by John Prebble
More humane measures would undoubtedly have answered every good purpose; and had such a course been pursued as an enlightened humanity would have suggested, instead of depopulated glens, and starving peasantry, alienated from their superiors, and in the exacerbation of their feelings too ready to imbibe opinions hostile to the best interests of their country, we should still have seen a high-spirited and loyal people, ready at the nod of their respected chiefs, to embody themselves into regiments with the same zeal as in former times.
He wanted the best of two worlds, of course, and worlds which had never truly existed. The loss of a docile and willing “nursery of soldiers” is no longer thought to be the greatest evil of the Clearances, nor was at the time by their victims.
There is also an irony in Stewart’s honest compassion for the evicted people. He does not appear to have extended this to the slaves on the West Indian plantation from which he received a modest income, and toward the end of his life he too became a Remover. After his long military career he lived quietly at Garth House, cared for by his spinster sister. The civil engineer Joseph Mitchell, who was once his guest, described him as “the dear old Colonel … a bluff soldier … universally beloved, particularly by the common people.” His solacing delight was a violoncello which he had carried with him on his campaigns, although playing it cannot have been easy with an arm never fully recovered from a wound he had received at Maida. In the evenings, said Mitchell, “he would send for three or four young lads, tenants’sons, who were expert fiddlers, and thus he would have two or three hours of most excellent Scotch airs, reels and strathspeys.” Musical evenings in the peace of Strathtay, further writing on the customs of the Highlands, would have been a pleasant end to his life, but his genteel poverty soon became unendurable. He first raised the rents of his estate and then cleared it of some of those loving common people, a necessary “thinning” of the population he called it. The sale of the land which had supported them was still not enough to pay his debts, and he finally petitioned London for a governorship in the West Indies. Now a Major-General, he left the Highlands in 1826, “with all the spirit and gaiety of a youthful veteran,” said the Gentleman’s Magazine. He died on Saint Lucia, three years later.
The tenants he had removed were still Gaelic speakers. The language is not heard in Perthshire now, or not naturally, not part of people and place as it can be in the Isles. But the use of it stubbornly survived into the beginning of this century. It was in Glen Lyon that I first heard a story I have since heard many times elsewhere on the mainland. A woman whose ancestors had lived in the glen for generations, and may have been Stewart’s tenants, told me that when her father was a boy he was whipped by his father if he spoke Gaelic. The story is part of Highland folk-lore but nonetheless true, I think. One of the most determined and sustained efforts to break the independent spirit of the Highlanders was an attempt to eradicate their language and replace it with English. Even the thought of a bi-lingual people was at times intolerable to Church or State. As early as the beginning of the 17th century the Lords of the Privy Council declared Gaelic to be one of two principal causes of savagery in the Highlands (the other was strong drink), and they issued ineffectual orders requiring the chiefs to educate their sons in the Lowlands. At the time of the Jacobite Rebellions statutory prohibition of the language was seriously considered. However absurd or impracticable that may appear, it should be seen in the context of other proposals made by men like the civilised Earl of Chesterfield, who advised the Prime Minister to “Starve the country by your ships, put a price on the heads of the Chiefs, and let the Duke put all to the fire and sword.” Others suggested the emasculation of all Rebels and the transportation of their children, but in a more temperate mood it was agreed that the gradual elimination of Gaelic would satisfy Christian charity and political expediency.
This work had already begun before the Rebellion of 1715, with the sympathetic approval of many Presbyterians whose Church had once encouraged the employment of Gaelic-speaking ministers and the printing of Gaelic Testaments as part of its evangelising mission to convert the clans from Popery. For almost sixty years the speaking and teaching of Gaelic was forbidden in all Highland schools established by the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge, the only positive result of which was that the children were robbed of an ability to express themselves fully in Gaelic or English. That sensible men and women in the south could approve of this idiocy is partly explained by their continuing fear of another armed rising in the mountains, and partly by their belief that the disappearance of Gaelic would be no great loss. Johnson said it was the rude speech of a barbaric people who had “few thoughts to express, and were content, as they conceived grossly, to be grossly understood.” But this, he admitted, was what he had been told by others. His own opinion, not of the language but of the right of the people to speak and read it if they wished, was more sympathetic.
Of what they had before the late conquest of their country, there remain only their language and their poverty. Their language is attacked on every side. Schools are erected, in which English only is taught, and there were lately some who thought it reasonable to refuse them a version of the holy scriptures, that they might have no monument of their mother-tongue.
The Society’s prohibition was finally abandoned in 1766, four
years after James Macpherson had published his spurious translation of Ossianic verse, persuading susceptible minds that there was a Gaelic mythology and literature comparable with ancient Greece. At the beginning of the 19th century the teaching of Gaelic was revitalised by the founding of the Gaelic Schools Society and the distribution of Testaments in that language by the British and Foreign Bible Society and the now contrite SPCK. This was part of and an encouragement to the rise of religious revivalism in the Highlands, alarming Presbyterian moderates and foreshadowing the great schism of 1843. Inspired by wandering preachers, the people may have turned to this new frenzy of faith as an escape from the confusion and decay of their society, but there can be no doubt of the joy they felt in once more speaking to God and listening to His Word in their own language. Had this encouragement of Gaelic been allowed to develop it might well have survived as the dominant tongue of the Highlands, but within four decades the Clearances had winnowed or dispersed the revivalists. It is not surprising that the strongest attachment to the language, and the inspirational use of it, should now be in the maritime provinces of Canada. The evicted people of the Gaidhealtachd who first settled there in the 18th century, and the revivalists who joined them later, left their homeland before a southern ascendancy finally persuaded them that their culture and their language were barbaric, and that only by military service could they earn the approval of the inheritors of their hills. And those who remained, still influenced by the malevolent spirit of that original ban, were sometimes convinced that dependence upon their ancient tongue would not only disadvantage their children in later life but was also sinful before God and thus deserving of a whipping.
There is a point beyond which the decline of a living language becomes irreversible, and it is hard not to believe that this was long since reached in the Highlands and the Isles. Gaelic continues as the natural tongue of some communities, but they are diminishing with the wasting of the economy that once supported them, and might still sustain them if successive Governments were not indifferent to them and their language. It is taught in island schools, in villages on the west coast, but their teachers sometimes bitterly admit that they are required to educate children for emigration to the mainland or the south. The voice and character of an alien and increasingly dominant culture is English and metropolitan, and as the widening range of television transmission carries it beyond Skye and the mountains of Kintail it becomes irresistible. It is true that there is a growing use of Gaelic by the valiant West Highland Free Press and other regional papers, and resolute efforts are made by Gaelic societies, largely urban and middle-class in direction, to encourage the learning and spea
king of the language and its publication as literature. But all this is perhaps fertilising a ground in which there may no longer be roots capable of survival.
There is, of course, no guarantee of perpetuity for any race or society. The Gaels and their language occupy less than half of Perthshire’s recorded history, and little survives of the people they overwhelmed and absorbed. There is no substantial record of the laws and customs of the Picts, their legends or their religion, no enlightening sentence in their language, only their lovely symbol-stones and the lonely remains of their hill-forts. But they were the Painted Ones, the Caledonii whom the Romans failed to subdue eight centuries before Kenneth MacAlpine made himself Ard-righ Albainn, and the seat of the Dalriadic kings was moved eastward from Dunadd to Scone. Perthshire was the northern frontier of Roman conquest, and from their great encampment of Pinnata Castra at Inchtuthill their legions and their patrols marched into and retired from the mountain wilderness to the north. Somewhere in the Grampians or the Monadhliath they fought a bloody battle against an army of tall, red-haired men led by Calgacus the Swordsman. If he was not the invention of Tacitus, he was the first inhabitant of Scotland to be given a name in its history. His defiance on the eve of the battle in which he died was also the first recorded voice of Scotland, condemning its enemies in a sentence that was subsequently used to describe the punitive battalions of Cumberland and the evicting sheep-fanciers of Improvement.
At the furthest limits of both land and liberty, we have been defended until this day by the remoteness of our situation and our fame … The plunderers of the world devastate the land and rifle the ocean, provoked by avarice to ravage and slaughter, and where they create a desert, they call it peace … We fight not for gain but for liberty, shall we not show what men Caledonia has for her defence …?
Tacitus probably composed this himself, from hearsay or his own imagination, thinking it proper for Rome to have such brave and noble opponents. But the spirit of The Swordsman’s declamation was enduring, and twelve and a half centuries later his words may have inspired the Chancellor of Scotland, Bernard de Linton, for there is a curious similarity between them and the phrasing of the Declaration of Arbroath, which he is believed to have written.
When the Romans withdrew from Perthshire, southward to the Antonine Wall and thence to the Cheviots, memories of their occupation were perhaps woven into the mythology of the Picts and later inherited by the incoming Scots. Stories of the legionaries who marched by Creag Mhor to Rannoch could have become entwined with the legends of the Fingalians who sleep on their shields in the high corries of Glen Lyon. Rome’s footprints at the mouth of this long valley survive in distorted history and nonsense tales. A rectangular site on the bank of the Lyon at Fortingall, close to a 14th-century plague-pit, is known as the Praetorium, and past scholars who found silver denarii and discoloured potsherds in the vicinity decided that it was once a Roman garrison. Perhaps it was, but the surface mound today is the remains of a medieval building whose last residents could be lying in the plague-pit, below a stone pillar where cattle ease their itching flanks on the surrounding barbed wire. The victims of the pestilence were taken to burial on a sled drawn by a white horse, an old woman leading. Horse, sled and woman still make this nightly journey, and will do so for as long as anybody is willing to believe it possible.
In the walled churchyard of Fortingall there is an ancient yew-tree, still great in size but smaller than it was when the MacGregors of Roro made bow-staves from its branches, or when Pennant estimated its girth to be fifty-six feet. Guide-books say it was already growing when Fortingall was the birthplace of Pontius Pilate, “whose father may have been an ambassador in North Britain during the Roman occupation.” At one time a belief in this beguiling story was encouraged by the Yorkshire barman of the hotel, with elaborations of his own that grew more fanciful as he left his side, of the bar to sit in jovial fellowship with the uneasy guests. He was much too intelligent to believe it himself, but he enjoyed the credulity of others, and I regret the day I spoilt his pleasure by asking how any Roman could have been born here half a century at least before Claudius began the conquest of Britain, and seventy-five years before the first legions entered Scotland.
Glen Lyon is a long and crooked pleat in the rolling hills of Breadalbane, the greatest district of Perthshire, once ninety miles from the Braes of Atholl to Argyll, and as many again from the Grampians to the hills above the Stirling Plain. When Breadalbane was ruled by despotic Campbell lords it took them three days to ride from one border of their ground to another, but when the summons of their fiery cross was carried by relays of runners it could pass from Kenmore to Kilchurn in one night. The land rises northward from Loch Tay in a great stairway of hills, by the blue crown of Ben Lawers and the maiden’s breast of Schiehallion to Loch Tummel and Loch Rannoch, and the limitless mountains beyond. In 1777 the Astronomer Royal, Nevil Maskelyne, built an observatory hut below the nipple of Schiehallion, and was watched with suspicion by the people until they decided he was looking for a lost star. Had they known he was trying to calculate the weight of the earth they might have burnt his hut, that being the Highlanders’old way of acquainting unnatural incomers with their disapproval. Wade’s military road went by the shadow of Schiehallion, northward to Dalnacardoch, Dalwhinnie, Corrieyairack and the Great Glen. He directed its progress from the inn at Weem, half a mile from William Adam’s bridge which he had built, he said, “to set the rapacious ferryman and his boats on dry land.” He cut the road along the flat carse of the River Tay toward the mouth of Glen Lyon, and then up the narrow gorge of Keltney Burn. It is still the shortest route from Strathtay to Rannoch, climbing steeply by the burn until it looks down on the square keep of Garth Castle, one of a dozen bleak strongholds built six hundred years ago by the Wolf of Badenoch, a royal Stewart, one of Robert II’s numberless bastards and a bloody man.
The view from Tomphubil, the tented hill at the top of the Keltney gorge, is one of the finest in the Highlands, two hundred feet above the serene waters of Loch Tummel and Loch Rannoch. Northward are the rolling combers of the Grampians, and thirty miles to the west the guardian peaks of Glencoe. The land here is open, the air clear and invigorating, and one breath-taking arc can sometimes encompass sunshine and storm, mist and rainbow. The basins of the lochs, and the wasteland of the moor from which they drain some of their peat-brown water, were once a great forest, the home of the wild beasts of pre-history. Bear and wolf, elk and boar are now long gone and only remembered in the badges of the clans and the arms of the chiefs. Some of the ancient pines, red-trunked and dark-headed, still survive in the Black Wood along the southern shore of Loch Rannoch. Protected and re-seeded by the Forestry Commission, they are a pleasing compensation for its more usual pre-occupation with Sitka spruce.
It was on the braes of Schiehallion, where the road forks westward from Tomphubil to Kinlochrannoch, that David Stewart’s uncle, a captain of the Atholl Highlanders, trained two or three of Garth’s young tenants to be pipers for the regiment. Some years ago on this road, a mile or two from Kinlochrannoch and by a golden stand of birch, I stopped to listen to a hedge-piper. He was an old man and a wild man. His clothes were held together by safety-pins and cunning knots of string, and the bright orange bag of his pipes appeared to have been made from an inner-tube. Whether he was a good piper or not, I cannot say. He told me that he had been taught by John MacDonald from Glencoe, and since I was the only person who had stopped and spoken to him that day he obligingly played for me as long as I wished. The music was unfamiliar but had once been well-known in his tutor’s glen, he said.
Before I left him, I asked where he lived. He moved his arm in a wide sweep, the land was his house and his bed. At dusk, he said, he would go over to Glen Lyon and spend the night within the walls of Garth Castle. It was then a ruin, but it has since been roofed, floored, plumbed and wired to make it a residence again. Breadalbane’s past, preserved in such imperishable stone, is not always as plain to the eye as
the Wolf of Badenoch’s stronghold. Screens of beech and alder hide the stumps of other fortresses, and quilts of belled heather cover the braeside cells of the missionaries who came from Ireland and Iona. Below the clear inshore water of Loch Tay, and sometimes breaking its surface, are the white-stone crusts of lonely crannogs, man-made islets of brushwood and gravel upon which an early Celtic people built their homes. The beautiful glen of the River Lyon, twenty-five curling miles from Keltney Burn to the south-eastern march of Rannoch Moor, is studded with the ruins or levelled sites of chapels, keeps and circular forts. “Twelve castles had Fionn MacCumhail,” said an old legend, “in the dark glen of the crooked stones.” In the 7th century Saint Adamnan, abbot of Iona and biographer of Columba, built a church and a school here, and a corn-mill which survives in the hamlet name of Milton where Allt Bail a’Mhuillin, the mill-town stream, comes down to Bridge of Balgie. Eight hundred years later, Black Colin Campbell of Glenorchy took the glen from the Stewarts of Garth and gave it to his younger son, whose descendants built almost as many castles as Fionn MacCumhail and graced their approaches with avenues of yellow sycamore.
I spent many days in this valley when I was writing Glencoe, for Robert Campbell of Glenlyon was the commander of the Argyll soldiers sent to destroy Maclain and his people. Drunken and improvident, a gambler and a wastrel, attractive to women even in his seventh decade, he was the last notorious member of his family, and in his defence it might be said that he and they had suffered bitterly from the raiding and thieving of the MacDonalds of Lochaber. The Lairds of Glenlyon had always answered force with force, so arrogant and secure in their isolation that they sometimes hanged a King’s Messenger at the door of Meggernie Castle, or used their fine trees as gibbets for the Lochaber Men. The third laird, whose wits had never recovered from a blow on the head in his youth, once captured thirty-six MacDonalds, pistolled their leader and hanged the rest. When an outraged Privy Council in Edinburgh ordered Mad Colin to put his hand to a deed swearing that he had executed them in defiance of proper justice, he said he would put his foot on it as well, for the raiders had come to his land
