Britain’s Last Frontier

by Alistair Moffat

  Highland societies were established and they organised such social life as could be afforded, with ceilidhs and mods encouraging the retention of language and cultures, at least in certain versions. In the later 19th century, the Central Station Bridge became known as the Hielanman’s Umbrella since so many immigrants were in the habit of meeting under it. In the early 21st century, Gaelic can still be heard occasionally in Glasgow and, of the small surviving speech community of 58,000, 10 per cent live in the city.

  Traffic moved in other directions. When Para Handy steered the Vital Spark past Craigendoran, he then had to navigate the stretch of water known as the Tail of the Bank. This was a large and very dangerous shifting sandbank but between it and Gourock and Greenock was a deep-water anchorage for ocean-going ships. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, many Highlanders were ferried out to ships riding at anchor at the Tail of the Bank, waiting to cross the Atlantic.

  As the Vital Spark puffed around Gourock Bay, Dunoon could be seen on the starboard side. From the mid 19th century, when rail and ferry links were made, wealthy Glaswegians began to build grand villas in the town. And when paddle steamers plied a developing tourist trade on the Clyde, what became known as ‘going doon the watter’, Dunoon was a prime destination. Trippers were also taken up the long sea lochs to the likes of Inverary or Gareloch, Rothesay on the Isle of Bute, Loch Fyne, and Brodick on the Isle of Arran. For the first time the Highland Line was regularly breached by ordinary people as they began to be able to afford holidays. Instead of a wild, romantic resort of the more wealthy or a source of trouble and troubling difference, the Highlands became a welcome destination.

  Para Handy helped put a smile on Glasgow’s Highland hinterland. The tales in the Glasgow Evening News and in book form were a kind of travelogue for doon the watter. While sailing to Lochgoilhead, the crew of the Vital Spark first heard of the introduction of the old age pension and the opportunities offered by ‘pension farms’ or old folks’ homes. The skipper mused, ‘Wan pensioner maybe wouldna pay ye, but if ye had a herd, like my frien’ in Mull, there’s money in it.’ At Tighnabruaich on the Kyles of Bute, the midgies were famously vicious: ‘They’re that bad there, they’ll bite through corrugated iron roofs to get at ye!’ And, on Mull, they were even worse having ‘aal the points of a Poltalloch terrier, even to the black nose and the cocked lugs and sits up and barks at ye!’

  As well as holidaymaking, history hovered over the Highlands, like dark clouds over the mountains. And it was history more than humour that caught the imagination of Neil Munro. In 1891, he published John Splendid, the first really authentic Highland novel. It was written by a Highlander, a Gaelic speaker, who made a story told from the inside of a culture he grew up in and understood. It was unlike anything written by Lowlanders such as Walter Scott.

  John Splendid is itself a translation of the Gaelic Iain Alainn. It literally means ‘John the Beautiful’ and, in the Highlands, that was an adjective that could be applied to men. The action of the novel crackled around the spectacular campaign led by James Graham, Marquis of Montrose, in 1664 in support of the failing reign of Charles I. Through the December snows, an army descended on Inverary, the stronghold of the Covenanting Campbells and their chief. He fled, making his escape by sea in his birlinn, and the town was sacked by Montrose’s army of avenging Macdonalds and other clans. But, as an Argyll man raised in Glen Aray near Inverary, Neil Munro told the story from a Campbell viewpoint, foregoing the easy temptations of the temporary glory of Montrose and his victory over a Campbell army at Inverlochy the following year. While Iain Alainn, John Splendid, is painted in the traditional colours of the fearless Highland warrior, his chief, Gillesbeg Gruamach, was a moderniser. He did not look backwards to a glorious military tradition but to the future, beyond the ancient ties of clanship to a more peaceful and productive society governed not by warfare and the bonds of service but by the rule of law – a thriving Highland economy built on trade rather than the old staples of cattle rearing and droving. These goals were at the centre of Gruamach’s ambition rather than prowess in battle.

  Munro’s Highlanders are often nuanced characters capable of the unexpected and far removed from the caricatures created by other authors. Three more historical novels followed John Splendid, all of them revisionist, all linked to the 1745 Rebellion and its aftermath, all beautifully conceived and written. In Children of the Tempest, a Captain Dan MacNeil, skipper of the Happy Return, makes a prophetic appearance. Munro clearly relished writing the character and he may well be the prototype for Para Handy.

  Significantly, Neil Munro felt no awkwardness in writing about Lowland Scotland. Several novels, including the ambitious Fancy Farm, deal confidently with agricultural and urban life. Munro had retired from journalism to concentrate on writing but, with the outbreak of the First World War, he returned and became editor of the Glasgow Evening News in 1918.

  The New Road was Neil Munro’s last completed novel and it is his greatest. Revisiting Highland history, he created an epic whodunit only resolved on the very last page. General Wade’s new road between Stirling and Inverness gave the novel its title and, in Munro’s hands, it became a route out of the darkness of the past to prosperity and improvement rather than repression. He understood that the new road was destined to mean the ultimate end of a separate cultural life for the Gaelic-speaking Highlands and the rapid integration of the lands north of the Highland Line into Scotland but it could also have the effect of improving the lives of ordinary people.

  The New Road is now a half-forgotten masterpiece, barely still in print, and yet it was included by one enlightened critic in a recent listing of 100 Best Scottish Books. The Vital Spark was not but, if the gentle humour and vitality of the tales keep Neil Munro’s reputation alive, perhaps his great novels, stories that uniquely crossed and re-crossed the Highland Line, will come back into fashion.

  The following passage from The Vital Spark is a wonderful example of Neil Munro’s magical ability to write Gaelic-English, to make readers believe that they are hearing dialogue in another language which they could miraculously understand, a language that spoke of another culture. Dougie had persuaded Para Handy to go to the Furnace Ball. Drink had been taken, tempers flared and the Tar was acrimoniously sacked from the crew, something the skipper had forgotten by the following morning as the Vital Spark made headway down Loch Fyne. Para Handy believes that a far worse fate had befallen the Tar:

  ‘Weel, there’s a good man gone!’ said Para Handy. ‘Och! Poor Tar! It wass yon last smasher of a sea. He’s over the side. Poor laad! Poor laad! Cot bless me, dyin’ without a word of Gaalic in his mooth! It’s a chudgement on us for the way we were carryin’ on, chust a chudgement; not another drop of drink will I drink, except maybe beer. Or at New Year time. I’m blaming you, Dougie, for making us stop at Furnace for a baal I wudna give a snuff for. You are chust a disgrace to the vessel, with your smokin’ and your drinkin’, and your ignorance. It iss time you were livin’ a better life for the sake of your wife and family. If it wass not for you makin’ me go into Furnace last night, the Tar would be to the fore yet, and I would not need to be sending a telegram to his folk from Ardrishaig. If I wass not steering the boat, I would break my he’rt greetin’ for the poor laad that never did anybody any herm. Get oot the flag from below my bunk, give it a syne in the pail, and put it at half mast, and we’ll go into Ardrishaig and send a telegram – it’ll be a sixpence. It’ll be a telegram with a sore he’rt, I’ll assure you. I do not know what I will say in it, Dougie. It will not do to break it too much to them; maybe we will send the two telegrams – that’ll be a shilling. We’ll say in the first wan “Your son, Colin, left the boat today”: and in the next wan we will say – “He iss not coming back, he iss drooned.” Och! Och! Poor Tar, amn’t I sorry for him? I wass chust going to put up his wages a shilling on Setturday.’

  The Vital Spark went in close to Ardrishaig Pier just as the Cygnet was leaving after taking in a cargo of herring box
es. Para Handy and Dougie went ashore in the punt, the Captain with his hands washed and his watch-chain on as a tribute of respect for the deceased. Before they could send off the telegram it was necessary that they should brace themselves for the melancholy occasion. “No drinking, chust wan gless of beer,” said Para Handy, and they entered a discreet contiguous public-house for this purpose.

  The Tar himself was standing at the counter having a refreshment, with one eye wrapped up in a handkerchief.

  ‘Dalmighty!’ cried the Captain, staggered at the sight, and turning pale. ‘What are you doing here with your eye in a sling?’

  ‘What’s your business?’ retorted the Tar coolly ‘I’m no’ in your employ anyway.’

  It is still Britain’s last frontier. The Highland Line remains a barrier, a clear division between two Scotlands. But much has changed. Just as Domhnall Ban Crosd could see through his tears at Carnish in the late 19th century, only the land and the sea endure. The suddenness of the Highland Boundary Fault is an obvious, imperishable geological drama and no one who travels across it can fail to notice the transition to another Scotland.

  What has all but perished is the distinctive culture that lay to the north. Over three millennia, the Highlands has slowly emptied. The volcanic winters that followed the eruption of Mt Hekla in 1159 BC accelerated the blanketing of the peat and forced farmers to depend primarily on stock rearing. People were forced to move east and south across the high passes and down the glens to find kinder and more fertile land in the Lowlands.

  The storms of battle erupted along the Highland Line for much of that long time. From the epic struggle at the foot of the Graupian Mountain in AD 83 to the slaughter at Culloden in 1746, great imperial powers have marched north to subdue the peoples of the mountains and straths. And, despite a deserved reputation for ferocity and bravery (and an undeserved one for mindless savagery), the Highlanders were ultimately defeated and their culture began a long retreat. One of the insistent themes of the story of the Highland Line is the victory of the more populous and wealthier Lowlanders. Inevitable and unequal, perhaps the most surprising aspect is how long defeat was delayed.

  From the Roman road and fort builders to Marshal Wade, soldiers understood that the Highlands could be never held – the hinterlands could only be more or less efficiently policed. Armies usually marched north in response to provocation. And containment rather than conquest was what their generals aimed to achieve. Few came to colonise or settle. To many outsiders, the Highlands seemed a harsh, barren and elemental wilderness that somehow bred fearsome warriors. But, until the 19th century, after the warriors had fled into legend, it was rarely a place to be possessed, not even by the great Agricola.

  At about 2 p.m. on Wednesday 16 April 1746, the sound of the last defeat was heard. After beating off a disorganised Highland charge across the boggy Drumossie Moor near Culloden House, the government army was ordered to march forward to take symbolic possession of the field of battle. The Jacobite army had been scattered and, as their drummers rattled out a steady beat, the victorious infantry advanced to where the clans had stood. And then they cheered.

  Less than two miles away, Prince Charles could hear the triumphant huzzas. He had reined in his horse and stopped to shelter under a tree at Balvraid. There, the remnants of his routed army mustered around him. Would they regroup, retreat and fight a summer campaign in the mountains? Showing no leadership, perhaps even panicking, the prince shouted that the Macdonald regiments and other survivors should do as they wished. With that he turned his horse and rode away to a life in exile.

  Men were still dying on the battlefield. Bleeding slowly and fatally, their legs often broken by grapeshot, men lay trapped under the bloody ruck of bodies. Clan Fraser had suffered badly in the thick of the battle and, when the brutal General Henry Hawley rode up with a party of soldiers, bayonets fixed, he found Charles Fraser of Inverallochie still alive. Captain of his clan, he lay trapped and covered in blood and he looked silently up at the general. When Hawley ordered a young officer, possibly James Wolfe, to shoot Fraser, he refused but another man more willing was immediately found.

  When burial parties came to the moor on Thursday 17 April, they reported that many wounded Highlanders had survived the bitterly cold night. Most had been stripped of their clothes the day before and some with broken limbs and severe wounds had crawled for shelter to a drystane dyke to the south of the battlefield. Desperately thirsty, others had dragged themselves to the spring that later became known as the Well of the Dead. Alexander McGillivray of Dunmaglass, a captain of Clan Chattan, was there and, when she found his body, his wife, Elizabeth Campbell of Clunas, saw that a white cloth had been tied to his arm. Someone who knew him had done that so that he might be recognised and found amongst the mangled piles of the dead.

  John Fraser of Lovat had been felled in the charge by a musket ball that shattered his kneecap. When the government army advanced, they stripped and beat him as they passed. All through the night of the battle, Fraser lay shivering in the heather. By the grey light of morning, he crawled to the cover of a small wood where other wounded men lay. Discovered by soldiers, they were taken in carts to Culloden House, put up against a wall and shot at close range. But still Fraser survived. Having crawled away once more, he was discovered by Lord Boyd, a government officer. Taking pity, Boyd concealed Fraser near a farm. And miraculously his wounds healed and although dreadfully crippled, he lived until 1796.

  As Prince Charles fled westwards, the Jacobite cause fled with him. The clans would not rise again and thousands of their young men enlisted in the British army as the great drive for empire gathered pace. The society they left behind began to wither as romance replaced reality and people were herded on to the emigrant ships.

  The distinctiveness of Highland culture is described best by its own language – and Gaelic is dying. When the question was first asked in the census of 1881, more than 250,000 Scots replied that they had Gaelic, around 7 per cent of the population. In 2001 the number had dropped dramatically to 58,552, 1.2 per cent. Many of these respondents were aged 50 or over and few were children. Activists comfort themselves that the rate of decline is slowing but, despite the heroic efforts being made to save the language, the overwhelming likelihood must be that, by the close of the 21st century, Gaelic will no longer have any native speakers. That is the definition of a dead language.

  It may take some time for the death of a culture to become apparent. Because of the richness of history and memory mixed with a measure of guilt at the manifest wrongs of the past, the culture and strong sense of identity in the Highlands will seem to survive. Emigrants, Lowlanders and tourists have too much affection for the lands north of the Highland Line to allow its traditions to die. And, in turn, the Highland economy, based on scenery, tartan, whisky, written and filmic romance and all the other unique identifiers, depends on tourism too heavily for that distinctiveness ever to be allowed to wane. But increasingly Highland culture will seem hollow, like a dead Christmas tree, its needles brown and brittle, but with all the tinsel still attached and the fairy lights twinkling.

  The positive legacy of all that history seems to be tolerance. Violence between Lowland and Highland has long been consigned to the past and prejudices appear to be waning. All Scots who wish to can cross the Highland Line and walk or sail through the glories of its landscapes and seascapes. It is no longer a barrier and there are signs that immigration from the south to certain parts of the Highlands, like south Skye, is increasing. It may be that a new sort of life in the north of Scotland is in the making – but it will be all the richer if the stories of the old life are remembered and celebrated.

  One of Scotland’s very greatest poets, Norman MacCaig, was the son of a Gaelic-speaking mother from the Hebrides. It was said that the freshness and simplicity of her English, her second language, opened up the possibilities of writing for the young MacCaig. For most of his working life, he was a primary schoolteacher and, during the long sum
mer vacations, almost always went on holiday to Achmelvich, Assynt in Sutherland, near the village of Lochinver. Summers in the Highlands were more than a break from work and his home in Edinburgh – they nourished MacCaig’s powerful affinity with Gaelic culture and the landscapes it described.

  Most of the poems in Norman MacCaig’s rich output are short, scarcely more than three or four verses, rarely more than a page. But, when he sat down to write of a return to the island of Scalpay, off the coast of Harris and his mother’s birthplace, he had a great deal to say:

  Return to Scalpay

  The ferry wades across the kyle, I drive

  The car ashore

  On to a trim tarred road. A car on Scalpay?

  Yes, and a road where there was never one before.

  The ferryman’s Gaelic wonders who I am

  (Not knowing I know it) this man back from the dead,

  Who takes the blue-black road (no traffic jam)

  From by Craig Lexie over to Bay Head

  A man bows in the North wind, shaping up

  His lazybeds,

  And through the salt air vagrant peat smells waver

  From houses where no houses should be. The sheds

  At the curing station have been newly tarred.

  Aunt Julia’s house has vanished. The Red Well

  Has been bulldozed away. But sharp and hard

  The church still stands, barring the road to Hell.

  A chugging prawn boats slides round Cuddy Point