by John Prebble
Westward from Ceannacroc and in a deep brown furrow, Loch Cluanie is three miles longer and a hundred feet higher than when I first saw it, swollen now by a dam and by water that comes down from Loch Loyne through a tunnel two miles in length. Until the bespoke tailoring of the Forestry Commission has covered the shoulders of its enclosing hills, Cluanie will always appear bleak and unfinished, its shoreline so unnatural that I have been surprised to see a long-billed greenshank feeding in its shallows. It was more pleasing when there was a water-fringe of oak and birch below the hills, and yellow iris bending to the wind, the “delightful spectacle” that Johnson saw when he paused beside it, sitting alone in thought while the horses were put to graze.
The day was calm, the air soft, and all was rudeness, silence and solitude. Before me, and on either side, were high hills, which by hindering the eye from ranging, forced the mind to find entertainment. Whether I spent the hour well I know not; for here I first conceived the thought of this narration.
The clear recollection of inspiring time and place is beguiling,
but provokes sceptical doubt. He had read Martin Martin’s Description of the Western Islands in his youth, and carried a copy of it with him now. He had long desired to visit the Hebrides. “So long,” he wrote in the opening sentence of his book, “that I scarcely remember how the wish was originally excited.” He was aware that Boswell was keeping a daily journal, and it is impossible to believe that until he reached Loch Cluanie he had not once thought of writing his own account of their tour. When they resumed their journey he did not tell his companion of his momentous decision, and Boswell does not seem to have been aware of its moment of inspiration until Johnson’s book was published. But they were bickering again. The Doctor was suffering from a painful stye, and was consequently in a contentious humour. When Boswell described one of the soaring peaks of the Five Sisters as a cone, Johnson said it was not, for one side was larger than the other. When the poor fellow then observed that a second mountain was immense, Johnson ended their conversation with a ponderous snub. “No, it is no more than a considerable protuberance.” It is sad to think of them so out of sorts as they travelled through a country that always lifts my spirits. But I have never ridden toward the Five Sisters on the back of a Highland pony, by the rough stones of a military road, with a painful affliction and no certainty of a good inn to comfort me at dusk.
Whether or not inspiration did strike Johnson so pleasantly by the water of Loch Cluanie, I have sometimes wondered where he sat, and by what “clear rivulet.” James Hogg had no doubt. In 1803 he walked over the hills from Glen Garry, crossed the River Moriston, and “joined the old military road at the very green spot where Dr Johnson rested, and first conceived the design of transmitting his tour to posterity.” If my deductions from both accounts are correct, it was then half a mile up the brae from the loch, but now that has been raised it is closer to the water’s edge where the little burn of Allt Coire Lundie passes under the modern road. And so, to the time and date of Johnson’s professed inspiration, the morning of Wednesday, September 1, 1773, a map reference might now be added. It is 35/161107, but as to that, I could be wrong.
The considerable protuberances of the Five Sisters – a description that can destroy all aesthetic or erotic pleasure to be got from the first astonishing sight of them – are the eastern wall of Glen Shiel. Three miles westward from the head of Loch Cluanie, the valley is a narrow defile of steep mountains and dark moods, so perversely angled and shadowed that sunlight rarely touches one spot for more than a few minutes before moving to another saffron slope or high wall of blue rock. At each turn of the road, and of the storming, stony river it follows, the mountains draw in upon a traveller, and by the Bridge of Shiel the first of the Five Sisters sweeps her dark skirt to the south and almost closes the glen. The memory of defeat and despair is theatrically essential in so melancholy a place, and history supplies that here as it does elsewhere in the Highlands. On a June evening in 1719, three hundred white-coat Spaniards of the Regiment of Galicia formed their battle-line on a braeside above the stone bridge, committed by their king to the Pretender’s cause and to yet another wasteful Jacobite Rebellion. They nobly stood their ground under the fire of mortar-shells, each trailing smoke from the river bank below. When their Highland allies fled, and the English and Dutch advanced against their breastwork, the Spaniards retreated to higher ground in good order. They did not surrender until the following morning, three thousand feet above the floor of the glen and in a misted hollow still known as Coirein nan Spainteach.
One can never be sure of the weather in Glen Shiel, except that whatever it may be to the east or west it will be reversed here. I left the Skye ferry-point at Lochalsh one morning in early spring, called home urgently and aware that I must make an unbroken journey of six hundred miles to the south. It was almost abandoned within the hour. The sun was warm on the Kyle when I set out, the broad windows of the hotel reflecting a blue sky and a calm sea, but as I passed by Loch Duich to the soot-black mouth of Glen Shiel a monstrous cloud was hiding the heads of the Five Sisters. The cars I now met had thick snow on their roofs and bonnets, their wind-screen wipers flapping a nervous warning. At Invershiel all sound and sight, was lost in a whirling white screen, from which a yellow school-bus confidently emerged, bright faces singing behind its windows. Two miles on, the wind changed and improved the visibility ahead, but snow was now rolling down the flanks of the Sisters in turning waves, building drifts across the road, and at Bridge of Shiel the black and metallic river was in joyous spate. Beyond the gorge, when the hills fell back, the wind was stronger, driving the snow from the surface of the road but covering it with bright crystals of ice. I passed Loch Cluanie without being aware of it until I heard the roar of its overflowing dam, and then suddenly at Ceannacroc Bridge the snow stopped, the clouds torn northward to Affric. Sunlight glistened on the Braes of Glen Moriston, and there was a clutch of bright primroses at the foot of Mackenzie’s cairn.
Glen Shiel was the land of the Macraes, the chamberlains of Kintail, its Catholic vicars and the standard-bearers of its Mackenzie lords. Their stronghold was the castle of Eilean Donan at the bent elbow of Loch Alsh and Loch Duich. It is the best known of all Highland castles, romantically placed on its saintly island at the end of a slender arched bridge. Since its first brief film appearance in The Ghost Goes West its varying image has decorated more post-cards, calendars, biscuit-tins and holiday guides than any other. But despite its arrow-slit windows, crenellated walls and crow-step gables, it is largely a 20th-century reconstruction, completed fifty years ago from the ruins of the original, destroyed by naval gunfire in 1719. Although I do not like it, or at least its artful pretensions, I remember that one thought behind its restoration was to make it a war memorial to the Macraes of Kintail, a brave people who once called themselves Mackenzie’s Shirt of Mail. They suffered bitterly in three Jacobite Rebellions, but many of them were still living in Glen Shiel when Boswell and Johnson passed through on their way to Mam Ratagan. Boswell was distressed by their appearance, their black and wild faces, and said that it was like being among a tribe of Indians. “Yes, sir,” agreed Johnson, “but not so terrifying.” He was momentarily in a good humour, distributing pennies among the children as he sat on a turf bench, drinking frothed milk from a wooden cog. Always ready to deflect his companion’s critical opinion of the Scots by suggesting he had the qualities of a fine Caledonian himself, Boswell said he would make a good chief. The old man was pleased by this, but it did not blind him to the realities of such a rank.
“Were I a chief, I would dress my servants better than myself, and knock a fellow down if he looked saucy to a Macdonald in rags; but I would not treat men as brutes.”
In the winter of 1778 the Mackenzie chief, Lord Seaforth, came to Kintail and enlisted a hundred young Macraes for his regiment of Highlanders. It was not a happy battalion. The Macraes, and other men whom Seaforth had gathered from his lands in Ross and on the Long Isle,
were ill-used by their brutal officers. Five hundred of them mutinied in Edinburgh, and held Arthur’s Seat under arms for three days until their grievances were redressed. They had been told that they were to serve the Crown against its rebellious subjects in America, and one of the assurances now given them on Arthur’s Seat was that they would not be sent to the East Indies, a station feared and detested by all soldiers. They had also been told that when its service was over the regiment would be brought home to the Highlands where they would be discharged, close to their homes. In 1781 they were sent to India, and a third of them died of fever and flux during the voyage. Three years later, the survivors of a hard and wasting war against Hyder Ali were disbanded in that country, ten thousand sea-miles from Loch Duich and the Five Sisters of Kintail. “Our discharge put in our hands,” said their poet sergeant, Christopher Macrae, “free to go where we wished, and told everywhere there was no ship, nor boat nor sail …”
It is a pity that I am not as light
as the hawk, slim flying in the sky.
I would take the desert road
and I would not rest in the tree-tops.
In spite of the violence of Turkey
I would pass it by like a lark in the sun,
and I would make a complaint in London
that would bring us all home.
No complaint was made in London, and few of the Macraes came home to Kintail. “Of the hundred of us … only an odd one surviving.” In 1803, James Hogg found the little townships of Glen Shiel “mostly in ruins, the estate being all converted into sheep-walks.” He was hungry, and exhausted by a long walk on the rough stones of the neglected military road. The remaining people of the glen told that they had no food to sell, but a young man ran after him and drew him back to a cottage, giving him bread, whey and cheese, refusing all payment. Refreshed by this, Hogg pressed on to the inn at Invershiel. To his relief, perhaps, its landlord was a Borderer from Annandale.
There are still Macraes in Kintail, people of the name or its allegiance. Some hold to the old faith, my friend Rory Mackay once told me. “They are good Gaelic speakers,” he said “and fleet of foot on the hills, which is right and proper.”
On the green floor of Glen Lyon between Keltney Burn and
Fortingall, and two miles from the river gorge below Creag Mhor,
there is a greystone figure of a Highlander. Masked by trees at a
twist of the road it could be mistaken for one of many war memorials
in the mountains, lonely reminders of a wasted generation and the
last Diaspora of the Gael. Seven miles to the east, where William
Adam’s classical bridge arches across the Tay at Aberfeldy, there
is another stone figure, in belted plaid and feathered bonnet, his
musket slung, and his right hand in the basket-hilt of his sheathed
broadsword. Properly set in the heart of Perthshire, and at the
geographical centre of Scotland, each represents a man whose work,
or short and tragic life, has diversely influenced my imagination
and my writing. The first is a monument to Major-General David
Stewart of Garth, at the entrance to a drive that once led to his
modest home on a lower brae of Drumcharry. His Sketches of the
Character, Manners and Present State of the Highlanders, published
in 1822, are the rich source of much that has been written about
the people and regiments of the Highlands, and his archetypical
clansman is an amalgam of Knight Templar and Paladin from which
fiction and fact make their continuing casts. The statue is perhaps
his likeness, or how he might have wished to see himself, bravely
posed and without his small-lensed spectacles. His kilt, plaid and
sporran are in the absurd military fashion adopted by the True
Highlanders, although the stone buttons on his jacket are a poor
indication of the cairngorm studs he wore when he attended their
The second Highlander, above a tapering cairn of sculpted stones, stands on what was once a natural river-bank but is now a lawned and flowered garden. In May 1740, six Independent Companies of the Black Watch were embodied here as a marching-regiment of the Crown, the 43rd Highlanders. The monument is their memorial, erected by public subscription a century ago. Five hundred pounds were collected at the doors of great houses and cottages in Strathtay, and a crowd of six thousand came by special trains to watch the unveiling in a November mist. The ceremony was a manifestation of patriotic emotion, respect and obedience to established order, and few if any of those present, including Mr Rhind the sculptor I suspect, can have been aware of a grotesque irony in that dramatic stone figure. It had been modelled from an 18th-century engraving of a private soldier of the Forty-Third, a catch-penny sheet sold at the sign of the Black Horse in Cornhill, London. The soldier was a young drover from Rothiemurchus, Farquhar Shaw, whose dignified courage in the last week of his life moved one observer to record that he had “a generous disposition of mind seldom found among men in more elevated stations.” Three years after the muster at Aberfeldy, and together with two corporals of the regiment10 he was executed for his part in a noble mutiny. They were shot by a firing-party of the Scots Guards in the Tower of London, against a blank wall of the Chapel. “There was not much blood spilt,” the Governor wrote in his diary, “but what was, I ordered immediately to be covered with earth, and their graves levelled so that no remains of the execution might be perceived.” Their weeping comrades buried them, each in a fifteen-shilling coffin and a few paces from the wall, and perhaps they lie there still.
The mutiny of the Black Watch was the first of sixteen major revolts in Highland regiments between 1743 and 1804, angry protests against broken promises or the Government’s callous indifference to the exceptional conditions of their enlistment and their peculiar attachment to their native dress and language. Contrary to romantic belief, the Highlander was not always a willing soldier. He was frequently recruited by threat and sold by the chiefs he trusted, and his songs regret the day he put on a red coat. “If I were as I used to be, among the hills, I would not mount guard as long as I lived …” The system of tenure-at-will made it easy for proprietors to force their young tenants into the regiments they were so eagerly raising, and in Sutherland this was done with despotic panache. The youths of each parish were summoned and inspected by William Wemyss, colonel of the new 93rd Regiment, and those who were offered a pinch from his snuff-mull and a dram from his flask were taken as soldiers. “I entered not as a matter of choice,” wrote John Matheson who was enlisted in a Fencible regiment also raised by Wemyss, “but owing to the old feudal system of the country I was obliged to go to please the Laird. Plainly, every farmer was under the necessity of giving at least one of his sons if he had any fit for service11
The Gaelic people’s contribution to the British Army in the 18th century was grossly disproportionate. Three per cent only of the population, they nonetheless supplied the Crown with sixty-five marching and Fencible regiments, as well as independent companies, militia and volunteers. Social and political historians have been little concerned with this revealing field of research, beyond bland observations that after the last Jacobite Rebellion the martial energy of the Highlanders was channelled into the Army. They have ignored the nature of Highland recruitment, its cause and effect, as they neglected the Clearances until recent years. They are sometimes the slavish servants of prevailing authority, past and present, and in Scotland this has encouraged their indifference to Highland history, or at best a nodding acknowledgement. There is almost a sigh of relief in their writings when Culloden and the punitive Acts at last bring a proud and contradictory people within the understandable pattern of southern government, and Johnson might well have been speaking of them when he said Lowlanders were strangers to the needs of the northern people “whose life they would model, and whose evil
s they would remedy.” There is also a lingering contempt for the Highlanders, disguised now as patronising affection but nonetheless an echo of the feelings expressed by James Wolfe when he was commanding an English regiment at Perth. Eight years later, at the moment of his death, the musketry and broadswords of the men he despised were securing his immortality, destroying the Regiments of Languedoc and La Sarre, and breaking the French advance on the Plains of Abraham. Fraser’s 78th Highlanders suffered more casualties than any other British battalion that day, and none of them knew what their dying general had once thought of their race and why it should be expended in this wasteful manner.
They are hardy, intrepid, accustom’d to a rough Country, and no great mischief if they fall. How can you better employ a secret enemy than by making his End conducive to the common good? If this sentiment should take wind, what an execrable and bloody being shou’d I be considered here in the midst of Popery and Jacobitism, surrounded on every side as I am with this Itchy Race12
This cynical attitude became more open toward the end of the century and was exercised in an increasing disregard for the special qualities of Highland regiments. The mutinies which resulted are the dark side of military history. Although reminders of them still provoke hostility, a study of the methods by which the regiments were recruited, and the reasons why they mutinied, is essential to an understanding of the destruction of the clan society and the dispersal of its people. When I wrote a full account of the revolts it was never my intention to devalue the achievements and valour of Highland soldiers, nor could I, having been a peripheral witness of their courage at’s-Hertogenbosch, Venlo, and the crossing of the Rhine. But one critic of the book, an officer and historian of the Black Watch, hoped “to high heaven that it will not be accepted as impartial history by the ordinary reader.” Understandably, perhaps, he was particularly offended by my assertion that Highlanders were the first of Britain’s colonial levies, originally used to police their own hills, and then deployed in imperial wars. That interpretation was fair, I think, and my lack of impartiality might have been shared by the remaining tenants of Sutherland in 1854. When told by their ministers and the Duke’s factors that they should enlist for the Crimean War, they baa-ed in response and cried, “Since you have preferred sheep to men, let sheep defend you!”