Clanlands

by Sam Heughan

  blood of Campbells after it congealed.

  To Hell with you if I feel pity for your plight, as I

  listen to the distress of your children, lamenting the company

  which was in the battlefield, the wailing of the women

  of Argyll.

  This poem is by a seventeenth-century Scottish poet called Iain Lom, from the MacDonald of Keppoch clan. Because a lot of people had the same names, many were given nicknames based on looks or features. Lom is Gaelic for ‘bare’, ‘bald’ or ‘as bald as a coot’. But it also can mean someone who is plainly spoken . . . so it fits Graham ‘Lom’ McTavish on both fronts!

  Gillebride asks us to sing the chorus with him. We do. And ‘Graylom’ kills it. Stone dead.

  GRAHAM

  Sam’s warbling is reminding me of Pierce Brosnan in Mamma Mia.

  [Sam: Funnily enough, I did an audition for that movie, to play the young lad ‘Sky’. At the time I had a natty 1940s ‘tash’ from starring in Noel Coward’s Vortex at the Manchester Royal Exchange with singer Will Young in the lead role. Will, who had won Pop Idol – a British talent show in 2002 – then went on to have many platinum albums and Brit Award nominations. He kindly offered to help me learn the song. Yet when he tried, he couldn’t make the top notes and suggested I didn’t try; transposing the song an octave down was a better idea. I walked into the audition with my newly grown tash perfectly manicured. The casting director looked at me in shock. I hesitated and took a deep breath, ‘I’m going to sing this an octave lower, Will Young said that’s a better idea.’ The casting director pulled her eyes away from my top lip and, unblinking, replied, ‘No you’re not. Sing it as it’s written.’ The sweat started to run down my back. ‘Okay, if you’re sure,’ I gulped. ‘I am,’ she replied, folding her arms and giving the pianist a nod. I think you can guess the outcome and clearly I didn’t find myself travelling to Greece to appear in a Pierce Brosnan/Meryl Streep sandwich. The result in the audition room was very similar to a cat being strangled, with a furry top lip. I wonder if Will Young could grow a tash as well?]

  GRAHAM

  I weirdly enough dated one of the leads of Mamma Mia in the West End, Helen Hobson. We met doing a stage version of Persuasion directed by the wonderfully named Michael Hunt. (Never call him Mike . . .)

  Although I admit to having Van Gogh’s ear for music (the one he cut off), to hear that music in the landscape of Glen Etive is profound . . .

  But this is a TV road trip and we don’t have endless time for reflections and pondering on the profound because we are on a schedule and need to beat it to Achnacarry Castle to learn all about Clan Cameron who, let’s just say, were a notorious bunch.

  I’ve already spoken of the enmity between the Camerons and the Mackintoshes, which lasted a mere 300 years! (It’s ironic that one of the West End’s greatest musical producers is called Cameron Mackintosh. I wonder if his parents knew about the feud?) Anyway, by the mid fourteenth century this feud had gone on so long that it had come to the attention of the King, Robert III, who decided to end it once and for all via a sort of gladiatorial-style pitched battle in 1396. The ground was selected in Perth by the River Tay, on the island of North Inch. (The battle was later known as the ‘Battle of North Inch’.) A huge trench was dug and an amphitheatre was erected with the King placed in the centre to judge the combat. Thirty Camerons and thirty Mackintoshes came to the battleground. They were to fight to the death to settle the feud.

  The Mackintoshes were one man short but this small detail wasn’t going to stop a good old battle. So they went to the pub and offered money to anyone who would volunteer to make up the numbers. Henry Wynd, probably having downed prodigious quantities of cask-strength whisky, rose to the challenge. In some reports he was a harness-maker, in others a blacksmith. Either way, Henry was someone used to working with his hands and he soon got busy on the battlefield.

  At this point I’ll let that little-known Scottish writer Sir Walter Scott take over:

  ‘The trumpets of the King sounded a charge, the bagpipes blew up their screaming and maddening notes, and the combatants, starting forward in regular order, and increasing their pace, till they came to a smart run, met together in the centre of the ground, as a furious land torrent encounters an advancing tide.

  ‘Blood flowed fast, and the groans of those who fell began to mingle with the cries of those who fought. The wild notes of the pipes were still heard above the tumult and stimulated to further exertion the fury of the combatants.

  ‘At once, however, as if by mutual agreement, the instruments sounded a retreat. The two parties disengaged themselves from each other to take breath for a few minutes. About twenty of both sides lay on the field, dead or dying; arms and legs lopped off, heads cleft to the chin, slashes deep through the shoulder to the breast, showed at once the fury of the combat, the ghastly character of the weapons used, and the fatal strength of the arms which wielded them. When the battle was over, eleven men of Clan Chattan stood, though wounded, and one man of Clan Cameron was left. He promptly fled for his life and Clan Chattan was declared winner.’

  From Sir Walter Scott’s novel, The Fair Maid of Perth

  Did you catch what Walter was saying there? Basically these two groups of lunatics actually had a half-time! Like a football match. You can just imagine it . . . ‘How’s it going out there, Donald?’

  ‘Well, I’ve split two heads in two, and left my axe in a third, how’s about you? Pass the whisky, bastard!’

  Needless to say one of the survivors was good old Henry Wynd, who no doubt returned to the pub bathed in gore to finish his pint. Of whisky.

  Now the Mackintoshes were part of a ‘Federation’, Clan Chattan. [Sam: Why are those raincoats named after them?] [Graham: Allow me . . . the waterproof raincoat, made of rubberised fabric, was first sold in 1824 and named after its Scottish inventor, Charles Macintosh, without a ‘k’.]

  Clan Chattan was a group of like-minded head-cases who all got together and formed a kind of ‘Super-Clan’. It certainly helped with the numbers. So it was that in 1370 the two teams came to the pitch – the Camerons and Clan Chattan. Now, to pursue the footballing analogy a little further, this would be like an FA Cup Final where one team fielded eleven men while the other had forty lads kicking the ball on the other side. Slam dunk for Clan Chattan, you would think? (Excuse the mixed metaphors.) But no! Where you stood on the line of battle was an excessively big deal for the average Highlander. You wanted to be on the right-hand side. If you were on the left-hand side, this was akin to putting you on the subs bench, or even locking you in the dressing room! The Mackintoshes were the clan leaders of Clan Chattan and on this occasion chose to place Clan Davidson on the right. This so infuriated and outraged the MacPhersons (remember these guys are all on the same side), that their leader took his men and walked off the pitch. So what had been a battle where Clan Chattan outnumbered the Camerons, suddenly became the opposite.

  Clan Chattan were heavily defeated, which went down like a mocktail in Motherwell, and that night a drunken Mackintosh went to the MacPherson camp and taunted them for their cowardice. Probably something along the lines of ‘Ma granny’s harder than youse!’ This set the MacPhersons into a collective homicidal rage, whereupon they marched off that very night and slaughtered the Camerons. It was just another day amongst the heather.

  Then we come to the Battle of Bun Garbhain in 1570. This is where we get to meet a real-life Dougal MacKenzie. The wonderfully named Donald Taillear Dubh na Tuaighe Cameron (Black Taylor of the Axe), uncle to the infant chief of Clan Cameron – not that I’m saying Gary Lewis (Colum) is like an infant, but you get what I mean. What a name, though. I mean, come on, try saying that after a morning of drinking with Sam Heughan. Black Taylor of the Axe, so called because of his terrifying ability with a Lochaber axe. In this battle, Black Taylor, henceforth to be known as just ‘The Axe’, killed the chief of the Mackintoshes with the aforementioned giant head chopper. But he didn’t stop ther
e, oh no!

  ‘The Axe’ went on to kill a couple of dozen more Mackintoshes with his hefty tool like some whisky-fuelled grim reaper. Those that survived fled to a small hollow called Cuil nan Cuileag, thinking themselves safe. But our dear friend ‘The Axe’ was only warming up.

  He led his Camerons to the hideout and slaughtered every last one of the Mackintoshes. Yes, you read that correctly. Not ‘he killed a lot of Mackintoshes.’ Or, even ‘most of them’. No, Donald Taillear Dubh na Tuaighe Cameron (Black Taylor of the Axe), killed all of them.

  After the battle (or massacre, depending on your point of view), ‘The Axe’ went back to tell the mother of the infant chief of Clan Cameron the good news.

  ‘They’re aw deid! I killed every last bastard Mackintosh there, what do you think of that?’

  Perhaps in his enthusiasm for slaughter, ‘The Axe’ had forgotten that the said mother of the infant chief was in fact a Mackintosh herself. Needless to say she didn’t take the news of the slaughter of everyone with her surname well at all and tried to throw the infant son onto the fire.

  ‘The Axe’ saved wee Allan Cameron (bit of a small name that one), and banished the mother from Lochaber territory forever by tying her naked to a horse, her face to the tail. The horse was whipped and off she went, leaving ‘The Axe’ no doubt to quietly clean the mountains of gore from his well-used weapon.

  By the way, he was nicknamed ‘Black’ because of his bad temper.

  SAM

  And why this senseless violence and carnage? Well, mainly because they were nicking each other’s cattle . . . or it was unbridled revenge for something someone said about someone’s mum? Just like the gangsters throughout time, you can’t say a bad word about their mums. But the Battle of Palm Sunday (1429) between the Camerons and the Clan Chattan was started ‘cos word on the moor’ was that the Camerons had taken a ‘spreagh’ of cattle from Strathdearn.

  spreagh n. plunder, especially cattle taken as booty.

  Origin: Scottish Gaelic spreidh, cattle.

  Derived terms: spreagh´ery, cattle-lifting.

  (Possibly the origins of the word ‘spree’, which Graham now uses for shopping.)

  The Camerons were attacked while worshipping in church, the whole tribe nearly cut to pieces. John Major (1467–1550) in the History of Greater Britain writes: ‘Clan Chattan put to death every mother’s son of the Clan Cameron.’

  It’s hard to picture now that when you hike or drive through the Highlands you are crossing a land quite literally soaked in blood. At some of the more famous locations, such as Culloden, the Isle of Eigg, the North Inch, if you close your eyes you can almost hear the battle cries of the warriors and the screams of the dying and wound-ed. It is a race forged in the crucible of death. For a Highlander, fighting was as natural as breathing, and all of this is in our minds as we arrive at Achnacarry Castle, at the western end of the Great Glen. Seat of the Camerons and home of the current Lochiel (every Cameron chief is known as ‘Lochiel’), we approach the castle along a beautiful wooded avenue. The Cameron lands stretch as far as Ben Nevis and the estate is still one of the largest at 70,000 acres.

  The original castle was burned down by the Hanoverians (British) after Culloden in 1746 and, after lands had been restored in 1784, a new one was built designed by the architect James Gillespie Graham in 1802. We park up in our Terry-and-June wagon to greet Ewan Cameron, the 27th Lochiel. I can’t help thinking of his fearsome predecessor, Sir Ewan, the 17th Lochiel, known as the ‘Ulysses of the Highlands’, such was his enormous strength and size. He lived until he was ninety (1629–1719), was a vigorous Jacobite, married three times and is credited as shooting the last wolf in Scotland in 1680. In a fight with the English he was about to be stabbed on the ground when he leant up and bit his aggressor’s throat out and said of the incident afterwards: ‘It was the sweetest morsel I ever tasted.’ Maybe he was bored of porridge?

  Ewan is a wonderful host – just to be clear, I’m talking about the current 27th Lochiel and not the throat-biter! He explains, ‘All Cameron clan chiefs are known as “Lochiel” – it’s not a title, just a patronym. There were Jacobite peerages but they got wiped out (after Culloden)!’

  As we enter the castle, Graham and I stop in our tracks, immediately struck by Highland and Jacobite weapons on display such as the famous Lochaber axe, claymores, basket-hilted broadswords, pistols from Prestonpans and the actual broadsword that the 19th ‘Gentle Lochiel’ used at Culloden. Like eight-year-old boys, we gaze up, mesmerised. Having recreated the struggles, politics and battle scenes of the era in Outlander, seeing the Gentle Lochiel’s sword really brings the history home. And, it’s moving because the Battle of Culloden signalled the end of a whole way of life and culture in the Highlands.

  GRAHAM

  I’ve already experienced some powerful, moving moments during this trip (not counting the bowel-loosening moments at the hands of Heughan), but none has affected me quite as much as seeing the actual broadsword wielded by Donald Cameron, the 19th chief of the clan, on the battlefield of Culloden. He led about 700 men that day. It was a matter of pride to him that their pipes were the first heard when the Prince’s standard was raised at Glenfinnan. It was their piper who sounded in the sleet on that fateful day, ‘You sons of dogs, of dogs of the breed, O come, come here on flesh to feed!’

  Chlanna nan con thigibh a so’s gheibh sibh feoil!

  As I say, these guys didn’t muck about.

  Over the staircase the Cameron flag flown at Culloden is framed. ‘Pro Rege et Patria – For King and Country,’ says Lochiel. ‘A chap called McLaughlin wrapped it around his body and escaped from the battlefield and gave it back some years later.’

  I imagined the Gentle Lochiel on that day. (Known as the Gentle Lochiel because of his humane treatment of prisoners taken at the Battle of Prestonpans.) The sword hanging at his side, soon to be unsheathed, the standard fluttering in the icy sleet, and the voices of 700 men raised singing that blood-curdling chant to the tune of the pipes as they began their charge towards the British lines. I can see Sam is moved too. It’s moments like this, when something so unexpected happens, that you must simply stand, absorb it and recognise its profound effect.

  A Highlander needs thirty inches or more around him to swing his broadsword. Lochiel and his men were among the first to charge. They stood on the right of a line that stretched a thousand yards. The line took an oblique angle with the left standing 800 yards from the British troops while Cameron and those on the right stood 500 yards away. It was only the right that made it to engage with the British. It was being in this situation, impatient and angry after being shelled for half an hour, that prompted the men on the right to charge first, and Lochiel was among that group. They had waited like children on their father, for the order ‘Claymore’, and finally it came.

  The Camerons started second, after their bitter rivals the Mackintoshes had charged first. The piper would have played the rant, and then passed his pipes to his attendant boy, at the same time unsheathing his broadsword. Again I imagine Lochiel beginning that 500-yard dash. Imagine the sound, the screaming, and the panting as hundreds of men ran forward like hungry wolves. If you’ve ever sprinted 500 yards you know how hard that is. Now imagine doing it with cannons packed with grape shot (a mixture of lead balls, iron nails, anything that could be packed into the mouth of a cannon and fired like a shotgun), with the withering platoon volley fire of disciplined, battle-hardened British troops. Some Highlanders held their plaids in front of them in the vain hope of shielding themselves from the rain of lead tearing through them. And now imagine doing it over rough ground, carrying a sword and shield. All of this ran through my mind looking at the weapons assembled in Achnacarry Castle.

  By the time the Camerons got to the British line, their hacking at the barrels of muskets could be heard all down the line as metal clanged on metal. Lord Robert Kerr, Captain of Grenadiers, received the first charging Cameron on the point of his pontoon, before a second
cleaved his head down to his chin. (Lochiel tells us that Captain Kerr is an ancestor of his wife. He once made a joke about his gory end and ended up wearing her homemade chocolate mousse!) Some Camerons even made it to the rear, where a Lieutenant Colonel Rich held out his slender sword to parry a blow from a Cameron, only to have his hand and sword severed at the wrist. James Wolfe went on to describe the Camerons as the bravest clan among them. The Gentle Lochiel, still carrying the sword now present at Achnacarry, was carried from the field, both ankles broken, by four Camerons, hidden in a cottage and then laid across a stray horse and led away to the mountains to hide. He joined the Bonnie Prince in his escape through the heather taking a route through the north-west Highlands, Western Isles and Skye, eventually fleeing to France from Loch nan Uamh, near Lochailort.

  Through the window of his drawing room, Lochiel points to some beech trees. ‘When Bonnie Prince Charlie landed, the Gentle Lochiel went to tell him that he hadn’t got a hope and should give it all up.’ He argued that the Jacobites now controlled Scotland, and with French support they had a much better chance of beating the British. ‘Before he left he chucked the young beech trees into a trench down the river and, of course, he never came back because Prince Charlie persuaded him to join him on the march south. So the trees have grown up higgledy-piggledy down the river; planted in 1745.’

  SAM

  One of the Gentle Lochiel’s brothers, Archibald Cameron, also escaped to France with the prince but he was sent back to Scotland to search for the lost Jacobite gold by the money-mad Prince. Spain had pledged 400,000 livres (the currency of the time) to Charles and the Jacobite cause. The Mackays, loyal to King George II, captured the first instalment. In 1746, two ships (Mars and Bellona – both gods of war) arrived with 1,200,000 livres from the Spanish and the French, leaving the money and gold at Loch nan Uamh Arisaig on hearing of the defeat at Culloden. It was the same place from where the prince would escape to France and it was on Cameron land.