by John Prebble
The complex and magical beauty of Ross numbs the imagination and mocks all attempts to describe it. In the first moments of an early dawn its great wastes and upthrust hills are grey with the pain of their solitude, and night-shadows still deepen the parallel lines on the troubled face of Liathach. The rising sun warms and enlivens, and at noon it glistens on the white quartzite head of Beinn Eighe. With the passing of day the ice-hewn spearheads on the side of Slioch are a gentle rose-pink above the blue mirror of Loch Maree, but southward the scarred sandstone flank of Beinn Alligin drips blood into the darkness of Torridon. The seasons change colour and metaphor. When spring has melted its last corrie of snow the amethyst escarpment of Ben More Coigach is a cloud city above the dark gateway to Loch Broom. In summer, when they are seen from the narrow coast-road to Diabaig, the round heads of the Beinn Damh range become gossiping women in purple shawls. The ochrous light of an autumn evening changes the jagged ridge of Stac Polly into the broken wall of a beleaguered Andalusian castle. In winter all can be hidden by a frozen mist. When that is lifted, by sun or wind, mountain and moor are chalk-white and ink-black against a blue sky.
It would be easy to believe that this land was always empty, but every glen, rock-face, mountain and lochan has a Gaelic name, remembering an imaginative society long since devoured by sheep. Most of its Mackenzie lairds were glad to be quit of it before the middle of the last century, but while they enjoyed their property they did so in style. On a June Monday in 1803, James Hogg stepped ashore from the Isabella at the head of Little Loch Broom to be the guest of George Mackenzie of Dundonnell. He was royally entertained, keeping his host company at the punch-bowl until they heard the dawn song of a blackbird beyond the window. Mackenzie lived well on his twenty thousand acres, employing one tutor in mathematics for his children, another in languages, and a third in music. With a Borderer’s keen eye for bad husbandry, Hogg thought the estate was dismally managed, and although it was “crammed full of stout, able-bodied men and women” the glens were impoverished by perpetual cropping. Mackenzie asked what the land might produce if let as sheep-walks, and Hogg thought its rental could not be less than £2,000. Mackenzie said his people would never pay that. “He was loath to chase them all away to America, but at present they did not pay him above £700.” Hogg liked Mackenzie, his good humour, the rich table he kept, the civility of his family, their musical evenings and their delighted applause when their visitor played upon the fiddle. And if the laird was not making as much as he might of his lands
He hath, however, the pleasure of absolute sway. He is even more so in his domains than Bonaparte is in France. I saw him call two men from their labour, a full mile, to carry us through the water. I told him he must not expect to be served thus by the shepherds if once he had given them possession.
When the dawn breaks on An Teallach the blackbird may still sing in the dark trees of Dundonnell, but the stout, able-bodied people are long gone. They are gone from all the sea-torn coast of Ross, the small townships that once supplied the Royal Navy and the fishery fleets with ten thousand men. They are gone from Strath Conon and Applecross, from Glen Torridon and from Loch Carronside where Hogg saw many villages, and where he lost his temper when he asked for more meat and was given whisky. On the peninsula coast of Coigach, looking out to the Summer Isles, there are a few white cottages and a good inn for those taking the twisting single-track by the ox-bow bend of Loch Lurgain. This was once a thickly populated estate, but in 1852 it became the property and responsibility of the young Marquess of Stafford who had ambitions to be as great an Improver as his grandfather, the first Duke of Sutherland. The land came to him as part of the property of his bride, Ann Hay-Mackenzie of Newhall and Cromartie, and it was in their joint names soon after their marriage that his agents issued writs of eviction upon its people. But the women of Achiltibuie, Polgass and Achabraighe were strong in spirit, and their defiance may have encouraged the women of Strathcarron two years later. They burnt the writs and drove the agents and Sheriff’s officers back to the boats that had brought them from Ullapool. “It was a distinguished triumph of brute force over Law and Order,” the agents told the Marquess, “and while it continues in the ascendant, the rights of the proprietors must remain in abeyance.” And so they did, but not for long.
To the south of Coigach, across the wide mouth of Loch Broom, the inheritors of the Mackenzie lairds of Gruinard also dispersed its tenants and sub-tenants, and a scattering of stones is all that is left of their township on Gruinard Bay. This is one of the finest inlets on that beautiful coast and deserves its Norse name, the fjord of green shallows. Its green-blue water is held in a bowl of rounded rock. There is a green belt of earth above the white stones of its shore, a plaid of green timber upon the gently rising hills. Black cattle from Lewis, brought over the North Minch, were once landed here and driven eastward up the river to the Glen of Hunting, by the black shadow of An Teallach to Dundonnell Garve and the Muir of Ord. Joy in the solitude of Gruinard would be a kindness to the people who left it in sorrow, were not its beauty imperceptibly but nonetheless obscenely marred. There is a tear-drop island on the water, and although it is green with trees it is dead, all animal life still poisoned by the anthrax which military scientists placed there forty years ago.
The Gulf Stream warms the coastal waters of Wester Ross, curling in from the Rockall Deep. Without this, Osgood Mackenzie would have been unable to create his wonder-garden on the same latitude as Hudson Bay and the Bering Sea. He began it in 1864 on an old sea-beach, twenty-four acres of a bleak peninsula in Loch Ewe, a rock of red Torridon sandstone known as Am Ploc Ard, the High Lump. Nothing was growing there but heather, crowberry and a single dwarf willow three feet high, and much of its surface peat, varying in depth from an inch to two feet, had been taken for fuel. Westward from the mouth of Loch Ewe is the Long Isle and then the broad Atlantic and until Mackenzie planted a wind-break of trees the “exposure was awful, catching as it did nearly every gale that blew”. He knew little of gardening when he began but he had inherited a love of it from his father, the fifth baronet of Gairloch. He learnt as he laboured, and after four years, during which black grouse, hare and red deer ate the young shoots of the trees and shrubs he planted, the land at last responded to his love. “Now came the real pleasure,” he wrote, “of watching the fruit of all our labour and anxiety.” He grew rhododendrons of wondrous size and colour, magnolias, azaleas and wistarias, camellias and cyclamens, spring, summer and autumn flowers, great shrubs and noble trees from two hemispheres, Bon Chrétien pears “as luscious as any that could be bought in Covent Garden”, plums and apples, orange-flowered ixias, scarlet lobelias and great lilies.
When he died in 1924 his work was continued by his daughter, and thirty years later it passed into the care of the National Trust. One hundred thousand people visit it every year, and in their proper admiration for Mackenzie’s achievements I hope they give some thought to how the garden at Inverewe acquired its present bed of black and fertile soil. The thin ground of the original sea-beach was first cleared by children who hand-picked it clean of pebbles. New earth was then brought by an old man, in a creel and upon his back. Later, others carried more soil in creels and carts, bringing it from the moors and from an abandoned turf-dyke. These people, unnamed in Mackenzie’s brief history of the garden3 were no doubt glad of the work. In a contemporary reference to Gairloch, Black’s Picturesque Tourist said “Extensive experiments have been tried to introduce the turnip husbandry among the crofters and tenantry, but not with any decided success as to the Landlord’s rental of the increased comforts of the people”.
There are two roads only through the central massit of Ross, from Strath Conon to the west coast. They begin as one on the Muir of Ord, dividing at Garve below the aloof shoulder of Ben Wyvis, and they follow the course of the old droving paths. The north fork goes by Strathvaich to Loch Broom and Ullapool, the second westward through Strath Bran to Achnasheen, Loch Maree and Gair Loch. At Achnasheen the
re is a southern branch to Loch Carron and the Skye ferry on the Kyle of Lochalsh. Each of these highways has sometimes been called Destitution or Desolation Road, although that title was originally given to a short stretch above Dundonnell, built to give employment in the years following the Potato Famine of 1846. But as the roads were used by the evicted people of the west, moving from their homes to the emigrant ships at Inverness, the name was applied to one or all with more sorrowful significance.
The northern road to the long sword-blade of Loch Broom was built to serve the new village which the British Fisheries Society was establishing at Ullapool, a planned and orderly assembly of parallel streets and a hundred houses, well-slated or thatched with turf and heather. Time has changed it and it has grown in size, but with Inveraray and Lochgilphead it is still an example of what other Highland towns might have become, had the good taste of the 18th century directed their growth. John Knox recommended the site to the Society, not only for the white fish in the ocean beyond the Summer Isles but also because of the abundance of herring at the mouth of the loch, “remarkable for their large size as well as their richness and flavour.” In 1786 there was only a droving-path to the east, “the track of a road” he called it, and because he could find no one to guide him along it, or none who could speak English, he wisely continued his tour by boat. A new road was surveyed four years after his visit and was finished in 1797 by Kenneth Mackenzie the laird of Torridon, inspired to this undertaking, he said, by the poor people’s needs and their “avidity for labour.” He built the road for considerably less than the £8,000 estimated, and should perhaps have been less cautious with the subscribers’money, for by 1809 the highway was in such disrepair as to be almost impassable along some stretches. In that year Telford began the southern road by Achnasheen to Loch Carron. There were long and frustrating delays, much anguish of his spirit and mind, before it was last completed, and Robert Southey’s carriage was the first to arrive at Strome Ferry. There the poet dined well at the inn on a choice of mutton chops, herrings, good potatoes, bannocks, cream and butter, as well as smuggled whisky.
Knox and Southey came to Wester Ross in autumn, when it burns with the red and brown, the bright orange of leaves inflamed by the first warning frost of winter. Southey saw the mountains and the glens “drest with sunshine” as I have often seen them, and always long to see them again. It was on such a golden day in late October that I once left Ullapool for Inverness. We had been filming The Three Hostages in Glen Achall, and that morning at the head of its lonely loch we had shot the last scene, Dominic Medina’s fall to his death as he slips from Richard Hannay’s grasp. On our drive eastward the high braes of Strathvaich were already touched with snow, but along the artificial loch of Glascarnoch the air was sunlit, the moorland heather bright with beaded rain. Beyond the dam we stopped at the inn of Altguish, a hotel now but once a drovers’tavern, I think, where some of them would halt before taking their herds a thousand feet over Corrimoillie to Strath Bran, saving time and distance to the Muir of Ord. The hotel was already closed for the winter but a bar at the back was still open, a stone-flagged floor and wooden benches, the air blue with peat-smoke. There were shepherds at the bar-counter, dogs lazily beating the floor with their tails. Aware of faces made familiar by television, the landlord’s wife brought an autograph book with our beer and sandwiches, taking all names lest one might be overlooked in ignorance. She returned in ten minutes to tell me that she had read only one of my books, but “Jeannie in the kitchen has got them all.” Whatever conceit that gave me was deflated by the ribald mockery of my companions as we drove on into the dusk of Strath Conon, toward the night-train from Inverness.
Now that James is gone from Spinningdale, and from Tigh an Allt at Ardgay, I do not often travel over Struie to the Kyle of Sutherland, and when I reach Inverness I go down the Great Glen to Lochaber, to Morvern or Kintail. I rarely use the road from Edinburgh to Inverness, the old hated road by Drumochter to the valley of the Spey. Now improved and widened, with long dual-carriageways, it avoids Newtonmore and Kingussie where the best bridies in the Highlands were once sold and perhaps still are. Sometimes I take the overnight sleeper to Inverness, more in nostalgia than pleasure, for the Royal Highlander is not the train it once was, when a breakfast-car was attached at Aviemore, the platform noisy with hungry, quarrelling gulls. I do not remember the rain that must often have been awaiting me at Inverness, only pale sunlight falling on the station square and on the white eroded statue of a Highland soldier, less honoured now for his valour at Tel-el-Kebir than for his value as a right flank marker for a platoon of parked cars.
There has been a town or settlement at the mouth of the River Ness for two thousand years. It was already old when Columba the Irish missionary came to convert the nothern Picts, miraculously opening the locked gates of their stronghold with the Sign of the Cross. History is rich with ironic coincidences. That conversion at Inverness, real or expedient, ensured the eventual domination of Scotland by the incoming Irish. Twelve hundred years later, when David Lloyd George was staying in the Highlands, he summoned his Cabinet to Inverness and there discussed Eamonn de Valera’s terms for a treaty and the recognition of Ireland as a sovereign state.*
Inverness was among the first of Scotland’s Royal Burghs. There was a King’s Highway between it and Aberdeen in the 13th century, but no good road from the south for another four hundred years, and no railway until 1858. It was a trading port and a military stronghold commanding the Great Glen and the approaches to the northern mountains. Its possession was disputed for centuries, by the Crown’s contenders and by feuding clans, and within half an hour’s drive from its centre there are the sites of a dozen massacres and battles. Macbeth the Mormaer of Moray had a timber castle on a prehistoric mound above the town, but if he killed Duncan in envious ambition it was not here. I would like to believe, however, that his castle did have a gate-porter with so perceptive an understanding of the relationship between lechery and strong drink. There were earlier fortresses on the green hill of Craig Phadrig across the river, and others later on the earthwork where the Anglo-Norman mercenaries of David I built a keep of stone. This survived in one form or another until George Wade repaired its walls and gave it useful employment as a garrison, but the Jacobites destroyed this in 1746. In the last century its remaining stones were replaced by a municipal castle of red sandstone, erected from plans which would also have served for the façade of a Victorian prison, a work-house, railway station or baronial hall.
Three hundred years ago, Commonwealth soldiers sent by the Protectorate built a Citadel on the quay, on a site now occupied by oil storage-tanks. It placed Cromwell’s military boot and England’s will upon the town and the Highlands, but Inverness had been an English-speaking if not an Anglo-Saxon enclave long before that. In many respects it is perversely English today. Not the harsh, arrogant, self-esteeming and self-destroying England of the late twentieth century, but the Anglo-Scottish world of the Victorian age, comfortable and almost complacent in the knowledge that it is “the hub of the Highlands”, as it somewhat inaccurately describes itself. It is certainly still the centre of their industrial, agricultural, educational and professional life, but is less concerned than it should be with the fact that its increasing role as a tourist centre is suffocating much of its old character and spirit. Its domestic and commercial architecture is largely Victorian and Edwardian, sometimes monstrous and often beguiling, but this too is changing, and its principal streets are becoming indistinguishable from other drear thoroughfares in Britain.
The property speculation of twenty years ago began that unpleasant change, and one of the men involved in it was a friend of my schooldays. When I see what he brought to Inverness I sadly remember our early and fervent interest in Scotland’s history. We gave ourselves Scottish names, writing them on house notice-boards, and we wore tartan ties instead of the obligatory black, blue and white. He had a talent for memorising verse and could declaim Scott and Aytoun at gre
at length. One poem to which he was particularly attached began with the only line I now remember, nor do I recall its source. “Mo chreach … my sorrow, at seven tomorrow I must be back in a garrison town.” He was a Jew, and when an insensitive master told him that it was ridiculous for him to have such an attachment to the Gaelic people of Scotland he said it was because he was a Jew.
I visit Culloden when I am in Inverness, no matter how brief my stay. Much of the work done in the past to preserve the battlefield, and honour the men who fought there, was due to the scholarship and devotion of Iain Cameron Taylor of the National Trust, without whose guidance and friendship my book would have been less than it is. He understood that the battle was not just the end of the Jacobite cause, to which he was nonetheless attached, but the climax of the Highlanders’long struggle for survival and the beginning of their betrayal and dispersal. Each visit I make to the moor brings another small discovery, not factual but emotional, a deepening rapport with place and past. No battlefield however sympathetically maintained, can present the sights and sounds of bloody conflict, and when this is attempted the result is often theatrical and absurd. Understanding must come from knowledge and a creative imagination, and the duty of the custodians is to supply one and inspire the other. Culloden does not look as it did in the sleet of that distant day, but now that some of its forestry trees have been felled it is again possible to look northward to the firth and the Black Isle and westward to the mountains, to see them as they were in that waiting hour before the armies began their killing. The great stones above the mass graves, erected less than a century ago, are starkly simple and painfully moving. Stripped naked by beggars, the Jacobite dead lay on the moor for two days before they were buried in great pits, by detachments of Cumberland’s soldiers whose white gaiters were soon as red as their coats. Thus no one can say with certainty that the clan names on the headstones correctly identify the men beneath, nor does it matter perhaps.
