John Prebble's Scotland

by John Prebble

  The jaws of sheep have made the land rich,

  but we were told by the prophecy

  that sheep would scatter the warriors

  and turn their homes into a wilderness.

  The land of our love lies under bracken and heather,

  every plain and fields is untilled,

  and soon there will be none in Mull of the Trees

  but Lowlanders and their white sheep.

  In 1786, walking on the high braes of Ross of Mull “to view the appearance of the ocean in a storm”, John Knox was invited into a cottage where he was given a pinch of snuff and told the great news. The Duke of Argyll himself, assisted by the King, was to cut a canal across the Knapdale peninsula from Loch Fyne to the Atlantic shore of Loch Crinan. It was built by more competent labourers within a decade, eight miles of winding waterway that shortened the sea-route from Glasgow to the Outer Isles by one hundred and thirty. It is still in occasional use, the slender masts of yachts and squat hulls of ring-net fishing boats moving miraculously overland above the Lochgilphead road. For me, the appeal of this small navigational marvel, which 18th-century Scots rightly regarded as evidence of their resurgent greatness, is that it enters the sea where their nation began, a green bay-shore that was the first landfall of some of its early Gaelic settlers. And two miles inland is Dunadd, the mystical and mysterious mound that was the political centre of their Dalriadic kingdom for three centuries, a thousand years before John Rennie designed the Crinan Canal.

  Although it is less than two hundred feet in height this aloof and crumpled rock-stack dominates the grieving grass of Crinan Moss, a’Mhòine Mhór the Great Peat-bog of early history. It looks seaward to the brown headland of Jura and it guards the northern passes into the Kilmichael hills. Silent now, except for keening winds and the sad cry of the curlew, Dunadd was a noisy stronghold long before it was taken by the Gaels, and the rough-pasture of the Moss is encircled by the burial-cairns, forts and standing-stones of their predecessors. It was the incoming Scots, perhaps, who built what is left of Dunadd’s defences – dry-stone walls and terraces, an earth platform upon which their timber halls once stood and where a bright spring now glitters in the grass. If this lonely mound was indeed the caput regionis recorded by Adamnan, Columba came here from Iona to preach and perhaps ordain one of Dalriada’s kings, almost all of whom were inaugurated at Dunadd. The nature of that solemn ritual is now conjectural, as is the part played in it by the mystic designs cut into a rock-face below the summit – a footprint, a basin, a docile boar, and an unintelligible Ogam inscription. Who carved them and why is also unknown, but they have mutely survived the Pictish spearmen and Gaelic bowmen who disputed this land, the women who used the fine bone tooth-combs which an archaeologist’s trowel sometimes turns from the black peat of Mhòine Mhór. There is now a quiet steading at the foot of the mound, and the River Add flows peacefully where Oengus, King of the Picts, almost changed history by driving the Scots back to their ships and drowning their king in a flowing tide.

  When Campbell lords came to Argyll in the 15th century, southward from Glen Orchy to Loch Fyne, Cowal and Knapdale, their feudal crest was a boar, an animal of totemic significance in Gaelic mythology. The shennachies, the story-tellers of the clan, made much of the mythological belief that their chiefs were descended from Diarmid the Boar-slayer, Diarmid of the legendary Feinn who still sleep in the hills, awaiting Fingal’s rousing horn. It is my fancy – relieved of a historian’s disciplinary caution – to believe that the Campbells may have adopted that rock-symbol on Dunadd, or cunningly exploited its likeness to their crest, thus strengthening their claim to be leaders of the Gaidhealtachd and superior to the MacDonalds who had the same aggressive conceit. The boar, now equipped with fearsome tusks, was carried on Campbell banners at Flodden. It was trodden into the mud of Loch Linnhe when Clan Donald took a terrible revenge at Inverlochy. Half a century later the two companies of the Argyll Regiment who entered Glencoe to murder its people wore a boar’s-head badge on their blue woollen bonnets.

  These badges had been made in London by William de Remon, a Huguenot exile. I discovered that pleasing fragment of inconsequential information in the archives of Inveraray Castle when I was gathering material for Glencoe. I told my host about it, and that evening MacCailein Mor, the eleventh Duke of Argyll, not only wore a dinner-jacket of his tartan but also blue velvet slippers upon which the boar was embroidered in silver thread.

  I spent more than a week reading the manuscripts of the archives, every day behind an iron fire-door in the vaulted cellars below the castle. The room was cold and cheerless, lit by a naked bulb hanging from the ceiling. If I plugged my tape-recorder into its socket I had no light to see, and if I used the light I was obliged to copy the papers by hand, an exercise which a lifetime using a typewriter has made unendurable after a few minutes. Until an adaptor was found in the town I read and made brief notes, listening to the singing and occasional brawling of the Mediterranean kitchen-staff along the stone-flagged corridor. The previous Duke, a retiring man with vain hopes of becoming an archivist, had attempted to transcribe many of the papers, and this might have been helpful had he paginated his transcriptions and restored the originals to their chronological order. Toward the end of the week there was still one wooden cupboard which could not be unlocked by any key brought to me. It was labelled Lorne on a yellowing card, and because Lord Lorne, heir to the first Duke, had been lieutenant-colonel of the Argyll Regiment I hoped it might contain more papers relating to his command. With permission, some effort and a small invocation, I was able to lift the door from its hinges. I was immediately overwhelmed by a clashing cascade of falling silver that silenced the startled kitchen-staff for half an hour. It took me longer to return the silver to the cupboard shelves – tea-pots and coffee-pots, jugs, bowls and vases, salvers, dishes and canteens of cutlery, albums of sepia photographs heavily encased in the same metal. Some of this tarnished treasure was engraved with the snarling head of the Campbell boar, and all of it had been loyal gifts from towns, burghs and cities, companies and corporations throughout the country when the House of Argyll reached its apogee, the marriage of the Marquess of Lorne to a daughter of the Queen in 1871.

  In London that year the Campbell crest was also on a few pieces of silver tableware and some fine damask napkins treasured by Jenny von Westphalen. Through her Scottish grandmother she was a descendant of the Earls of Argyll, and when she was not obliged to pawn the silver she produced it for the special guests who came to sup with her husband, Karl Marx.

  Inveraray is a small and pleasing town lying on the flat shore of Loch Fyne, on Bracken Point where it was once the custom to hang incorrigible Lochaber Men, and where their invading kinsmen consequently hanged fourteen young gentlemen of Clan Campbell. On a still summer-day, when the sun is high above the hills of Cowal, the grey and white houses of Inveraray appear to be supported by their own reflection in the blue glass of the loch. At sunset in December, with red snow in the westward sky above Knapdale, they are lost in dark and solemn shadow. The town was planned and built with simple taste in the 18th century, replacing the medieval castle and a muddle of filthy houses that had been Clan Campbell’s capital for three hundred years. William Adam was first employed as Clerk of Works to produce something more appropriate to the climbing eminence of the Argyll family, and when he died his son John, with Robert Mylne, created the only Highland town that completely delights the eye. The new castle they built within pistol-shot of the old was not a castle at all but an opéra-bouffe country house of blue slate-stone, round turrets and Gothic windows, outwardly theatrical but inwardly noble, enriched by Mylne’s elegant and decorative talent. Despite its thick walls and Armada cannon, the Lochaber Men would have had no difficulty in storming and burning it, had they not been destroyed by grape and musketry at Culloden, or dispersed by the evictions that followed. But fire, that terrible Highland visitation, has twice attacked the castle, once in 1877 and again more disastrously a few ye
ars ago. On this second occasion, when a public fund was opened for its restoration, a Skye man wrote in response to the West Highland Free Press. All Highlanders, he said, must have sympathy with the Duke of Argyll at this time, for their ancestors had also seen their roof-trees burnt above their heads.

  Johnson and Boswell came to the castle when it was still not completed, and with more deference than was justified by the Doctor’s reputation or the fifth Duke’s respect for it. They were driven about the parkland in “a low one-horse chair”, and the grandeur of it all – tall trees and fine grass, slate-stone walls and lance-headed windows – greatly impressed Johnson. “What I admire here,” he said, “is the total defiance of expense.” He was also flattered thought Boswell, by an invitation to dine at the castle, and when he met the Duke he did not lecture him as he had the chief of Clan Donald on Skye, telling that anglicised baronet that he must be more Highland, that he should close the gates of his house and see that his arms did not rust. Boswell maliciously reminded the Doctor of this, and Johnson changed ground without shame. “Let us be glad we live in times when arms may rust. We can sit today at his Grace’s table without any risk of being attacked, and perhaps sitting down again wounded or maimed.” Boswell’s fear was that he himself might be snubbed by the Duchess, the beautiful and notorious Elizabeth Gunning, and although she did speak to him once, he may have wished she had not. Something he said implied a belief in second sight, whereupon she dismissed him and all such notions in seven words. “I fancy you will be a Methodist.” Johnson was more successful, and spoke at length on the relative importance of wealth and food. “We have now,” he said, introducing the subject, “a splendid dinner before us. Which of these dishes is unwholesome?”

  Food indeed appears to have been a harmless topic when commoners dined with an ennobled chief of Clan Campbell. In 1803, James Hogg was also the guest of the fifth Duke, now a gentle, drowsing old man of eighty. After some initial embarrassment, having mistaken a footman for another guest, Hogg spiritedly defended his refusal to take gravy, mustard or spice with his beef, only a little salt, and he advised others to do the same if they wished to enjoy the true flavour of the meat. “By great good fortune,” he wrote ponderously to Scott, “I was joined by several in this asseveration which my extremity suggested.” By the end of dinner, the Duke was asleep and “the ladies were diverting themselves by throwing crumbs of cake at the gentlemen, and at one another.” No one had warned Hogg to expect this, but before dining in the same room a century and a half later I was told not to be alarmed if another guest, having enjoyed his sherry, “soon drops off, with his head in his soup.” He stayed awake, however, maintaining his bright Wodehouse chatter throughout the course. Catching my questioning eye, MacCailein Mor the eleventh Duke inclined his head in apology and said, “I’m sorry, but he always has before.”

  The Ettrick shepherd saw no tartan worn or arms carried at Inveraray. All the male guests came to dinner clothed in black like their host, and the servants were uniformed in southern livery. The somnolent old Duke may have considered Highland dress archaic, even distasteful perhaps, remembering the barbaric surge of Rebel tartan against his Campbell regiment at Culloden. And many of the yard-long, two-edged broadswords used in the last Jacobite Rising had long since been turned into railings for his house in London.

  A generation later, when the yacht Fairy brought Victoria and her consort to Inveraray, they were met on the quayside by ribboned pipers and by local gentlemen of the Celtic Society, all dressed in belted plaid and bonnet. At the castle steps the Queen was welcomed by her future son-in-law, “just two years old, a dear, white, fat, fair little fellow with reddish hair” wearing a black velvet dress, scarf, sporran, and Highland bonnet. An honour-guard of the Celtic Society lined the room where the Queen and her husband took lunch, each gentleman with a halberd, she said, by which she no doubt meant a Lochaber axe, a limb-hewing weapon not usually associated with chilled hock and a light collation. Her second visit to Inveraray, after the marriage of her daughter to Lorne, was a greater spectacle of tartan and steel. Her carriage brought her down the September gold of Glen Aray, and through the castle gates to a lime-tree avenue where she was delighted to see “halberdiers posted at intervals, dressed in Campbell tartan kilts, with brown coats turned back to red, and bonnets with a black-cock’s tail and myrtle, the Campbell badge.” Drawn up in welcome before the castle were the Duke’s pipers, artillerymen, and members of the Argyll Volunteer Regiment in scarlet tunics and dark green tartan. On the third evening of her stay, in a great pavilion filled with tenants of the estate, Gaelic songs were sung, candle-light gleamed on silver dirks and the brass of basket-hilts, tartan swirled to the music of a Glagow band, and the Queen’s daughters danced spirited reels with the Duke’s foresters. Night and day throughout her visit, the kilted axe-men mounted guard in the deer-park and beneath the falling leaves of the limes.

  Much of this theatrical trumpery was a loyal response to her love for what she believed to be true Highland dress and the tartans of the clans. Her faery castle home in the parkland of Deeside, across the Grampians to the east, was a picturesque temple for the ritual of her worship, and an insipid tartan designed by her husband was extravagantly displayed on its wall-furnishings, carpets and linoleum. On a more modest scale than at Inveraray or Balmoral, the same rites and costume charades were performed in mock castles and Gothic shooting-lodges throughout the mountains where chiefs and lairds who had avoided bankruptcy, and southern incomers who owned the estates of those who had not, now dressed themselves in absurd caricatures of what had once been the simple clothing of the Gaelic people.

  The wearing of tartan had become a romantic fashion shortly after the publication of Waverley in 1814, and to a great extent because of it. The hero of that novel, Fergus MacIvor, was based upon the preposterous and contentious chief of Glengarry, Alasdair Ranaldson MacDonell, whom Scott called his “treasure”. A year after the appearance of Waverley this arrogant and obsessed man formed The Society of True Highlanders “in support of the Dress, Language, Music and Characteristics of our Illustrious and Ancient Race.” Membership was limited to men of “birth and property”, of whom ninety-six attended the inaugural meeting on a green field in Lochaber, where the Highlanders of Montrose’s army had broken the power of Clan Campbell one hundred and seventy years before. Until Glengarry’s death, the result of a fall from a steamer in the Caledonian Canal he had so long hated, the Society held annual gatherings to which its members came in gaudy waves of tartan, silver buttons, feathered bonnets, bright swords, dirks, powder-horns and pistols. They danced on the heather at moonlight, dined on roe-deer brought down from the hills, shouted toasts in Gaelic, and made a holy sacrament of the blood shed by their ancestors. The zenith of the Society was reached when George IV came to Edinburgh. Alasdair Ranaldson’s gentlemen strutted about the city as the King’s Celtic Guard of Honour, overwhelmed sceptical doubt and imposed the half-truths of a tartan mythology upon the hearts and minds of an imaginative people.

  All this may now seem innocent and harmless, and the stubborn survival of that mythology today no more than a colourful expression of Scotland’s pride in its past. But while these True Highlanders were play-acting their absurd dreams, the common people to whom the dress, language and music of the Gael had once been a solace and an inspiration were being driven from their mountains to exile in Upper Canada. The qualifications of birth and property which brought those ninety-six chiefs and lairds to Inverlochy would have excluded the same number of young men and women of Kildonan who took ship for Lord Selkirk’s colony at that time, and the hundreds of sub-tenants already removed from Alasdair Ranaldson’s own estates.

  The fever of romantic emotion which tartan excited spread rapidly south of the Border, and England’s affection for it increased as improved roads and a regular steamship service made the Highlands an accessible arena for the slaughter of its wild-life. Sportsmen who blazed away at almost anything that moved in the rock and h
eather above them, returned home with bolts of tartan cloth as well as the mounted trophies of their marksmanship. In 1834, after a shooting holiday with the Duke of Sutherland at Dunrobin, with Mr Edward Ellice M. P. in Glengarry, and with the Duchess of Bedford at Rothiemurchus, Lord Brougham called upon Mr McDougall, draper of Inverness. He ordered a great quantity of tartan in velvet and worsted for the tailoring of waistcoats, trousers, and women’s dresses. Mr McDougall, said the Inverness Courier, “was delighted to find that his lordship knew the various patterns of the clans.” What the Lord Chancellor knew, or thought he knew, was only endearing nonsense. There is no historical evidence for a belief in clan tartans, and those bought by Lord Brougham, all that are sold and worn today, were designed a generation and more after a clan society had ceased to exist and while its bewildered people were being evicted and dispersed. In the days when it was a vibrant and sometimes terrifying reality, a clansman’s familial loyalty was not demonstrated by the sett, the pattern, of his tartan but by the slogan he shouted in battle and by the plant badge he wore on his bonnet – heather for Clan Donald, bog-myrtle for the Campbells, a sprig of pine for MacGregors …

  There were perhaps district tartans, sett and colour determined by preferential custom and by the availability of particular vegetable dyes, but the wearing of them crossed the frontiers of clan territories and clan loyalties. Highland gentlemen chose colours and patterns that pleased their vanity, no more, and early portraits show them wearing two or three setts in one costume, for plaid, jacket and hose. None of them resembles a professed clan tartan of today, and there is none to be recognised in David Morier’s vivid and meticulous painting of Culloden, for which Jacobite prisoners were used as models, I am perhaps labouring the argument, but it need not end there. Separated from his command in the rain and powder-smoke of Falkirk in January, 1746, and finding himself alone among the Hanoverian army, Donald MacDonell of Tirnadris declared himself a member of its Campbell militia, a foolish pretence if he and they were wearing distinctive tartans. The same deception was attempted at Culloden by “a pretty young Highlander” who was pursued by James Ray, that brutal and unpleasant trooper of Kingston’s Horse.