John Prebble's Scotland

by John Prebble

  I am glad I was able to see the Great Glen when it was still a busy waterway, when white-decked steamers from Oban and black trawlers from Peterhead passed lock by loch along Telford’s canal. He began this engineering marvel in 1804 but the original inspiration was not his. Thirty years earlier, James Watt had surveyed the glen and made the first proposals for a system of canals that would link its four lochs and join the North Sea to the Atlantic. By such a highway, it was said, sailing-ships would avoid the storm-hazards of the long north-about voyage by Cape Wrath, but before the canal was finished the coming of steam had eased many of the dangers of that passage. Even so the venture prospered, and was the greatest engineering achievement in Scotland until Thomas Bouch built his calamitous railway bridge across the Firth of Tay.

  Telford’s malicious incubus during the building of the canal, and one he prayed God and the Government to remove from his shoulder, was Alasdair Ranaldson MacDonell of Glengarry. Perhaps I write too much about this anachronistic clown, and I know that there are members of the Clan Donald Society who would agree. When I wished to reproduce Dighton’s vivid pencil sketch of Glengarry, as an illustration in Mutiny, the Society’s representative in Edinburgh refused me permission to use the original it holds on loan, informing me that I had denigrated him enough. It would be hard to improve upon the theatrical caricature he himself created, particularly when he posed for Henry Raeburn’s superb portrait. He was a handsome but mock warrior obsessed with dreams of glory, although his regimental career was a comic disaster and it was his agreeable brother who became a hero at Waterloo. Had his wish to have been born two generations earlier been granted, his contemporaries would still have thought him insufferably bizarre. He lived as he believed they had lived, dressed in a fanciful elaboration of their costume, strapped about with fearsome arms, and always accompanied by a tail of body-servants in equally absurd dress. Although he evicted his clansmen to find the money to support his melodramatic way of life, he was angered when they emigrated. He tried to stop them, and was denounced by Burns who called him a tyrant for preventing their escape from slavery. He made a misery of Telford’s hard-working days, raiding the Canal Company’s saw-pits and brick-stores, threatening the workmen with his terrible anger. When the Commissioners rightly accused him of stealing their timber, he told them that a Highland-man had different notions of property (meaning theirs, not his), and when brought to court in expensive actions that further ruined him he defended himself by saying that not only was a Highlander, naturally generous and brave, he was an enemy to all oppression. It was such braggadocio, perhaps, that persuaded Scott to think of him as a treasure. Bitter and angry, Telford saw MacDonell and his ilk in a different light. Highland landlords, he said, were the most rapacious in Europe.

  All that is left of Alasdair Ranaldson now, beyond the Clan Donald Society’s jealous concern for his memory and my repeated denigration of it, is the ridiculous Glengarry bonnet he designed. When he was buried, fittingly in a Wagnerian thunderstorm, his wake was renowned. One hundred and fifty members of his True Society came to Invergarry for the funeral meats, shouting his slogan as they raised their glasses to his yellow standard, below candles stuck in the white skulls of the stags he had killed, sometimes with his dirk. Outside in the rain, bread and cheese and whisky were given to fifteen hundred people of his clan, most of whom would be evicted within two decades. “Many of his faults,” said the Inverness Courier in a generous obituary, “were traceable to he having been left, like Byron, without a strong guiding hand in youth.” The blind bard of Glengarry, Ailean Dall MacDougall, spoke a more grieving valediction in the storm, “Blessed the corpse the rain falls on …” It is impossible not to see some irony in that, for Ailean Dall had earlier composed a bitter threnody for those whom his chief and others were driving from their homes.

  A cross has been placed upon us in Scotland.

  Poor men are naked beneath it.

  Without food, without money, without pasture,

  the North is utterly destroyed.

  Alasdair Ranaldson’s profligacy had squandered his inheritance, and to pay his debts his son Aeneas kept the lands of Knoydart in his possession but divided the rest of his estate, more than 100,000 acres, into three parcels and sold them for £198,150. The grazing was offered on lease to Border sheepmen, and while all these arrangements were being concluded by Aeneas MacDonell’s agents they were also issuing Writs of Eviction against the encumbering people of his clan. That same year, he too became an emigrant, but not crowded into a coffin brig in the Sound of Sleat, with three square feet on a lower deck for himself and each of his family, and already in debt to the master for food and water. He left for New South Wales in style, with his wife and child, his piper and his servants, clothing, bedding and bolts of tartan, furniture, agricultural tools and a number of prefabricated timber houses. “We cannot regard this expatriation of the head of an old Highland family,” said the Inverness Courier, “without some regret and emotion.”

  The new owners of the Glengarry estates were Edward Ellice, M.P., Lord Abinger, an aged opponent of the Reform Bill, and Lord Ward, a young man so affected by his novel lairdship that he dressed himself in kilt, plaid and feathered bonnet when he visited it. Between them, for their pleasure and expected profit, they had acquired a sad and beautiful land, sadder still for the departing of a people who had lived here for a thousand years. Although afforestation and a hydro-electric scheme have altered its appearance, it still moves the heart. The new road to Kintail and Skye now passes through it from Invergarry in the Great Glen, climbing above its lochs to the brown head of Meall-leac-ulaidh where I once watched a party of English visitors toasting the majesty of the view with gin-and-tonic. Nine hundred feet below the summit of the road, in the benevolent sunlight of a clear day, the green valley stretches westward from the Great Glen, by Loch Garry’s timbered banks to Loch Quoich in its blue bowl of mountains, over the high pass to Glen Barrisdale and the Knoydart shore. The lower valley, where a river thread joins the sapphires of the lochs, was once rich with oak trees, so plentiful that they were known as “the weed of the country”. Most of them are now gone, but in spring, when the green powder of their leaves lightly dusts the sombre face of the forestry plantations, there is a brief and wondrous reminder of their lost greatness.

  Edward Ellice paid twenty-one shillings and fourpence for each of the 30,000 acres of his Glen Quoich parcel. Within three years of the day he took possession of the Lodge at the foot of Gleoulaich, his guests had slaughtered four thousand game birds, a thousand hares and more than two hundred deer. The Game Book at the Lodge also recorded the “vermin” it had been thought necessary to destroy before a buyer would take the estate – fifteen golden eagles, forty-eight otters, one hundred and ninety-eight wildcats and more than a thousand hawks, as well as ravens, badgers, martens and foxes. The chiefs of Glengarry had worn an eagle feather in their bonnets, and Creagan-an-Fhithich!, the Raven’s Rock, was the war-cry shouted by their clan. All these creatures now regarded as vermin had once been part of the subtle and colourful mythology of the Gaelic people, but they too had become incompatible with the grazing of sheep and the sporting pursuit of game.

  In his Visitors’Book, Mr Ellice’s distinguished guests recorded their reason for accepting his hospitality and their reactions to the country about them. Although Richard Cobden called it “a dreary glen, into which gas or other modern improvements have failed to penetrate”, and the Marquis of Dalhousie wrote in horror of “hills white, loch black, wind howling like a whole legion of demons”, most of the visitors were euphoric in approval. They had come “for pleasure … for peace and quietness … idleness and good company … to find the heart of the Highlands … the key of the Highlands … to see Glengarrie her nain-sel …” When they left, they wrote valedictions in execrable verse, or mocked themselves with heavy jocularity. For no understandable reason now, John Delane the great editor of The Times described himself as “a physician extraordinary”, and in
the column reserved for Complaints he laboured through a remarkably bad pun.

  That my Hart is in the Highlands (Mr Delane

  was very unfortunate with the stags, on three

  occasions he always left his Hart on the Hills2

  None of the guests who stayed in the mountain cup of Glen Quoich, and at other estates of the new proprietors, can have been unaware that the peace and quietness they so much enjoyed had been made possible by the removal of the native peoples. It cannot be thought that John Delane, agreeably housed at the Lodge or pursuing his hart below the fluted escarpment of Gairich, did not once remind himself that the recent clearances in Glengarry had been as bitter as the evictions in Easter Ross ten years earlier, during which The Times had intervened as the champion of justice and humanity. Delane sent a special correspondent to report them, and published the dispatch which that angry journalist wrote from the inn at Ardgay. After a long and harrowing account of the eviction of the Glencalvie people, and a declaration that the destitution which followed all such removals was the result of “a cold, calculating heartlessness which is almost as incredible as it is disgusting”, the correspondent quoted a letter he had received from a minister of the Free Kirk.

  Nothing short of a visit to this quarter and conversation with the poor creatures themselves could give an idea of the misery and wretchedness to which the people of this parish are reduced by the heartless and cruel tyranny of their oppressors. Here there is a kind of slavery ten times worse than that which for so long disgraced Britain.

  I once found a more agreeable Visitors’Book in a small fishing hotel near Whitebridge, where the meandering military road climbs up from Foyers. It stood by a river bend and several small lochs, above the pleated wilderness of the Glendoe Forest and the brown, immobile waves of the Monadhliath. This was more than twenty years ago, and the hotel is undoubtedly changed now, but when I stopped there for an hour it was held in a curious limbo between present and past. The leather on its old chairs was worn and split, and the yellowing curtains at its windows buzzed with trapped flies. A stuffed wildcat snarled in a dusty corner, and varnished fish of prodigious size hung in glass boxes that lined a corridor leading to the source of a pervasive smell of boiled cabbage. As I waited for my coffee I read the Visitors’Book. It lay open on a table near the door, by an oriental vase filled with horned walking-sticks and green umbrellas. The entries began in the last century, a seasonal record of the kills made in loch and stream, each with date and place meticulously recorded, and sometimes with the sportsmen’s laconic comments on the weather, their good or bad fortune that day. On August 4, 1914, two words only were written, perhaps by the landlord or by a hurriedly departing guest – War declared. There was no further entry until 1919.

  The road outside the hotel is one of the earliest built in the Highlands, thirty miles from Inverness to Fort Augustus. It was cut by General Wade two and a half centuries ago and it is perhaps his monument, and a memorial, too, for the hundreds of soldiers and drafted Highlandmen who laboured on it. They worked from April to October in the rain and heat, tormented by midges, drinking and fighting, cursing God and their petty masters. For much of its length, one fork of the road is direct and straight like a sergeant’s halberd, along the shore of the loch from Dores to Foyers, where it then climbs into the hills, to the whispering brown grass of Stratherrick. Here it ripples over the uneasy earth for eight miles until it curls by Loch Tarff and comes down through the narrow green decline of Glen Doe to Fort Augustus. If there is no need for haste, as there should never be in the Highlands, it is the best road to take by Loch Ness, with a thought for Wade’s men who built it in the dust and mud, and sometimes roasted oxen whole to honour their general when he visited them in his old brown coach.

  But for this military road the pacification of the Highlands after Culloden might have been more difficult and thus, perhaps, less terrible. Four weeks after the battle, the advance guard of Cumberland’s Army, three battalions of infantry and eight companies of Campbell levies, left Inverness and reached Fort Augustus in two days. A week later they were followed by the rest of the Army, eight more battalions in faded scarlet and white pipe-clay, marching briskly along Wade’s road by tap of drum and the thin fluting of fifes. At Fort Augustus, an uninhabitable ruin since the Rebels destroyed it, they entered a strange and threatening land. At first there was little to cheer them when they set up their tented lines beside the River Oich, on a flat meadow that later became a golf course. “The mountains,” wrote Private Michael Hughes of the Buffs, “are as high and frightful as the Alps in Spain, so we had nothing pleasant to behold but the sky. ’Tis rainy, cold and sharp weather.” He and his companions watched as the Campbells “made a pretty place for the Duke to reside in, with handsome green walls, a fine hut with doors and glass windows, covered at the top with green sods or boughs, so that His Royal Highness resembled a Shepherd’s life more than that of a courtier.” Flushed with the glory of his decisive victory, and the ease with which he had entered the heart of the Highlands, Cumberland called Fort Augustus “this diamond in the midst of hell.” The hell was of his creation. The Army stayed there for six weeks, and in that time the whole of Lochaber and much of Badenoch was laid waste, and the back of the clan system was broken for ever. “For the space of fifty miles,” said Hughes, “neither house, man, nor beast was to be seen.” And a junior officer told a friend in Northumbria that “We hang or shoot everyone that is known to conceal [the Pretender], burn their houses and take their cattle, of which we have got 8,000 within these few days.”

  It is easy to see the British soldier as an inhuman beast in the sad story of Culloden, and there are witnesses enough to his savagery in the dusk of that afternoon. But it is not always realised that he was as much brutalised by his superiors as he was brutal in the execution of the orders they gave him, and the Age of Reason that employed him was not an age of compassion. There was none the less a human being inside his red coat, and often a thinking mind beneath his black three-cornered hat. Men like Michael Hughes, Alexander Taylor of the 21st, Enoch Bradshaw of Cobham’s Horse, and other common soldiers who put their halting thoughts on paper, helped me, I hope, to see and write of the battle with sympathy and concern for the ordinary men of both sides. I have been a private soldier in the ranks of a victorious and occupying army, among a defeated and demoralised people. I think I understand something of the elation, self-pride and arrogance of Cumberland’s men at Fort Augustus. And more – the weariness, shame and disgust that can disturb a soldier’s sleep after his war is won.

  South-westward from Loch Ness to Fort William, George Wade’s road is now covered by a modern highway, twenty-two miles by the water of Loch Lochy and a brooding council of seven mountains dominated by Ben Nevis. Now that Ballachulish is becoming more pleasing to the eye, its slate cones planted with trees and grass, Fort William is the ugliest town in the Highlands, and grows worse as a dribble of Teasmade hotels moves down the shore of Loch Linnhe. Its car-park, built out into the loch, threatens to become as large as the town itself. On its central street, its only true thoroughfare, there is a small sloping square and a museum where relics of Jacobite hagiolatry are preserved in the amber of lingering regret. The rest of the town, in summer at least, is a crowded lodging-house and depressing bazaar for the tourists upon whom it must increasingly depend. It was its misfortune that at the close of the 18th century no ducal overlord or Fishery Board thought it as worthy of Improvement as Inveraray, Lochgilphead or Ullapool, and the industrial transfusions of recent years have given it neither spirit nor dignity, whatever they have or have not done to staunch the bleeding of Highland economy. As I remember it forty-six years ago, it was then a more pleasant place, but perhaps I am wrong. When Victoria drove through it in 1873, to go aboard the smart little steamer placed at her disposal by Donald Cameron of Lochiel, she thought it “very dirty, with a very poor population”. But she was in a romantic mood, inspired by the beauty and history of Lochaber, “which I
am proud to call my own … for Stewart blood is in my veins, and I am now their representative.” She was right, of course, but it is a pity her words make Cumberland’s dragonnade seem like a civilised Deed of Conveyance.

  The town was once called Maryburgh, a mud and timber, fever-soaked village on the western approach to the 17th-century fort. When the Government sold this decayed stronghold to the West Highland Railway in the last century it was dismantled to make way for the waterside line to the station and pier. The gateway, however, was rebuilt at the entrance to the town cemetery where it still stands. The choice of the new site was perhaps no more than sensible economy on the part of the town council, but it was also peculiarly appropriate. The star-shaped fort of stone and timber at the mouth of the River Nevis was once a miserable pit of sickness and death. Fever, flux and despair winnowed its successive garrisons, and every week in winter, in the mist-rotting days of spring, burial parties slow-marched from the gateway of the fort, by muffled drum to the old grave-yard now covered by much of that expansive car-park.