Clanlands

by Sam Heughan

  An oh Lord, bless the wee coo, an’ make it a big coo.

  An oh Lord bless the sucklin’ and make it a grand boar.

  An oh Lord, bless the wee bairns, yon Angus, Alex an’ Bessie an’ Maggie an’ Florrie.

  An oh Lord, build up a great wall between us an’ the Irish, an’ put broken bottles on the top, so they cannae come over.

  An’ oh Lord, if ye hae anything gude to gie, dunna gie it to the Irish, but gie it to your chosen people, the Scots, especially to the Clan Mackenzie an’ a’ their friends.

  Glorious ye are for ever more.

  Anonymous

  SAM

  As we walk up the impressive tree-lined driveway to Castle Leod (pronounced ‘loud’), seat of the MacKenzies, Graham puffs out his chest and takes in the view of the Highland fortress.

  Graham: Ach, home at last! I used to hang out here a lot with Colum. And, we let you stay here for a while. (The fictional seat of the MacKenzies in Outlander, Castle Leoch, was actually filmed at Doune Castle in Stirling.)

  I’m feeling a wee bit peely-wally after another evening of whisky and a long drive over the bridge across the Great Glen Loch to the Eilean Dubh (the Black Isle) where we are this morning, an isthmus ten miles wide and twenty miles long, north of Inverness within Ross and Cromarty. Scotland is so much bigger than people think. There’s a whole other world above Glasgow and Edinburgh.

  John MacKenzie, 5th Earl of Cromartie, chief of Clan MacKenzie, has agreed to meet us thanks to an email from Cameron McNeish.

  Sam,

  Just a thought and I don’t know if it’s helpful but I’ll tell you anyway.

  The present Chief of Clan Mackenzie, John Mackenzie, the Earl of Cromartie, is a good pal of mine. He’s a mad keen rock climber, and a bloody good one in his day. He’s written rock-climbing guides. I made a television programme with him years ago. He lives in Castle Leod at Strathpeffer. He’s also a bit of a nutter, and really good fun. In a previous life he was an explosives expert – loves blowing things up . . .

  I’ll see if I can find a YouTube of the show I did with him . . .

  Cheers

  Cameron

  Staunch Jacobites, this branch of the MacKenzies has followed the House of Stuart since the Battle of Flodden in 1513, when James IV of Scotland declared war on England to divert Henry VIII’s troops from France, honouring ‘The Auld Alliance’ (1295–1560) between the French and Scots in an attempt to curb the numerous English invasions. James IV died at Flodden, the last British king to die in battle. (The English won. Again. Groan.)

  John MacKenzie walks with purpose to greet us in the grounds of his stunning fifteenth-century castle. Well spoken, unassuming and nothing like Gary Lewis who plays Colum (no hug! More on that later . . .), it’s great to meet another man of the mountains. Hill walker and climber extraordinaire, he’s climbed the Old Man of Hoy, a towering stack of rock over 400 feet high off the north coast of Scotland. ‘I started rock climbing at twelve,’ he says. ‘I don’t know how old I am now – the birthday candles fall off because the cake isn’t big enough but I’m still climbing! It’s a fantastic thing to do – I see it as a celebration of life.’

  The gardens at Castle Leod are vast, with a number of enormous ancient trees, the ground covered in bluebells in the spring. He shows us a grove of lime trees with a secret tree house in the centre and then guides us to a stone commemorating the fallen MacKenzies on both sides of the Jacobite Risings. As we’ve discovered, nothing was clear-cut during that period with husbands and wives dividing their allegiances between opposing forces – ‘wisely sitting on the fence’ as John says – so they wouldn’t lose everything.

  The MacKenzies are an enormous clan so many were pro-Hanoverian (aka British) but this branch was pro-Stuart (Jacobite – Latin for followers of James, specifically James II). ‘It was disastrous for the MacKenzies after the 1745 Risings but we’re still here. It was a lost cause with the benefit of hindsight,’ he says.

  As we make our way into the medieval tower house that dates from 1400, he shows us the Marriage Stone over the original medieval oak door. ‘It was for Sir Rorie MacKenzie, the Tutor of Kintail, who married Dame Margaret McLeod of Lewis – bringing unity. They lived at Leod and her money made this place more comfortable! Sir Rory was a formidable character who was given the ‘Patent of Fire and Sword’ by James VI to ‘civilise’ the north and west. I love the word civilise – more ethnic cleansing – which was done effectively.’

  Sir Rorie certainly had a fearsome reputation, inspiring sayings such as, ‘There are only two things worse than the Tutor of Kintail, frost in spring and mist in the dog-days’. And there is an apocryphal story of him riding alone near Blair Castle, when he was asked what he was doing by the Duke of Atholl’s men. He said nothing, dismounted and began sharpening his sword on a rock. They watched him as he finally told them his mission. ‘I am about to make a road between your master’s head and his shoulders.’ The men rushed to tell the Duke who replied, ‘It can only be two people, it is either the Devil or The Tutor of Kintail, let him pass safely!’

  Sam: Graham – leave the door alone!

  He won’t stop touching the door. I think he’s fallen in love with it. A huge, thick wooden studded door, reinforced with steel and bolts. No enemy would be able to gain access without permission. I think Graham wants it for the home he’s building in New Zealand which, he says, has ‘270 degree views of the harbour and the hills.’ I love how specific he is.

  GRAHAM

  It is a truly splendid studded oak door. They don’t make those in Ikea, I can tell you. ‘It dates from 1605,’ says Chief MacKenzie. ‘So relatively modern,’ he smiles. Over 400 years old and, yes, Sam is right, I can’t stop stroking it.

  But whoa! Then there’s the key, an enormous iron thing that could also be used as a club, or possibly a doorstop. MacKenzie hands it to me; it’s the weight of a brick and doubles as – I kid you not – a firearm. ‘.45 calibre,’ he grins. ‘Just as well we’re not in America.’ I bet he’s fired it given his former penchant for blowing things up. I wonder if he’s got any cannons we could play with? On second thoughts, Sam’s here, maybe not.

  The walls of the castle are 2.4 metres thick in places – I mean this really is a proper castle – and one to which Mary Queen of Scots aka Mary Stuart (who reigned 1542–1567) had a lot of ties. We make our way up a winding spiral staircase and enter a room oozing history with portraits of the Chief’s forebears lining the walls like a rogues’, gallery and, there it is, Mary Queen of Scots’ prayer stool (prie-dieu), one of several belonging to Mary and her mother before, Marie de Guise, who ruled Scotland as Regent from 1554–1560. In the grounds there still stands a sweet chestnut planted for Marie de Guise’s visit all those centuries ago.

  There are two beautiful high-backed chairs with gently curving arms from 1701 owned by the 1st Earl of Cromartie. It’s wonderful to speculate who has sat on these chairs and what was discussed and plotted. ‘The 1st Earl was six foot two or three, a polymath, Secretary of State for Scotland, Lord Justice General, Founder Member of the Royal Society of Scotland, friend of Sir Isaac Newton, spoke eight languages, including Gaelic, and strongly disagreed with extreme religions and the burning of witches, which he considered to be idle superstition,’ says John. What a guy.

  A modern thinker, he was instrumental in the union of the crowns (uniting Scotland and England). ‘However, on the principle that both countries would be considered equal trading partners. But guess what happened? (England feathered its own nest? Surely not?) And, that’s one of the reasons this family became Jacobite,’ explains MacKenzie.

  We look at a portrait of the 2nd Earl who was involved in the plot to oust George I. A good swordsman, he ran a Frenchman (who was a government spy) through in a tavern before cleverly covering up the murder with a drunken bar brawl. ‘The 3rd Earl of Cromartie was an out and out Jacobite who supported Bonnie Prince Charlie and after Culloden was sentenced to death with other Jacobite Lords,’ s
ays Chief John showing us a surviving bedpost owned by Simon ‘The Fox’ Fraser, aka Lord Lovat, who was executed in 1747 at the age of eighty. The 3rd Earl was sentenced to suffer the same fate but was saved by his wife who petitioned the King, fainting at his feet. George II commuted his sentence from death to ‘life in exile south of the River Trent’. Never to see Scotland again he lived in Honiton in Devon, all titles, lands and money confiscated.

  However, the MacKenzies got it all back in one generation. The son, Lord McCleod, still only nineteen when released from the Tower, went to Sweden and became a legendary soldier, given the honorary title by the Swedes of Count of Crowmarty. He returned to Scotland and raised a ‘regiment of foot’ (unmounted foot soldiers), which was later to become the Highland Light Infantry. After serving in the British Army in India he was allowed to buy back the Leod estate for £19,000 – a vast sum in those days.

  But let’s get back to the Old Fox, Simon Fraser – now there was a Highland character! I think having played Dougal MacKenzie, I have an affinity with rogues like Lord Lovat, played brilliantly by Clive Russell in Outlander, Season Two. There is a sketch of Fraser by Hogarth. It is the drawing of a man who clearly enjoyed life to the full. His saturnine face, full mouth, and twinkling eyes make him look like he is plotting mischief, which he undoubtedly was.

  He was a famous double agent, spying for the Jacobites and the Hanoverians – think Lord Sandringham in Outlander (portrayed magnificently by Simon Callow) who played politics for his own ends, revelling in the mischief and sadistic outcomes he created. Our host, John MacKenzie, tells us it was none other than The Fox who persuaded his ancestor to ‘come out’ for Charles Stuart by handing George, the 3rd Earl, his great-great-grandfather’s sword named ‘The Triumphing Sword of the Clan MacKenzie’. I mean how could you say no?

  After Culloden, the Bonnie Prince headed for the hills and Lovat rowed across Loch Ness where gout and arthritis hampered his escape and he had to be carried ‘on a litter’ (think enclosed sedan chair!). If Hogarth’s depiction is correct he was vastly overweight so it would have been slow-going. It was rumoured he went ‘to ground’ at several local castles including Leod and Cawdor (in a secret turret) until he was eventually discovered hiding in the Isles of Loch Morar.

  He finally met his end on the scaffold at Tower Hill on Thursday 9th April 1747. It was a public holiday. Tens of thousands turned out to witness it. On the day itself Fraser was very particular about how he looked, the stylish clan chief till the end. He sent his wig back because there was too little powder on it. He said that if he had a suit of velvet he would wear it to the executioner’s block. This was MacShimidh Mor, ‘The son of the Great Simon’. They had fought their way onto the beaches of England with William the Conqueror; one of Lovat’s forebears was Robert the Bruce’s chamberlain. Another had been William Wallace’s compatriot, who shared the same punishment of hanging, drawing and quartering. This was to be Simon’s fate but it was commuted to simple beheading.

  In the build-up to the execution a timber terrace built for the occasion collapsed under the weight of spectators, crushing and impaling dozens, killing nine of them.

  When told of this, Lord Lovat laughed. ‘Good, the more mischief the better the sport.’ What a wag! He is supposed to have found it so funny that the phrase ‘laughing your head off’ comes from his execution.

  Finally a message was sent to the prisoner – ‘The axe demands your body.’ (Not a message you ever want delivered. It’s a bit unequivocal.) He walked with a straight back, smiling and joking, as he climbed the steps to the scaffold. He shook off the supporters who tried to help him. He paused at the top to test the edge of the axe, and looked at the casket waiting for him, as if he were browsing in a particularly macabre shop. He had left instruction in his will that his funeral should have pipers from John O’Groats to Edinburgh playing before his corpse and the women of the country should sing a ‘coronach’ for him (a Celtic keening song involving clapping of palms, howling, rocking and tearing of hair – weirdly exactly the same instructions as I have whenever I’m working with MacGinger).

  He spoke to the axeman and knelt down while two supporters stretched a scarlet sheet in front of him to catch the head as it fell from his shoulders. The executioner adjusted Lovat’s position and they spoke again. He would raise his handkerchief to pray; when he dropped it the executioner should strike. Among his last words was a line from the Roman poet Horace: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. (It is sweet and seemly to die for one’s country.) He died, in his own eyes, as a Scottish patriot.

  He stretched out his short, thick neck and less than a minute later dropped the handkerchief. His head was severed in one blow and he had the grim honour of being the last person to be beheaded in Britain. It was commanded that his remains be buried at the Tower of London but legend has it that his body was spirited away to the family mausoleum in Wardlaw, Kirkhill, near Inverness. However, in 2019, forensic scientists found that the headless corpse in The Fox’s coffin was actually that of an eighteenth-century well-to-do woman, which means wily Lord Lovat continues to fox us even from the grave!

  To examine Lovat’s story gives a wonderful glimpse into the life of a Highland chieftain in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. He once said of his kin that, ‘The Highland clans did not consider themselves as bound by the letter of the law, like the inhabitants of the low country around Inverness, but to a man would regard it as their honour and their boast to cut the throat, or blow out the brains of anyone who should dare to disturb the repose of their laird.’

  It’s the descendants of folk such as this who went on to colonise the world, and help build the British Empire. In a famous feud between the Murrays and the Frasers, Simon didn’t muck about. It started with him trying to marry Amelia, the Murray heiress (she’d only just reached puberty). Rather than let this happen, the mother of the unfortunate Amelia along with the Marquis of Atholl contrived to have the teenage object of Lovat’s affections whisked away. In return for being spared on one occasion the Murrays went to court to declare the Frasers had risen in ‘open and manifest rebellion’. This was a capital charge.

  They asked for a ‘Commission of Fire and Sword’ like John MacKenzie’s ancestor the Tutor of Kintail was given. This was effectively DEFCON 5 – the nuclear option – which would allow soldiers to go into the Fraser lands and kill anyone of the clan, and destroy their homes. However, the Crown was not inclined to give this power to the Murrays for what they considered a private feud. But good old Simon wasn’t done yet. He went with his men to Castle Dounie. If he couldn’t have the daughter, he’d have the mum. Then he’d have them both! He proposed marriage. ‘Come on, doll, we’ve known each other all our lives, let’s get it on.’ Or words to that effect.

  She refused.

  He urged, ‘If you don’t marry me the Atholl Murrays are going to come and burn and pillage my homeland, and kill everyone I know!’ Somehow she managed to resist this outpouring of romance!

  Not to be deterred, he thought for a moment then sent two of his men to kidnap a drunken priest. (Reminiscent of how Dougal gets a priest to marry Jamie and Claire.)

  What followed is summarised by one of Fraser’s kinsmen, Fraser of Castleleathers:

  ‘The Lady not yielding willingly, there were some harsh measures taken, a parson sent for, and a bagpipe blown up.’

  She was dragged in next to Simon, in front of the priest and was declared married while the sound of deafening bagpipes bounced off the walls. It’s like an episode of Love Island.

  The ‘wedding night’ involved some of Lovat’s men forcibly undressing her and lifting her onto the bed. They placed her face down and cut the stays of her corset with a dirk, and then left the happy couple alone. The sound of her subsequent screaming was drowned by the faithful piper playing for his life outside the room. In the morning she was found speechless and out of her senses. Diana Gabaldon would have been proud. Indeed when I told one of the showrunners of Out
lander this, he desperately wanted to put a version of it in the show. However, given that a rape occurs in Outlander so often you could set your watch by it, there probably wasn’t room in the schedule for yet another ravishing to occur.

  I could write a whole book about Simon Fraser alone (in fact people have), such is the extent of his extraordinary life. But hopefully this gives a glimpse into the character of the old fox. A man who would even make warlord Dougal MacKenzie blush.

  SAM

  Up the spiral staircase in Castle Leod, past suits of armour, crossbow bolt holes, and various pieces of centuries-old furniture, we stop to admire a rather new addition on the wall: a wooden plaque, thanking everyone who has donated money to help restore and maintain the upkeep of the castle. Diana Gabaldon is the latest donor and the interest that has been created in her books is generating revenue for these ancient fortifications. Graham and I are added to the list, happy to donate to the Trust in return for the personal tour. The castle holds so many secrets; many characters have walked through that thick wooden door and up the same spiral staircase. We hope many more people in the future get to follow those same footsteps and be warmed by the MacKenzie hearth.

  A fireplace, large enough to stand in, is situated at the end of an oak-panelled room; a smaller fire crackles and warms the room. We set up a good spot to shoot and sit in three chairs, all over 200 years old. I couldn’t help imagining the amount of arses that had sat there before. Mary Queen of Scots’ prayer stool, a priceless dining table, the room was filled with history and John patiently took us through it all. Various lords and ladies had done the same for centuries, entertained, played music, admired the paintings and sat where we were. These included a notorious eighteenth-century guest who, after drinking with the MacKenzies for five days straight, had to be revived by a doctor.