advice of their counsel, who hoped thereby for the leniency of the Court, they pleaded guilty to the lesser offence of a breach of the peace. Lord Justice-Clerk Hope, coming to the Court from a shooting-holiday on his son’s estate in Sutherland, addressed the prisoners in English, which they may have had some difficulty in understanding, but he was perhaps less concerned with them than he was with the riotous and presumptuous spirit of the commonality in general. The course of Law, he said, must protect all persons high and low, and all persons, whatever their feelings or perverted notions of right and wrong, must submit to the authority of the Law.
It is quite essential therefore, that such a spirit as that which these pannels exhibited should be repressed. Neither they nor their neighbours can be allowed to suppose that they can live in this kind of wicked and rebellious spirit against the Law. They must be taught submission in the very first instance.
The woman was sent to prison for twelve months, and the boy for eighteen. Thanking the jury for their attendance, Lord Hope said that they had performed a most important duty in ensuring the conviction of Ann Ross and Peter Ross. They were aware, he said, of the singular and perverted feeling of insubordination in some districts of the Highlands against the execution of civil processes in the removal of tenants. “This feeling is most prejudicial to the interest of all, and it is absolutely necessary to suppress it.”
I have sometimes sat by the roadside at Greenyards, listening to the distant sound of gulls above a moving plough. I have walked by the river at Braelangwell where the wife of William Ross tore her apron into strips for bandages, and was herself clubbed into the water. Foolishly, I once stood on the spot where Sheriff Taylor waved his cane like a sword, and I shouted his orders at the empty road, “Clear the way …! Knock them down …!” But it has always been difficult to see the strath as it was on that cold March day, the red shawls of the women, the white paper of the Riot Act in the angry Sheriff’s hand, the frosting breath of the coach-horses and the marching constables, and I cannot hear the shouts and the screaming cries of pain. The recreative faculty which serves me well at Glencoe, Strath Naver, Kintail and Culloden is unresponsive here.
Strathcarron is now too lovely, perhaps, too serene and gentle to be recognised as an arena for bloody violence, and time has grown a scar tissue over memory and concern. Some years ago, when I was staying at Spinningdale, I drove again to Braelangwell and walked by the river. The afternoon was warm and sunlit. Smoke scarcely moved above a field of burning stubble, and in the silence the hum of a single insect was like the throb of a cello string. A man came from the road and said that if I wished to cross the water there was a bridge further up the glen by Anat. I said I was content, and explained why I was there. He had only a fragmentary knowledge of “The Massacre of the Rosses”, his family had been incomers at the end of the last century, but he remembered an old woman who had once spoken of Gillanders. A bad man was he now, he asked, and I said it seemed so. They were hard times for all, he said. He was attached to the land, and like many of the Strathcarron men two hundred years ago he and his father had soldiered in a Highland regiment. I saw him again later that month, in the noisy motor-inn at Ardgay. We took a dram together and talked briefly, not of the Strathcarron evictions but of winter days on the Maas, the Hochwald in the spring of 1945, and Canadian flame-throwers burning the last German trenches on the west bank of the Rhine at Xanten.
The Clearances in Ross and elsewhere are said to have been foreseen three centuries ago by the Brahan Seer. He was Coinneach; Odhar Fiosaiche, Sallow Kenneth the Soothsayer, an Islesman by birth but working as a farm-labourer in Strath Conon near the Mackenzie stronghold of Brahan Castle. In his youth the gift of a magic blue stone brought him the power of taibhsearachd, second-sight, and he prophesied many calamities great and small, domestic, local and national, including a few yet to come – such as the “horrid black rains” which some believers say will be radioactive fall-out, and others the result of a monstrous explosion in the oil fields of the North Sea. He had a vision of Drummossie Moor at Culloden “stained with the best of Highland blood … no mercy will be shown or quarter given.” He forecast mountain roads from sea to sea, bridges over every stream, dram-shops “at the head of every plough-furrow”, and policemen so common that they would be met on every street-corner in every town. He saw the coming of the railway in “a fiery chariot” and “long strings of carriages”, and may have had his finest moment of precognition in a terrifying vision of the automobile age, declaring that he would not like to be alive when “a black bridleless horse passes through the Muir of Ord.”
Most of the understandable predictions of this Gaelic Nostradamus were concerned with parochial affairs or the misfortunes awaiting the Mackenzie chiefs and their wives, one of whom ultimately ordered him to be burnt for witchcraft. The prophecies are often clothed in an imagery that easily fits subsequent events, but in their forecasts of the Clearances the language is blunt and clear. The Big Sheep will over-run the country and the disheartened clans will flee before it, across the sea to islands as yet undiscovered. The land will pass into the possession of strangers and become so desolate that no cocks will crow in the glens north of Drumochter. The price of sheep will rise and then fall, and in time they too will disappear and be forgotten. Some comfort is offered, if not altogether reassuringly, in a promise that after the horrid black rains have destroyed all wild life, and turned the mountains brown, the people will return. Credulous belief in these prophecies should perhaps be qualified by the knowledge that until they were published a century ago2 they were oral folklore, and there is little or no documentary evidence of them before the events they predict. A churlish mind might therefore conclude that the Brahan Seer’s reputation as a prophet depends less upon his remarkable second-sight than on the inventive hindsight of others.
One of these was perhaps the old man who was said to have wandered from township to township in Ross in the last quarter of the 18th century, crying “Mo thruaighe ort a thir, tha’n caoraich mhor a’teachd!” Woe to thee, oh land, the Great Sheep is coming! This has been taken to mean the Cheviot which was brought to Easter Ross in 1790, but profitable sheep-farming was already flourishing there long before that, and before the old man had his melancholy vision. In 1762 Admiral Sir John Lockhart inherited the medieval castle and forty-eight properties of the Balnagowan estate. Since his tortuous descent from the Celtic Earls of Ross also gave him claim to the disputed leadership of Clann Aindrea, he hyphenated his surname with Ross, took pleasure and pride in his inheritance, and began his shore life as a successful Improver. He enclosed and cultivated neglected land, drained marshes, raised rents, gave leases to southern graziers, and put black-faced Lintons on the hills. A resentful people sometimes shot or drowned these placid animals, and in Bliadhna nan Caorach two years after Sir John’s death they attempted to drive them all from Ross, but nothing could halt the changes the Admiral had begun. The prosperity of his family, founded upon prize-money and Linton sheep, continued for another century until the baronetcy expired with the entertaining inventor of the Ross rifle, a weapon I still remember with astonished dismay. For two dark nights during an invasion-scare in 1940 I sat on the beach at Pensarn in North Wales, holding it between my knees and wondering what use I could be with five rounds of ammunition only, and those too large for the rifle’s breech. There are few sheep on Balnagowan now, and much of it is a sporting estate for foreign guns. The turreted castle above the road to Tain is the Highland seat of an absent Arab sheik, and its sixteen sunken baths of pale blue mosaic are a marvel unforeseen by the Brahan Seer.
Westward from the low hills and fertile ground between the Dornoch and Cromarty Firths the county of Ross stretches across the Northern Highlands from sea to sea, and beneath the black soil of some of its glens are the pebbled beaches of their long-receded tides. It is a land of magnificent peaks, dark bogs, grieving survivors of once-great forests, and moorland tarns like burnished shields. Its high-coned mountain wall on the western coast is lofty and indifferent, facing the grey Atlantic from which it arose as part of the first crust of the planet. Inland is another ocean of heaving earth and eroded rocks, tumultuous but immobile, empty of man but rich in the wild-life he now makes a brave effort to preserve – red deer and roe, fox and pine-marten, otters moving at dusk, ravens clearing their throats on moss-green outcrops, snow buntings on the cold high braes, red grouse in the heather, warblers among stands of white birch, a lone eagle, a stooping peregrine below scudding clouds.
The complex and magical beauty of Ross numbs the imagination and mocks all attempts to describe it. In the first moments of an early dawn its great wastes and upthrust hills are grey with the pain of their solitude, and night-shadows still deepen the parallel lines on the troubled face of Liathach. The rising sun warms and enlivens, and at noon it glistens on the white quartzite head of Beinn Eighe. With the passing of day the ice-hewn spearheads on the side of Slioch are a gentle rose-pink above the blue mirror of Loch Maree, but southward the scarred sandstone flank of Beinn Alligin drips blood into the darkness of Torridon. The seasons change colour and metaphor. When spring has melted its last corrie of snow the amethyst escarpment of Ben More Coigach is a cloud city above the dark gateway to Loch Broom. In summer, when they are seen from the narrow coast-road to Diabaig, the round heads of the Beinn Damh range become gossiping women in purple shawls. The ochrous light of an autumn evening changes the jagged ridge of Stac Polly into the broken wall of a beleaguered Andalusian castle. In winter all can be hidden by a frozen mist. When that is lifted, by sun or wind, mountain and moor are chalk-white and ink-black against a blue sky.
It would be easy to believe that this land was always empty, but every glen, rock-face, mountain and lochan has a Gaelic name, remembering an imaginative society long since devoured by sheep. Most of its Mackenzie lairds were glad to be quit of it before the middle of the last century, but while they enjoyed their property they did so in style. On a June Monday in 1803, James Hogg stepped ashore from the Isabella at the head of Little Loch Broom to be the guest of George Mackenzie of Dundonnell. He was royally entertained, keeping his host company at the punch-bowl until they heard the dawn song of a blackbird beyond the window. Mackenzie lived well on his twenty thousand acres, employing one tutor in mathematics for his children, another in languages, and a third in music. With a Borderer’s keen eye for bad husbandry, Hogg thought the estate was dismally managed, and although it was “crammed full of stout, able-bodied men and women” the glens were impoverished by perpetual cropping. Mackenzie asked what the land might produce if let as sheep-walks, and Hogg thought its rental could not be less than £2,000. Mackenzie said his people would never pay that. “He was loath to chase them all away to America, but at present they did not pay him above £700.” Hogg liked Mackenzie, his good humour, the rich table he kept, the civility of his family, their musical evenings and their delighted applause when their visitor played upon the fiddle. And if the laird was not making as much as he might of his lands
He hath, however, the pleasure of absolute sway. He is even more so in his domains than Bonaparte is in France. I saw him call two men from their labour, a full mile, to carry us through the water. I told him he must not expect to be served thus by the shepherds if once he had given them possession.
When the dawn breaks on An Teallach the blackbird may still sing in the dark trees of Dundonnell, but the stout, able-bodied people are long gone. They are gone from all the sea-torn coast of Ross, the small townships that once supplied the Royal Navy and the fishery fleets with ten thousand men. They are gone from Strath Conon and Applecross, from Glen Torridon and from Loch Carronside where Hogg saw many villages, and where he lost his temper when he asked for more meat and was given whisky. On the peninsula coast of Coigach, looking out to the Summer Isles, there are a few white cottages and a good inn for those taking the twisting single-track by the ox-bow bend of Loch Lurgain. This was once a thickly populated estate, but in 1852 it became the property and responsibility of the young Marquess of Stafford who had ambitions to be as great an Improver as his grandfather, the first Duke of Sutherland. The land came to him as part of the property of his bride, Ann Hay-Mackenzie of Newhall and Cromartie, and it was in their joint names soon after their marriage that his agents issued writs of eviction upon its people. But the women of Achiltibuie, Polgass and Achabraighe were strong in spirit, and their defiance may have encouraged the women of Strathcarron two years later. They burnt the writs and drove the agents and Sheriff’s officers back to the boats that had brought them from Ullapool. “It was a distinguished triumph of brute force over Law and Order,” the agents told the Marquess, “and while it continues in the ascendant, the rights of the proprietors must remain in abeyance.” And so they did, but not for long.
To the south of Coigach, across the wide mouth of Loch Broom, the inheritors of the Mackenzie lairds of Gruinard also dispersed its tenants and sub-tenants, and a scattering of stones is all that is left of their township on Gruinard Bay. This is one of the finest inlets on that beautiful coast and deserves its Norse name, the fjord of green shallows. Its green-blue water is held in a bowl of rounded rock. There is a green belt of earth above the white stones of its shore, a plaid of green timber upon the gently rising hills. Black cattle from Lewis, brought over the North Minch, were once landed here and driven eastward up the river to the Glen of Hunting, by the black shadow of An Teallach to Dundonnell Garve and the Muir of Ord. Joy in the solitude of Gruinard would be a kindness to the people who left it in sorrow, were not its beauty imperceptibly but nonetheless obscenely marred. There is a tear-drop island on the water, and although it is green with trees it is dead, all animal life still poisoned by the anthrax which military scientists placed there forty years ago.
The Gulf Stream warms the coastal waters of Wester Ross, curling in from the Rockall Deep. Without this, Osgood Mackenzie would have been unable to create his wonder-garden on the same latitude as Hudson Bay and the Bering Sea. He began it in 1864 on an old sea-beach, twenty-four acres of a bleak peninsula in Loch Ewe, a rock of red Torridon sandstone known as Am Ploc Ard, the High Lump. Nothing was growing there but heather, crowberry and a single dwarf willow three feet high, and much of its surface peat, varying in depth from an inch to two feet, had been taken for fuel. Westward from the mouth of Loch Ewe is the Long Isle and then the broad Atlantic and until Mackenzie planted a wind-break of trees the “exposure was awful, catching as it did nearly every gale that blew”. He knew little of gardening when he began but he had inherited a love of it from his father, the fifth baronet of Gairloch. He learnt as he laboured, and after four years, during which black grouse, hare and red deer ate the young shoots of the trees and shrubs he planted, the land at last responded to his love. “Now came the real pleasure,” he wrote, “of watching the fruit of all our labour and anxiety.” He grew rhododendrons of wondrous size and colour, magnolias, azaleas and wistarias, camellias and cyclamens, spring, summer and autumn flowers, great shrubs and noble trees from two hemispheres, Bon Chrétien pears “as luscious as any that could be bought in Covent Garden”, plums and apples, orange-flowered ixias, scarlet lobelias and great lilies.
When he died in 1924 his work was continued by his daughter, and thirty years later it passed into the care of the National Trust. One hundred thousand people visit it every year, and in their proper admiration for Mackenzie’s achievements I hope they give some thought to how the garden at Inverewe acquired its present bed of black and fertile soil. The thin ground of the original sea-beach was first cleared by children who hand-picked it clean of pebbles. New earth was then brought by an old man, in a creel and upon his back. Later, others carried more soil in creels and carts, bringing it from the moors and from an abandoned turf-dyke. These people, unnamed in Mackenzie’s brief history of the garden3 were no doubt glad of the work. In a contemporary reference to Gairloch, Black’s Picturesque Tourist said “Extensive experiments have been tried to introduce the turnip husbandry among the crofters and tenantry, but not with any decided success as to the Landlord’s rental of the increased comforts of the people”.
There are two roads only through the central massit of Ross, from Strath Conon to the west coast. They begin as one on the Muir of Ord, dividing at Garve below the aloof shoulder of Ben Wyvis, and they follow the course of the old droving paths. The north fork goes by Strathvaich to Loch Broom and Ullapool, the second westward through Strath Bran to Achnasheen, Loch Maree and Gair Loch. At Achnasheen there is a southern branch to Loch Carron and the Skye ferry on the Kyle of Lochalsh. Each of these highways has sometimes been called Destitution or Desolation Road, although that title was originally given to a short stretch above Dundonnell, built to give employment in the years following the Potato Famine of 1846. But as the roads were used by the evicted people of the west, moving from their homes to the emigrant ships at Inverness, the name was applied to one or all with more sorrowful significance.
The northern road to the long sword-blade of Loch Broom was built to serve the new village which the British Fisheries Society was establishing at Ullapool, a planned and orderly assembly of parallel streets and a hundred houses, well-slated or thatched with turf and heather. Time has changed it and it has grown in size, but with Inveraray and Lochgilphead it is still an example of what other Highland towns might have become, had the good taste of the 18th century directed their growth. John Knox recommended the site to the Society, not only for the white fish in the ocean beyond the Summer Isles but also because of the abundance of herring at the mouth of the loch, “remarkable for their large size as well as their richness and flavour.” In 1786 there was only a droving-path to the east, “the track of a road” he called it, and because he could find no one to guide him along it, or none who could speak English, he wisely continued his tour by boat. A new road was surveyed four years after his visit and was finished in 1797 by Kenneth Mackenzie the laird of Torridon, inspired to this undertaking, he said, by the poor people’s needs and their “avidity for labour.” He built the road for considerably less than the £8,000 estimated, and should perhaps have been less cautious with the subscribers’money, for by 1809 the highway was in such disrepair as to be almost impassable along some stretches. In that year Telford began the southern road by Achnasheen to Loch Carron. There were long and frustrating delays, much anguish of his spirit and mind, before it was last completed, and Robert Southey’s carriage was the first to arrive at Strome Ferry. There the poet dined well at the inn on a choice of mutton chops, herrings, good potatoes, bannocks, cream and butter, as well as smuggled whisky.
Knox and Southey came to Wester Ross in autumn, when it burns with the red and brown, the bright orange of leaves inflamed by the first warning frost of winter. Southey saw the mountains and the glens “drest with sunshine” as I have often seen them, and always long to see them again. It was on such a golden day in late October that I once left Ullapool for Inverness. We had been filming The Three Hostages in Glen Achall, and that morning at the head of its lonely loch we had shot the last scene, Dominic Medina’s fall to his death as he slips from Richard Hannay’s grasp. On our drive eastward the high braes of Strathvaich were already touched with snow, but along the artificial loch of Glascarnoch the air was sunlit, the moorland heather bright with beaded rain. Beyond the dam we stopped at the inn of Altguish, a hotel now but once a drovers’tavern, I think, where some of them would halt before taking their herds a thousand feet over Corrimoillie to Strath Bran, saving time and distance to the Muir of Ord. The hotel was already closed for the winter but a bar at the back was still open, a stone-flagged floor and wooden benches, the air blue with peat-smoke. There were shepherds at the bar-counter, dogs lazily beating the floor with their tails. Aware of faces made familiar by television, the landlord’s wife brought an autograph book with our beer and sandwiches, taking all names lest one might be overlooked in ignorance. She returned in ten minutes to tell me that she had read only one of my books, but “Jeannie in the kitchen has got them all.” Whatever conceit that gave me was deflated by the ribald mockery of my companions as we drove on into the dusk of Strath Conon, toward the night-train from Inverness.
Now that James is gone from Spinningdale, and from Tigh an Allt at Ardgay, I do not often travel over Struie to the Kyle of Sutherland, and when I reach Inverness I go down the Great Glen to Lochaber, to Morvern or Kintail. I rarely use the road from Edinburgh to Inverness, the old hated road by Drumochter to the valley of the Spey. Now improved and widened, with long dual-carriageways, it avoids Newtonmore and Kingussie where the best bridies in the Highlands were once sold and perhaps still are. Sometimes I take the overnight sleeper to Inverness, more in nostalgia than pleasure, for the Royal Highlander is not the train it once was, when a breakfast-car was attached at Aviemore, the platform noisy with hungry, quarrelling gulls. I do not remember the rain that must often have been awaiting me at Inverness, only pale sunlight falling on the station square and on the white eroded statue of a Highland soldier, less honoured now for his valour at Tel-el-Kebir than for his value as a right flank marker for a platoon of parked cars.
There has been a town or settlement at the mouth of the River Ness for two thousand years. It was already old when Columba the Irish missionary came to convert the nothern Picts, miraculously opening the locked gates of their stronghold with the Sign of the Cross. History is rich with ironic coincidences. That conversion at Inverness, real or expedient, ensured the eventual domination of Scotland by the incoming Irish. Twelve hundred years later, when David Lloyd George was staying in the Highlands, he summoned his Cabinet to Inverness and there discussed Eamonn de Valera’s terms for a treaty and the recognition of Ireland as a sovereign state.*
Inverness was among the first of Scotland’s Royal Burghs. There was a King’s Highway between it and Aberdeen in the 13th century, but no good road from the south for another four hundred years, and no railway until 1858. It was a trading port and a military stronghold commanding the Great Glen and the approaches to the northern mountains. Its possession was disputed for centuries, by the Crown’s contenders and by feuding clans, and within half an hour’s drive from its centre there are the sites of a dozen massacres and battles. Macbeth the Mormaer of Moray had a timber castle on a prehistoric mound above the town, but if he killed Duncan in envious ambition it was not here. I would like to believe, however, that his castle did have a gate-porter with so perceptive an understanding of the relationship between lechery and strong drink. There were earlier fortresses on the green hill of Craig Phadrig across the river, and others later on the earthwork where the Anglo-Norman mercenaries of David I built a keep of stone. This survived in one form or another until George Wade repaired its walls and gave it useful employment as a garrison, but the Jacobites destroyed this in 1746. In the last century its remaining stones were replaced by a municipal castle of red sandstone, erected from plans which would also have served for the façade of a Victorian prison, a work-house, railway station or baronial hall.
Three hundred years ago, Commonwealth soldiers sent by the Protectorate built a Citadel on the quay, on a site now occupied by oil storage-tanks. It placed Cromwell’s military boot and England’s will upon the town and the Highlands, but Inverness had been an English-speaking if not an Anglo-Saxon enclave long before that. In many respects it is perversely English today. Not the harsh, arrogant, self-esteeming and self-destroying England of the late twentieth century, but the Anglo-Scottish world of the Victorian age, comfortable and almost complacent in the knowledge that it is “the hub of the Highlands”, as it somewhat inaccurately describes itself. It is certainly still the centre of their industrial, agricultural, educational and professional life, but is less concerned than it should be with the fact that its increasing role as a tourist centre is suffocating much of its old character and spirit. Its domestic and commercial architecture is largely Victorian and Edwardian, sometimes monstrous and often beguiling, but this too is changing, and its principal streets are becoming indistinguishable from other drear thoroughfares in Britain.
The property speculation of twenty years ago began that unpleasant change, and one of the men involved in it was a friend of my schooldays. When I see what he brought to Inverness I sadly remember our early and fervent interest in Scotland’s history. We gave ourselves Scottish names, writing them on house notice-boards, and we wore tartan ties instead of the obligatory black, blue and white. He had a talent for memorising verse and could declaim Scott and Aytoun at great length. One poem to which he was particularly attached began with the only line I now remember, nor do I recall its source. “Mo chreach … my sorrow, at seven tomorrow I must be back in a garrison town.” He was a Jew, and when an insensitive master told him that it was ridiculous for him to have such an attachment to the Gaelic people of Scotland he said it was because he was a Jew.
I visit Culloden when I am in Inverness, no matter how brief my stay. Much of the work done in the past to preserve the battlefield, and honour the men who fought there, was due to the scholarship and devotion of Iain Cameron Taylor of the National Trust, without whose guidance and friendship my book would have been less than it is. He understood that the battle was not just the end of the Jacobite cause, to which he was nonetheless attached, but the climax of the Highlanders’long struggle for survival and the beginning of their betrayal and dispersal. Each visit I make to the moor brings another small discovery, not factual but emotional, a deepening rapport with place and past. No battlefield however sympathetically maintained, can present the sights and sounds of bloody conflict, and when this is attempted the result is often theatrical and absurd. Understanding must come from knowledge and a creative imagination, and the duty of the custodians is to supply one and inspire the other. Culloden does not look as it did in the sleet of that distant day, but now that some of its forestry trees have been felled it is again possible to look northward to the firth and the Black Isle and westward to the mountains, to see them as they were in that waiting hour before the armies began their killing. The great stones above the mass graves, erected less than a century ago, are starkly simple and painfully moving. Stripped naked by beggars, the Jacobite dead lay on the moor for two days before they were buried in great pits, by detachments of Cumberland’s soldiers whose white gaiters were soon as red as their coats. Thus no one can say with certainty that the clan names on the headstones correctly identify the men beneath, nor does it matter perhaps.
My visits to Culloden are not always melancholy, and should not be. There was joking that day, I think, for laughter is the reassuring companion of desperate courage. I remember that Iain once stood by the great cairn with Lord Doune, a member of the Culloden Committee and descended from the bastard half-brother of Mary Queen of Scots. The day was cold with rain, and in the shelter of the cairn a Scots guide was talking to a small group of Americans, bright plastic hoods tied beneath their earnest faces. As he reached the end of his galloping history of the Stuarts and the Jacobite cause he pointed over their heads to Lord Doune. “And there,” he said, raising his voice above the wind, “there but for the thickness of a blanket is the rightful King of Scotland!”
When I left Spinningdale at the end of one of my last visits my car was filled with daffodils. “For your friends in the south,” I was told. I drove southward by Culloden and gave some of the flowers to Neil MacDonald, the gentle Islesman who was then warden of the site. Others I laid on the Field of the English and the newly-discovered graves of the Campbells. The rest I took to Iain. He is gone now, as James and Rory are gone, but their memory is with me whenever I go to the Highlands.