by John Prebble
Acharacle was a stronger Gaelic enclave in those days before the war than it is now, a cluster of small houses on the low ground between Moidart and Ardnamurchan, an Episcopalian community living in traditional amity with its Catholic neighbours. I saw old adults and children only, and was told that most of the young people had gone away to Glasgow for work. I was welcomed to stay the night in a cottage, ate trout for breakfast, and can still remember the hurt in the cottager’s face when I offered to pay. Now there are Bed-and-Breakfast signs in the windows, two hotels and room for caravans. To regret that is no intended slight upon those to whom such changes are a necessity.
I travelled southward to Loch Sunart on a cart, over low hills of birch and pine. There were butter-pat globe flowers by the roadside, water-lilies on tiny lochans, and where shelving rock broke through the thin earth there were ranks of that straight-stemmed, thornless and sweetly-named melancholy-thistle which is perhaps the true emblem of Scotland. As we came down the brae to Salen the sea-loch below was hidden by a dank mist that did not lift until I parted from the carter in Strontian. This was more than forty years ago and I did not know that here in the 18th century, not long after Culloden, Lowland miners discovered the metallic element which has become part of our enduring nightmare in the form of Strontium 90.
Perhaps I remember that distant August with too much hindsight. I had no reason then to ask why the mountains were empty, where the people had gone and why. In Edinburgh, waiting for the train home in the lingering light of a summer evening, I saw no absurdity in the tartan, velvet and calf-laced brogues that skipped over Princes Street on their way to a Highland Ball in the North British Hotel. Nor should I blame Scott entirely for falsely colouring my imagination. Two years before his death he became disenchanted with the chiefs and lairds whose company he had once enjoyed. Writing to Maria Edgeworth of the manner in which such men were now dispersing their people, he angrily declared “I would to God that gibbetting one of them would be a warning to the rest.”
Although I did not visit Scotland again for fifteen years it continued to touch my imagination and my life. At an Army camp in North Wales some time in 1942, having secured the post of night orderly-corporal and the uninterrupted use of an office thereby, I at last had time to write Where the Sea Breaks. I set the story on a Hebridean island and believed it to be my own creation, but many years later when I saw the distant shape of Eigg from the deck of the Armadale ferry I immediately recognised it. The novel was published when I was in Europe, in a unit attached to the 15th Scottish Division. I remember the familiar star and saltire of Government tartan on khaki sleeves, Scots voices whispering in slit-trenches on the banks of the Maas, Highland and Lowland faces beneath the rims of steel helmets as we crossed the Rhine in the dawn of a bright March day. And there was a windmill by Venlo where we had briefly halted. The great beams that supported its shell-broken superstructure were caked with centuries of hardened flour. By the yellow glow of a Tilly lamp one night I chipped at the flour with my bayonet. On the wood beneath I found the carved names of soldiers who had fought on this ground three hundred years before with the Scots Brigade, men from the glens of Lord Reay’s country where the wrinkled rock-face of Ben Hope looks northward to the Arctic. I cut my own name and the date beside theirs, moistened the flour with tea and pasted it over them all.
After the war a book on the fall of the Tay Bridge took me back to Scotland, and later still in 1959 when I went to Inverness I stood on the field of Culloden and decided to write of the men who are buried there, others who died on the gallows and prison hulks or were sent in bondage to the colonies, all those whose lives were brutally changed by the battle. I thought it would be the only book I would write on the Highlands and their people, but others came naturally from it. They have made this book inevitable and in that context I hope its title will not be thought immodest. It is selective and neglects much, perhaps, but it says something of what I think and feel, what I have learnt and seen of those parts of Scotland to which my writing and my love of the country have taken me.
Chapter 2
In July, 1831, Mr Gilbert’s “New and Superior Patent Safety Coaches” began their daily run from the Blossoms Inn by Cheapside in London to the Star Hotel in Edinburgh. For the first time a light post-vehicle made this long journey without pausing for the night at Carlisle, and by using more than a hundred horses, six drivers in relay and only one change of coach, it reached its destination in the astonishing time of forty-seven hours. Gilbert and his partners called it Peveril of the Peak in honour of the great novelist whose eccentric house at Abbotsford, gabled and turreted below the Eildon Hills, could be clearly seen from the four-in-hand as it turned northward by the Tweed into Galashiels. They promised to observe the same speed and punctuality as the Royal Mail, and because the fare they asked was one-third less than that charged by their competitors they were confident of loyal support from all the nobility and gentry, all merchants and travellers along the line of the North Road. Within a year faster coaches had cut the time by an hour, and by two a year later. This was the brave noontime of the stage-coach, its varnished panels, red-spoked wheels and braggart horn, but all would shortly come to twilight and final darkness. A sulphurous steam-kettle on wheels was already in motion and Mr Huskisson M.P. had inaugurated its arrival by becoming its first fatal victim.
The Peveril entered Scotland by Eskdale, Teviotdale and the Gala Water, by roads I take when the disciplines of my work do not oblige me to journey as did those early travellers who put their carriages on flat-cars behind the new locomotive engines. However expedient this may be, it does not compensate my loss, a lifting heart on a dew-bright morning when I drive northward from Langholm to Hawick. Here is the first gateway to my Scotland, to the distant Highlands, and once I have passed through it I know that I can be in Kintail by dusk, or on the summit of Struie, looking sadly across the water to the white house at Spinningdale.
There are three ranges of high ground between England and the carse-land of the Forth and Clyde. Once they were mountains, some taller than any peak in Lochaber or Glen Avon until the timeless grinding of unimaginable pressures smoothed them into rolling hills. Fittingly for the part they have played in man’s brief history they are ranked in battle order, three lines facing the sun from the north-east to the south-west. In the van and straddling the contentious Border are the Cheviots, whence came the sheep that emptied Highland glens and the district checks worn by the men who inherited them. Behind the Cheviots and beyond the Marches are the Lammermuir, Moorfoot and Lowther Hills. They climb in height southwestward to Cairnsmore of Carsphairn and to the blue spine of the Rhinns of Kells, to hill-fort and chapel overlooking the lovely tableland of Glen Trool where Bruce once hid from Edward’s anger and our bureaucracy has thought of hiding its radioactive waste. Guarding Edinburgh and the Lowland plain, the Pentland Hills are the reserve of these formidable battle-lines. In the never silent winds that move across the Pentlands, from Cairn Muir to Scald Law and Rullion Green, it has sometimes pleased me to hear the God-obsessed voices of the Covenanters who marched here from Galloway, led by an old soldier with the felicitous name of Wallace. Sword in hand, they asked the King for a return to Presbyterian church and government, but were hanged instead, or sent to his colony on Barbados.
At one time, it is said, the bare hills of the Border counties were blanketed with trees, the valleys water-green with marsh and lake. Until the fierce coming of Saxon, Scot and Norseman they were inhabited by Brythonic Celts, the abandoned people of a Roman protectorate that stretched from the slopes of the Cheviots to the Firth of Forth and the frontier of mountainous Pictland. They lived in palisaded manors and stone forts on high ground, in stilted villages on the lakes. Under beloved chieftains and kings, one of whom may have been Arthur, they rode to war in powerful divisions of cavalry, behind banners of many colours. They grew a little wheat, pastured stock, flew hawks, bred dogs for the chase, and worked simply in gold and silver. They passed at last in
to the darkness that obscures much of Scotland’s early history, and little is left of them but the elegiac verse of the Gododdin, recording their loving cradle-songs and wasting conflicts. In the east they were overwhelmed by Northumbrian invaders, but the wild cattle of their hills survived them into the thirteenth century when abbey chroniclers marvelled at the wondrous beauty of the animals, their white hides, black muzzles, and flowing manes.
There is little ethnic justification for the erratic course of the Border, and when the kingdoms were united in 1603 its precise boundaries had still to be agreed. Its hatching on a modern map, along hill-ridge and valley floor, illustrates that indecision and old passions long-spent, greed, betrayal, and venal loyalties. It follows no natural division except for twenty miles or so where the Tweed flows sinuously seaward from Birgham. Before the river’s mouth is reached it turns abruptly to the north, as if deflected still by English arrows from Halidon Hill, and the once fiercely disputed town of Berwick has not been Scots for five hundred years, to the satisfaction, no doubt, of the Great Plantagenet’s spirit. There is nothing in the village of Birgham to-day to persuade a traveller’s mind that it has been the pivot upon which history has turned. By a wooden bridge that gave it its English name a Saxon army was once destroyed. All Northumbrian ground between the Tweed and the Forth then became part of Scotland, and English speech and English customs began their dilution of that Celtic kingdom. In the twelfth century Birgham had become an agreeable trysting-place where delegates from each country met to resolve their present quarrels, or lay the foundation for others in the future. Here in the summer of 1290 it was agreed that the girl Queen of Scotland should marry the heir to England’s throne, and had she done so their child would have ruled all Britain from Caithness to the Channel coast, and little of Scotland’s history would have been the same. But Margaret died of sea-sickness on her betrothal voyage from Norway, in a ship laden with gifts from the English king – gingerbread, sugar-loaves, figs and raisins. From this sad accident came the harsh dispute over her successor, ambition, intrigue and sacrilegious murder, the bloody struggle of Scotland’s War of Independence and the unquenched fire of its nationhood.
Southward from Birgham the frontier climbs to the brooding shoulder of The Cheviot, and onward then by wooded valleys, stark hill-tops and stone-white streams to its end on the Solway Firth. The empty uplands from Bowmont Water to Kershope Burn were once the contested ground of mindless blood-feuds, rape, robbery and revenge. Scots and English formed alliances against their own compatriots, then turned upon each other in disputes of complex duplicity. They defied the March Wardens from black peel towers that are now husks of stone choked with ivy, or fled with their families and stock into the safety of desolate bogs. The great, hewing battles between the two countries were not fought here, nor could be, but on the flat merse-land near the coast. Border spearmen who took part in these wars often did so from self-interest. In the darkening sunset at Flodden, when the best of Scotland was dying, some of them reined back and watched the slaughter from Branxton Hill. “He does well that does for himself,” said their leader. “We have fought our vanguard, let others do as well.” Centuries later, and in a whimsical moment, his descendant said that but for this instinct for self-preservation he would not have been born, and become Prime Minister of Great Britain.
The sinewy names of their valleys reflect the nervous spirit of the old Border reivers. Eskdale and Annandale … Liddisdale and Teviotdale … Lauderdale and Tweeddale … The trotting music of the syllables, with grace-notes from bridle-chain and scabbard steel, was heard in the panelled study at Abbotsford where the verse it inspired cast the Blue Bonnets in a role that might have astonished some of them. It was in Scott’s day that the Borderers – by then industriously concerned with wool, water and weaving – began to boast that no part of Scotland was more Scots than their hills, and the claim is perhaps proved by the disproportion of its suffering they endured. For more than a thousand years the first assault by invading torch and sword fell upon them. The thought of this is awesome, and there are times on the climbing road above Jed Water when the pink sandstone surface ahead of me seems to glow blood-red in the rain. It could indeed be said that the iron of national pride was roughly forged in the Borders, to be tempered later on Stirling plain by the peasants who fought with William Wallace and the bonnet lairds who rode with Bruce. Border lords were among those magnates who attached their seals to the Declaration of Arbroath six long years after Bannockburn, maintaining that if but a hundred Scots were left alive they would not be brought under English rule. It has been cogently argued that although this bond was written at Arbroath in Angus it was sealed far to the south in Newbattle Abbey, behind the Moorfoot Hills and a morning’s hard ride from the Border seat of war. Despite its justification by fanciful legend and questionable fact, the Declaration is the most important document in Scottish history, and the most inflammatory. Few who quote its heady words know or remember that it was not a defiant challenge thrown into the teeth of the English. It was a desperate appeal from war-weary men, asking the Pope to persuade the King of England “to leave us poor Scots in peace, who live in this poor little Scotland, beyond which there is no dwelling-place at all.” The distinction is perhaps academic, if not churlish. The petition affirmed a people’s right to independence with a nobility beyond nation and race.
It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom, for that alone, which no honest man gives up, but with life itself.
The Pope did little to help the Scots, and Edward of England sent a great army northward to the Tweed. For another four hundred years the Borders continued to be the killing-ground of freedom. When Scotland’s Parliament then surrendered its independence it did so without one reference to the Declaration of Arbroath, and English regiments waited below the Cheviots, ready to march should the Scottish people rise against the Treaty of Union
A resolute and sturdy nationalism, distilled into burghal pride, distinguishes the Border towns. Selkirk and Galashiels, Melrose, Jedburgh, Hawick and Kelso … holding a loose knot of roads behind the north-eastern flank of the Cheviots. They were created by a need for walled protection, and by a Church which graced them with tall abbeys of red sandstone, rebuilding and rebuilding them whenever they were destroyed by an avenging English torch. The wars fought in the name of God were excessively hard on his houses, and might not have been had the wealthy vanity of the Church not made them a temptation to ill-paid armies on both sides, their commanders and their kings. When Lord Hertford came to the Borders, on the Rough Wooing that was intended to enforce another union between the heirs of the kingdoms, he sent Henry VIII a joyous account of his progress. Seven monasteries burned, four abbeys, five market-towns, two hundred and forty-three villages … He was not only reporting the robust nature of his marriage-broking but also that the campaign might well pay for itself. This was the last great destructive invasion by the English, and a terrible climax for the Roman Church before the curtain fell upon it. The open walls and broken vaulting at Melrose, Jedburgh or Dryburgh are not the result of England’s frenzy alone, they show the contempt of Scotland’s zealous Reformers who first desecrated the remaining grandeur of the abbeys and then abandoned them to decay and humbler architectural uses. Many of their absent stones now lie beneath Victorian buildings in the towns, in the arches of bridges, or the floors of hillside farms.
From their beginning the Border towns were always a refuge, welcoming incomers if they brought profitable crafts and skills, and tolerating them if they did not, always providing their religion was not offensive. In time all became one, Scots, Flemings, Baits, Dutch and French. And lastly the Irish, those whom famine and eviction did not drive further to America. By Ettrick Water one day in early spring I stopped for the pleasure of an idle hour. Above me in the sea-blue sky a regatta of white clouds waited for a starting wind. The crumpled hills through which the road curled toward Selkirk were my first sight of the Ettrick
Forest, which has been treeless since James V drove out its deer four hundred years ago and turned it to pasture for ten thousand sheep. On the far side of the Water a tight flock of their descendants was moving before a circling dog, like mercury on sloping glass. As I watched them, a man came from the brae of Singlie Hill and paused to talk. When we had done with the weather and the lamentable lack of responsible government, we exchanged names. His was Irish, and I asked if he knew that another with the same, a captain under Montrose, had once brought Irish soldiers here from Antrim. That when their battle was lost, on a riverbend outside Selkirk, three hundred of their women and children were slaughtered. And that the regiments of the Covenant, at last sickened by the butchery their Church demanded, cried out against its ministers, “Have you not once gotten your fill of blood?” He listened to me silently, as the polite always do when I bore them with an uninvited lecture, and then said that he knew this of course, but it was all langsyne, and he was not himself a Catholic, not Irish but a Scot and a Borderer.
In the same corrective way I was once rebuked by a guide at Holyrood. I had been spending long hours in Register House and the National Library, making notes on the turbulent history of the Glencoe Men, including their part in the battle of Killiecrankie and the assault on Dunkeld. My visit to the modest grey palace below Arthur’s Seat was a valediction to the past before I went home to England and the present. In dark trews of Government tartan, black tunic and white spatter-dashes, the guide came from the shadows to the stairway where I was looking at David Morier’s painting of Culloden. Or at a copy of it, perhaps, for the owner of Inveraray Castle had recently told me that his was the original, and that the canvas in Holyroodhouse (once hanging above the Duke of Edinburgh’s bed, he said) was only an imitation. The guide’s lifted eyebrow indicated that the proper behaviour for visitors was to move smartly with a conducted party, from one unlocked room to another. I explained that I had stopped to look at the painting because it particularly interested me, and I thought it ironic that a work by Cumberland’s military artist, celebrating his terrible victory, was displayed on the wall of a Stuart palace. He considered this shortly behind empty blue eyes and then said, “We’re no a’Jacobites here, ye ken.”
