John Prebble's Scotland

by John Prebble

  There is no Highland coastline more lovely to my eye than Arisaig, the tip of Morar’s finger between Ardnamurchan and Knoydart. It is fragmented into green islets past which the tide moves into its white-sand bays like the wake of invisible ships. In spring the croft-land above the tough sea-grass of the machair is veiled by the smoke of burning heather, milk-white and lazily drifting. On days of rough weather the wind from the Atlantic can be strong. Dark-headed pine lean inland before it, and the grieving rain it brings is rank with the smell of salt and kelp. And sometimes, in the tranquil dusk of autumnal evenings, greylag geese from Iceland plane down to a shoreline of yellow birch and skid across the water on the splayed web of their pink feet.

  Where the road marches briefly beside the railway to Mallaig both cross the shortest river in Britain, less than half a mile and bisecting a narrow isthmus of sand and rock, oak and birch. Its clear and curling flow is the outlet of Loch Morar, the deepest water in Scotland and the legendary home of an ill-tempered monster so far ignored by publicists and post-cards. This brooding and beautiful loch was once a great glacier, four thousand feet deep and held in a bowl of mountains which now darken the water for most of the day until the westering sun ignites its cluster of islands with incandescent fire. There are no roads along its steep shores, and the remaining houses of its deserted townships can be reached by boat only, or by heather tracks from Glen Pean and Lochailort. Its remote silence, like that of many Highland glens, is deceiving, persuading the eye and mind that it was always so, but once there was a Catholic seminary here, and the residence of Hugh MacDonald, the Pope’s Vicar-Apostolic in the Highlands. It was thus good theatre, perhaps, that the most notorious of Catholic chiefs – that is to say, the most guileful and double-dealing of all chiefs, who happened also to be a Catholic – took shelter on Loch Morar after Culloden and was captured there by a landing-party from H. M.S. Furnace, after they had dragged their long-boat over the isthmus from the sea. The fugitive chief, Simon Fraser of Lovat, was subsequently relieved of his estates and his head. The loss of the latter was scarcely regretted outside his own clan, and the former were ultimately restored to his onetime Jacobite son, perhaps because of the young man’s energy as a prosecuting counsel at the trial of James Stewart of the Glen, or his greater zeal five years later when he raised fourteen hundred Highland soldiers for George II, whose right to the throne he had once disputed in arms5

  Morvern is the southern peninsula of the Rough Bounds, although some would place it outwith the Garbhchriochan. Behind the axe-blade edge of its coastline, slicing at the Isle of Mull, is a rising land of crumpled hills, lonely glens, and starch-white outcrops of high rock. Much of its principal highway follows the 18th-century drove-road by which some of Mull’s black cattle were brought to a staging market at Strontian, below the braeside pits of the York Company’s lead mine. The long-horned beasts came ashore in Loch Aline, a sheltered bay like a notch in the axe-blade. On Ardtornish Point at its narrow entrance is the greystone rind of a castle from which John of Islay, the last MacDonald Lord of the Isles, sent envoys to England with proposals for a grand alliance against Scotland’s king. They met the English commissioners at Westminster in February, 1462, and when their long arguments were over it was agreed that in return for England’s help and a share in all the lands north of the Forth – which he was expected to conquer – John of Islay would become the vassal of Edward IV. The briefly-secret Treaty of Ardtornish and Westminster was the MacDonalds’ greatest challenge to the Crown of Scotland, and undoubtedly their most calamitous mistake. After thirty years of intermittent conflict during which the English, fighting among themselves, did little to help their distant ally, the Lordship of the Isles was taken from Clan Donald and its humbled chiefs knelt before James IV in the midsummer shadow of Mingary Castle. Stripped of his estates and titles, a miserable pensioner now of the King he had opposed, John of Islay died at last in a Dundee lodging-house, far from the Hebrides and too poor to pay the last reckoning for his bed and board.

  Loch Aline was not always as peaceful as it now appears, a green mantle of trees on the lava cliffs above its silicate shores, and its blue water dusted with white sea-fowl. The long and bloody history of Morvern, feud and foray, reached a violent climax here in March, 1746, when two of the King’s sloops, one of them suitably named Terror, made an evening anchorage off the mouth of the loch. At dawn the next day, Captain Robert Duff landed fifty-five seamen and almost as many soldiers of the Royal Scots Fusiliers with orders “to burn the houses and destroy the effects of all such as were out in the Rebellion.” By six o’clock that evening, reported the captain of the second sloop, “near 400 houses amongst which were several barns fill’d with corn, horse, cows, meal and other provisions were destroy’d by fire and firearms.” Along fourteen miles of the coast, from Drimnin to Ardtornish at the head of Loch Aline, fifteen small townships were razed. The seamen of the Terror also put their torches to the natural woodlands, a wanton spite from which the trees have never fully recovered. Two weeks later another landing-party from the sloops set more houses, barns and trees aflame on the Sunart shore. All this was the bitterly-remembered “Burning of Morvern”, and two generations later old men still spoke of the day when their beloved land became “one red ember”.

  Stevenson first saw the Morvern coast in his late teens, when he joined his father aboard the yacht Pharos for an inspection tour of the western lighthouses. He was more familiar with the Islands than with the mainland, the Devil’s Staircase and the long track by Rannoch. He never trod that path, I think, or he would not have made Alan Breck declare that twenty squadrons of dragoons could hide in the mist of the moor, and ride down the fugitives among its bogs. But he knew the beauty of Mull, and Morvern across the Sound, and the harsh inhumanity that could violate their innocent tranquility. When he put David Balfour ashore in Loch Aline the young man saw the beach “quite black with people”, and a seagoing ship taking emigrants aboard for the American colonies.

  … and there began to come to our ears a great sound of mourning, the people on board and those on shore crying and lamenting one to another so as to pierce the heart.

  This incident is irrelevant to the narrative flow of Kidnapped. It is also set too early in history, although it is true that here, on Loch Aline, many of Morvern’s unhappy people later saw the last of their homeland, its green hills darkening to blue as their ship went out with the evening tide. Writing his novel in a yellow-brick house on a Bournemouth chine, struggling with sickness and mounting bills, Stevenson was perhaps recalling a boyhood memory, a painful experience that had long awaited relief through his creative imagination. In the year he sailed about these waters more than thirty families were evicted from the Lochaline estate by its new proprietor, the widow of a Glasgow banker. If he did not see their departure himself, as I believe he must have done, the boy undoubtedly heard about it. These were the hard days of eviction and clearance in Morvern, sadly lamented by John MacLachlan of Rahoy, a Gaelic bard and a good man who practised medicine among the people, without any formal qualifications, it would seem.

  Heavy, sorrowful my heart

  going through the glen …

  On an April morning I no longer hear

  bird-songs or the lowing of cattle on the moor.

  I hear the unpleasant noise of sheep

  and the English language, dogs barking

  and frightening the deer.

  From the beginning of the sixteenth century, after the passing of the Lordship of the Isles, Morvern was ruled by the chiefs of Clan Maclean before the Earl of Argyll took most of it in the King’s name and for his own profit. The Campbells gave it stability, reform and some prosperity until the middle decades of the last century when the estate was sold to the newly-rich from England and the Lowlands. Its history under these incomers has been admirably told in a dispassionate work by Philip Gaskell6 Although this studies one area of the Clearances without the emotion of less scholarly writers, it justifies their anger, I
think. The native population of Morvern was reduced by two-thirds in the 19th century, and little if anything now remains of their small townships. But some of the great houses built by the new proprietors still stand behind their protective screens of woodland, mansard roofs lifted above the leaves, dark windows looking westward to the sea.

  One of the earliest incomers was Patrick Sellar, an advocate who had abandoned Law for estate management while he was still a young man. He became a factor to the Countess of Sutherland and her English husband, the Marquess of Stafford, and cleared Strath Naver for them with a zealous brutality that led to his trial, and acquittal, on a charge of murder. Having emptied the strath, and burnt the roof-trees of its evicted people, he then took a lease on the best of its land between Ben Griam and the River Naver. With the money acquired by his success as a tenant-farmer he bought the Acharn estate in the heart of Morvern, evicted 220 people or more, and stocked the land with sheep brought from Strathnaver. Six years later he took the Ardtornish estate on the southern shore of the peninsula, and this time the outgoing proprietor was obliged to clear its encumbering people before the conveyance was completed. All this, perhaps, should be considered against Sellar’s deprecatory admission that before he went to Sutherland he believed that “the growth of wool and sheep in the Highlands was one of the most abominable and detestable things possible to be imagined.” Nothing redresses the misjudgements of youth so well as financial and social success in middle-age. Gaskell is critically generous to Sellar, and supporters of the sensitive House of Sutherland today maintain that he has been ill-used and misunderstood. He was clearly intelligent and industrious, amiable and agreeable among his equals, respectful to his superiors, and no doubt kind to his children. But in the Gaelic verse of the Clearances, stubbornly ignored by most academic historians, he is less charitably remembered. Nam faighinn’s air an raon thu…

  If I had you on the field

  and men binding you,

  with my fist I would tear

  out three inches of your lungs!

  Applying the wit as well as the wealth they had inherited from distilling, haberdashery, brewing and grocery, the new gentry of Morvern were instinctively more efficient than their Gaelic predecessors in the business of Improvement. Like others elsewhere in the Highlands they introduced no radical changes in the nature of land ownership, the joint holdings and co-operative sheepherding suggested by Sir John Sinclair fifty years earlier, and they did not respond to Delane’s reporter who urged them to “create employment… make many yeomen out of one sheep-farmer.” By such genuine improvements the land might have been able to support its population and avoid recurring famine and destitution. The only answer the proprietors had to these calamities was one most profitable to themselves, the removal of the people, and in that light they could sometimes think of Clearance as the solemn duty of humane landlordism. Stiff in such rectitude, and entrenched in the Victorian belief that the increasing wealth of the few must alleviate the poverty of many, they posed for photographers on the sheep-cropped lawns of their new chateaux, sitting imperially on chairs brought from within, their faces hidden by Mosaic beards or shadowed by wide sun-hats. They delighted in the romantic beauty of their mountain paradise. They read Scott and Aytoun, painted in water colours, held balls and musicales, hung stags’-heads and broadswords on the walls of their libraries, tramped their glens in good tweeds, filled their visitors’-books with the names of the fashionable and illustrious, and sometimes married their children to the descendants of chiefs. When the staple economy of the Highlands was weakened by the import of mutton and wool from Australasia – to which they had dispatched their unwanted Gaelic people – they were now secure enough in foreign investments to clear sheep from much of their land and turn it into a playground for deer-stalking and grouse-shooting.

  Before passable roads were cut and before the railway reached the Great Glen, visitors to Morvern arrived by sea from Greenock, on elegant steamers with raking funnels, splashing side-wheels, and white awnings amidships. The little port of Lochaline has survived this busy past and is still in occasional use, piermaster’s house and ticket office like an abandoned and paint-blistered railway station. It is a pleasant place to sit on an autumn evening now, with Ardtornish Castle a black silhouette on the Point, and the last ferry from Mull creaming the water of the Sound. In the silence of a closing day it is possible to think of the pier as it was when a Clyde steamer came alongside – English voices as noisy as a gathering of starlings, alpine ranges of unloaded luggage, rods and guns like stands-of-arms, spinning parasols moving toward waiting gigs, children in martial order behind their governess, a homeward soldier in scarlet and tartan, Glasgow carpenters and masons with carpet-bags of tools, a commercial traveller haggling for the hire of a horse, a wicker post-cart and canvas sacks of mail, the scent of peat-smoke, the stench of fish-boxes, the barking of game-dogs, and the music of a kilted piper, sent from Ardtornish House to greet its guests. For seventy years privileged life moved pleasantly through the seasons, and inexorably toward August, 1914, which it would survive more happily than the last of Morvern’s young Highland men.

  Northward between Loch Duich and Loch Hourn, Glenelg is sometimes said to have taken its name from a holy place. Once it was indeed a flourishing and devout parish, and two of its dark peaks are The Chapel and The Church. It is also thought to have belonged to Eilg, a Pictish or pre-Celtic chief. Thirdly, and more sweetly to my mind, the root of its name may be Elgga, a poetic term for Ireland. The old approach to this knotted peninsula goes by Glen Garry and the dammed waters of Loch Quoich, and then to the north through a narrow pass. Here it is one of the most spectacular roads in the Highlands, insanely twisting and resolutely climbing, and when it descends to Loch Hournhead it has only touched the eastern skirt of Glenelg. When I first came this way, although my mind was already stunned by the lonely majesty of the country I was still unprepared for what I saw at the end of the road. Westward in a narrow trough of mountains, the crooked bend of Loch Hourn was a dazzling blue, the tide on the turn and gently breaking the reflection of sky and clouds. During the lighting of a cigarette the surface of the water changed to violet, and then became ink-black. A storm broke in thunder along the ridge of Druim Fada, and rain came quickly from the hidden sea, grey and yellow, sweeping through the narrows at Caolasmor and masking all but the immediate stones in front of me. The air was suddenly death-cold, and there was no sound but a long drum-roll on the roof of the car. In five minutes the squall had passed, the loch was blue again, and sunlight steamed on the road. Having made its point, the thunder grumbled inland toward the glens of Lochaber.

  In the days of the drovers there was a northern track from Kinloch Hourn, over the heather saddle of Buidhe Bheinn to a deep gorge below the Ben of the Sheep, turning there to the Sound of Sleat. It is scarcely visible now, but sometimes on a high point, before I come down to Loch Hourn, I believe I am not deceived by a trick of light and shadow, that I do see the clear trace of the drove-road. Because imagination is always my evocatory companion in the Highlands, I can see the slow movement of black cattle on the braes of Buidhe Bheinn, the sunlit gleam of drovers’swords. I believe that what I hear is not the keening of gulls above the tidal mud but the voices of men, calling as they approach an evening stance for their herd, rough lodgings for themselves behind the tavern and the hope of a dram from any Glengarry gentry awaiting a seaward passage to Inverie.

  Glenelg was once the richest district of the Rough Bounds, rich in warriors for the rent-roll of its chiefs, in wool and mutton for their inheritors. More than two thousand people lived in its mountains, in the townships along Glen Mor and Glen Beg, and on the green and fertile urlar by Glenelg Bay. In centuries past the tip of the peninsula was the home of the MacCrimmons. Two hundred feet below the round summit of Glas Bheinn, guarding the narrows of the Sound, there is a contrived or natural heap of stones, marked on an Ordnance map as Carn Cloinn Mhic Cruimein. Here a party of the clan slept at peace one
night, having defeated invading Mathesons in the Battle of the Archers and driven them back to their own country across the sea-water of Loch Alsh. Before dawn, the raiders returned and killed the young men as they slept. It is said that haunting pipe music is sometimes heard on the slopes of Glas Bheinn, and one should believe this, perhaps. The MacCrimmons’legendary reputation as unrivalled masters of the pipes deserves no less from the illusion of a lamenting wind.

  The MacLeods of Skye had a mainland foothold on Glenelg, granted by royal charter in 1340. They successfully defended it against the piratical ambitions of Frasers and Campbells, but in the beginning of the 19th century the mounting debts of the unfortunate or improvident Laird of MacLeod compelled him to surrender the estate to southern incomers and the Great Cheviot. It was sold for £98,500 in 1811, and sold again in 1824 for £82,000. Thirteen years later at an Inverness auction its price was £77,000, but profitable sheep-farming in the intervening years no doubt repaid the proprietors for the fall in value. With each change of ownership, more of the native population were evicted, and by 1846 almost all of those remaining were living in great poverty and squalid hovels along the shore of Loch Hourn, an increasing liability under the Poor Laws. They were finally removed by the agents of the absentee landlord James Baillie, a merchant banker of Bristol who now styled himself of Glenelg, once of Dochfour. One of the social advantages of estate ownership in the Highlands was that it gave incoming proprietors the right to an ancient territorial designation, with colourful associations in romance and history, and if this did not always make them acceptable their grandchildren were assured of an influential place in society. When the name of a Highland landlord appears in the press today, dignified by territorial, military or municipal title, it sometimes pleases me to search through old notes and discover the price paid for such distinction and authority, by his grandfather or great-grandfather, and by the Gaelic people of the Highlands.