John Prebble's Scotland

by John Prebble

  In the last great clearance of Glenelg five hundred men, women and children left for Canada on the Liscard, helped by £500 from the Destitution Board and £2,000 from Baillie, two-thirds of the amount the people had been led to expect from him when they agreed to accept their removal. The Inverness Courier praised him for his liberality in responding to the people’s desire to emigrate. Thomas Mulock had a keen ear for such humbug, however distasteful his polemics are to academic scholars today. He visited Glenelg, called the heads of forty families together and asked them if they were indeed willing emigrants.

  With one voice they assured me that nothing short of the impossibility of obtaining land or employment at home could drive them to seek the doubtful benefits of a foreign shore … So far from emigration being a spontaneous movement springing out of the wishes of the peasantry, I aver it to be the product of desperation … the calamitous light of hopeless oppression visiting their sad hearts.

  No sudden storm darkening the water of Loch Hourn, and no burning sunset on Druim Fada can solace a mind angered by the knowledge of such despair. There is scarcely any part of the Highlands where the joy I take in its solitude and beauty is not sobered by the thought of the people who once lived there, and of the manner of their dispersal.

  There were men who believed more might be done for Glenelg than its transformation into an uninhabited sheep-walk. Thomas Telford reported that it would always be the principal ferry-point for black cattle from Skye, and he thought the fishing-ground of Loch Hourn would develop if the military road from Loch Duich were improved. Twenty years earlier, John Knox had said “there are few places in the Highlands where the benefits of a town would be more generally felt than this place.” He was writing of Glen Mor, the green valley that drops gently down from the rock-fist of Sgurr Mhic Bharraich to the crescent curve of Glenelg Bay. The land here was always of importance, as a religious centre, in clan warfare and military occupation. For more than half a century it was the lonely site of the outpost garrison of Bernera, a three-storied barrack-house largely built with stories taken from the prehistoric brochs of the glen. It was established after the abortive Jacobite Rising of 1719, and although the earth upon which it stood belonged to MacLeod of MacLeod, the Government did not ask his leave. It was thirty years before he received any payment, and while he may have been grateful for the £1,600 he was given, his agents complained that the soldiers had taken possession of a peat-moss belonging to the people, and that a salmon-fishery had been ruined by “the nastynesse which was thrown out of the barracks.”

  Shaded by pines, the ruin of Bernera is now a grey husk on a green meadow known as Grund nan Righ, the King’s Ground. When I first visited it, I stood inside its fragile walls and listened to the sighing of the wind, trying to make some imaginative contact with the Englishmen who had soldiered there, until a passing voice warned me that I was putting my life at risk from falling stones. For much of its early life, Bernera was well-built and comfortable, and had to be, perhaps, for surrounded by dark and hostile hills its redcoats were far from home and the reassurance of friends. Their daily patrols left at dawn, to stumble through the rain and mist of narrow glens to the east. Young subalterns logged the passing of ships in the Sound, and successive commanders informed their masters in London of more rumours of another Rising. When that came, the soldiers might as well have been in York or Colchester. A French frigate, having brought the bonnie Prince to claim his own, sailed past Bernera without challenge and captured four English vessels in the Narrows. The garrison ended its existence in miserable decline. Where there had once been two hundred soldiers, Johnson and Boswell found only “a serjeant and a few men.” Sixty years later its abandoned shell was a brief refuge for some of Baillie’s evicted tenants, and when its slates were taken for the building of a Free Church its roof and floors soon collapsed. Now it is sometimes garrisoned by undisciplined crows, and once, at least, by a grey harrier which I started from the darkness of its rain-wet stones.

  Despite occasional reports of its closure, there is still a summer car-ferry between Glenelg and Skye, and it is a humbling experience to watch Murdo Mackenzie’s skill at the wheel of the little Glenmallie. The arc of the boat’s crossing, dwarfed by blue and silent hills, almost doubles the breadth of the Sound at this point. The distance is no more than five hundred yards, but too wide, one might think, for the Fingalians who decided to vault it on their spears, hurrying to defend their homes in Glenelg. They were mythological giants, however, and all succeeded, except one called Reath who was drowned when his spear broke. He is remembered by the name given to the narrows, Kyle Rhea – unless one prefers to believe that it means the Strait of the Current, for the tides here are the swiftest on the coast. In the days of sail it was impossible to make the crossing when wind and tide moved in the same direction, yet this was indeed the most expedient point for ferrying stock from Skye to the mainland, and as many as seven thousand animals would be taken over in one season. At slack tide, cattle were driven down to the water by a slipway still there, but horses, said John Knox, were pushed off the rocks.

  A small boat with five men attends, four of them holding the halters of a pair on each side. When black cattle are to cross the kyle, one is tied by the horn to a boat, a second is tied to the first, and a third to the second; and so on, to eight, ten, or twelve.

  The cattle were secured head to tail by a yard of stout rope, the leading strand noosed about the lower jaw, leaving the tongue free to prevent water from entering the throat. When an animal drowned, it was usually because this precaution had not been taken.

  Ashore on the mainland, close-herded on the King’s Ground for their evening stance, the black cattle still had one hundred and fifty miles to travel before reaching a market tryst in the Lowlands. The journey for other herds was even longer. A map of the drove-roads resembles one quarter of a spider’s web, the lines joining and crossing, pulled southward to the Stirling Plain7 Great and small, the herds came from Strath Helmsdale and Strath Naver in the far north, from Scourie and Assynt in Sutherland, Loch Broom and Loch Maree in Easter Ross, the Long Isle and the Uists, Skye. Mull, Lorn and Knapdale. For much of the way they followed the valley floors, where grazing was good and freely granted in return for welcome manuring. But time and distance sometimes made it necessary to go by the high passes, a thousand feet above sea-level over Lairigmore to Kinlochleven, and thence another eighteen hundred by the Devil’s Staircase to Rannoch. A higher climb yet was over the Monadhliath by the bleak pass of Corrieyairick and down to the valley of the Spey, terrace by terrace where George Wade would confidently cut his military road along much of the winding track.

  According to Stevenson, the drovers lived on ewe’s milk, cheese and bannocks. Perhaps they did in his youth, but a century earlier Thomas Pennant said they ate oatmeal and onions, mixed with blood drawn from a living steer. They were unwashed, bearded and unshorn. They wore homespun tweeds, coarse brown plaids, and dark bonnets of knitted wool. After the passing of the Disarming Acts, when other Highlanders were forbidden weapons, they were given licences to carry sword and dirk, pistols and musket, to protect themselves and their herds. Like the cowmen of the American West, they were stubbornly independent, offering their skill, experience and courage for the period of the drive only. They were landless men, without clan allegiance or pride, except in quarrelsome drink. When their services were not needed they were often despised and abused, and where they appear briefly in Scottish fiction they are presented as furtive and suspicious animals. Yet they were entrusted with their employer’s annual income in a land where cattle-thieving was an essential way of life. When the son of a chief or tacksman accompanied them on a drive, as much for adventure as the need to assure its safe arrival in Falkirk, he dressed himself with care – in tartan trews and plaid, silver buttons on his coat and a silver-hilted dirk at his hip, his bonnet cocked and a long sword slapping the flanks of his shaggy horse. This was not vanity alone. A laird who sent his son on a drive was a
nxious that his own dignity and station should be properly represented among the broadcloth of southern cattle-buyers and merchants. Boswell failed to understand this nicety of pride, or was derisively amused by it when he met Maclean of Lochbuie. “We were told much of a war-saddle on which this reputed Don Quixote used to be mounted, but we did not see it, for the young laird had applied it to a less noble purpose, having taken it to Falkirk fair with a drove of black cattle.”

  The herds came down to the Lowlands in August, September and October. At the height of the droving-trade, during the first years of the 19th century, more than 160,000 animals were annually gathered and sold on Stenhousemuir, two miles to the north of Falkirk. The Tuesday sales were busy, noisy and good-humoured, the moor dark with long-horned cattle and lines of carts and gigs. At dusk the light of naphtha flames glowed inside the tents of bankers, the booths of ale-sellers, tavern-masters and fairground entertainers. By 1849 droving had passed its peak, and in that year, for the first time, sheep outnumbered the black cattle brought to the tryst. Even so, cattle drives continued into this century, diminishing in size and importance. One of the last, nine years before I was born, came ashore on Glenelg Bay, moving inland by Loch Hournhead to a modest sale in Lochaber.

  The first reference to a cattle-tryst, I believe, was eight hundred years ago in the records of Melrose Abbey, and it is hard to understand why the long history of Highland droving has not been a rich inspiration to Scottish literature. The great days of cattle-driving in the American West, the cutting of trails from Texas to Kansas, Wyoming and Montana, lasted no more than twenty years, from the end of the Civil War to the Great Blizzard and the fencing of open range. But they have produced a colourful balladry and mythology, a scholarly library of sober history, good as well as bad fiction, and an enduring art-form in the cinema, all of it strongly influencing the spirit of the American people and exciting the imagination of diverse nations throughout the world. Scotland’s historical fiction, obsessed as much of it is with Jacobite hagiolatry and romance, has neglected the adventurous and frequently hazardous life of the Highland drover. It is too late now for that imbalance to be corrected, and long has been perhaps. The written record of the American West and its transformation into legend, the work of Ned Buntline as much as Owen Wister and Mari Sandoz, began while its inspiration was still a reality on the Great Plains beyond the Mississipppi8

  There is a small mystery in the story of Highland cattle that I have yet to see explained or acknowledged. Until the second or third decade of the 19th century all references to them carried that adjective black, and this was not, as I have been told, because of the peat-mud that darkened their long hair. The black bull of the Highlands, like the black herds it sired, was prized for its glossy coat, its green and waxen horns, its tapering quarters. But above all, “his colour should be black,” wrote an agriculturalist in 1811, “that being reckoned the hardiest and more durable species.” Hardy or not, it did not endure. By the middle of the century, artists who responded to a growing sentimental interest in the Highlands were picturing the now familiar red or red-brown animal, the pretty postcard beast still seen upon the braes. Black cattle were gone, and none can be seen today except a rare dehorned beast, forlorn among its red brethren. Perhaps I do know a common-sense explanation for their disappearance and consider it unsatisfying, preferring to believe that Providence or the like spared them from ignoble survival when the people who had depended upon them were departing, and the Great Cheviot was flooding over their valley pastures.

  The only land-way to Glenelg is the road from Shiel Bridge at the head of Loch Duich, a twisting hair-pin ascent of one thousand feet to the pass of Mam Ratagan. Except for re-surfacing, it has scarcely changed since 1809 when Telford improved the old military highway to Bernera barracks. I wish I could have climbed this road before much of it was red-walled and darkened by a forestry plantation, and thus seen the rugged mountains of Lochalsh and Kintail slowly unfolding to the north and east. But from the summit, when the road comes out of the cathedral pines, there is at last a noble view of the Five Sisters of Kintail, three times the height of Ratagan, with lakes of mist between their peaks. And westward, where the road curls down to Glenelg Bay, are the dark green waters of Kyle Rhea and the sun-hazed mountains of Skye. It was on the summit at Bealach Ratagan that I once saw an eagle below me in Glen Mor, the upturned fingers of its wing-feathers lightly resting on a thermal current. It hung motionless for a timeless moment and then, on one wing-beat it seemed, soared upward and lost itself in the sun.

  Soon it may again be possible to look eastward to Kintail from the northern ascent to Ratagan, although the price to be paid is perhaps unacceptable. The unnatural forest has matured and is being felled. Great lorries laden with timber are breaking the road and weakening the structure of Telford’s once sturdy bridges. The annual cost of repairing the road, already high, can only increase, but differences of opinion over the responsibility for its maintenance delay a practical agreement upon its future. There is no other mainland access to Gienelg. The last mail-boat visited it twenty years ago, the last Clyde steamer or coaster ten years before that. There is only the road, built for horsemen, wheeled carts and marching feet. The forest is not inexhaustible, of course, and in time the felling will stop, but by then the road may be unusable, and the little communities of Glenelg will be negelected and alone.

  Boswell and Johnson passed over Mam Ratagan on their way to Skye, the Doctor riding a small grey horse that staggered under his weight and gave him unhappy thoughts about mortality above a precipice. He was in a dreary humour, angered by the journey and by Boswell who had pressed on ahead, anxious to reach the inn at Glenelg. Johnson called him back with a passionate shout, saying he would rather pick a man’s pocket than desert him thus. After an exchange of polite incivilities they rode on together, in friendship again and in anticipation of warm comfort at the inn. Instead of that, they found the place “damp and dirty … a variety of bad smells … a coarse black greasy fir table … with not a single article we could eat or drink.” After the misery of the pass, and now the thought of a night to be spent on a wretched bed of hay, Johnson was surprisingly calm. From vanity, suggested Boswell, still nettled by his companion’s ill-temper that afternoon. “No, sir,” said Johnson, “from philosophy.”

  I make no apology for my frequent references to these entertaining travellers. Their companionship in Scotland is stimulating, and Boswell’s Tour is the best account yet written of a journey to the Highlands, or likely to be written9 They came westward to Shiel Bridge from Fort Augustus, through opening hills and narrowing glens that are the legendary hunting-ground of the Feinn. They left the fort at noon and “travelled eleven miles through a wild country” before resting for the night at the inn of Aonach in Glen Moriston. Aonach is no longer marked, or remembered perhaps, but I believe it was on the north bank of the river close to Achlain. Here the heather-hidden track of the old military road comes down the side of Druim a Chathair to the present highway on the south bank, eleven or twelve miles across the hills from Fort Augustus. The keeper of the turf-walled inn was a MacQueen who had fought for the Pretender at Culloden, and although he was not a young man he was thinking of emigrating. “All the Laird of Glenmoriston’s people would bleed for him,” he said, “if they were well used.” But seventy men had gone out of the glen to America and he intended to follow them now that his rent had risen to twenty pounds, twice what he could afford. Johnson was sympathetic, and wished MacQueen’s landlord would go to America instead. The innkeeper said he would be sorry at that, for the Laird “could not shift for himself in America as he could do.” Boswell observed that this was generously said, missing the point of MacQueen’s irony, I think. Despite their approval of the innkeeper’s sensibility and English pronunciation, his little shelf of books and a daughter worthy enough to be given Johnson’s copy of Cocker’s Arithmetick, both men went to bed believing MacQueen might rob and murder them in their sleep. They were perhaps asham
ed of that fear in the morning, when he gave them his protective company for some miles along the road, and made Boswell weep with his account of Culloden.

  They took the recently completed military route through Glen Moriston to Glenelg, the second of four roads that have been built here since 1654, when one of Cromwell’s avenging generals burnt his way from Loch Ness to Loch Alsh. A good highway now makes this long approach to the Isles. It is the best of Highland roads, or so I believe until I pass again by Lochaweside. There is a fine harmony between earth and sky on the braes of Glen Moriston, a robust strength where the rolling land climbs to the clouds, stretching its limbs and opening its lungs to the winds from Knoydart and Glenelg. Five miles from Achlain at Ceannacroc, a low stack above the waters of three small rivers, there is a roadside cairn for Roderick Mackenzie whose death here first inspired me to write about Scotland. And northward in the twisting glen of the River Doe is the rock-cave of Coiredhoga where the man for whom Mackenzie died was sheltered by seven outlaws. Twenty-three years ago, in the summer when Culloden was published, I set out to walk the rough path to the cave with my daughter. It is not far to go perhaps, but she was young, and although she would have stayed with me bravely as far as she could, it was a foolish thing to ask of her. After we had climbed a mile or so, and passed beyond a green waterfall, a shepherd came down the brae to us. He looked at my daughter and asked where we were going. When he was told, he smiled and handed her a sprig of heather, saying, “You will be walking no further this way.”