The writer Martainn MacGilleMhartainn, or Martin Martin, visiting the island in 1700 in the footsteps of Dean Monro, found Fascaray “in good heart, despite the recent reversal of clan fortunes,” and observed: “The Natives are generally a very sagacious people and quick of Apprehension; several of both Sexes have a Gift of Poesy, and are able to form a Satyr or Panegyrick ex tempore, without the assistance of any stronger Liquor than Water to raise their Fancy.”*2
But strong liquor, Martin noted, was as much a part of Fascaradian life as Poesy and Panegyrick. He enjoyed the hospitality of Domnhall McGlaister at Finnverinnitie Castle and wrote: “Their plenty of Corn was such, as dispos’d the Natives to brew several sorts of Liquors, as common Usquebaugh, another call’d Trestarig, id est Aquavitae, three times distill’d, which is strong and hot; a third sort is four times distill’d, and this by the Natives is call’d Usquebaugh-baul, id est Usquebaugh, which at first taste affects all the Members of the Body: two spoonfuls of this last Liquor is a sufficient Dose; and if any Man exceed this, it would presently stop his Breath, and endanger his Life.”
Famously, hospitality of a more frugal sort was offered to Bonnie Prince Charlie by the McWatts, then living in reduced circumstances in Calasay, when the Young Pretender fled the Scottish mainland after the crushing of the ’45 rebellion. Grigor McWatt cites Neil MacEachan’s Narrative of the Wanderings of Prince Charles in the Hebrides,*3 a first-hand account of the royal fugitive’s flight. The prince, disguised as an Irish servant woman, had distant sight of Finnverinnity House when he arrived at the island by night on a French frigate. He ruefully declared it “ane douce and gentill place” but was advised to steer clear of the house on account of the incumbent McGlaister’s English sympathies. The prince spent the night in “a hummel wee shielin with the puir but leal McWhatts of Calasie,” according to MacEachan, before resuming his journey.
By the time the travel writer Thomas Pennant arrived in 1769, the McGlaisters were absentee lairds, Scots in name only, enjoying the rewards of their loyalty to the Hanoverian Crown in a 300-acre estate in Leicestershire, while “the houses of the Scotch peasants are the most wretched imaginable and shocking to humanity.” Many Fascaradians had been “cleared”—violently driven off the land—by the island’s factor (estate manager or bailiff), set on making “agricultural improvements” for his masters. Pennant noted the “melancholy aspect of Finnverinnitie House, commanding the wide eastern bay, with very fine oaks and horse chestnuts in the garden. Its noble family have left North Britain and swallows are making their nests in the bold stucco of the upper apartments.”*4
Four years later Dr. Samuel Johnson, visiting the island with his Scottish amanuensis James Boswell, found the house “romantically derelict,”*5 and by the time Dorothy Wordsworth visited Fascaray in 1803 she could exult in the “most pleasing romantic effect of the scene—like a barren Ullswater, interveined with water, empty of people, and with a few ruined cottages, built simply like savages’ huts, scattered among fir trees that made a delicious murmuring in the wind.”*6
McWatt continued: “After the second wave of brutal evictions failed to make the land sufficiently profitable for the profligate McGlaisters, Finnverinnity House, along with the island, was sold towards the end of the nineteenth century to a Bristol tobacco merchant who restored the central crenelated fortress, added two wings, a Gothic tower and an open turret above a castellated porte cochère entrance.” The silhouette of the extended house was, and remains, “dominated by 23 ornate chimney stacks of varying heights and design which squat on the building’s dark mass like giant chessmen.”
For more recent history, McWatt drew on Fascaray’s “living reference library”—the Finnverinnity Inn—and it was there he learned that “the celebrated Glasgow architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh is said to have visited the house at the turn of the twentieth century.” Design historians have attributed to Mackintosh the handsome master bathroom in the Big House, with its pea-green sanitary suite and chequered black-and-green tiles with Japonaiserie-style thistle motif.
In 1929, Percy Mere-Stratton, Lord Montfitchett of Godalming and Mayfair, bought the island and its main estates, Finnverinnity and Balnasaig, “as a playground for his pals,” wrote McWatt. Three times a year the new laird would travel up with his shooting and fishing parties wearing brogues, houndstooth plus-fours and matching cap, for what McWatt called “a spot of recreational colonialism,” while Montfitchett’s wife, Lady Muriel, “the buck-toothed, etiolated heiress to a pomade fortune,” played cards with her smart friends, “chain-smoking theatrical types imported from London who had a horror of mud, cold and midges and rarely ventured outside the house.”
For Montfitchett’s triannual sprees he maintained a staff of twenty-two at the house all year round, men and women—mainlanders, some English—stringently divided by rank and responsibilities. As well as a cook and a housemaid, a butler, groom and stable boy, there were kitchen maids, parlourmaids, laundry maids, ladies’ maids and a footman.
The factor oversaw the land and tenants, three ghillies and four stalkers assisted with the fishing, stag hunting, capercaillie and pheasant shooting, and a young man known as “an occasional boy” cleaned and set the fires in the reception hall, drawing room, dining room and each of the eighteen bedrooms when a full house party was in residence. He also maintained order among the guns and rods of the tack room and—the only task he enjoyed—set off a rocket across Finnverinnity Bay to welcome the arrival and signal the departure of the laird. Shonnie MacDonald of Lusnaharra, a fourteen-year-old piper and fiddler much in demand at the island’s taighean ceilidh (ceilidh houses), was employed to stand in the open turret in all weathers to skirl the Montfitchetts and their guests into dinner.
Provisions were conveyed by boat from Auchwinnie to Finnverinnity Pier, where they were loaded onto carts pulled by Clydesdale horses and taken directly to the house.
The hierarchy within the house was reinforced by rules governing communications between servants (few, and only of a business nature—unauthorised liaisons would result in immediate dismissal) and between servants and islanders (none—servants were confined to the house and its grounds and, again, instant dismissal would be the price of fraternisation with locals).
During the ten months of the year when the laird was not in residence, the servants busied themselves cleaning, dusting and airing the empty rooms each week, laundering unused bedclothes to keep them fresh, cleaning windows each month and polishing and repolishing furniture, guns, shoes and rods.
The factor and ghillies controlled vermin, raised the pheasant chicks and did their best to keep down poaching. “If the factor had extended his field of operation to the maintenance of the island’s small and fragile infrastructure, to its crofts and cottages, to the needs of its tenants, he would have had little time for other duties but Lord Montfitchett instructed him to ignore crofters’ complaints about their crumbling, windowless homes—the taighean dubh blackhouses, smoke-charred, heather-thatched drystone hovels which many islanders still shared with their cattle,” wrote McWatt.
Like many of its insular neighbours, Fascaray was too remote from the mainland to be connected to the national grid and the only regularly functioning generator, located in the main village of Finnverinnity, mostly served the Big House. Islanders drew their water from wells, and self-dug pits screened by ramshackle wooden sheds served as toilets. Domestic rubbish was piled outside crofts and when the piles got too unwieldy they were shovelled onto the open decks of fishing boats and buried at sea.
Most Fascaradians accepted this squalor and hardship as the status quo. If the injustices of the Highland Clearances, when Montfitchett’s predecessors had forcibly evicted many Fascaradians to make way for the more profitable caora mhor (big sheep), were alive in local memory, so too was the sense of defeat against overwhelmingly superior forces. Resignation and stoicism were regarded as Fascaradian virtues.
But even the most passive islanders were
provoked to anger when news reached them in 1932 that Lord Montfitchett had issued an order banning children from playing on Finnverinnity beach. The laird—“beneficiary of, but not necessarily an advertisement for, an Eton and Oxford education,” wrote McWatt—also did his best to thwart plans for the expansion of Finnverinnity School.
“Send them to the damned mainland, if education’s what they want, though I can’t think what good it’s going to do them in the bally bog,” he was reported to have said.
The schoolteacher, Miss Elspeth Millar, daughter of a minister from Resolis, was said to have been as scandalised by the laird’s language as by his attitude. But the islanders were powerless. There was no higher authority to appeal to. Montfitchett was their laird and they were his serfs, and Sammy Nelson, his factor, with “a face like a nippy sweetie,” as Effie MacLeod would later say, was his enforcer. “This was the arrangement, the social contract, and they were all bound by it; always had been and always would be,” wrote McWatt in 1945.
A Granite Ballad—The Reimagining of Grigor McWatt, Mhairi McPhail (Thackeray College Press, 2016)
* * *
*1 William Auld, Edinburgh, 1774.
*2 A Description of the Western Islands of Scotland by Martainn MacGilleMhartainn, published by Andrew Bell, Cross-Keys and Bible, Cornhill, 1703.
*3 Edward Black & Sons, Glasgow, 1750.
*4 A Tour in Scotland, and Voyage to the Hebrides 1772 by Thomas Pennant, John Monk, 1774.
*5 The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D by James Boswell, Malone, 1785.
*6 Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland, A.D. 1803 by Dorothy Wordsworth, John Campbell Shairp, 1885.
The Pushion Tree
Ah wiz ragin at ma pal:
Ah telt ma wraith an it gied ower.
Ah wiz ragin at ma fae:
Ah telt it nae, ma wraith eikt power.
An Ah wattered it wi tears,
Greetin sair ootthroo the years;
Wi whids an sleekit chairm,
An smirks Ah kep it wairm.
An it eikt baith day an nicht,
Till it buir an aipple bricht.
An ma fae behaud it shine.
An he kennt that it wis mine,
An tae ma croft he stole,
His greed he couldnae thole;
In the morn Ah seen wi glee
Ma fae ootstreekt aneath the tree.
—Grigor McWatt, efter William Blake, 1948*
* * *
* From Kenspeckelt, Virr Press, 1959. Reprinted in Warld in a Gless: The Collected Varse of Grigor McWatt, Smeddum Beuks, 1992.
8:30 a.m., 20 August 2014
I’m woken by a blinding flash. Sunshine. I come round to full consciousness blinking at the white walls of my new room which, in the purifying blaze of light, summons a memory of our suite in a Sedona spa resort—a birthday break, during which Marco had proposed again, I’d refused again and Agnes had been conceived in a reconciliation tryst. Ten years ago. Breakfast here, though, will not be a leisurely berry granola with cold-pressed wheatgrass served by wait staff filling in between acting jobs. We must fend for ourselves, with whatever frugal supplies the Auchwinnie store has provided.
Outside, apart from the cry of seagulls and the faintest tidal sigh, there is no sound. Curled next to me in the bed is Agnes, who crept in to join me at midnight. She is still asleep, warm and fragrant as oven-fresh brioche, clutching her quilt. Trying not to disturb her, I lift my head to look through the window. Under a cloudless blue sky the sea is opalescent turquoise; it could be the Gulf of Mexico, or the Aegean.
Agnes stirs, raises herself from the pillow and gazes out of the window.
“Wow, Mom. The sea! It’s awesome!”
Her accent is as pure, deep-dyed American as her guileless high spirits. Unlike her mother, whose neutralised mid-Atlantic diction testifies to a rootless past—Scotland, Canada, England, New York—and whose recent absence of any discernible enthusiasm might, in 1950s Hollywood, have seen her hauled up before McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee.
After breakfast, we prop open our front door and get to work. I put my laptop, the box of letters and the manuscript out of harm’s way, on top of the kitchen cupboard. Agnes is an eager assistant and we roll up the hideous carpet and put it in the shed in the small yard behind the house. We move the fake-coal heater—I’d rather freeze than warm my hands in its feeble glow and I’m willing to sacrifice my daughter’s comfort as well as my own on the grounds of taste. But no sacrifice is necessary. Behind the electric heater is a hearth with a functioning, perfectly acceptable fire basket in which a real fire has been carefully laid, with paper (the Auchwinnie Pibroch, eighteen months old, headline “DOG RESCUED AFTER NIGHT ON MOUNTAIN”), firelighters, kindling and logs. Hypothermia will not be necessary. We stow the heater in a cupboard under the stairs. Back in the sitting room, we sweep and mop the stone floor and lay a plain rush mat which Agnes has found in a corner of the shed.
Animal lover though she is, she agrees that the cattle portraits are excessive—“tacky,” she says, though she looks a little longingly at a photograph of a calf and its mother in the grounds of a ruined castle and asks if we can keep it. I tell myself that it will read as irony to my New York friends, as if any of them will ever cross the Atlantic to see it. We stash the rest of the portraits in the shed. I replace the lightbulb and switch the nylon lace shade for a rusting utilitarian tin cone—a relic from a ship, probably, the sort of artefact metropolitan loft dwellers would ransom their children for—also retrieved from the shed. From the airing cupboard we take out extra blankets, soft lambswool in the colours of heather and moss, and drape them over the chairs and couch.
The kitchen is easier. We fold away the plastic tablecloth with its oppressively chirpy print of teddy bears tucking into gargantuan breakfasts. I check Agnes for signs of regret but she is firm.
“No way,” she says.
Beneath it, after a good scrub, is a pleasingly plain and serviceable pine table.
The bathroom is fine, apart from the china lady whose frilled nylon skirts conceal a spare toilet roll. I pick her up. Kitsch, of the unironic sort, corrodes the spirit. But a little moue from Agnes makes me change my mind. Okay, I can live with it. Taste is another tyranny. She smiles, a sweet victor’s smile, pats the china lady gently on the head and asks if she can go outside.
“Please! I’ll only be ten minutes,” she says. “I just want to go to the beach.”
I look along the road. In our two hours of work, a handful of pedestrians have walked by, heading to or from the pub or store, or both, and two quad bikes and the occasional rusty Land Rover have cruised by at strolling pace. Speeding wouldn’t be possible on these rutted roads. The sea is busier, with several small fishing boats bobbing in the wake of a big workhorse ship carrying its cargo of hothoused salmon and mussels to the mainland from the industrial fish farm beyond Plodda and Grodda. The sturdy ferry, its red trim giving it a children’s-book jauntiness, is on its way back from Auchwinnie, and the white triangles of the pleasure yachts, out from the mainland for a brief fair-weather voyage on this beautiful day, carve lazy arcs in the sea. Concealing my anxiety about non-existent road traffic, I watch my daughter cross safely to the shore, then I go into the kitchen to unpack our groceries.
This is plain fare, dismayingly so to a North American with vegan inclinations and borderline gluten intolerance. It’s the food of my parents’ generation, who were raised in Scotland in a post-war world of scarcity when, if it ever came up, the notion of actually taking pleasure in what you ate, or failing to eat every last morsel on your plate, would have been considered decadent. I know we can survive in a world without quinoa, arugula and cilantro, but will it be any fun?
Agnes, though, has never been much of a gourmet and fancy farmers’ market goods are of no interest to her. A boiled egg, a piece of toast, would do just as well. Simple, undemanding appetites seem to have skipped a generation. But she tolera
tes my needs and impulses and was always endearingly receptive to her parents’ more adventurous culinary experiments. She is supremely adaptable and will be content with whatever Auchwinnie’s supermarket has to offer.
Upstairs, there is little to do except open our suitcases and put away clothes and shoes. From my bedroom window I watch the clouds massing, obscuring the sun and leeching colour from the sea. My dark-haired daughter walks, absorbed, along the pebble strand, occasionally stopping, eyes drawn to a particular stone or shell, which she bends to pick up and turn in her hand. She has the gift of concentration—unlike her mother, who is shamefully distractable when it comes to homemaking.
Apart from my document box, our heaviest case contains our books. Instead of the fashionable stories for nine-year-olds—didactic tales of bullying, body dysmorphia, family dysfunction and the joys of diversity—Agnes has brought old favourites, mementoes of her earlier childhood, before the fall, when she was part of an old-fashioned, two-parent family and the future was fixed. I set out the books on the dresser—The Little Prince, Treasure Island—classic novels in early editions given to her by her father when she was way too young, and a recent vintage addition, The Treasure Seekers. I suspect they’re more cherished for the pretty illustrations than the stories. She’s also brought a Nancy Drew, The Clue of the Whistling Bagpipes—another Goodwill find from her father—an anthology of Grimms’ fairy tales, Eloise at Christmastime and, in a classic regressive move, her baby books—Sendak, Browne and Ahlberg.
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