My Mother always went to Houghton well provided with trifling presents for her numerous connexions there. There had never been any lack of daughters in the household of the reigning Ironside, and they formed quite a Saxon Colony by their marriages. We had a Great Aunt Blackburn, Horseman, Potter, Goodchild, with cousins to match, all the degradations in name possible bestowed on the Serf Saxon by his conquering Norman lord—with one redeeming Great Aunt Griffith who, however, had never recovered caste among her relations for her misalliance with, I believe, a schoolmaster, though had they followed my clever Welsh Great Uncle to his mountains his maligners might have heard of a princely ancestry.
Two Maiden sisters of this generation, my Great Aunts Peggy and Elsy, lived in the village in a square low house very near to and very like my Uncle’s, but it stood back from the road, and was kept delightfully dark by some large elm trees which grew in front in a court yard. This retreat was apparently sacred to the ancient virgins of the family, for their Aunts Patience and Prudence had been established there before them. I hardly remember these old ladies, Aunt Elsy not at all, though it was in their house that Jane and I were domiciled. Aunt Peggy made more impression. She was fat, rosy, merry, idle, told funny stories, made faces, and winked her eyes at good jokes when sometimes her laughing listeners rather blushed for her. My mother was much more attached to her Aunt Jane Nesham, the only and the maiden sister of her mother; her house was just opposite to my Uncle’s and it was the home of my two unmarried Ironside Aunts, my Mother’s sisters, Mary and Fanny. Aunt Mary was not often there, she went on long visits to Mrs Leitch and to my Mother, and to an Indian Colonel and Mrs Ironside, distant relations who lived in London in Brook Street. Aunt Jane Nesham was a charming little old lady with powdered hair turned over a cushion and a little white muslin turban stuck up on the top of it. She wore tight fitting cross folded gowns with full skirts, much as we wear them now, the whitest and the clearest muslin handkerchiefs puffed over her neck, a row of pearls round her throat, and high heeled shoes. Her house was order itself, her voice gentle and her smile the kindest. She had been in the highlands with my father and mother before my recollection. The cousins Nesham lived in the village, at least the then head of the family with one or two of his unmarried sisters and his young wife. Mrs Griffith and a disagreeable daughter had a small house there, and the clergyman, the schoolmaster, the Doctor and Squire Hutton, and there was a very populous neighbourhood. Such was Hough ton as I first remember it. How different from what it is now. There are no gentry, the few neat rows of Pitmen’s houses of that time have grown into streets belonging to a town. It is all dirt and bustle and huge machinery and tramways, one of which cuts through the fields of the Ironside inheritance. These frightful tramways were our childish delight, such a string of waggons running along without horses reminded us of our fairy tales, and the splendid fires blazing on all sides enchanted us, after the economical management of scanty fuel we had been accustomed to in London. We liked our young cousins too, three or four of whom were old enough to play with us.
The next stoppage on our northern journey was at Edinburgh, where we remained long enough for an abiding impression of that beautiful city to be made on a young mind. The width of the streets, the size of the houses, the brightness and the cleanliness, with the quantity of gooseberries to be bought for a penny, impressed me before I was capable of appreciating the grandeur of its position. It was then very far from being what it became a few years later, how very very far from what we see it now! The new town was but in progress, the untidy appendages of building encumbered the half finished streets, and where afterwards the innumerable gardens spread in every quarter to embellish the city of palaces, there were then only unsightly greens abandoned to the washerwomen. My father had always business to detain him here. We put up at Blackwood’s hotel, at the corner of the north bridge in Princes Street, where my Mother received a quantity of visitors of all degrees, amongst whom was my nurse, an ill conducted woman, never a favourite, yet who managed to keep up a claim to assistance by dint of persevering pretence of tenderness for her nursling. The same scene was rehearsed regularly—she had always a long string of misfortunes to bewail, disappointments and losses and cares of one sort or another, the death of five children amongst the rest. But somehow my foster sister ‘bore a charmed life,’ for not only did she exist and flourish, but she actually got younger occasionally, even to my father’s short seeing eyes—my Mother was always clearer sighted—a miracle that at length put an end to our forbearance.
The Queen’s ferry was the next landmark!, to speak in Irish fashion. No steamer in those days, no frame to run the carriage on from quay to deck. Ugly, dirty, miserable sailing vessels, an hour at the quickest crossing, often two or three, it was the great drawback to the journey. The landing at Inverkeithing was as disagreeable as the embarking, as tedious too. We seldom got on beyond Kinross that night, where Queen Mary, the Castle, the lake, red trout, and a splendid parrot all combined to make it one of our favourite resting places. At Perth we were always met by my father’s only surviving Uncle, Sandy, the parson, his mother the Lady Jean’s favourite son, and her youngest. He was of the episcopalian church, and had at this time the care of a chapel at Dundee. He was a popular preacher, had published very fair sermons,15 was an accomplished person for his times, gentlemanly in manner, taller than the ‘little Grants,’ more of a Gordon, in fact, in his appearance. He had had a good deal to do with my father’s education, and his own five ill brought up sons had been my father’s principal companions towards his College days. My mother never thought kindly of this uncle, to whom my father was much attached. She judged him perhaps harshly, an easiness of temper may have been fully as much the cause of the loose discipline he maintained as want of principle, which she ascribed his errours to, errours they were and errours of evil consequence proving him to have been unfitted for the charge of youth. He probably had been deficient in the capacity to avoid them.
It took us three days to reach home from Perth, Blackbird, Smiler, and their pairs who met us there, and whose names I have not remembered not being in as great a hurry to return to the Doune as we were. There was no good ford near the house in those days, the shifting river not having revealed the rather deep one near the offices we used so constantly afterwards; besides, there was then no road from the bridge of Alvie down the heathery bank to the bogach and so round its shallow waters to the riverside. We had to drive on, after a good peep of our dear home, two or three miles past the burn at Lynwilg, towards Aviemore, and then turn off down a seldom travelled road through the birch woods—I smell them now—to the ford at Inverdruie, where there was a carriage boat at the ferry a little higher up the stream, so that travellers could cross in all states of the river.
Once ‘over the water’ we were at home in Rothiemurchus, our beloved Duchus,16 which, through all the changes of our lives, has remained the spot on earth dearest to the heart of every one of us. We have been scattered far and wide, separated, never now all to meet again. We children have grown up and married and have had new interests engrafted on our old feelings, and have changed our homes and changed all our surroundings, and most of us have lived long, busy years far away from the Highlands, yet have we never any one of us ceased to feel that there was the magnet to which all our purest, warmest, earliest, and latest affections were steadily drawn. No other place ever replaced it, no other scenery ever surpassed it, no other young happiness ever seemed to approach within a comprehensible distance of our childhood in Rothiemurchus.
1. The name of the principal house on the Rothiemurchus estate.
2. Observations on the late Influenza, the Febris Catarrhalis Epidemica of Hippocrates as it appeared in London in 1775 and 1782, by William Grant M.D. (printed for the author and published London 1782, price one shilling). An earlier work on fever had been translated into French in 1773 and an essay of 1775 on ‘Jail Fever’ into German in 1778 (Dictionary of National Biography).
3. A s
mall house on the property.
4. The Hon. Mrs Murray Aust of Kensington visited Rothiemurchus during the tour chat led to her Companion and Useful Guide to the Beauties of Scotland (1803); in it she described how ‘Mr Grant annually cut down perhaps £ 1500 of timber; and yet when riding through his woods, not a tree to the eye is missing.’
5. Sir John Sinclair (1754–1835), was the celebrated agricultural improver, first President of the Board of Agriculture and organiser of the Statistical Account of Scotland.
6. From Sir Walter Scott’s Guy Mannering. Six feet tall, she is ‘a kind o’ queen among the gipsies’.
7. The size of a book in which each sheet is folded into 24 leaves.
8. Dialogue Opera (1790) by Stephen Storace (1762–96).
9. As You Like It, 11, v. 162.
10. John Kemble was ⅙ proprietor and actor-manager of Covent Garden in 1803; John Bannister was acting manager of Drury Lane.
11. A four-wheeled covered carriage, with a hooded seat behind.
12. One of these children, Lady Normanby’s son (who was to be Lord lieutenant of Ireland 1835–39 when Elizabeth Grant and her husband resided on their estate in Co. Wicklow) married Maria, daughter of Sir Thomas Liddell.
13. Benjamin Franklin (1706–90), the American statesman and scientist, was the author of Experiments and Observations on Electricity (1751).
14. Ballad opera by William Shield, first produced at Covent Garden in 1782.
15. Sermons an Various Subjects and Occasions, by Alexander Grant D.D., Minister of the English Episcopal Chapel at Dundee; two volumes, published in 1800 at Dundee.
16. A Gaelic word having much the same signification as domain. The crest of the family is an armed hand holding a broadsword, with the motto ‘For my Duchus.’
CHAPTER TWO
1803–1804
IT was in July or August 1803 when we crossed the Spey in the big boat at Inverdruie in a perfect fever of happiness. Every mountain, every hill, every bank, fence, path, tree, cottage was known to us, every face we met revealed a friend’s, and our acquaintance was by no means limited, for the ‘wide plain of the fir trees,’1 which lies in the bosom of the Grampians, cut off by the rapid Spey from every neighbour, has its beautiful variety of mountain scenery, its heights, and dells, and glens, its lakes and plains and haughs, and it had then its miles and miles of dark pine forest through which were little clearings by the side of rapid burnies, and here and there a sawmill. We were expected, so from the boathouse to the Doune it was one long gathering, all our people flocking to meet us and to shout the ‘welcome home!’—the only time that I remember so great an assemblage on our arrival, the custom becoming obsolete, warm and hearty as it was. William and I knew every one, remembered every thing. Our dear Betty waited for us at the house anxiously. She had married the grieve, John Campbell, and was now a great lady in her high cap and shawl, and she had a baby to shew us, a little daughter, the only child she ever had, called after me, to whom I was bringing a real silver coral with more than the usual complement of bells. She had been left in charge of the house and beautifully clean she delivered it. We thought the floors so white, the polish so bright, the beds so snowy, all so light, so airy, our nursery so enchanting with its row of little plain deal stools, creepies, and our own dear low table, round which we could ourselves place them. We were certainly easily pleased with any thing Highland, for a less luxurious abode than the charmingly situated Doune at that date could hardly have been the residence of a lady and gentleman.
It took its name from a long low hill in the form of a boat with its keel upwards, at the end of which it had been rather ill advisedly built, and which had been fortified in the ruder ages when the dwelling of our ancestors had been upon the top of it. I never saw the vestige of a ruin there, but the moat is perfect and two or three steep terraces along the side. When improving times permitted our ancestors to descend from their ‘Doune,’ a formal Scotch house was built at the foot of it, with a wide door in the centre, over which were emblazoned the arms in a shield, and as many narrow windows were stuck in rows over the wall as were required to light the rooms within. A kitchen built of black turf was patched on to one end which had an open chimney and bare rafters overhead. A green duck pond and such offices as were at the period necessary were popped down any where in front and all round, wherever and whenever they were wanted. There were a barn and a smithy, and a carpenter’s shop and poultry houses, all in full view from the principal rooms, as was the duck pond. A perfect network of sluggish streams, back water from the Spey, crept round a little knot of wooded islands close at hand, and a garden lay at the foot of the hill. My Uncle Rothy had not latterly lived here; he had married a very delicate woman, a daughter of Mr Grant of Elchies, commonly known as a Lord of Session by his legal title of Lord Elchies. She had persuaded him that the situation of this old family mansion was unhealthy, which, considering all the wood and water on this side of the Spey, and the swamp of the bogach on the other, was probably a correct opinion. He had therefore built at Inverdruie, to please her, a modern mansion very like a crab with four extended claws, for there was a dumpy centre to live in, with four low wings, one at each corner, for offices; and this was set down on a bare heath, with a small walled garden behind and a pump standing all alone some little way off in front. Here with them my father had spent his boyhood, always, however, preferring the Doune, which had been, when deserted, let to various half Uncles and second cousins, retired half pay Captains and Lieutenants, who all, after their wandering youth, returned to farm out their old age in the highlands. A few years before his death my grandfather, the Doctor, had taken possession of it and anticipating a much longer tenure, undertook many improvements. To the end of the old house opposite the black kitchen he stuck an outrigger of an overwhelming size, containing a cellar to which the descent was by stone steps outside, a large dining room on the ground floor and a couple of good bedrooms above reached by a turning stair. As an additional object from the windows he erected a high stable, where as long as it stood my brother William spent his leisure, and he encreased the old garden, laid it out anew, and stocked it from Hertfordshire. The entrance to this paradise of our childhood was by a white gate between two cherry trees, such cherry trees, large white heart, still standing there to prove my taste, and by no means dwarfish looking even beside the fine row of lime trees that extended on either side. The old house had a few low rooms on the ground floor with many dark closets; the principal apartment was on the first floor, and reached by a wide and easy stair; the family bedroom was on the one hand, a large hall on the other for the reception of guests, and the state bedroom through it. Up in the atticks, beneath the steep grey roof, were little rooms again. This was the highland home to which my mother had been brought a Bride.
I imagine that the furniture had been very much suited to the style of the house; there was some plate, some fine old china and glass and a few valuables of little use but as curiosities. The state bed and bedroom were curtained with rich green silk damask heavily fringed, and the japanned toilette table in which was my drawer of shells with a mirrour to match, and numberless boxes, trays, and baskets of japanned ware belonged to this chamber; the other rooms were, I fancy, rather bare. There was, however, never any lack of living furniture. My Mother found established there my great Uncle Sandy the Parson with his English wife, her sister and all their carpet work, two of the five sons, an old Donald, a faithful servant of my grandfather’s, who had been pensioned for his merits, an old Christy who had gone from Strathspey to wait on my father and my Aunt Lissy, and their Bonne good Mrs Sophy Williams. She had had her leg shot off in the garden at Twyford by some unlucky Raper cousin, while she was wandering about there in her double employment of frightening the birds with a rattle from the cherry trees, while watching Master Jack’s operations in the strawberry beds. She had her pension and her attick and so had Mr Dallas, one of the line of tutors, when he chose to come to it. Then there were College friends, b
achelour cousins, and it was the fashion of the country for any of the nearer neighbours, when they came in their full dress to pay their occasional morning visits, to expect to be pressed to remain the day, often the night, as the distances are considerable in that thinly peopled district. My father and mother never wanted for company, and the house was as full of servants as an Indian or an Irish one, strange, ignorant creatures, running about in each other’s way, wondering at the fine English Maids who could make so little of them. Amongst the rest was a piper, who, for fear of spoiling the delicacy of the touch of his fingers, declined any work unconnected with whisky, which with plenty of oatbread and cheese was given to all comers all day long.
Most of the farms in Rothiemurchus were occupied by relations. Colonel William Grant was at the Croft, Captain Lewis Grant at Inverdruie. These were my father’s great Uncles. Lieutenant Cameron, a cousin, came to Kainapool from Kinrara as soon as a former tenant left it. Up in Badenoch and down in Strathspey there were endless humble connexions most attentive in observing the visiting customs of the country. Relations at a greater distance were not wanting,—Cummings in Morayshire, McKenzies in Rossshire, Grants in Urquhart, etc. Of great neighbours there were few. Highland properties are so extensive that there can neither be walks nor rides in general to the homes of equals. Each proprietor holds, or held perhaps I should say, his own little court in his own domains and when he paid a brother Laird a visit it was in a stately manner befitting the rareness of the event, and the number of miles he had to travel. Our great house then was Castle Grant, the residence of our Chief. It was about twenty miles off down Speyside. My father and mother were much there when they first married, my Aunts Mary and Lissy delighting in the gaiety of so new a scene to them. Generally about fifty people sat down to dinner there in the great hall in the shooting season, of all ranks. There was not exactly a ‘below the salt’ division so marked at the table, but the company at the lower end was of a very different description from those at the top, and treated accordingly with whisky punch instead of wine. Neither was there a distinct ‘yellow drawing room’ party, though a large portion of the guests seldom obtruded themselves on the more refined section of the company unless on a dancing evening, when all again united in the cleared hall. Sir James Grant was hospitable in the feudal style; his house was open to all; to all and each he bade a hearty welcome; and he was glad to see his table filled and scrupulous to pay fit attention to every individual present. But in spite of much cordiality of manner it was all somewhat in the king style, the Chief condescending to the Clan, above the very best of whom he extremely considered himself. It was a rough royalty too, plenty, but rude plenty, a footman in the gorgeous green and scarlet livery behind every chair, but they were mere gillies, lads quite untutored, small tenants’ sons brought in for the occasion, the autumn gathering, and fitted into the suit that they best filled. Lady Grant was quiet and ladylike, Miss Grant a favourite, the rest of the family of less account. This was my Mother’s description to me years afterwards, when all connexion between us and the head of our house had unhappily ceased.2
Memoirs of a Highland Lady Page 4