“I can’t begin to imagine what it means,” Kate said thoughtfully, looking up at the cottage.
“You should have a word with Miss Weir, then—she’s been doing enough imagining about it for two people.”
Kate smiled.
“Anyway, never mind about Jamie’s Cottage and Cameron Fraser, whoever he might be; I want to show you my favourite place in the world.” He led Kate to the end of the path, where they were level with the tops of the trees lining the banks of the hanging valley. She followed him down a wooden-sleepered staircase that wound through the trees and led to an old stone bridge spanning the river just before it plunged into the glen below. An enormous rock sat in the middle of the fast-flowing water, dividing it into two forks and forming the foundation for the central pillar of the small, twin-arched bridge.
Kate walked to the center of the bridge, speechless, and leaned on the stone parapet. Castle Crag towered high above the trees to her right, with Greystane just visible atop it…
Jamie’s Crag, with its ruined cottage, rose to her left…
And the river thundered beneath her feet, running from the hanging valley at her back to cascade over the falls just ahead. The dark lochan fed by the waterfall stretched away into the distance in the glen below.
“Finlay, this is beautiful,” Kate told him when she was finally able to speak. “It’s just perfect.”
“It’s the secret weapon in my little campaign to persuade you to hang on to Greystane and not sell it to those English carpetbaggers.”
“Who?”
“I’ll leave it to Mr. Cunningham to explain it to you this afternoon. When he does, and you think about whether or not to sell, Lady Kate, just remember this place.”
“I couldn’t forget it if I tried,” she told him.
“I wish we could stay here longer but there’s a lot more to show you, and you said you were wanting to know about the story behind the ‘curse’.”
“Yes, I am.”
Finlay led her back up the sleepered staircase, along the path at the back of the rocky summit of Castle Crag, and then down the track they’d driven up in the Land Rover the day before. They paused at a gentle flapping above them and looked up to see an osprey leave its cragside ledge and circle with deceptive laziness high above the lochan, its broad wings barely beating. Kate caught her breath even before the osprey broke off into a swooping dive and skimmed the surface of the still water, rising moments later with a big fish squirming in its talons. “I can’t believe that just a couple of days ago I was in San Francisco,” she said, watching the majestic bird of prey fly off with its prize. “This isn’t just like a different country, it’s like a different world, a different time.”
“I’ve really nothing to compare it with,” Finlay said. “Sometimes I wish I’d seen a bit of the wider world, but then I stand on Waterfall Bridge and I can’t really wish for anything more than I have around me here.” The quiet contentment vanished from his voice when he said, “The people who lived in the places I’m about to show you must have felt the same way, I imagine. That’s why it broke their hearts to leave. It was their tears that christened Gleann Corranoch.”
“The glen’s not completely empty, though, is it?” Kate asked, seeing wisps of smoke rising towards them from the whitewashed cottages clustered at the foot of Castle Crag.
“That’s the crofters,” Finlay said. “You’re only talking about a dozen families, though, whereas there used to be hundreds living here before Lady Carolyn’s ‘improvements’.”
“You say ‘improvements’ as though they made things worse, not better.”
“I’ll leave you to make your own mind up about that.”
They continued their descent of Castle Crag in companionable silence. After passing the crofts they made their way down to the lochan, and the nearest of the clusters of cottages Kate had glimpsed from the Land Rover the day before. They were very different to the neat, whitewashed crofts at the foot of the crag. Some were little more than piles of rubble, with only four corners to suggest the shape of what had once stood there; others had crumbling gables and looked close to collapse. A few were almost complete apart from the absence of a roof, but they looked just as derelict as the others because their windowless drystane walls were cracked and blackened by fire.
Finlay led Kate over to one of the more complete cottages, Hamish trotting along at his side. “Every half mile or so around the lochan there were little farm townships, each made up of cottages like these,” he told her. The doorless doorway was so low he had to stoop to pass through it.
Kate had formed the impression that Hamish followed Finlay everywhere, but the little Westie whimpered now and shied away, preferring to hang back outside. She understood why when she followed Finlay into the shell of the ruined dwelling. Even without a roof the windowless interior was dark, and a shiver ran down her spine despite the fact that it was a warm, sunny morning.
Looking down at some scorched flagstones, Finlay said, “This is where the fire would have been—just an open hearth that they’d burn squares of dried peat on, with a hole above it in the divots of the roof to let some of the smoke out.”
“There wasn’t even a proper chimney, or any windows?”
“No.”
“It seems so primitive.”
“Aye, but well thought-out, none the less. An open fire heats a house better than one that’s set against a wall, and the soot you get without a proper chimney helps make the roof waterproof and kills off any creepy crawlies. It’s a better fire for cooking on, too. They’d hang a big cauldron from the rafters and use it to make porridge or broth or clapshot.”
“Clap-what?”
“Clapshot—a mash of cabbage and potatoes.”
“Is that all they lived on?”
“Not if they’d been on a creach—a cattle raid.”
“They ate the evidence, did they?”
“Aye,” Finlay laughed. Looking around, he said, “They sat on creepies—low stools that kept their heads below the smoke—and slept in a sort of big, open box filled with heather for a mattress.”
Pointing to the far end of the cottage, he said, “Over there would be the byre.”
“The what?”
“Byre. A place for animals—a few cows, goats, sheep, and some hens.”
Kate tried to imagine the sights, smells, and sounds that would have resulted from such a primitive arrangement. “It must have been very ‘atmospheric’,” she said.
“If it was what you were used to, it would seem like home,” Finlay told her.
Kate was glad to get outside. She’d felt something like claustrophobia in the ruined cottage, but knew there had been more to it than that because she’d been in smaller places before without experiencing any such discomfort.
Finlay reached down to muss Hamish’s white coat, saying, “You’re a wee fairdy, aren’t you? Can’t say I blame you, though. These old houses give me the willies, too.” Then he straightened and started walking again, resuming his little history lesson. “This flat ground around the lochan would have been used for growing oats and barley and potatoes.”
Looking a little further afield, he said, “Highland cattle would roam the lower hillsides in winter.
“In the better weather they’d be driven up to the sheilings—the high pastures where the deer forest is now—so they didn’t trample the crops.
“On a fair day like this the people would repair the roofs, get the harvest in and cut peat for the winter. They did those things for the clan chief as well as themselves, because they didn’t pay their rent with money. There was nothing money could buy in this part of the world back then, so there wasn’t any use for coin of the realm.
“As well as providing their labor and a share of whatever the land and animals produced, the clansmen would answer the chief’s call when he lit the fiery cross; when he needed men to protect his land or just his honor. Their loyalty gave him status and security—things that were worth far more than
money to a man of means in a lawless land.”
“That all sounds quite onerous.”
“Aye, I suppose it does, but in return they got much more from the chief than just the use of the land.”
“Such as?”
“The knowledge that they could turn to him for food if they were hungry, for justice if they were wronged, and protection if they were threatened. He’d provide all those things if he could because he thought of himself as their father, and it was a matter of pride to a man that he looked after his children. Often the chief’s help must have meant the difference between life and death in the days when there was no social security to protect the poor and sick, no police force to protect the old and weak and threatened.”
Looking around the glen, Finlay said, “It can’t have been an easy life, but I can see how a person would be content living it, in a way that people don’t seem to be content now. They might not have had many possessions back then, but they had the freedom and joy of living in a wild and beautiful land.”
Turning back to Kate, he said, “Maybe that doesn’t sound like very much, but that’s only because people have become so far-removed from the land that they’ve forgotten the powerful beauty of being close to it. People have got so used to looking out for number-one in pursuit of trivial luxuries which can’t bring lasting happiness that they’ve forgotten what it means to be part of a community that shares the burden of the bad times as well as the bounty of the good.”
“I can see your point, Finlay, but I think you’re maybe romanticising things more than a little, the way people do when they look back at the past from a present that seems less than perfect.” Recalling the inside of the ruined cottage, she said, “It must have been a squalid, miserable life at times—most of the time, I guess. I can’t see how there would be any chance to improve your lot or make things better for your family. That’s not living, just existence. I’m not trying to defend whatever it is my family did in the past—I don’t even know the what of it yet, let alone the why—but I think they can at least be forgiven for imagining there was room for improvement.”
“Maybe over time they might have been forgiven for the what and why, but there are a lot of people who’d say they’ve been damned by the how.”
“Damned is a pretty strong word—was what they did really that terrible?” Kate asked.
“To be fair, what they did was little different from what most of the other landed families were doing at the time. It was the way they went about it that led to talk of a curse.”
“What were the landed families doing?”
“Getting rid of the people who lived on their land. I don’t mean with a bullet in the head, though in some cases that would have been a kinder way to go about it. No, it was more of a knife in the back, an abdication of ancient responsibilities, a betrayal of time-honored traditions.”
“Why would they suddenly start acting so badly?”
“After Culloden the Highlanders were stopped from wearing tartan, speaking the Gaelic and carrying arms, so that a ‘rebellion’ might never be allowed to happen again. Law and order was brought to what had been lawless lands—”
“I’d have thought that was a good thing,” Kate said as they walked beside the lochan, Hamish splashing happily in the cool, clear water.
“In a way it was, but it meant that the chiefs no longer relied on their clansmen for protection from warring neighbours, and their prestige no longer depended on how many fighting men they could put in the field. In other words, they didn’t need their ‘children’ for status or security any more.
“No longer able to play the part of warlords, or forced to play the part of benevolent fathers, they sought new roles. They looked to the growing cities in the south:
Glasgow and Edinburgh and London; to town houses and ballrooms, gaming parlours and gentlemen’s clubs, boardrooms and stock exchanges. They were exposed to a different way of life that was based on cold, hard cash and not a warm heart: where a man’s worth was determined by his bank balance rather than his benevolence; where honor and responsibility didn’t count for nearly as much as the cut of a man’s clothes, the cutlery on his table, the art collection on his walls and the bottles of wine in his cellar. One by one they succumbed to the temptation to sell their souls for coin of gold.”
“In what way?”
“They soon found out their lavish new lifestyles couldn’t be funded by the old clan system, so they brought in factors to manage their estates as commercial enterprises, to evict the Highlanders and give sheep the run of the land after renting it out to the highest bidder.
“Later, after the wool boom had gone bust, they planted forest for deer—” he gestured to the trees on the hillside above them “— groomed the moors for grouse and hired out their Highland homes as hunting lodges. Glens like this one that had once been the home of little communities were turned into playgrounds for handfuls of privileged men who hunted animals for fun rather than to feed their families.”
“I think I’m starting to understand,” Kate said quietly.
“You can call these changes ‘improvements’ rather than clearances, ‘removals’ rather than evictions … You can argue that there had been more cattle and people than the land could comfortably support, and that without what happened there wouldn’t have been any hope of progress, just recurring poverty and famine …
“But you can also argue that land is held in trust rather than owned outright, that it should be cared for to support the many and not just exploited to benefit a few. You can question whether this is progress, Lady Kate,” he said, pointing to the next cluster of ruined cottages up ahead.
“There had been famines and poverty before the clearances, but there had also been trust and loyalty and kinship, and that should have counted for something,” Finlay told her.
Kate sensed his quiet outrage, and in a strange way found herself sharing it. But she also felt some things that Finlay McRae would never feel as he wandered around Glen Cranoch: responsibility, guilt, and a humbling shame. “What happened to the people who were cleared off the land?” she asked, with a sense of dread.
“The ‘lucky’ ones were sent to the edge of the estates and given little parcels of land so barren that it broke their ploughshares as well as their hearts. They had to turn to the sea for a living and learn how to build and sail boats, make and mend nets—all on coastlines with few places to launch or land a boat or shelter from a storm,” he told her. “Imagine living on land so poor that in spring the wind blew seeds from the soil before they could take root…
“Mildew and sea spray rotted the harvest in summer …
“And in winter, if you didn’t want to watch your family starve in front of your eyes, you had to put to sea in an open boat in storms that drove down from the Arctic or all the way across the Atlantic. A hundred boats were lost in a single year on the thirty-mile stretch of coastline just north of here,” he said. “In this one county the Government and landowners spent a million pounds to accommodate sheep, and just £500 to house the people who’d been ‘removed’ to make way for them. People who’d lived and worked on almost 800,000 acres were ‘relocated’ on just 6,000.
“If you weren’t ‘lucky’ enough to get a plot of barren land on the coast, but had a little money to fall back on, you could try making a new life over the water, booking passage on one of the coffin ships bound for America—”
“I know I’m going to be sorry I asked, but why were they called coffin ships?”
“Because the conditions were so bad that many passengers ended up in a different promised land from the one that was advertised at the harbor gates.
“As for the survivors, they arrived in a strange land with only the clothes on their back and homesickness in their hearts.
“Of course if you were a young man and didn’t fancy the fishing boats or the coffin ships, you could always join the army and fight for ‘your’ country. A prime minister of the day said that besides ensuring eve
n the bloodiest of battles would be won, sending in the Highlanders had the advantage that not many of them would return home to cause trouble; while an English general who commanded them declared that it was ‘no great mischief if they fall’.
“And as for the people who had no plot of land on the coast, no passage on a coffin ship or place in the army, all they could do was head for the cities to the south, where they were forced to swap their ‘primitive’ cottages for tenement slums and their Highland glens for rat-infested alleys, coal mines, and factories.”
Looking from the ruined cottages to the woman at his side, he said, “I’m well aware that there are two sides to every story, Lady Kate, and I don’t know enough about history to tell you what the other side of this one is. All I can speak of is the side that the people who once lived here would tell you if they had a voice you could hear.”
“I understand, Finlay,” Kate said quietly, shocked by what he’d told her and by the contrast between the idyllic setting and the terrible images his words conjured up. “And this was happening all across the Highlands?” she asked.
“Aye, all across the Highlands.”
“You said something about it being worse here than in other places, though,” Kate said as they continued towards the far end of the lochan. “That’s hard to believe, because it sounds as if it was terrible everywhere.”
“I don’t think there could be a kind way to evict people from their homes and exile them from their glens, but some ways were crueller than others. Lady Carolyn’s way was the cruellest of all.”
“What exactly did she do?”
“First of all she talked her husband Malcolm into clearing that side of the glen—” he pointed to the opposite hillside “— to make way for sheep. In his heart he must have known it was wrong, but what he felt for Carolyn was stronger than what he felt for his ‘children’. Still, at least he arranged for them to have plots on the coast—a faraway part of the estate that his wastrel son Alisdair would later sell to pay off gambling debts.”
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