Folklore of the Scottish Highlands

by Anne Ross

  Special dances and scenes were enacted on St Michael’s Night which clearly show the pagan origin of the Festival. One of these was a dance called Cailleach an dùdain, ‘the Hag of the Mill-dust’. Carmichael himself saw it performed many times; it was danced by a man and a woman. The man held a rod in his right hand known as the Slachdan Druidheachd, ‘the Druid Wand’ or the Slachdan Geasachd, ‘the Magic Wand’. The man would hold the wand over his own head and then over the head of the woman. She then would fall down at his feet, as if dead. He then mourned for her, dancing about her body. Then he would raise her left hand, touch it with the wand and the hand would come to life and begin to move up and down. The man was overjoyed, and he would then dance about her. Next he would bring her other arm and her legs to life. Then he would kneel over her and breathe into her mouth and touch her heart with the wand. This would restore her fully to life, she would spring to her feet, and both would dance joyously. The music changed with the different stages of this curious performance. The instrument might be the pipes, the fiddle or even port-a-beul, ‘mouth music’ which was often used at céilidhs instead of a musical instrument. According to Carmichael the accompanying music is peculiar and irregular and the words archaic. It seems beyond question that this dance is related to the kind of cult scenes that were mimed at the ancient pagan festivals in the wider Celtic world and have long lingered on its periphery. The great collector, Iain F. Campbell of Islay, also witnessed the dancing of Cailleach an Dùdain. Another strange dance, Cath nan Coileach, ‘The Battle of the Cocks’, and Ruidhleadh nan Coileach Dubha, ‘the Reel of the Black Cocks’, were danced on St Michael’s Night, as was the sword dance, another primitive and pagan dance; on that night, however, it was danced in eight sections instead of four. That this triumphal dance over the weapon goes directly back to pagan times is evidenced by its depiction on certain Gaulish coins, for example dating to the pre-Roman period.

  All night long, individual struans were given and received. People of all ranks joined together in this ceremony. By the time Carmichael was collecting in the Highlands, this rich tradition had become obsolete, but memories and tales of it still survive. The last traditional circuiting of St Michael’s burial-ground in South Uist seemingly took place in 1820; the last great oda in North Uist was in 1866 and took place on the Strand of Mary, on the west side of the Island. Vestigially, the Michael lamb continued to be slain, the struan baked and the carrots picked, but by people who had no real understanding of the earlier significance of these things. Carmichael perspicaciously remarks, of affairs in his own day:

  In the present, as a rule, the proprietors and gentlemen of the Highlands and Islands are at the best but temporary residents, if so much, and generally strangers in blood and speech, feeling and sympathy, more prone to criticize than to help, to scoff than to sympathise. As a result, the observances of the people have fallen into disuse, to the loss of the spiritual life of the country, and of the patriotic life of the nation.

  Michael was, according to tradition, the leader of souls to the next world, just as was Mercury according to classical tradition.

  Samhain, ‘Hallowe’en’

  Hallowe’en, from the earliest Celtic records, has been the most important and sinister festival of the Celtic year. It was originally celebrated on the night of 1 November and on the following day. Then the whole world was believed to be open to the gods and spirits of the pagan Celts, and the Otherworld became visible to, and accessible to mankind. The occupants of the supernatural world could mix freely, a privilege fraught with peril for human beings. Originally a Druidic festival, and accompanied as the Irish tales indicate with human sacrifice and many propitiatory offerings, it remained the most popular of the calendar festivals, and was celebrated with much ritual well into the twentieth century. It is still observed vestigially, but the old significance has been lost. Different parts of the Highlands still carry on their own traditional activities, but these are less authentic and varied as the old beliefs and traditional ways of celebrating rapidly disappear. Divining the future by means of nuts, kail plants, dropping egg whites into water and so on, was a regular pursuit, and sometimes the person seeking to know the future would get unexpected and perhaps unwanted answers to the questions asked. The supernatural would really manifest itself, or one of the company would play a trick and make the seeker after future knowledge believe that this was the case. In many districts each house had its own bonfire, samhnag, and one house was usually especially popular as a gathering place. In early Celtic tradition, Samhain was closely associated with the burial mounds which were believed to be entrances to the Otherworld; and for this reason, the celebration of Hallowe’en at Fortingall, at the head of Glen Lyon in Perthshire, is of especial interest.

  The festival itself was observed in a somewhat unusual fashion, being essentially of a communal nature there, and it continued well into the twentieth century. Another unusual feature in this region of the Highlands where so much archaic tradition has been preserved, was the date on which the festival was traditionally held — 11 November. The samhnag, ‘bonfire’, was a communal effort, and it was built on the mound known as Càrn nam Marbh, ‘The Mound of the Dead’. Local tradition has it that the mound contains the bodies of victims of a dreadful plague which were brought there and buried by an old woman with a cart or sled pulled by a white horse; the story has a clear supernatural flavour about it, and the mound is, in fact, a Bronze Age tumulus. A stone, known as Clach a’ Phlàigh, ‘the Plague Stone’ crowns the mound. Although people living in the neighbourhood knew of the Fortingall ceremonies, only the local populace seems to have taken part in them. In the other townships the usual individual bonfires were lit, and it was usually the children who built them.

  The following account was obtained from a local man who actually took part in the celebrations as a boy. Everybody shared in the preparations which began months before the event. The young people used to go up onto the hill to collect and store great quantities of whin, which was once very plentiful there. This went on night after night. It was finally made into a huge pile with wood shavings and tar barrels added to increase the great conflagration. It was the duty of the older men to actually build the bonfire on the top of the Mound of the Dead. Finally, it was lit, and the whole community took hands when it was blazing and danced round the mound both sunwise and anti-sunwise. As the fire began to wane some of the younger boys took burning faggots from the flames and ran throughout the field with them, finally throwing them into the air and dancing over them as they lay glowing on the ground. When the last embers were cooling, the boys would have a leaping competition across the remains of the fire. When it was finished, the young ones went home and ducked for apples and practised divination. The older people went to Fortingall Hotel, an old coaching house, and held a dance there, with much merry-making. There was no ‘guising’ here, the bonfire being the absolute centre of attention until it was consumed. The last bonfire, made by the community, was lit on the mound in 1924. It is said that this ancient festival was finally destroyed, not only because interest in such things was dying out amongst the young, nor because the people ceased to remember it, but because it was stopped by the keeper who claimed that this great stripping of cover from the hill was interfering with the game there. It is thought locally that the unusual date of Samhain here was due to the fact that the date of the big Fortingall Féill or Market was held then, and there was some association between the two gatherings. In other places, the ceremony was observed on the traditional date and the activities varied from region to region.

  After sunset, in many places, every youth who was able to carry a blazing torch or samhnag ran out and circuited the boundaries of their farms with these blazing brands in order to protect the family possessions from the fairies and all malevolent forces. Then, having secured their homes in this manner, by the purifying force of the sacred fire, all the households in a township would gather together and participate in the traditional activities.
Nuts and apples were regularly used. In the Hebrides the boys dressed up as guisers and went from house to house; much damage to property was done by them on this wild night, gates being removed, carts overturned, and mischief of every kind indulged in. One means of divining the future was to place six plates on the floor, each with different contents. The girls of the house were blindfolded and led to the spot where the plates were laid down, and the first plate each blindfolded girl touched foretold her fate. Pennant likewise makes mention of these widespread Hallowe’en customs. He says that in his day the young people determine the figure and size of their husbands by drawing cabbages blindfold; and to divine the future, fling nuts into the fire.

  When the festival was carried out with complete solemnity, new fire, kindled from the sacred communal fire, was brought into each house at Samhain, and it is likely that, like the Beltain fires, the Samhain fire was made from tein-éigin, fire made from the friction of two pieces of wood. Stones were sometimes placed in the great fire for purposes of divination. Traces of the original orgiastic nature of the festival remained in the Highlands until the end of the nineteenth century at least. In origin, Samhain was clearly a pastoral festival, held to assist the powers of growth and fertility, to placate the dead and keep at bay the forces of evil, to please the gods (and later certain spirits who had replaced them) with sacrifice, and as a clear demarcation between the joys of the ingathered harvest, and the hardships of the approaching winter.

  These calendar festivals, then, not only provided occasions for religious and superstitious ritual, when the protection of the gods and, later, God and the saints, was sought against the countless hostile powers; they were times of great relaxation and feasting, games and entertainment of every kind, in a society which lived in many cases very near to subsistence level, and daily life consisted of heavy toil and labour and utter dependence on the elements and their influence on crop and stock, and the vital harvest of the sea.

  8 Epilogue

  In this book, the emphasis has been laid on those aspects of the vast and rich traditions which are essentially Celtic, and thus have a long ancestry in the pagan world. Many topics have had to be omitted, due to the dictates of length, but this is inevitable. They include not only the vast repertoire of tales, heroic and humorous, which so delight the Highland mind, but countless legends of birds and beasts; sacred springs and severed heads; holy trees and magic mounds; dread supernatural beings that were believed to populate the lonely moors and mountains: fairies, hags — black dogs, evil aggressive goats, sinister and dangerous bulls. In fact, the amount of recorded material of every kind is almost unbelievably large and varied, some published, much awaiting publication in the Archives of the School of Scottish Studies and elsewhere. I have used published material in many instances, but only when I have been able to corroborate the evidence by personal field collection and ascertain that practices and beliefs previously recorded are, in fact, valid.

  The richness and the sophistication of Highland folklore and legend are due, partly, to the fact that so much of it has been handed on by means of the oral tradition which was so highly developed in Celtic societies from earliest times. It is also a manifestation of the spirit of the Gaels themselves; their love of words, their deep involvement with nature and its moods and beauties; and their intense passion for immediate locality, their homeland. The songs and poems of exile reveal in a deeply moving way this aspect of the Celtic psyche. Thus the songs and poems, the hero tales, legends of fairies, ghosts and monsters and a nostalgic preoccupation with the past, provided the sole relaxation in lives which were spent in the relentless struggle to obtain a sufficiency of food and clothing and shelter which was the daily lot of the crofters and cottars of the Highlands in past times. Nevertheless, the Celt has always had a great capacity for joy. He has always faced his rigorous life cheerfully and without complaint, his active mind and deep enjoyment of his home, his language and his rich storehouse of traditions doing much to compensate for paucity of worldly goods or entertainment of a more sophisticated kind. All is now, of course, changing. Radio, television, improved communications, higher standards of living and the opening up of the West to tourists have all played a vital rôle in transforming much that survived until the middle of the twentieth century; and it has not yet entirely gone. There is still a surprisingly large body of tradition to be heard and collected while the older people who knew a different way of life remain to give testimony to the past. But whatever survives in the way of superstitious belief — for superstition dies hard in every human milieu — the situation described to the great collector J.F. Campbell of Islay, by Hector Urquhart, gamekeeper at Ardkinglas, will never return. He says:

  In my native place, Pool-ewe, Ross-shire, when I was a boy, it was the custom for the young to assemble together on the long winter nights to hear the old people recite the tales or sgeulachd, which they had learned from their fathers before them. In these days tailors and shoemakers went from house to house making our clothes and shoes. When one of them came to the village we were greatly delighted, whilst getting new kilts at the same time. I knew an old tailor who used to tell a new tale every night during his stay in the village; and another, an old shoe-maker, who, with his large stock of stories about ghosts and fairies, used to frighten us so much that we scarcely dared pass the neighbouring churchyard on our way home . . . it was a common saying ‘the first tale by the goodman, and tales to daylight by the guest’.

  Rather than lament the rich treasure-house of lore and legend that has been irretrievably lost down the centuries, we should be deeply grateful for the amount of invaluable oral material that has been saved for posterity by the tireless labours and utter devotion of dedicated collectors, past and present.

  Postscript

  I should like to acknowledge the achievement of all the collectors of the past who worked tirelessly and in harsh conditions without the assistance of electric light and tape recorders, often in dangerous terrain, studded with peat bogs, lonely moors, and treacherous mountainsides. Our debt to them is immeasurable. I would also wish to make mention of some very distinguished field workers in the School of Scottish Studies, such as the late Calum MacLean of Raasay, Donald Archie MacDonald of North Uist, James Ross of Skye and many others. Today the School continues with its programme of recovering from obscurity valuable information of every kind concerning Scotland’s turbulent past. I myself had the privilege of being a Fellow of the School and of meeting and recording some fine tradition-bearers who are, alas, no more. It was a deeply enriching experience and one which brought a new dimension to my archaeological and historical studies of the early Celtic world.

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