Britain’s Last Frontier

by Alistair Moffat

  Across the Highland Line, crofting turned out to be more tenacious – a way of life that has outlasted what one observer called ‘a bad attack of history’. Culloden broke the political and cultural hold of the clans and set in motion a cycle of consequences that were to become known as Fuadach nan Gaidheal, ‘the Highland Clearances’.

  Increasingly absent and anglicised clan chiefs came to value their estates not for the number (and loyalty) of the people they could support but for how much of an income they could produce. Forced evictions from the fertile glens to free them for more profitable sheep farms drove tenants down the seashore, to more marginal land. There, many failed to scratch a living from poor soil and, to subsist, they became involved in kelping, a near-forgotten industry. Seaweed was gathered and burned. The ash was rich in chemicals, such as magnesium, sodium and potassium, but, when cheaper sources became available after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the industry collapsed.

  It was then that emigration gathered pace. Brutal landlords forced tenants off the land entirely. Many moved south to the growing industrial cities and others left Scotland for a new life in North America and elsewhere in the Empire. The USA was also a popular destination – precisely because it was no longer a British possession. The bitterness and heartbreak of exile left an indelible scar.

  The ignorance and careless contempt of some landowners was startling. In the early 19th century, the Countess of Sutherland employed the notorious Patrick Sellar as her factor to clear people off her estates. Amidst scenes of starvation and pitiful suffering, she wrote to a friend in England, ‘Scotch people are of happier constitution and do not fatten like the larger breed of animals.’ It was all done in the spirit of progress – to make the land more productive – and the Countess remarked of her husband, Lord Stafford, that ‘he is seized as much as I am with the rage of improvements, and we both turn our attention with the greatest of energy to turnips’.

  John Prebble

  Scotland’s greatest popular historian was not a Scot. John Prebble was born in Edmonton in North London and raised in Saskatchewan in Canada. He returned to London to complete his education at the Latymer School. His close affinity with Scotland and the Highlands came about in Canada where he grew up in the township of Sutherland in rural Saskatchewan. Mainly inhabited by emigrant Scots, many of them Highlanders, stories of Glencoe, Culloden and the Highland Clearances were told to Prebble at an impressionable age. After serving in the Royal Artillery in the Second World War, he began a career as a journalist and an author. First published in 1961, his account of the Battle of Culloden was the first in the Fire and Sword trilogy – the other two deal with the Massacre of Glencoe and the Highland Clearances. Prebble’s wide-ranging and meticulous research allowed him to see the battle from many standpoints but, in particular, he foregrounded, where he could, the experiences of the soldiers who fought at Drumossie Moor. Beautifully structured and written with real verve, his account of Culloden has not only remained in print for more than 50 years and sold hundreds of thousands of copies, it has yet to be bettered. Written for the common reader, the book has, like much popular history, drawn the ire of academics. The former Historiographer Royal in Scotland, Professor Gordon Donaldson, was particularly intemperate when he described Prebble’s Culloden as ‘utter rubbish’. This sort of remark is not untypical and is a symptom of an uneasy relationship. On the one hand, academics require history to be popular in order to keep the study of it in curricula – and it is often threatened. On the other hand, popular historians often depend on the spadework of academic research from which they can fashion a coherent story that will appeal to the reading public. However, the vitriol appears to flow in only one direction.

  Those tenants driven out of their homes by Patrick Sellar and others who settled on the coasts were often let a holding known as a croft. Essentially a smallholding, the term ‘croft’ actually refers to the land rather than the house or any outbuildings on it. Often set out in long strips, these parcels of land were intended to support a single family. Grazing rights on common land were attached and sometimes the right to cut peats from the moor. In his beautifully written memoir Night Falls on Ardnamurchan, Alasdair Maclean explains that these arrangements could be very detailed. At Sanna on the Ardnamurchan peninsula, the crofters had customary rights to cut peats at different mosses because the quality was variable. In this way, each family shared the best and worst sources of fuel equally. Co-operation was at the centre of crofting life but strict rules were enforced. Here is Maclean’s summary of the conventions of the peats: ‘The criterion was the common good. Our crofter, for example, might cut as many peats as he had time and energy for and fireplaces to absorb. He might come at last to despise the ordinary cubed form and hack out his fuel in the shape of pyramids or octahedrons. He might consume his handiwork himself or warp each block in tartan cellophane for the tourist trade. What he might not do was to open up new working wherever he felt inclined: his peats would be cut only in the place appointed to him.’

  In 1979, there were 17,997 registered crofts and approximately 13,000 crofters. Tenants now enjoy an absolute right to buy their croft for 15 times the annual rental, which is generally low. Despite many difficulties and the unlikelihood of ever becoming wealthy on the proceeds, it is a way of life that appears to be growing in popularity. With effect from February 2010, Arran, Bute, the Cumbraes, Moray and those parts of Highland region not already inside the boundaries of the traditional crofting counties have all been formally recognised as new crofting areas. Landowners and certain sorts of tenants in the new areas were also given the right to apply to the Crofters’ Commission to create new crofts. It seems that a way of life has indeed survived a bad attack of history and that the Highland Line is moving.

  Alasdair Maclean

  In 1984, one of the most elegiac, deeply personal and occasionally funny book ever published on the crofting way of life was published. Night Falls on Ardnamurchan is subtitled The Twilight of a Crofting Family and the author, Alasdair Maclean, captured with extraordinary precision the pain of crossing the Highland Line never to return. Here is a poem that appears near the beginning of this remarkable book:

  Glasgow is not for me.

  I do not see the need for such a crowd,

  All jumping and biting like fleas in a great blanket.

  How long is it since I met myself?

  The people lock their faces every morning

  Before they go to work,

  For fear, I think, of having a good look stolen.

  Who knows where the key is?

  Here nothing grows but memory and that crookedly.

  That sitting-rock by the ford on the way to Plocaig

  I can feel its roughness on the back of my legs.

  Our folk had a name for it. What was it?

  I was a good man with spade once.

  The houses are too high:

  The streets too narrow.

  Who could dig himself out of so deep a ditch?

  I’d give all I own: my good name,

  The linings of my pockets, that kiss you gave me

  When I left (you’d replace it surely)

  If I could go home once more to Ardnamurchan.

  9

  The Auld Lichts, Peter and Wendy

  PETER PAN WAS BORN close to the Highland Line. In the winter of 1866, he went skating, suffered a terrible accident and, two days before his 14th birthday, he died. Peter, the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, was, in reality, David Barrie, the older brother of J. M. Barrie. Born in the little town of Kirriemuir in the county of Angus, David had been sent to school in Lanarkshire where he was being looked after by his elder brother and sister, Alexander and Mary. When news of the tragedy reached their mother, Margaret Barrie, she resolved to ‘get between death and her boy’ but admitted that, even before she could board the train, death had taken him.

  In his writings, J. M. Barrie confessed that his boyhood was dominated by David’s death and his mother’s obses
sion with the son who never grew up. In the biography he compiled, calling it Margaret Ogilvy, using her maiden name, Barrie recalled how he tried to fill the yawning gap in her life by dressing in his dead brother’s clothes. Once, when he came into her room unnoticed at first, his mother said, ‘Is that you?’ ‘I thought it was the dead boy she was speaking to,’ wrote Barrie, ‘and I said in a little lonely voice, “No, it’s no’ him, it’s just me.” ’

  All of his immensely productive life, J. M. Barrie enjoyed the company of children – perhaps he and they felt closer because of his height. According to his passport of 1934, Barrie stood only 5 foot 3 inches tall. When he moved to London, he met the Llewelyn Davies family. Fond of walks in Kensington Gardens, Barrie struck up a friendship with George, Jack, Baby Peter and their nanny, Mary Hodgson that was to last a lifetime. The boys enjoyed Barrie’s stories and playing with his big St Bernard dog, Porthos. The cast for Peter Pan was slowly assembling.

  When Barrie met little Margaret Henley and her mother, another friendship blossomed and this time it created a popular Christian name. A photograph of the 1890s shows a plump-cheeked girl wearing a long cloak and a hood. Margaret adored Barrie and called him My Friendy. But, as with many small children, she had trouble pronouncing her Rs and the nickname came out as Fwendy, and sometimes Fwendy Wendy. Aged only six, Margaret Henley died and, out of that terrible loss, Wendy was born. She first appeared in a story, ‘Sentimental Tommy’, in 1895 but, in 1904, she was immortalised as Wendy Darling in the play Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up.

  In his superb, sympathetic biography of J. M. Barrie, Andrew Birkin understood how Peter’s character and story grew out of tragedy and a series of warm friendships with children. Originally invented as an entertainment for George and Jack Llewelyn Davies, the tales first revolved around Peter who was still a baby. He could fly, said Barrie, because babies were birds before they were born and, to prevent them from escaping, parents had bars put on nursery windows. This grew into a story about one baby who did escape and who flew through the nursery window – and eventually reached Neverland, never to grow up. The stage set for the opening of Peter Pan was almost complete.

  In 1904, the play was an instant success and the indelible, original image of Peter Pan entered the pantheon of children’s – and adults’ – heroes. Part of the appeal was that Barrie cleverly gave him a darker, anarchic aspect. When the statue of Peter Pan was planned for Kensington Gardens in 1912, it was thought he should be modelled on photographs of Michael Llewelyn Davies in costume. But the sculptor, Sir George Frampton, had other ideas and used a more conventional-looking child. When the statue was unveiled, Barrie was not impressed: ‘It doesn’t show the devil in Peter.’

  The success of the play was enormous and enduring but by no means Barrie’s sole literary achievement. For the stage, he wrote What Every Woman Knows, Dear Brutus, The Twelve Pound Look and several other beautifully crafted pieces that are still regularly performed and have been translated into many languages. His novels are perhaps less well read now and, shamefully, his first is out of print. Auld Licht Idylls is a brilliant, hilarious satire on the mores of small town Scotland and it is based on what Barrie observed in Kirriemuir, the place he calls Thrums in the novel. In contrast to Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s elegy to the old life on the land in Sunset Song, it focuses on a curtain-twitching community, creates a pungent, even claustrophobic atmosphere and reveals Barrie as a truly prodigious talent. As much as the influence of childhood tragedy and his close friendships with children helped create Peter Pan, it is the sheer quality of the writing that makes the boy fly into every imagination.

  Auld Licht Idylls is not only wonderfully well written, it is also a powerful piece of social history but it may be that its present obscurity is understandable. The tensions in the narrative and much of the satire themselves derive from an obscure series of episodes in the tumultuous history of Scottish religious life. These affected both Highlands and Lowlands but probably had greatest impact in towns like Kirriemuir. To understand something of the power of this superb novel, its references, indeed its title and also something of what drove the tremendously ambitious and industrious J. M. Barrie, history needs to rewind a little.

  Central to the Scottish Reformation of the 16th century was literacy. John Knox, his supporters and those who carried on and deepened the effect of what was achieved after the revolution of 1560 believed absolutely in a doctrine known as the priesthood of all believers. This insisted that each Christian was responsible for his or her own salvation and, in order to gain that, they had to be able to read the Word of God for themselves. The old role of priests as interpreters and readers of the Bible would be swept away as mass literacy was introduced all over Scotland. It would usher in what the reformers called a ‘Godly Commonwealth’. A school in every parish! That was the clarion cry and, over the course of the 17th century, in the face of great hardship, much was achieved.

  J. M. Barrie was not born into wealth or privilege. His father was a weaver in Kirriemuir and he was aware that this his cottage industry was dying as industrialisation took hold. Nevertheless, he and his wife somehow managed to find the money to have all of their eight surviving children educated and not just at an elementary level. Barrie was sent to Glasgow Academy, Forfar Academy, Dumfries Academy and Edinburgh University. By a mixture of scholarships and bursaries to add to the spare means of the family, the modest fees were paid. The Reformation ultimately succeeded in ushering in era of mass literacy because the 900 parishes of the Church of Scotland provided schools with competent teachers and, in contrast with England’s two, there were four universities. Education was not free in early modern Scotland but it was cheap and widely available.

  Scalan

  Despite the fervour of the reformers in Scotland after 1560, Catholicism survived in isolated pockets, most of them in the north and in the Highlands and Islands. The complete eclipse of the Catholic Church had only been prevented by the bravery and piety of a handful of Irish Franciscans. In the 1620s and 1630s, when persecution was a constant threat, they baptised more than 10,000 people and returned them to the Holy Mother Church but, to sustain even that partial recovery, priests were needed urgently. In a remote glen deep in the mountains above Glenlivet, Scalan College was finally set up in 1716. At first little more than a very basic farmhouse built almost entirely of turf, the secret seminary continued to train young men for the priesthood until 1799. By then, the laws banning the Catholic Church had been repealed and colleges could be openly founded. Scalan has now become a place of pilgrimage.

  If the promotion of literacy was one of the glories of the Scottish Reformation, the mania for witch-hunting was a disfigurement. During the last quarter of the 16th century and for the whole of the 17th, thousands of Scots, most of them women, suspected of witchcraft were hideously tortured, hanged or burned. Part of the motivation for these grisly episodes was rooted in the preservation and purity of the Godly Commonwealth. Satan was thought to be everywhere and his agents on earth both polluted and endangered society. All over Lowland Scotland, appalling atrocities were perpetrated as suspects were subjected to ‘pricking’, having been stripped naked and hung from a beam or a hook. It was thought that witches derived their power from contact with the earth. The witch prickers – and there were men who made a profession of this – drove long brass needles into any unusual marks found on the naked bodies of victims. Searching for the ‘Devil’s Nip’ or the marks of Satan, they inflicted terrible injuries and generally extracted confessions. Most convicted witches were strangled before being burned at the stake but others suffered the dreadful fate of being burned ‘quick’ or alive. In Auld Licht Idylls, Barrie recounts a historical episode when a minister absented himself form the parish at Thrums to attend a witch burning.

  It was different in the mountains, glens and islands of the north and west. These horrific acts and attitudes did not cross the Highland Line. Between 1570 and 1720 there were only 89 indictments for
witchcraft in the Highlands compared with many thousands in the Lowlands and almost all of these were tried in the English-speaking areas of Caithness, Ross, Sutherland and Bute. The Gaelic language was the greatest, most robust defence against the horrors of the witch finders. Zealots anxious to root out the creatures of Satan were met with incomprehension and a refusal to translate and the reason for this was a straightforward determination to preserve something integral and valuable in Gaelic culture.

  Most Lowland women condemned for witchcraft were, in reality, folk healers, people who practised and passed on traditional remedies. Many of these were associated with childbirth. In 1590, Agnes Sampson of Keith in Banffshire was brutally tortured and burned at the stake because she had used ‘develisch prayers’ to relieve the pains of labour. In the Highlands, such women were admired and their skills prized, their medicine often founded on the use of plant derivatives or therapies designed to ease the discomfort of the sick. And, since these traditions were not written down anywhere and uttered only in Gaelic, they were beyond the twisted reach of monoglot Lowland inquisitors. Since the witch craze infected most of northern and western Europe, the ancient traditions of folk medicine in the Highlands were some of the few to survive the purges.