by John Prebble
It was, of course, and the man surely knew it. There is perhaps a need for an academic study of the relationship between the human effect of the Duke’s land reforms and the violent revolt of his tenants five years before Hogg’s visit. There is no reference to this in Hogg’s letters, although it cannot have been forgotten by the people he met, and there is no mention of it in the guide-books now sold at Blair Castle. In September, 1797, sixteen thousand people of Strathtay and the Braes of Atholl gathered in protest against the imposition of Militia Act. Of these, six hundred men and seven hundred women marched upon Blair, determined to have the Duke’s written assurance that their sons would not be taken into the Militia. They barred all approaches to the Castle, holding it under siege, and as they lit their evening fires about the kirk-yard on Banavie Burn their leaders composed a petition to the Duke.
We your dutiful Tenants and all the country people round about, do not at all approve of Militia in Scotland, whatever encouragement you may show us; because we do not at all wish to serve against our inclinations, because our most brave ancestors and forefathers would not suffer such usage; and we your above-named are surprised that you endeavour to make slaves of brave Atholl Highlanders. May it therefore please your Grace to abolish this Act from us, and give security for it, as we will lose the last drop of our blood before we yield to such oppression.
This was delivered to the Duke at noon the next day, and two hours later the people advanced upon the Castle. The women, he was told, were in the van, and many had removed their stockings, filling the feet with stones and broken glass. Alarmed by such threatening anger, and because he had less than two hundred loyal tenants to defend him, he signed the papers presented to him. That evening, as the rioters celebrated by the inn at Blair, he wrote to the Lord Advocate, asking for dragoons to protect him and all men of property. The soldiers came, English horsemen and Highland Fencibles from Sutherland, and the revolt ended with the arrest of its principal leaders and the dispersal of their dismayed followers. But for one terrifying week, during which their beacons and their torches had burned from Blairgowrie to Bridge of Orchy, from Loch Rannoch to Strathearn, they had badly frightened the gentry of Perthshire, persuading it that the radical teachings of Tom Paine and the evil example of the French Revolution had at last reached the Highlands.
The story of the Perthshire riots is rarely told, and then only as part of a wider resistance to the Militia Act, the climax of which was the bloody suppression of a colliers’revolt in the Lowlands, but the Highlanders’ protest should perhaps be seen in its own particular perspective. The wording of their petition to Atholl suggests there was more to their discontent. Eviction was already undermining their security and self-respect, past betrayal had weakened their loyalty to vestigial clan ties. There was also a sullen resentment of the proprietors’power to demand military service as a condition of tenure, and the Highlander’s presumed warrior zeal had already been in decline before the Rebellion of 1745. The Atholl Brigade was one of the strongest clan formations in the last Jacobite Army, but despite its suicidal courage at Culloden it had been largely recruited by threat and had the highest rate of desertion. When the rioters recalled their ancestors and told the Duke that he should not “make slaves of brave Atholl Highlanders” they were reminding him of those bloody months of rebellion, and of a later year more wounding to his pride.
In 1778 he had raised a marching-regiment for the Crown, the 77th Atholl Highlanders. Like other battalions then formed, the men were engaged for the duration of the American Revolution only, but when that was over Britain had another, unfinished war in the Far East. The news of the peace treaty was not made public for six days, and in that time the Atholl Highlanders and other regiments quartered near Portsmouth were ordered to embark for India. The Highlanders were at first willing to go, but when the Lord Mayor of Portsmouth let slip the news of peace their anger was immediate and violent. They drove their officers from the city and held it under arms for a week until Parliament forced the Secretary at War to give them their discharge. They were marched to Berwick and there, at the border of their own country, they were dismissed with ignominy, their officers complaining that they were “insolent cowards … scoundrels divested of Principle.” But as the men walked northward through the Lammermuirs, and across the Forth towards the Braes of Atholl, they sang their own derisive valediction.
We Atholl men go home to rest,
For sure we are we’ve done our best,
But her nainsel17 has been opprest
By Murray who fairly sold us!
History would have been charitable to their memory if that were the last record of them. In 1822, however, the aging Duke resurrected the ghost of the regiment to represent him and his clan at the Gathering in Edinburgh. Seventeen years later, his successor mustered a company of Atholl Highlanders for his contribution to the musical-comedy Tournament of Eglinton. They were thereafter maintained as a ceremonial house-guard, delighting a romantic Queen who presented them with a pair of Colours and presumably her permission to carry arms denied her other subjects. When “the only private army in Britain” now parades at Blair Atholl with plaid, kilt, ribboned bonnets and old Lee-Enfield rifles, only a malcontent would remember those angry and embittered soldiers in Portsmouth two hundred years ago. Or recall the warning they sent to their lieutenant-colonel when they discovered the shabby trick that would have put them aboard ship for India. “You need not doubt, but we’ll do for you if we go, and before we go!”
Quoted in “The Seven Men of Knoydart” by Iain Fraser Grigor, published in Odyssey – Voices from Scotland’s Recent Past, Polygon Books, 1980. Drawn from the Odyssey series broadcast by B.B.C. Scotland, and produced by Billy Kay, this is a remarkable and invaluable record of oral history.
Back to Text
Chairman of the Board of Supervision for thirty years. A conscientious, fatherly old man, he was none the less an example of how good intentions may be corrupted by power and responsiblity. After a visit to the Highlands he told the Home Secretary that there should be no increase in Poor Relief, and that emigration was the only solution to destitution. He accused the Highlanders of laziness, and of expecting relief as a right. “People who some years ago carefully concealed their poverty have learned to parade and of course exaggerate it.” The Highlands and Islands Emigration Society was a direct result of his report, and was welcomed by those proprietors who were finding it increasingly difficult to sell estates encumbered by a pauper population.
Back to Text
His sceptical opinion of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was remarkably perceptive. Harriet Beecher Stowe had undoubtedly produced the most influential novel ever written, and Abraham Lincoln was said to have greeted her as “the little woman whose book started this great war.” But all her first-hand knowledge of slavery had been acquired during a brief weekend visit across the Ohio River to Kentucky, and as a true picture of that iniquity it was closer to comedy. Perhaps it was as well, however, that she had no intimate association with Southern plantation-owners. When she came to the Highlands in 1856, as the guest of the Duke and Duchess of Sutherland, she wrote an ecstatic defence of her hosts and of James Loch’s Policy of Improvement, “an almost sublime instance of the benevolent employment of superior wealth and power in shortening the struggles of advancing civilisation.”
Back to Text
I suspect Boswell’s ears were also at fault, or that he repaired his memory with Johnson’s account, itself confused in hearing or recollection. Lochbuie probably did say Johnson, the English version of MacIain, and Glencoe not Glenero, the Clan Donald people of the former also being MacIains.
Back to Text
At the age of nineteen he commanded the Clan Fraser Regiment on his father’s behalf, supporting the Jacobite cause for reasons that may have slipped his memory when he appeared before the Inveraray Assize as counsel for Glenure’s widow and children. In his address to the Court he declared that the Appin Murder was “the most daring and bare-
faced insult to be offered to His Majesty’s authority and Government, at a time when we are reaping the fruits of his most benign reign.”
Back to Text
Morvern Transormed, by Philip Gaskell. C.U.P. 1968
Back to Text
See The Drove Roads of Scotland, by A. R. B. Haldane, Nelson, 1952, and also his New Ways through the Glens, Nelson, 1962. I owe a great debt to these books for widening my understanding of the past, and 1 am at a loss when I fail to take them with me to the Highlands.
Back to Text
Scotland’s contribution to the growth of the American cattle industry was considerable, its capital heavily invested in a number of Scottish-American companies. Many of the ranch-managers, trail-bosses and cowmen were Scots, Highland or of Highland descent, like Murdo Mackenzie who built the great Matador Ranch with money from Dundee. It is not too fanciful, I think, to believe that as Highland droving declined some of the spirit and courage that had sustained it for eight centuries was reborn on the rangelands of America.
Back to Text
They did not travel alone. They were accompanied by Boswell’s servant Joseph Ritter, a Bohemian six feet tall, and as far as Glenelg by Lachlan Vass and John Hay, two Highlanders whom they employed as guides at Inverness, and from whom they rented their horses. While the travellers and Joseph rode, with a fourth horse to carry their portmanteaux, Vass and Hay ran on foot beside them. Although the Highlanders’tolerance of their employers’eccentricity and bickering must have been admirable, their presence is only briefly recorded in the books the travellers wrote. Boswell refers to them three times only, and Johnson once, approvingly but without giving their names. Since they and Ritter are often ignored in later accounts of the jaunt, this footnote is a small acknowledgement of their protective concern for their employers, and their contribution thereby to one of the great delights of English literature.
Back to Text
Samuel Macpherson and Malcolm Macpherson, cousins from Breakachie and Driminard in Strathspey.
Back to Text
The 93rd Sutherland Highlanders and the Sutherland Fencibles were raised in the name of Elizabeth Gordon, Countess and later Duchess of Sutherland. Her English husband was the employer of James Loch and Patrick Sellar, architect and mason of the Policy of Improvement. In 1881 the 93rd was amalgamated with the 91st Argyll Highlanders.
Back to Text
A double reference, no doubt, to their pride and the skin complaints from which they were believed to suffer. Wolfe’s comments are taken from a letter to his friend, Captain William Rickson. His proposal for the recruitment of Highland regiments from lately disaffected clans may have been passed to the Duke of Cumberland, who in turn recommended it to William Pitt. In 1766, when the Prime Minister reminded the Commons of his own part in raising such regiments, he used words remarkably similar to Wolfe’s. “I called forth and drew into your service a hardy and intrepid race of men. .. .”
Back to Text
A Military History of Perthshire, 1660–1902, 2 vols, R. A. & J. Hay, Perth 1908. Edited by the Marchioness of Tullibardine, later Duchess of Atholl.
Back to Text
The designation “of Glenlyon” continues in a viscountcy held by the Dukes of Atholl, an irony less astringent than the Barony of Culloden, a royal title borne by the Dukes of Gloucester.
Back to Text
Sir John Campbell, 11th Laird of Glenorchy and 1st Earl of Breadalbane (1635-1717). Known as Iain Glas, Grey John, “cunning as a fox, wise as a serpent, slippery as an eel”, he was one of the principal figures in the dark plotting that led to the Massacre of Glencoe, although he has taken more blame for that than he deserved.
Back to Text
A Companion and Useful Guide to the Beauties of Scotland, Sarah Murray, 1799 and 1803. She was a redoubtable widow of 52 when she made her tour in the summer of 1796, travelling two thousand miles with only her maid and coachman for companionship. Her Guide, recently republished by Byway Books, is among the most delightful of all travel books, and it has the best opening sentence of any before or since. “Provide yourself with a strong roomy carriage, and have the springs well corded.”
Back to Text
One’s ownself, a common reference to a Highlander. The song was written in a Portsmouth tavern during the mutiny, and sung to the music of the Jacobite rant Hey, Johnnie Cope!
Back to Text
Chapter 8
It was a spring afternoon when I first visited the church at Croick, on a river-bend where Strath Cuileannach joins the wider, greener floor of Strathcarron. There was still snow on Diebidale Ridge above dark braes of bracken and heather, and the air was noisy with the cold sound of hastening water. The twisting glens of Cuileannach, Alladale and Calvie are talons on the extended arm of Strathcarron, clawing at the mountain hide of central Ross. They are also narrow airways down which winter-visiting greylag come to the alder-woods and farmland fields along the Dornoch Firth. A northward skein was returning to Iceland when I reached the church-yard wall, and I watched them until they were lost against the leaf-brown hills. I remember them clearly, and not only because they recalled a boyhood memory of wavering arrow-heads in a prairie sky. I remember them because of the native greylag which James kept on the shore of the firth, and because the book that took me to Croick also brought me his friendship.
I went to Spinningdale at his invitation three months after my account of the Clearances was published. I went in December and by train from Inverness. There were leaden snow-clouds upon Ben Wyvis, hoar frost like dusted sugar on the Muir of Ord and the furrowed fields of Cromarty, but at Bonar Bridge the sky was clear, roses and lupins flowered in a cottage garden, and the warm hills were glazed in sunlight. I was the only passenger to alight, the carriage door held by a porter who told me that Dr Robertson-Justice had just arrived to collect me. And there he was with an outstretched hand and a welcome in Gaelic, tweed cap and cape, and a swathe of red Clan Donnachaidh tartan about his waist. At Spinningdale, which he reached with skilful speed in a Mini, he took me first to the oak-wood that marched with his policies, naming plant, bird, lichen and insect with encyclopaedic brevity. With two pointers and Irena’s Jack Russell at our heels we went to the ruin of a cotton-mill above the inlet. It was built by an improving Dempster laird in 1791, inspired by Richard Arkwright’s mills at New Lanark. It was never a success, and when fire destroyed its timbers it was abandoned, time and erosion changing it to the ancient fortress most travellers presume it to be. I asked if it explained Spinningdale’s name, and James’s answer disturbed the rooks above us. “Spanzidaill… not Spinningdale!” The word is Norse, meaning a place for spinning, perhaps, but we later agreed that another derivation was more to our taste – spanntng-daill the vale of temptation.
That night we talked until first-light touched the head of Struie across the Firth, and a silent tide ebbed from silver to gold. We built walls of reference-books at our feet – Brewer, Roget and Burke, Ruvigny’s Jacobite Peerage, Haydn’s Dignitaries and Cruden’s Concordance, gazetters, dictionaries of etymology, place-names and quotations. We talked of the clans and the Clearances, of falcons and the marital fidelity of greylag geese, of moths and butterflies, Bach, Mozart and Robert Louis Stevenson, salmon, seal and seine-netters, London before the war, journalism, socialism, brave soldiers and their obscene trade, the Spanish Civil War and Belsen. We discovered a mutual pleasure in serendipity, and decided that it was not so much a faculty as a faery gift. We shared an admiration for Alexander Mackenzie from Stornoway, the first white man to cross the Canadian Rockies, and we decided to visit his grave not far away at Avoch on the Black Isle, but we never did. We talked of the white-lipped bay of Calgary on the west coast of Mull, and the redcoat Mounted Police Commissioner, James MacLeod, who gave its name to a settlement in Alberta, not long before he and his small patrol took Sitting Bull and the Sioux nation under the protection of the British Crown.
We also talked of Croick Church which he had never seen although w
e went there together in later years. Plain-walled, rectangular and functional, screened by a wind-break of fir, it is one of a hundred and more Parliamentary Churches built by Thomas Telford. At the beginning of the last century it served the ninety people who lived in Glen Calvie, tenants and subtenants of William Robertson of Kindeace. They were able to support a poor teacher for their children’s education, albeit in English, and until many of them joined the newly-established Free Church their spiritual needs were answered by a sympathetic minister, Gustavus Aird. In 1842, two years before his death, Robertson decided to clear them from the estate and offer it on lease as one farm, leaving the troublesome details to his factor, James Falconer Gillanders. This resolute man was the third generation of a family of factors who rose in station and wealth by the leases they took upon the land they cleared for their employers. The first was George Gillanders who managed Lord Seaforth’s estate on the Long Isle, where the people endured epidemic fevers, recurrent crop failures and predatory raids by emigration agents. Gillanders’ factorship gave him a trading monopoly in black cattle, white fish, grain and meal, and he increased this comfortable income by selling back to the people any surplus of the firing they were obliged to collect for his use. He conducted his own affairs as prudently as he managed those of his master, and soon accumulated a capital of £20,000 with which he bought an estate at Highfield in Easter Ross. When he retired to this, his son Alexander succeeded him in Seaforth’s employ and did so well at the tenants’expense, it was said, that he became richer than many Highland proprietors. The grandson James was the most successful of the three, and like Patrick Sellar he was respected by his superiors, admired by his peers, loved by his family, and hated by the people.
James has shown by his nature