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I HAVE read much, seen much,
and lived long,
and I do not think it within human nature possibilities that there ever
could be or can be a more morally blameless community of a thousand people
than was the one in which I was born and brought up. Of course there were a
few wastrels, and not every one of the honestly industrious people was
either a born or a converted saint. My friends the Gray Egyptians said that
too much religious rule and teaching had done more evil than good, that it
had knocked joyousness out of life, and rather lowered than raised the
standard of honour, truthfulness, and sense of duty which existed in their
own young days and in the days of their fathers.
And I think the history of the Glen after Culloden,
to a certain extent, bore out their contentions.
Between 1830 and 1843 the spiritual power ruled
without a check. Of the three proprietors none
was resident. Culdares was a minor away in England at school and college. Chesthill resided down
at Duneaves, Fortingall, and Lord Breadalbane had
no residence on his Roro estate, which he seldom if
ever visited. Divided into wards, each of which had
an elder or two, the Glen was wholly ruled in the
years mentioned by minister and kirk session. It
was good, wholesome rule, although needlessly
intolerant in regard to the dancing, fiddling, song-
singing, tale-telling amusements, and shinty play,
putting-stone, and hammer-throwing games of pre-
ceding generations. It was a rule which regularised
wakes, and put an end to excesses at weddings and
funerals. "Render to Csesar" preaching did more
than excisemen and cuttersmen to convince Glen farmers that smuggling was
sinful and should be discontinued. It was not easy to convince any Highland
growers of here and barley that the English Parliament had not done them gross injustice
in the whisky business, and that they had not a
perfect moral right to convert their grain into malt
and whisky, which found a ready market in the
Lowlands, and made it easy for them to pay their
rents.
Glenlyon smuggling was almost brought to
an end before I began to range over hills and to
take note of the secret places in which, not long
before, whisky used to be secretly distilled. The
old Highland smugglers, unlike modern ones, turned
out splendidly manufactured whisky, which, how-
ever, required some maturing delay before it
attained its perfection. My dear old friend, Mr
Murray-Macgregor, minister of Balquhidder, gave
me more than once a taste of smuggler's whisky,
distilled in Glenbuckie thirty or forty years before then. It was singularly
aromatic. It did not grip the throat like raw whisky, but it sent quickly a
pleasant feeling of warmth through one's whole body. The excise people had
seized the smuggler's big barrel when he was taking it to the Lowlands.
After having been declared forfeited by the Gallander Justices of the Peace, it was sold, and one of
them, Captain Stewart of Glenbuckie, bought it.
In 1846 Captain Stewart's son sold Glenbuckie to Mr David Carnegie, and went
to Argyllshire, where he bought the Island of Coll. On leaving Balquhidder, he gave the minister what remained of
the smuggler's whisky a half-dozen bottles or so
which for the next twenty years the minister doled
out to friends as a real curiosity.
This leads me to
another little story of smuggled whisky. In 1826
Archibald Stewart, Craigelig (Gilleaspa Mor), one
of the four partners in our Eight Merkland
club farm, was about to marry my aunt, Mary
Campbell. He was as strictly honest and honour-
able a man as ever stood in shoe leather, but he
thought it then no sin nor shame to make the
whisky for his own wedding out of his own "eorna."
He made a good deal more than \vas consumed at
the wedding. He put the surplus I forget how
many gallons in a big earthen jar, which, carefully
stoppered, he carried on a dark night to Car Dunshiaig, and buried it there in a peat bog where it was
to stay hidden until wanted for sale or use. Weeks
or months elapsed before he went to see in daylight
the place in which he buried the jar on a mirk night.
He then searched for it in vain, for in the interval a
great flood had washed away his marks and very
much changed the whole face of the moss. For the
next nineteen years at every sheep gathering he took
the beat that led him through Car Dunshiaig, and
in passing he searched for his lost jar with a long
iron probe, but he never found it.
Gilleaspa Mor,
with a large family, a mother ninety years old, and
two widowed sisters with large families, emigrated
in 1846 to the London district of Ontario, where
there was a brother previously settled and glad to
give them all a hearty welcome. Now, 1908, there
is a large clan of Stewarts, exclusive of the many
descendants of daughters, representing the two
brothers in Ontario and Manitoba. Gilleaspa Mor
was perfectly sure that no one but himself knew
about the burial of the jar in Dunshiaig moss, and
almost equally confident that if by chance anyone
found it, the discovery would have been revealed to
him. From the anti-septic, hermetically-sealing
nature of peat, it is likely that the whisky is still
contained in the buried jar, and if so, and it is
ever found, a bottle of it would be a gift for a
king. It must not be supposed that much of
the whisky illicitly distilled before smuggling was
cried down by the Church was consumed in the
Glen itself, for that was not the case. It was made
for export and profit, and the very magistrates who
sat in judgment on detected smugglers had a good
deal of sympathy with them.
The obstinate belief
of Glenlyon men that they were wronged and robbed
of an ancient right, in being prevented from freely
making the most profitable use of their fine "eorna"
had a good deal of historical justification ; for the
making of malt for sale was a Glen trade from the
ancient times when kings came there to hunt in
their own prehistoric forest. Until he went to reign
in England, James VI. came annually with many
followers to hunt in the then much reduced belt of
that old forest which still stretched across the heads
of Glenlochy and Glenlyon to Bendoran and the
Coireachan Batha, or Blaek Mount tops, about which
the Marchioness of Breadalbane has lately been
writing in "Blackwood." The royal hunter and his
party were a drouthy lot. John Dow Malster, the
Laird of Glenlyon's "maor," or land steward, was busily employed before
the hunting season in converting the laird's rent in kind "eorna," and the
purchased surplus "eorna" of the tenants, into malt
and ale. When royal demand failed and finally ceased,
the tenants had to carry the malt to Perth and
Stirling to be sold there. James II. had a "pubal,"
or wooden hunting lodge in the braes of Glenlyon,
but it was in the days of his grandson, James IV.,
who had his court at Insecallan, on the Glenorchy side of the watershed,
that the whole district profited most from the annual coming of the King and
his followers and many visitors from adjacent Highland districts. With his
free command of their language, appreciation of their music, songs, and
heroic poetry, and chivalrous if not wholly faultless personal qualities,
James IV. was the king for the Highlanders, and had his reign not been cut short by the
fatal error of rushing to meet his fate at Flodden, the subsequent history
of Scotland would certainly have been of a less disturbed and regretful complexion. His descendant, the British Solomon, was
not a man of noble or fascinating character, but he
was affable, homely, shrewd, and accessible, and, as
the last king who spoke Gaelic, "Seumas Mac
Mairi," was fairly popular in the forest lands. It
was through the forest that the potato got into
Glenlyon. I was told that the introduction took
place when Seumas Mac Mairi was king, and in
corroboration manifest signs of old lazy- beds were
pointed out. If the introduction took place early
in the 17th century, the next century was well
advanced before the potato was ranked as a main
crop in Glenlyon agriculture.
The "Gray Egyptians," on
information from
their seniors and personal knowledge, asserted that
for the century before the religious revival the
inhabitants of the Glen were as temperate drinkers
as it was physically and morally wholesome for any
community to be. In my time that was truly the
case, a few ne'er-do-weels excepted. The smuggling
had been cried down, but there were three small
licensed inns, one at Innervar, one at Innerwick,
and one at Bridge of Balgie. The Innerwick one
was the provision Old Culdares made for the clans-
man who was his officer son's piper, and who brought
an Irish wife with him from Ireland. The other two
represented alehouses with crofts, which had been
in existence for hundreds of years. The whole three
disappeared years ago, and now tourists have reason
to complain that in the forty miles westward from
Fortingall to Tyndrum, and in the cross-country
line of twenty miles from Kinloch-Rannoch to
Killin, there is not a single licensed house for the
entertainment of man or beast. As far as I can
see, there never was much general need for the
Innervar inn, although it existed as an alehouse
from time beyond memory. Until railways and
large Inverness and Perth cattle sales changed the
whole situation, there was clamant need for the
Bridge of Balgie inn, which, till the bridge was
built in about 1780, was situated a little further
east, near the churchyard ; and for the later inn at
Innerwick, which never was an old alehouse, there
was general utility justification likewise; for these
two places of public entertainment were placed at
the entrance to Larig-an-lochain, and where the
eastern and western passes came together by which
the stock of the North was driven to Falkirk trysts
and other southern markets. The driving time
created no small stir in Glenlyon, and all along the
old line of cattle tracks and immemorially appointed
stopping stations. It helped to make northern and
southern Highlanders known to one another.
With differences which were
generally of a trivial
nature, the social and moral life of the Highlands
eighty or seventy years ago was very like what I
have been describing from information and observation as being the social and moral life of the people
of my native Glen at that time. A high ideal of
individual responsibility and obligation, reverence
for age, family affection, love of children and care in
training them up to be good men and women,
mutual helpfulness of kinsfolk, and ready sympathy
with the afflicted were characteristics of the whole
race. Primogeniture backed by entail which was
profitable to the eldest sons of landed, families imposed a self-sacrificing duty in the eldest son of a
tenant, whose father happened to die when his
children were young. The son had to take the
father's place, to keep a roof tree over his brothers'
and sisters' and mother's heads, to labour, sweat and
struggle, remain celibate until the brothers were
launched on their own careers and the sisters were
married. Even when the father lived to old age,
the eldest son did not escape the bearing of the
burdens peculiarly his own. But he generally had
his reward in the fealty and patriarchal position he
had won by self-sacrifice. |
