John Prebble's Scotland

by John Prebble

that he is a brutal chamberlain

  like his grandfather before him,

  wasting and stripping the poor.

  He is a poor creature without responsibility,

  without honour, understanding or shame.

  An unpleasant boor, he will be

  doubly judged for driving

  away the Rosses of Glencalvie.

  Writs of eviction were issued against the Glencalvie people at Whitsuntide in 1845. Before they were executed, concern for the distress and destitution they would cause prompted some northern gentlemen to establish a relief fund. When The Times was asked to publish their advertisement appealing for subscriptions “to cheer the sufferers amidst their cloudy prospects”, John Delane recognised that there was more to this matter than a modest source of advertising revenue. The anonymous correspondent he accordingly sent to Ross was probably the legal writer Thomas Campbell Foster, an ardent and compassionate man who later reported the Irish Famine for The Times. Witnessing the removal of eighteen families from Glen Calvie, he wrote one of the most vivid accounts of eviction, with a precise understanding of the suffering and responsibilities involved. His first dispatch, written at the inn of Ardgay on the evening of his first day in Ross, began as angrily and as trenchantly as it continued.

  Those who remember the misery and destitution into which large masses of the population were thrown by the systematic “clearances” (as they are here called) carried on in Sutherlandshire some 25 years ago under the direction and on the estate of the late Marchioness of Stafford1 – those who have not forgotten to what an extent the ancient ties which bound clansmen to their chiefs were then torn asunder – will regret to learn that the heartless course, with all its sequences of misery, of destitution, and of crime, is again being resorted to in Rossshire.

  That morning Gustavus Aird had taken Foster to Glen Calvie. All the cottages were now empty except one in which Hugh Ross, an old military pensioner, was dying. The people were standing on the open hillside, “the women all neatly dressed in net caps and wearing scarlet or plaid shawls, the men wearing blue bonnets and have their shepherds’plaids wrapped about them.” When the Times man arrived they were singing the 145th Psalm, The eyes of all things wait on Thee, the Giver of all good. Two days later they moved to the churchyard at Croick, making tents from tarpaulins, blankets and plaids, “the poor children thoughtlessly playing round the fire, pleased with the novelty of all around them.” There were twenty-seven children, all under ten, and seven were ill. There were also some young and unmarried men and women, but most were married and over forty. When Aird told them why Foster was there they gathered about the Times man, shaking his hand. “Their Gaelic I could not understand,” he told Delane, “but their eyes beamed with gratitude. This unbought, spontaneous and grateful expression of feeling to you for being their friend is what their natural protector – their chieftain – never saw, and what his factor need never hope for.” Why, he asked, were the Highland people reduced from comfort to beggary?

  I confess I can find no answer. It is said that the factors would rather have one tenant than many, as it saves them trouble. But so long as the rent is punctually paid, as this has been, it is contrary to all experience to suppose that one large tenant will pay more than many small ones or that a sheep walk can pay more rent than cultivated land. Now, no doubt there is an object in driving off the people – namely fear of the New Scotch Poor Law, compelling the heritors to pay toward the support of those who cannot support themselves.

  He was wrong in believing that sheep were not more profitable than cultivated land, but he was right to accuse Highland proprietors of being unwilling to pay their share under the Poor Law. The lairds of Kindeace, he said, “never gave one farthing, the poor supported their own helpless poor, the wealthy let them do so unassisted.” Major Charles Robertson, the new proprietor, was not in Ross to answer this charge, or watch the energy with which Gillanders cleared his estate, and I know of no record of his thoughts and feelings at this time. Like other proprietors, he was protected by his factor who no doubt willingly accepted all the hatred and obloquy that Kindeace and his father should have shared.

  The leaders of the Glen Calvie community, those named as tenants in the writs of eviction, were a teeming family described as “Ross alias Greishich”, a variant spelling of greusaich, a shoemaker. On the day following my first visit to Croick I found the writs in the Tolbooth at Tain, in a high tower room above the cells of the old gaol. It was used to store burghal documents and was now rarely entered. Yellow columns of papers, tied with pink tape, were shrouded in dust-heavy cobwebs upon which black spiders hung like beads of shining jet. There was a rough order in the storing – if only that those papers nearest the door were the latest in time – and it was not too difficult to find the writs I wanted and read the fine cursive handwriting that required the Shoemakers

  … to flit and Remove themselves, Bairns, Family, servants, subtenants, Cottars and dependants, Cattle, Goods, and gear forth and from possession of the said Subjects above described with the pertinents respectively occupied by them as aforesaid, and to leave the same void, redd and patent, at the respective terms of Removal above specified, that the Pursuer or others in his name may then enter thereto and peaceably possess, occupy and enjoy the same in time coming.

  Within two weeks of the eviction, the people of Glen Calvie were gone from the cold shelter of the churchyard. Gillanders claimed that he had resettled six of the families, and the Times man followed them. David Ross Greishich Senior, David Ross Greishich Junior, and Alexander Ross Greishich “got a piece of black moor near Tain, twenty-five miles off, without any house or shed, out of which they hope to obtain subsistence.” The other three families were given turf huts near Bonar Bridge, but “the rest are hopeless, helpless.” The short-lived Society for the Protection of the Poor, inspired by the northern gentlemen’s concern and by Foster’s reports, could do little to aid them or prevent further evictions on the Kindeace estate, and they were soon gone to the south and ultimately, perhaps, to Australia. There is nothing now on that piece of black moor to show that the Shoemakers settled there, and for some years I believed that they too had left the land of their birth. But not long ago, in a kirkyard near the tidal flat of Edderton sands, I found some of their graves. They had not lived long after their eviction.

  Before they left Croick, a few of the Glencalvie people scratched their names and sorrowful messages on the eastern window of the church, the most moving evidence of the Clearances that I know. This was what I came to see that Spring day twenty-two years, ago, walking over the long yellow grass of the grave-yard, by stark headstones and glass bowls of skull-white porcelain flowers. The diamond panes of the window were thick with grime, and even when I wiped them clean with my hand the oblique fall of the afternoon light made reading difficult. A woman I had not seen in the churchyard now came round a corner and offered me face-powder from her hand-bag. I rubbed it on the window, and immediately the writing became clear, slanting across the glass. The messages are in English, for although the people were Gaelic speakers none of them had been taught to write in their own tongue.

  Glencalvie people was in the church here May 24 1845 … Glencalvie people the wicked generation … John Ross shepherd … Glencalvie people was here … Amy Ross … Glencalvie is a wilderness blow ship them to the colony … The Glencalvie Rosses …

  Since I recorded these inscriptions in my book a protective grating has been placed over the window, too late to prevent some unthinking visitors from adding their own names, and for that I feel a sad responsibility.

  In 1854 James Gillanders, now married to Kindeace’s daughter, cleared the Greenyards estate in Strathcarron, and this time the people did not submit without protest. When a Sheriff-Officer brought the writs of eviction they were torn from his hand and burnt, and a crowd of women and boys stripped him and his companion of their clothes and drove them from the glen. Three weeks later the Sheriff-Substitute and the Procurator-Fi
scal came with new writs, and escorted by thirty-five constables who had drunk “several bottles of ale, porter and whisky” at the inn of Midfearn. Entering the strath shortly after dawn they heard firing and whistles blowing, but Sheriff Taylor put his head out of his carriage and told the constables to be of easy mind, this was the Rosses’usual method of warning. As they came through the wood at Greenyards they found the road blocked by sixty or seventy women with red shawls over their heads. Behind them were less than a dozen men and boys. All were dispersed by a savage baton charge. “The police struck with all their force,” wrote the advocate journalist Donald Ross,

  … not only when knocking down, but after the females were on the ground. They beat and kicked them while lying weltering in their blood. Such was the brutality with which this tragedy was carried through, that more than twenty females were carried off the field in blankets and litters, and the appearance they presented, with their heads cut and bruised, their limbs mangled, and their clothes clotted with blood, was such as would horrify any savage … Dirty work must be done by dirty hands, and a cruel business is most generally entrusted to cruel hearts and ferocious dispositions.

  Four women and a boy, whom the Sheriff described as “ringleaders in the riot and mobbing”, were dragged to Tain and locked in the Tolbooth below the room where I read the Glencalvie writs. One of the women and the boy were later brought to trial at Inverness, and upon the advice of their counsel, who hoped thereby for the leniency of the Court, they pleaded guilty to the lesser offence of a breach of the peace. Lord Justice-Clerk Hope, coming to the Court from a shooting-holiday on his son’s estate in Sutherland, addressed the prisoners in English, which they may have had some difficulty in understanding, but he was perhaps less concerned with them than he was with the riotous and presumptuous spirit of the commonality in general. The course of Law, he said, must protect all persons high and low, and all persons, whatever their feelings or perverted notions of right and wrong, must submit to the authority of the Law.

  It is quite essential therefore, that such a spirit as that which these pannels exhibited should be repressed. Neither they nor their neighbours can be allowed to suppose that they can live in this kind of wicked and rebellious spirit against the Law. They must be taught submission in the very first instance.

  The woman was sent to prison for twelve months, and the boy for eighteen. Thanking the jury for their attendance, Lord Hope said that they had performed a most important duty in ensuring the conviction of Ann Ross and Peter Ross. They were aware, he said, of the singular and perverted feeling of insubordination in some districts of the Highlands against the execution of civil processes in the removal of tenants. “This feeling is most prejudicial to the interest of all, and it is absolutely necessary to suppress it.”

  I have sometimes sat by the roadside at Greenyards, listening to the distant sound of gulls above a moving plough. I have walked by the river at Braelangwell where the wife of William Ross tore her apron into strips for bandages, and was herself clubbed into the water. Foolishly, I once stood on the spot where Sheriff Taylor waved his cane like a sword, and I shouted his orders at the empty road, “Clear the way …! Knock them down …!” But it has always been difficult to see the strath as it was on that cold March day, the red shawls of the women, the white paper of the Riot Act in the angry Sheriff’s hand, the frosting breath of the coach-horses and the marching constables, and I cannot hear the shouts and the screaming cries of pain. The recreative faculty which serves me well at Glencoe, Strath Naver, Kintail and Culloden is unresponsive here.

  Strathcarron is now too lovely, perhaps, too serene and gentle to be recognised as an arena for bloody violence, and time has grown a scar tissue over memory and concern. Some years ago, when I was staying at Spinningdale, I drove again to Braelangwell and walked by the river. The afternoon was warm and sunlit. Smoke scarcely moved above a field of burning stubble, and in the silence the hum of a single insect was like the throb of a cello string. A man came from the road and said that if I wished to cross the water there was a bridge further up the glen by Anat. I said I was content, and explained why I was there. He had only a fragmentary knowledge of “The Massacre of the Rosses”, his family had been incomers at the end of the last century, but he remembered an old woman who had once spoken of Gillanders. A bad man was he now, he asked, and I said it seemed so. They were hard times for all, he said. He was attached to the land, and like many of the Strathcarron men two hundred years ago he and his father had soldiered in a Highland regiment. I saw him again later that month, in the noisy motor-inn at Ardgay. We took a dram together and talked briefly, not of the Strathcarron evictions but of winter days on the Maas, the Hochwald in the spring of 1945, and Canadian flame-throwers burning the last German trenches on the west bank of the Rhine at Xanten.

  The Clearances in Ross and elsewhere are said to have been foreseen three centuries ago by the Brahan Seer. He was Coinneach; Odhar Fiosaiche, Sallow Kenneth the Soothsayer, an Islesman by birth but working as a farm-labourer in Strath Conon near the Mackenzie stronghold of Brahan Castle. In his youth the gift of a magic blue stone brought him the power of taibhsearachd, second-sight, and he prophesied many calamities great and small, domestic, local and national, including a few yet to come – such as the “horrid black rains” which some believers say will be radioactive fall-out, and others the result of a monstrous explosion in the oil fields of the North Sea. He had a vision of Drummossie Moor at Culloden “stained with the best of Highland blood … no mercy will be shown or quarter given.” He forecast mountain roads from sea to sea, bridges over every stream, dram-shops “at the head of every plough-furrow”, and policemen so common that they would be met on every street-corner in every town. He saw the coming of the railway in “a fiery chariot” and “long strings of carriages”, and may have had his finest moment of precognition in a terrifying vision of the automobile age, declaring that he would not like to be alive when “a black bridleless horse passes through the Muir of Ord.”

  Most of the understandable predictions of this Gaelic Nostradamus were concerned with parochial affairs or the misfortunes awaiting the Mackenzie chiefs and their wives, one of whom ultimately ordered him to be burnt for witchcraft. The prophecies are often clothed in an imagery that easily fits subsequent events, but in their forecasts of the Clearances the language is blunt and clear. The Big Sheep will over-run the country and the disheartened clans will flee before it, across the sea to islands as yet undiscovered. The land will pass into the possession of strangers and become so desolate that no cocks will crow in the glens north of Drumochter. The price of sheep will rise and then fall, and in time they too will disappear and be forgotten. Some comfort is offered, if not altogether reassuringly, in a promise that after the horrid black rains have destroyed all wild life, and turned the mountains brown, the people will return. Credulous belief in these prophecies should perhaps be qualified by the knowledge that until they were published a century ago2 they were oral folklore, and there is little or no documentary evidence of them before the events they predict. A churlish mind might therefore conclude that the Brahan Seer’s reputation as a prophet depends less upon his remarkable second-sight than on the inventive hindsight of others.

  One of these was perhaps the old man who was said to have wandered from township to township in Ross in the last quarter of the 18th century, crying “Mo thruaighe ort a thir, tha’n caoraich mhor a’teachd!” Woe to thee, oh land, the Great Sheep is coming! This has been taken to mean the Cheviot which was brought to Easter Ross in 1790, but profitable sheep-farming was already flourishing there long before that, and before the old man had his melancholy vision. In 1762 Admiral Sir John Lockhart inherited the medieval castle and forty-eight properties of the Balnagowan estate. Since his tortuous descent from the Celtic Earls of Ross also gave him claim to the disputed leadership of Clann Aindrea, he hyphenated his surname with Ross, took pleasure and pride in his inheritance, and began his shore life as a successful Imp
rover. He enclosed and cultivated neglected land, drained marshes, raised rents, gave leases to southern graziers, and put black-faced Lintons on the hills. A resentful people sometimes shot or drowned these placid animals, and in Bliadhna nan Caorach two years after Sir John’s death they attempted to drive them all from Ross, but nothing could halt the changes the Admiral had begun. The prosperity of his family, founded upon prize-money and Linton sheep, continued for another century until the baronetcy expired with the entertaining inventor of the Ross rifle, a weapon I still remember with astonished dismay. For two dark nights during an invasion-scare in 1940 I sat on the beach at Pensarn in North Wales, holding it between my knees and wondering what use I could be with five rounds of ammunition only, and those too large for the rifle’s breech. There are few sheep on Balnagowan now, and much of it is a sporting estate for foreign guns. The turreted castle above the road to Tain is the Highland seat of an absent Arab sheik, and its sixteen sunken baths of pale blue mosaic are a marvel unforeseen by the Brahan Seer.

  Westward from the low hills and fertile ground between the Dornoch and Cromarty Firths the county of Ross stretches across the Northern Highlands from sea to sea, and beneath the black soil of some of its glens are the pebbled beaches of their long-receded tides. It is a land of magnificent peaks, dark bogs, grieving survivors of once-great forests, and moorland tarns like burnished shields. Its high-coned mountain wall on the western coast is lofty and indifferent, facing the grey Atlantic from which it arose as part of the first crust of the planet. Inland is another ocean of heaving earth and eroded rocks, tumultuous but immobile, empty of man but rich in the wild-life he now makes a brave effort to preserve – red deer and roe, fox and pine-marten, otters moving at dusk, ravens clearing their throats on moss-green outcrops, snow buntings on the cold high braes, red grouse in the heather, warblers among stands of white birch, a lone eagle, a stooping peregrine below scudding clouds.