by John Prebble
What endears that story to me, as it did to James when I spoke of it one day on the road to Lochinver, is its lingering and pleasant echo. John Reid died in 1807, a general and a man made wealthy by a fortunate marriage. His will endowed the University of Edinburgh with a chair of music, with the simple condition that every year on or about the February day of his birth a concert should be given, and that among the pieces played should be a march or a minuet of his own composition. The condition is still kept, perpetuating the memory of an amiable man to whom, it was said, the Highland soldiers of his command “were much attached for his poetry, his music, and his bravery.”
James and I often drove to the west, leaving Telford’s road at Invershin and going by Strath Oykel across that central plateau of crumpled rock and moor to the buckler of mountains on the Atlantic coast. The road took us by Loch Assynt, silent water in a leather-brown valley of treeless hills, and to the ruined stones of Ardvreck Castle, below which there are said to be cannon, still primed and loaded. Once we sat in its shadow for half an hour, talking briefly of Montrose’s surrender and betrayal here, and then we were silent, watching red-throated divers on the loch, admiring their pearl-grey heads and sad, orange eyes. When we spoke again it was of Inchnadamph at the loch-head, and the caves nearby where geologists had found evidence of communities eleven thousand years old, the scars of their fires, the discarded bones of deer, ptarmigan, brown bear and lynx. On the winding road to Lochinver, where we went to meet the prawn-boats, we sometimes paused to stare at the great heads of Suilven and Canisp, upthrust from the wide earth in frozen astonishment. Northward at noon on the road to Kylesku a year or so ago I wondered why we had agreed that Glasven was like a sprawling grey seal on the tidal bank before Spinningdale, for now, in a storm of bitter rain, it was monstrous and ugly.
For our mutual pleasure and information we peopled the emptiness of the land, the wide debris of bog, rock and heather, rolling toward the grey cone of Ben Stack or the wave-curl of Foinaven. As we passed a quiet mountain loch, and saw the first island with its sentinel pines, he would tell me or I would tell him – it mattered not, so long as the story was told – that the trees had been planted by home-coming soldiers, in memory of companions who would never return. It is a myth, I think, but more pleasing to the mind and the heart than the probable truth, that the islands were too small for sheep-grazing and thus the trees had grown unhindered.
We sometimes listened to a lark in the hot sky above Loch Shin at Overscaig, and were once blessed with the rare sight of a fulmar, snow-headed and stiff-winged on its seaward flight from the rock shore by Drumbeg. We counted goldcrests, finches and warblers in the garden at Spinningdale, collected gulls’eggs from the sand on Dornoch links, drove to Croick church, and once walked by the dried bed of Loch Migdale in a summer of drought, wondering when it would again fill the burn that gave Spinningdale its light and power. We were alone in the house at that time, and for almost a week we ate cold meals of grouse in aspic, and talked without lights at night. It may have been then that we spoke of the great mound which Telford built across the tidal water of Loch Fleet, reclaiming four hundred acres for the Marquess of Stafford. There is now a wide muskeg of saplings and green water on the inland side, and James believed that it would be possible to introduce the beaver there. How that should be done, by stealth or not, we never decided, and we differed on the choice of the animal. He believed it should be the European beaver, and when I said that the Canadian species would be more proper, remembering the people who had gone to that country, he agreed with the thought but said the animal would not flourish in Sutherland, and I have no doubt he was right.
Fresh thoughts on this fanciful proposal, and others like the possibility of finding a hoard of Spanish silver on Migdale, were always exchanged in the first hours of my arrival, as if it were necessary to knit up the threads of old conversations before new subjects were begun. This became a ritual, as much to be honoured as lifting a hand in salute when we drove by the Norse standing-stone at Ospidale. We talked often of the Clearances, for these had encouraged him to write to me in the beginning, with the hope that I would join him and Compton Mackenzie and Eric Linklater in the making of a film about them. It was never written, nor could be, perhaps, but we came back to the subject again and again. Sometimes when we sat together at dusk in that still hour of the tide’s turn. Sometimes in a Land Rover on the hill, too old, we said, to follow the hawks on foot, but watching them on the high brae, hearing the gentle sound of their bells and the echoing voice of Stephen the falconer, calling in the pointers.
As I come by the top of Struie now, and see the white brush-stroke of the house across the water, there is always sadness, of course, but also the warmth of memory. I hear his voice shouting a greeting in Gaelic above the barking of the dogs. And I hear his valediction when time took me away, “Haste ye back!” And so I do, and always shall to the Highlands, but nevermore to Spinningdale.
The 5th Duke and 23rd Earl of Sutherland died without issue. The earldom went to his niece, Mrs Elizabeth Janson, by right of primogeniture and inheritance through the female line. The dukedom, which had no such recognition of women’s rights, passed to a collateral male descendant of the first duke. Thus, for the first time in two centuries, there was once more a Countess of Sutherland in her own right.
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Looking Back, the Autobiography of the Duke of Sutherland, London, 1957.
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Copyright
First published in 1984 by Secker & Warburg
This edition published 2012 by Bello an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR Basingstoke and Oxford Associated companies throughout the world
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John Prebble, John Prebble's Scotland