John Prebble's Scotland

by John Prebble

  My visits to Culloden are not always melancholy, and should not be. There was joking that day, I think, for laughter is the reassuring companion of desperate courage. I remember that Iain once stood by the great cairn with Lord Doune, a member of the Culloden Committee and descended from the bastard half-brother of Mary Queen of Scots. The day was cold with rain, and in the shelter of the cairn a Scots guide was talking to a small group of Americans, bright plastic hoods tied beneath their earnest faces. As he reached the end of his galloping history of the Stuarts and the Jacobite cause he pointed over their heads to Lord Doune. “And there,” he said, raising his voice above the wind, “there but for the thickness of a blanket is the rightful King of Scotland!”

  When I left Spinningdale at the end of one of my last visits my car was filled with daffodils. “For your friends in the south,” I was told. I drove southward by Culloden and gave some of the flowers to Neil MacDonald, the gentle Islesman who was then warden of the site. Others I laid on the Field of the English and the newly-discovered graves of the Campbells. The rest I took to Iain. He is gone now, as James and Rory are gone, but their memory is with me whenever I go to the Highlands.

  Elizabeth Gordon, Countess of Sutherland, Marchioness of Stafford and Duchess of Sutherland. The events referred to by Foster are the clearances in Strath Naver and Strath Helmsdale as part of James Loch’s Policy of Improvement.

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  The Prophecies of the Brahan Seer, by Alexander Mackenzie, 1881. Mackenzie was the editor of The Celtic Magazine, and the author of The History of the Highland Clearances, 1882. He appears to have given Kenneth Odhar the title of The Brahan Secr.

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  Chapter XVIII of A Hundred Years in the Highlands, by Osgood Mackenzie, 1921.

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  Chapter 9

  Sergeant Donald McLeod was born on June 20, 1688, at Ullinish on the west coast of Skye. If not the greatest of the many soldiers this island has produced he was perhaps the most astonishing, and for some years now I have thought of writing a picaresque novel based upon his Memoirs. They were published in 1791 when he was still alive, an outpensioner of the Royal Hospital, in tolerable health and happy with the last of his several wives. His eldest son was eighty-three, the youngest nine. “Of the sixteen sons that he knows of,” said his biographer, “not a less number than twelve are in different stations in the army and navy.”

  In the prime of life he was five feet and seven inches in height. He is now inclined by age to five feet five inches. He has an interesting physiognomy, expressive of sincerity, sensibility, and manly courage, though his eyes have lost their lustre and become dim and languid. With regard to his mental qualities, that which is most impaired is the faculty of memory, and of discriminating lively conceptions and ideas from historical truths.

  He was proud of his age but he had no explanation for it, and when asked for one he said “I eat when I am hungry, and drink when I am dry, and never go to bed but when I can’t help it.” If told after his evening glass that it was time for him to sleep, he replied, “My eyes are not shut yet,” and prolonged that condition by keeping one open for several minutes after the other was closed. But in the morning, “the moment he awakes, up he springs, washes his face and hands, and goes somewhere or other, for he seems to have an aversion to rest, and is constantly in motion.”

  Although the fact of his existence is confirmed by one contemporary record only outside the Memoirs, and that brief and deflationary, his longevity, fecundity, amorous adventures and military prowess have been accepted without question by clan and regimental histories, the former in family pride, and the latter in gratitude no doubt for such astounding proof that old soldiers never die. According to his biographer, he was born the son of John MacLeod of Ullinish, “as appears from the parish register of Bracadale” which has not, however, survived. He was thus descended from the great chiefs of Dunvegan, but his father, whose runaway marriage at sixteen had angered his own parents, soon abandoned his wife and children “for a course of dissipation which terminated in a military life”, a lieutenancy of Marines in the Chatham Division. Donald was no better treated by his grandfather who apprenticed him to an Inverness stone-mason at the age of nine. Four years later he ran away to Perth, where a captain of the Royal Scots, “recognising him to be the descendant of a gentleman, immediately enlisted him.” Before his fourteenth birthday he was a recruiting-sergeant.

  He served with the First of Foot in Marlborough’s wars, fighting at Blenheim, Ramillies and Malplaquet, as well as “engaging in several private encounters”, hot-blooded duels with any man who provoked him, and later any man called Maclean whom he could himself provoke. He was at Sheriffmuir during the Rebellion of 1715, he said, although the Royal Scots were not. There he cut down a French officer in the Pretender’s service, but was wounded by a dragoon whom he also killed. The horseman’s sword laid open his brain, but “he bound his head fast with a handkerchief, otherwise, as he says, he verily believes it would have fallen into pieces.” He recovered slowly at Chelsea Hospital, returned to Scotland and joined the Black Watch, pursuing cattle-thieves and taking the daughter of one as his first wife. He fought with the Watch at Fontenoy where he was wounded in the leg by a musket-ball. “Yet he did not drop down, nor yet fall behind, but was among the first that entered the trenches.” He slew a French colonel, and was pocketing the dead man’s purse and watch when he was attacked by an Irish officer whom he was able to defeat “after an obstinate and skilful contest.”

  At the beginning of the Seven Years War in 1756 he was transferred from the Black Watch to Fraser’s Highlanders, as a drill-sergeant. He was now almost seventy, but well-known for his exploits and much esteemed by James Wolfe. “The General finding that our Sergeant, to courage, honour and experience added a tolerable knowledge of both the French and German languages, employed him on sundry occasions.” Charging with Fraser’s regiment on the Plains of Abraham, MacLeod was twice wounded, in the arm and leg, but he nobly surrendered his plaid so that it could be wrapped about his dying general. “With General Wolfe’s corpse, being now an invalid, he was sent home to Britain in November, 1759, in a frigate of war named the Royal William.“ A year later, MacLeod was serving in Germany with Keith’s Highlanders and was again wounded, by one bullet in his shoulder and another in the groin, “on account of which he still wears a bandage.” In his ninth decade he sailed to New York on a military transport and offered his services as a volunteer against the American rebels. Sir Henry Clinton, the commander-in-chief, gave the old man the munificent sum of half a guinea a day from his own pocket, but kept him away from battle and finally sent him home1 That was not the end of his adventures, of course. Travelling by sea from London to Aberdeen, he was ship-wrecked and washed ashore on the coast of Yorkshire, lashed to a plank.

  For ten years he worked as a stone-mason in Inverness, apparently using the skills he had acquired during his broken apprenticeship eighty years before. In 1789 he walked to London with his third or fourth wife, Jane MacVean, in the hope of persuading a dilatory bureaucracy to pay his meagre grant as an out-pensioner of the Royal Hospital. Sympathetic officers secured him an audience with George III, and although the King was at this moment losing his mind for the first time he had enough sense left to give the old soldier eleven guineas and instruct the Governor of the Royal Hospital to pay him a shilling a day. The MacLeods went home to Inverness in great joy.

  But see again the crooks of one’s lot, the labyrinths of life! Though Macleod’s name was inserted in the King’s List he was to wait for the actual receipt of a shilling a day until there was a vacancy, which has not yet happened. Behold, therefore, Serjeant Macleod and Mrs Macleod again in London, in September, 1790, after a journey performed on foot, from Inverness, upwards of five hundred miles, in the space of three or four weeks, accompanied by their youngest son, a lively little lad, about nine years old, as above-mentioned.

  It was while MacLeod was waiting for an
answer to his second petition that his literary ghost discovered him in a Chelsea tavern or lodging-house. William Thomson had been an assistant minister at Monzievaird in Perthshire until complaints about his behaviour, or his interpretation of the Scriptures, forced him to resign. He came to London and made a comfortable living as a miscellaneous writer. One of the books he may have ghosted was the entertaining Travels of John MacDonald, a Keppoch man who became a London footman. If Thomson did not write this book he plagiarised it, for some of its anecdotes are repeated in MacLeod’s Memoirs, published a year later. In his defence it might be said that he was sometimes disappointed by his subject. “I have noticed the proneness of the old Serjeant, in the present debilitated state of his mind, to confound mere imagination with realities.”

  I do not know if the Sergeant received his shilling a day from the Royal Hospital, or a share of the money earned by the Memoirs. I have been unable to find his portrait which Thomson said was engraved at this time, and I have discovered no record of his death or burial in the parish records of Chelsea. Perhaps he returned to Inverness, dying there or upon his long journey home. It was to establish a physical contact with him that I first went to Ullinish some years ago, a strange and unreal visit. I drove from Kyleakin to Loch Sligachan, by the perfect conical hill of Glamaig to the dark cathedral ruin of Sgurr nan Gillean at the loch-head. The day was warm and sunlit on the eastern coast of the island, but as I drove westward through the narrow defile of Glen Drynoch to Loch Harport the weather changed. There was shapeless cloud on the black ramparts of the Cuillins, and before I reached the mouth of the loch a golden gauze thickened to mist, damp and grey. At Struanmore I took a side-road to the little peninsula of Ullinish, and now visibility was only a hundred yards and decreasing. I did not know what I expected to find. Not a township, that was long gone with the Clearances, and not the “very good farm-house of two stories” where Boswell and Johnson were guests of the Laird of Ullinish, and where the Old Sergeant was perhaps born. I wanted to see the shore, the rocks and caves where MacLeod once played and was taught his murderous skill with the broadsword, the hill-road he walked to the parish school at Bracadale, carrying his young brother on his back. I saw nothing but mist and the warning fronds of barbed-wire on a dry-stone wall at the roadside, until suddenly there was a building ahead of me, dark and silent, like a ship becalmed in fog. It was an empty hotel, not abandoned but oddly deserted. Its door was open, tables were laid in the dining-room, the linen fresh and white, and there was a warm smell of cooking. But there was no one in any of its rooms, no one to answer my call.

  I have since been to Ullinish on clear, blue-bright days and found the hotel busy with noise. I have seen a westering sun turning the water of Loch Bracadale to polished copper, and drawing long shadows from the stooked sheaves on the sloping fields. I have watched a fall of snow quickly approaching from the Cuillins, like a sheet expertly flung. I have seen a black-faced and white-lipped tide coming in from the horizon rim of the Uists, and thought of the “melancholy sight” which disturbed Boswell’s morning walk along this shore, an emigrant ship under way for America. I would like to believe that Donald MacLeod was indeed a child here three centuries ago, and that the brother he carried on his back grew to be the Laird of Ullinish, that “plain honest gentleman” who was greatly impressed by Johnson’s knowledge of tanning and the manufacture of whey. “He is a great orator, sir,” he said to Boswell, “it is music to hear the man speak2

  There are not only memories of Donald MacLeod on the shore of Loch Bracadale. Fifty years after his birth, the Irish ship William put in to the bay, ostensibly to unload brandy for the gentry of Skye but also to take aboard one hundred tenants of the lairds of Dunvegan and Sleat, sixty of them women and children. They were forcibly taken by the ship’s crew, to be sold as indentured servants in America. Both Norman MacLeod of Dunvegan and Sir Alexander Macdonald of Sleat were party to the kidnapping, although they protested that their intention had been to rid their estates of “thieves and undesirables.” Nothing might have been remembered of this sad incident had not the William called at its home port of Donaghadee in Ireland, where some of the prisoners escaped and a magistrate ordered the shipmaster to release the rest. In historical hindsight it was a warning of greater suffering to come, when the profit to be got from sheep would be a stronger temptation than a few guineas from the sale of helpless tenants. And it would be a bard to the Macdonalds of Sleat, Iain MacCodrum, who would make an angry and bitter protest against such inhumanity.

  Look around you and see the gentry

  with no pity for the poor creatures

  with no kindness to their kin.

  They do not think you belong to the land,

  and although they leave you destitute

  they do not see it as a loss.

  To an English ear, the island is happily-named. The sky is its broad ceiling, supported by the ancient columns of its hills. Its moorland pools are windows through which another sky can be seen, the untroubled heaven of Tir nan Og, the land of the always-young, stretching beyond the Hebrides. There is no agreement on the meaning of its name. To some it is Norse for a clouded isle, to others a shield or a dirk, but the derivation I prefer is from the Gaelic sgiath a wing, for that is how it appears on a map, an eagle’s wing with feathers extended in upward flight.

  The island was created sixty million years ago by the terrible volcanoes which burst through a crust of sandstone three times as old, spewing out the black lava and igneous rock which form the red wall of Beinn Dearg, the hostile escarpment of the Cuillins, great terraces and high cliffs like the impregnable strongholds of warring gods. Ice and sea carved the chaos of volcanic fury into a majestic beauty, the Red Hills above Broadford Bay, the sleeping giant of Blaven with a shawl of scree and heather drawn up to its scarred face, the basalt plateaux of MacLeod’s Tables where a braggart chief once dined with a southern guest, fifteen hundred feet above the sea and in the light of torches held by a hundred clansmen. The green and storm-grey sea-lochs create the feathers of the island wing, and as the eye turns inland from them it is drawn to the southern mass of the Cuillins, twenty-four mounting peaks with names like the clash of steel upon a shield. The young Irish warrior Cuchulainn built a fortress in their shadow, across Loch Eishort at Dunscaith and above a pit where he had killed its guardian snakes, dragons and monstrous toads. The mythology which claims that his name was given to the Cuillins is persuasive, but there is another explanation. When they appear paper-thin against a pearl-grey dawn their thorned outline resembles a leaf of cuilionn-mara, the blue-flowered sea holly that grows on the saline shore of the lochs. No one writing of the Cuillins has used adjectives of affection. The ice which carved their soaring crags and plunging falls of stone still chills the emotions. When Boswell saw them from Ullinish he could only describe them as “prodigious”, and add that they reminded him of the mountains in Corsica “of which there is a very good print.” Johnson said nothing that Boswell thought worthy of record, and wrote nothing in his Tour.

  Except for the green littoral on the Sound of Sleat, the island is largely treeless, wastes of sepia moorland, harsh rock, indigo and terracotta cliffs dwarfing the white cottages at their feet. Nowhere in the Highlands is there a deeper loneliness than on the peninsula of Trotternish, the index feather of the eagle’s wing, where the pleated folds of Kilt Rock glisten with climbing spray, and the Old Man at the postern-gate of Storr looks across the sea to Raasay. On the shore at his feet, a century ago, a Viking treasure was found, including coins from the western foothills of the Himalayas. Trotternish, the bear’s cape of the Norsemen, was later Clan Donald ground, and the Lords of the Isles held a fortress on its northern tip, at Duntuilm above a beach of olivine stones. It is now a desolate ruin, heather and yellow grass cover the garden made with earth brought from seven kingdoms, and there is only the stump of a tower where fifty unmarried girls danced at a great ball given by Donald of the Wars. Upon Staffin Bay, eighteen miles northward from P
ortree, the strange formation of the Quirang was created by a great landslip at the end of the Ice Age, when a floor of lava one thousand feet deep first cracked, then broke and moved toward the sea. The Norse called it The Crooked Enclosure, recognising its great pillars, buttresses, and pinnacles of stone as a massive stock-pen, and within its walls three thousand cattle could be hidden from sea-borne raiders. It is said that the land on this part of the coast is still sliding into the sea, and in time will take with it the house where Flora MacDonald lived for twenty-two years after her marriage, and where she bore five of her seven children. It is sometimes difficult to see that young woman of the speeding, bonny boat as the abundant matron she became.

  In the 18th century the chiefs of Clan Donald moved from Duntulm to softer living at Armadale, on the Sound of Sleat. Johnson and Boswell stayed there as the guests of Sir Alexander Macdonald ninth baronet and eventually first Baron Macdonald of Macdonald and Sleat, heir-male of Clann Uisdein, descendant of Iain the first Lord of the Isles. He was hawk-nosed and chinless, an anglicised chieftain with an English wife and a preference for life in London or Edinburgh, tastes which most of his descendants would inherit. Johnson had a great contempt for chiefs whom he believed to have degenerated from patriarchal rulers into rapacious landlords, and most particularly did he despise Sir Alexander Macdonald of Macdonald. “He has no more the soul of a chief than an attorney who has twenty houses in a street and considers how much he can make by them.”