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Neptune's Staircase - On
Board a Trawler from Lowestoft - The Keppoch Bard - I Sail up Loch Lochy -
Sir Ewen Cameron - A Hot-tempered Chief - Tinkers de Luxe at Invergarry -
The Man who Saw a Water-Bull - Forward to Aberchalder.
HOW powerfully a good
square meal can affect a man's outlook! My feet were comfortable for the
first time in days, for I had bought a new pair of shoes at a little shop
in the main street, and made a gift to the hotel porter of the wretched
instruments of torture I had been wearing. I felt ready for anything, and
I decided to get a lift back towards Fassifern and make for Moy by the
hill-path which I had funked at half-past four the previous afternoon. I
had heard that a tradesman's van was due to go in the Fassifern direction
in about three-quarters of an hour, and I decided to beg a lift,, so I
went down to Banavie to have a look at the Caledonian Canal until the van
turned up.
I wonder if it is realised
how close the connection is between the Caledonian Canal and the Rising of
'Forty-five. It was the trustees of the Forfeited Estates who, in an
effort to improve the Highlands and give employment to the crofters, first
put forward the idea of building the Canal. They asked James Watt, the
steam-engine man, to have a look at the Great Glen and make a report. Watt
said that a canal could certainly be made, but the idea was dropped, and
thirty years passed before anything more was done. Nowadays the Canal may
be thought no great shakes as an engineering triumph, but a century ago it
was one of the wonders of the world.
Thomas Telford was the man
who built it, and if ever anyone deserved his tomb in Westminster Abbey,
it was the civil engineer who was born in a shepherd's hut on a
Dumfries-shire hillside. Apprenticed to a stone-mason, he became so deft
with the chisel that his gravestones gained him as much fame in the parish
of Westerkirk as the Scots verses he wrote under the name of Eskdale Tam.
He taught himself French, German, and Latin; and when he had saved a
little money he studied architecture in Edinburgh, and then went to London
to hunt for a job. According to the song, you can't keep a good man down :
in a short time Thomas Telford had found his feet ; and there is hardly a
county in Britain that does not to-day carry his work upon its landscape.
He was called abroad to plan the inland navigation system of Sweden, and
the Scot who began life in a shepherd's hut in Eskdale found himself with
a Swedish order of knighthood. Some say that his greatest work, greater
even than the Menai Suspension Bridge or the St. Katherine Docks at
London, is the road that runs from Inverness into Sutherland and the
North; but he will always be remembered by his countrymen as the maker of
the Caledonian Canal. If he had cared much for money, he could have built
up a vast fortune and lived like a Ruritanian prince. But for years his
only home was a room in the Old Ship Inn at London. It was there he
entertained his many friends, and in his old age they persuaded him to
move into a house of his own. He used to relate with a quiet chuckle what
happened when he informed the landlord of this decision. The inn had just
changed hands, and the new innkeeper was struck dumb with horror. "But you
can't leave, sir!" he gasped out. "Why, sir, I have just paid £750 for
you!" He explained that he had been charged this additional sum for the
inn because of the custom Telford brought to it. And I am told that in the
Great Glen some of the people still repeat the tales their grandparents
told of him how he used to sew on his own buttons, and patch his clothes,
and how he liked to walk about in the evenings among his Highland workmen,
and have a dram with them beside the fire after each day's work on the
Canal was done. The
task that faced Telford, as he cut that long channel between the North Sea
and the Atlantic, was a pretty grim one. He had to blast and dredge his
way up from Fort William at one end, and from Inverness at the other, to a
meeting-point in the Great Glen that is one hundred feet above sea-level.
He had estimated the cost at £350,000; but the war with France sent prices
soaring. When he began work, his labourers were paid eighteen pence a day,
but ten years later their wage was half-a-crown, and timber rose from
ten-pence a cubic foot to three shillings and sixpence. At one time it
looked as if the sea-lock at Inverness would beat him completely, for he
had to run it out into the open Firth for over half a mile and build an
artificial mound on a bed of mud sixty feet deep. Before the Canal was
opened it had cost nearly one million sterling more than he had
anticipated. He had hoped to finish it in seven years, but it took nearly
twenty-and another twenty after that before the final improvements were
made. It was planned to accommodate the biggest British and American
trader afloat, but times have changed, and to-day most cargo vessels must
take another route. Even the sturdy old Leith salvage-ship, Bullger, when
hurrying to a wreck on the west coast, had to go round by the Pentland
Firth, for she would have scraped her bottom plates on the sills of some
of the locks. There is, however, one class of vessel that passes through
the Canal every year-the trawlers from the east coast - and when I got
round to "Neptune's Staircase," Telford's name for the eight locks at
Banavie, I found a score of these trawlers jammed as tight as a shoal of
the herring they had been seeking in the western waters. They were
returning home to the North Sea, and I wondered how the fishing had gone.
Having twenty minutes to spare, I strolled along the lock-side and spoke
to a cherub-faced young man who was smoking his pipe beside the tiny
wheel-house of a trawler.
"Fishing?" he said. "No fish to be got. It's
been a poor year. These damned foreigners are killing the trade. Still,"
he added, " we shouldn't grouse at the foreigners. They eat about
three-quarters of the fish we catch."
"It beats me why we don't eat more herring in
Britain," I remarked.
The young man smiled, eased the red
handkerchief that was round his neck, and shrugged his shoulders. "I
haven't got much use for a herring myself," he admitted.
It certainly wasn't a Scots tongue he had in
his head; and when I asked him where he came from, he named to my surprise
an inland Essex village a few miles from where I live. Presently I
learned, again with surprise, that this young man with the cherubic
countenance was the skipper of the boat, and most of his crew were on
sharing terms with him. "Care to come below ?" he asked, knocking out the
ashes of his pipe on the low bulwarks.
I stepped aboard and picked my way among the
piles of fishing-gear. The lifeboat was warped down aft; and above the
engine-room, some washing had been hung out to dry. Ducking my head, I
entered the deck-house, in the corner of which was an open trap. Down
through this the skipper went, and I followed him on the iron ladder, to
find myself in a tiny dug-out, with a table in the middle and bunks all
around. The atmosphere was fetid with human breath and sweat.
"Tea?" said the skipper. "We're always ready
for tea on this boat."
He shouted up the ladder, and in a few minutes
two huge enamel mugs of black tea were put on the table by an
earnest-faced young man who looked more like a City clerk enjoying a rough
holiday than a cook on a trawler. Where, I wondered, were the old salts of
yesteryear-the grim old teak-faced shellbacks of square-rig days? Do all
herring fishermen look like amateur yachtsmen out for a spree ? The
skipper was intelligent, a reader of books, and we talked about Prince
Charlie. He was interested to hear about my walking-tour; and when I told
him my journey would take me up the Great Glen as far as Loch Oich, he
offered me a lift in the tone of one who invites you to share a taxi-cab.
A lift on a trawler. It sounded attractive, but I explained that it was
out of the question. I was going back towards Fassifern to walk over the
hills to Moy. There is, however, an adage about the affairs of mice and
men; and we climbed up on deck in time to see the tail end of the
tradesman's van disappearing westward.
Here was a blow. I stared after the van until
it had rounded the distant corner. I had solemnly vowed to return and walk
to Moy by the hill-path; and now it seemed that I must either trudge back
over these miles of hard highway or hang about in the hope of finding
another conveyance.
With a sudden impulse, I turned to the skipper and told him I would sail
with him up the Great Glen. As for the hill-path to Moy, all thought of it
went whistling down the wind, and the poor fragments of my broken oath
splashed overboard into sixteen feet of water. I smothered my conscience
with the thought that from Moy onwards I would be following the Prince's
tracks-not indeed upon the road, but on the sea-road that runs beside it.
The lock-gates swung slowly open, propellers thrashed the water, and the
covey of trawlers began to move.
An hour later we had climbed up fifty feet
above sea level and were steaming slowly up the Canal towards Loch Lochy.
The leading boats left an enormous wash, which we picked up and sent
splashing high on the artificial banks. I noticed that several mountain
streams flowed into the Canal by sluices, while others ducked under it
through culverts and fell into the river Lochy below. I will admit that,
from the deck of the trawler, Ben Nevis was a more imposing sight than
from the road near Fort William. Perched high on the mountainside like a
raven's nest there is a little house which marks the entrance of the
tunnel through the Ben, and you can trace the pipe-lines that carry the
water from Loch Treig down to drive a team of turbines, each of which
develops nine thousand horsepower. I am told that the tunnel through Ben
Nevis is fifteen miles long, one of the largest of its kind in the world,
and before it was finished a million and a half tons of rock had been
excavated. The completion of the new Laggan scheme will mean that so much
water will be artificially carried down to the powerhouse at Fort William
that it would be enough to supply the domestic demands of half the
population of Great Britain. This will flow from the turbines into Loch
Linnhe, and one wonders what Loch Linnhe will think about it. It will
certainly provide the pleasant folk of Fort William with an alternative
topic of conversation when they are tired of telling visitors about the
prodigious height of their Ben Nevis.
Behind, we had left the ruins of Inverlochy
Castle, where lain Lom the Keppoch bard looked down upon the battle that
was fought on the plain below and made that impassioned poem, "The Battle
of Inverlochy." Although Montrose lost but one officer and three men,
Argyll's army was so smashed up that the Campbells as a fighting force
never recovered, and lain Lom revelled in the soil being fattened by the
best of the Campbell blood. But there was a much older fortress than the
present ruins at Inverlochy, and folk say that there the Auld Alliance
between Scotland and France had its beginning over a thousand years ago,
when one of the northern kings entered into a bond with Charlemagne.
Historians may scoff, but some fables take a long time to die.
We sailed on between mountains that were piled
up to the sky on either hand. To the north-east, Auchnacarry - the seat of
Cameron of Locheil - nestled somewhere among the trees ; and since the
skipper showed an eager interest in old stories about the glen, I tried to
tell him about one of the greatest Camerons of that great clan, Ewen Dubh
- the Sir Ewen of the seventeenth century. I described how little patience
he had with anyone who was less of a Spartan than himself. One night he
was storm-bound among the hills, and he ordered his followers to lie down
beside him and sleep in the snow. As he was wrapping himself in his plaid,
he saw that one of his young relatives had rolled a snow-ball to rest his
head on. Leaping to his feet, Sir Ewen kicked the snow-ball aside. "What
!" he cried, roused to fury at such degrading effeminacy. " Can't a
Cameron sleep without a pillow?"
But the yarns about Sir Ewen are innumerable.
Perhaps the best-known of all is the story of his encounter with an
English officer from Cromwell's garrison in Inverlochy Castle. The
Camerons were a thorn in the flesh of the Government troops, and in one of
the many skirmishes Sir Ewen and this officer met in a hand-to-hand
combat. The officer must have been a doughty fighter, for he managed to
parry the chief's whirling broadsword, and the pair of them finished up on
the ground locked fiercely in each other's arms. At last the Englishman
got hold of his dagger, and a moment later the fight would have ended, but
his throat was exposed, and the Cameron's teeth went into it like a
terrier snapping at a rat. Scrambling to his feet, Ewen Cameron looked
down at the crimson throat of the expiring Englishman. "God put it into my
mouth," he said; "the sweetest bite I ever had in my life!" But the story
ends far from Lochaber. After Charles II came to the throne Sir Ewen was
received at Court, and London rang with his exploits. One day he was in a
barber's shop; and the barber, noticing that his customer was from the
North, began to talk about the Highlands of Scotland. "There are savages
there, sir!" he cried, his eyes glinting with rage as he peered down into
the swarthy countenance of the man lying back in the chair. "One of them
tore out the throat of my own father with his teeth. I wish to heaven I
had that fellow's throat as near my razor as I have yours!" The Cameron
chief did not blink an eye, but he never entered that barber's shop again.
He lived until he was over ninety, and the
skipper was interested to hear of Sir Ewen's gift of second-sight. He had
it right to the end; and I told how, in the Rising of 'Fifteen, he called
out from his bed to his attendants. When they hurried in to him he
declared that his king had landed in Scotland. "Summon the household," he
ordered, "so that they may drink the health of His Majesty!" At that very
hour the exiled James was disembarking from a ship at Peterhead to join
the Earl of Mar.
It was a happy voyage I made on the Lowestoft
trawler. With the help of my map I had been able to locate Moy, a little
white-washed farmhouse up on the roadside, where the Prince stayed during
the nights of Saturday and Sunday. As we passed a tiny head land on the
south shore of the loch, I picked out Letterfinlay, once a coaching inn.
It was here that Charles, after marching from Moy, decided to spend Monday
night, for the weather was vile. But a messenger arrived to say that Sir
John Cope's army
was within sight of the Corrieyairack, and was about to march over the
mountain pass and come down to Fort Augustus. This news, which was not
accurate, inflamed the Highlanders; and in spite of the torrents of rain,
Charles decided to hurry on. By eight o'clock in the evening he had
reached the head of Loch Lochy, and there he found awaiting him four
hundred Glengarry men led by Donald Macdonell of Lochgarry. At the head of
the loch, the Prince was also joined by men from Appin under Stewart of
Ardshiel. Sending a party of scouts to keep watch on the Corrieyairack
Pass, the Prince marched on, and arrived after dark that same night at
Invergarry Castle. It
was at the head of Loch Lochy that I disembarked from the trawler. The
skipper invited me to look him up one day in the South, and to come
fishing with him in the North Sea if I felt like roughing it for a week,
but that is another story. I continued on my way, warmed by my unexpected
meeting with a man whose home was not many parishes distant from my own,
and headed for Invergarry. I was now tramping within half a mile of Ben
Tee, called Glengarry's Bowling Green, and it overlooks the flat green
strath where one of the most desperate of all clan battles was fought four
hundred years ago. John of Moidart took part in it, though Laggan-an-droma
is a far cry from the Atlantic tides that creep up round Castle Tirrim.
John was Captain of Clanranald; and Lord Lovat, who had fostered the son
of a previous chief, was determined that young Ranald Galda would become
chief in Moidart. But John was too clever to give battle, because Lovat
had Huntly's men to help him. The Frasers went home, and John followed at
a safe distance. Huntly had branched off by Glen Spean, and John of
Moidart saw his chance. On a hot July day, he swooped down on the Frasers
and their allies the Grants. After discharging their arrows, the clansmen
stripped off their plaids and rushed together clad only in their linen
shirts. And so the Battle of the Shirts was fought to an end. Lovat
himself and nearly all the Frasers were dead by nightfall, and the old
people who still talk of Blar nan Leine will tell you that only four
Frasers and ten Clanranald men survived the battle. But Providence must
have been on the side of the Beauly men, for the wives of no less than
eighty of the fallen Frasers gave birth to a man-child, each to become a
warrior in the place of his dead father.
As I looked at the streams that came splashing
down the mountainsides and flowed into the Canal, I remembered the story
about a woman who lived here in the days before the Canal was built. One
of these hillburns formed the boundary between Glengarry's land and
Locheil's, and at a point above her cottage it could easily be deflected
from its course and made to flow either into Loch Lochy or Loch Oich. When
the factor came from Glengarry to collect her rent, he found the stream
flowing down to the east, which put her outside his boundary; and when the
Cameron factor arrived, the water was tumbling down westward towards Loch
Lochy. An hour's work with a shovel now and again enabled this adroit old
body to live rent-free for years.
When I came to the shore of Loch Oich the
smoke of the trawlers hung like a tiny cloud in the distance. Loch Oich is
small, about four miles long, and it is one of the loveliest inland lochs
I have ever seen. The wind had fallen, and the water was like a glittering
sheet of mica between the mountains.
I found it a little difficult to adjust myself to the scenery in the Great
Glen. In the west country, among the grey jagged mountains, I had felt
almost all the time that I was alone-indescribably alone -in the heart of
a desolate and fairy-haunted land. But in the Great Glen, the high hills
are softly rounded, and there are many young plantations of trees that
keep reminding you of the handiwork of man. Compared with Moidart and
Arisaig, the Great Glen has a well-manicured look. In the West, the sight
of a cottage in a corrie had made me blink, as though it were a miraculous
thing to see there a wisp of smoke and signs of life. But here, although
few houses can be picked out on the hillsides, I did not gaze upon any of
them with surprise : it seemed natural that folk should live in this more
homely place. The oceangoing ships on the Canal, and the motor-buses that
daily race up and down the glen, remind you that you are in touch with the
world of cinemas and sixpenny-stores. As I trudged eastward, I wondered if
many people spoke Gaelic in this place. And then I was brought up short at
the sight of a long Gaelic inscription on a .damnably ugly monument by the
roadside. I found
that there was not only Gaelic carved on this thing, but French and Latin
and English as well. I hadn't read many lines of the English before I knew
that this must be the notorious "Well of the Heads." The incident of the
Seven Heads is usually referred to as a barbarous piece of Highland
cruelty which would be better forgotten. I disagree. The episode was less
barbarous than the monument, and the chief who erected it was so
ill-informed about it that he had the wrong date carved upon the wretched
obelisk. In the seventeenth century, the killing of the seven Keppoch
murderers was no more than a reasonable act of justice which the Glengarry
chief himself had refused to carry out. It was Iain Lom the poet who had
the courage to exterminate the seven rogues that had murdered the young
Keppoch chief, and the fact that the murderers were his own nephews did
not hold him back. There is at least one thundering lie in the Gaelic
inscription, which is quite different from the English, for Lord Macdonell
and Aros certainly did not order this act of vengeance ; and the severed
heads of the murderers, which were washed in the water of this well, were
in all likelihood flung at the feet of Lord Macdonell as a gesture of
contempt, since he himself had refused to make any move in the affair. It
was in fact Sir James Macdonald of Sleat who backed lain Lom, and moreover
they had the full approval of the Privy Council. But why a monument should
have been put up for what was no more than a sound bit of police work it
is hard to understand ; and we have the word of Lord Cockburn that Thomas
Telford, when he was building the Caledonian Canal, saw it soon after it
was erected and could scarcely keep his hands off it. Alexander Ranaldson
Glengarry was the man who had it built, and it is little more than a
monument to his own arrogance. Lord Cockburn, a pretty sound judge of men,
called him a paltry and odious fellow, selfish, cruel, base, dishonest,
with all the vices of the bad chieftain and none of the virtues of the
good one. Cockburn declared that Glengarry's only act of physical courage
was one which he and Telford watched by the side of the loch, and the
chief was driven to it by his own insolent fury. He wanted to cross the
loch in a boat which had already put out from the shore. He shouted
angrily to the men at the oars, but their only reply was a laugh. With a
howl of rage, Glengarry spurred his pony into the water to swim after the
boat. Telford remarked to the group beside him that he hoped Glengarry
would drown, and the place would be well rid of him. But the sturdy pony
carried him more than half-way across the loch, and at last the dripping
figure clambered into the boat.
The truth probably is that Glengarry had shown
his truculent side to Lord Cockburn and Telford, as he did to all
strangers who failed to kow-tow to him. The poet Southey went with Telford
when he paid his duty-call on the chief, and they were received with great
civility, but Thomas Telford was too blunt a man for Glengarry's liking.
And Sir Walter Scott, an even better judge of men than Lord Cockburn, said
that Glengarry was warm-hearted, 'generous, friendly, full of information
about his own clan and the customs of the Highlanders. So we can take our
choice. Glengarry may
have been a popinjay, but he was no poltroon. Charmed with the bright eyes
of Miss Forbes of Culloden at a dance in Inverness, he pressed his
attentions upon her, and a young Black Watch officer protested. Afterwards
in the mess, Glengarry slashed him across the face with his cane. The
officer, a grandson of Flora Macdonald, challenged him to a duel. On a
sunny afternoon they met with loaded pistols on the links near Fort
George, and Glengarry wounded his man, who died a month later. When he was
charged with murder, his first impulse was to show a clean pair of heels ;
but Henry Erskine who had been briefed for the defence urged him to stand
his trial. Never did anyone have a closer shave, and it was Erskine's
eloquence that got him acquitted. But this did not tame him. He was seldom
out of the Law Courts over petty rows with his tenants, and he almost
always lost his case. It was his custom to strut about with an entourage
like the "tail" of a Highland chief of an earlier age, and he claimed to
be the hereditary chief of all the Clan Donald. Some years before his
death he had a public row with Clanranald; and I have in front of me as I
write, a pamphlet of over a hundred pages of vitriolic argument entitled
Vindication of the Clanronald of Glengarry which he published in
1821. In this he said he found it incumbent upon him to make a "public
disclosure of the bastardy of John MacAlister of Castel-Tirrim." This was
the famous John of Moidart, and Glengarry declared that John and all the
succeeding captains of Clanranald were usurpers. The feud, if it can be
called a feud, lasted until 1911, when a treaty was drawn up between the
present descendants of Glengarry, Clanranald, and Macdonald of Sleat. It
is an astonishing document. It mentions the great jealousy and dissension
among the different branches of Clan Donald in the past and the consequent
" great injury and prejudice suffered by our whole race and kin." In this
treaty, none of them abandons his claim to the supreme chiefship of Clan
Donald, but each agrees that when more than one of them are present on any
occasion when the question of precedency arises, they will draw lots to
decide who will have the preeminence for the time being. One might be
pardoned for wishing to be present when these modern descendants of dead
chiefs spin a coin to decide which will walk in first to dinner ! And,
finally, they agree that Macdonald of Sleat shall be permitted by custom
to use the designation "of the Isles." And so ends an old and trumpery
family squabble. When this document was signed and sealed in 1911 by the
three Macdonalds, at Bridlington, at Bordeaux, and at Tuapse in South
Russia, Alexander Ranaldson Macdonell of Glengarry must have turned in his
grave with a groan of despair.
In the pine-woods I stopped a cyclist to ask
him where Invergarry Castle was to be found, and he pointed to lodge gates
along the road. At the lodge I was given permission to enter the private
grounds of the present Invergarry House, and made my way down to the
ruined castle at the lochside.
It was here that the Prince arrived in the
darkness of that stormy Monday night in August after a march of about
fifteen miles from Moy. But it was not the chief who welcomed him ; for
John Macdonell of Glengarry was a weak drunken fellow, and he was skulking
in Perthshire. He had indeed visited Sir John Cope in his camp at Crieff
on the previous Wednesday and assured him of his loyalty to the
Government. He was playing a double game. If the Rising failed, he was
ready to swear that the clan had come "out" against his wishes; if it were
successful, he was prepared to skip nimbly forward and make his obeisance
to Charles. His ruse was plain to everyone in the Prince's army, and they
were all glad he was well out of the way. With such a chief, it is not
surprising to learn that a good many of his clansmen hung back and had to
be forced out by threats. Lochgarry issued the orders. Before the Rising
he had been commissioned as an officer in King George's army; although he
had his doubts about the wisdom of the Prince's enterprise, he tore up his
commission and joined the Jacobite force ; and with Glengarry's second son
Angus, who had been on a visit in Rannoch while the clan had gathered, he
entertained the Prince on that tempestuous night at Invergarry Castle.
But long before the days of the 'Forty-five
the old glory of this fortress had departed. Built upon the Rock of the
Raven (the war-cry of the clan), it was gutted under General Monk when he
made his victorious march against the loyal clans in June 1654. The
Glengarry of that time rebuilt it-he was the great Alastair Dubh who had
led the attack under Claverhouse at Killiecrankie - and he narrowly
escaped the same fate as the Macdonalds of Glencoe. Indeed, the infamous
Stair wrote to General Livingstone a month before the Glencoe massacre:
"These troops posted at Inverness and Inverlochie will be ordered to take
in the house of Invergarie and to destroy entirely the country of Lochaber,
Locheil's lands, Keppoch's, Giengarie's, and Glencoe . . . and I hope the
soldiers will not trouble the Government with prisoners." But Glengarry
had signed the oath of allegiance within the allotted time, and his people
were spared. His castle, however, was used for many years as barracks for
a Government garrison: a bitter pill for Alastair Dubh. After the Rising
of 'Fifteen, it was burned again ; and finally it was roofed over to
become the lodging of the manager of some iron-works that the York
Buildings Company had set up in the glen. Thomas Rawlinson was his name,
and some say it was he who invented the philabeg or little kilt, because
the long plaid impeded the Highlanders he employed, and he was shocked to
find them at their work indecently naked. But whether or not it was this
Rawlinson who was the only begetter of the modern kilt-and his claim to
this fame is doubtful-the fact that he took up his lodging in the old
castle was resented by the Glengarry men. He invited some of them to
dinner one evening, and after the usual toasts had been drunk Rawlinson
rose to his feet and said in a grandiloquent voice, "Be welcome to
anything in my house." At this an old clansman jumped to his feet, and
cried, "Damn you, sir; I thought it was Glengarry's house!" They knocked
out the candles and made a rush for the man at the head of the table. It
was fortunate for Rawlinson that he managed to escape in the darkness, and
later on the old place came back into the hands of its rightful owners.
On that Monday night in August 1745, when the
Prince arrived at Invergarry, the scene in the castle was perhaps the most
romantic in all its history.
Until a late hour, Charles discussed with the
chiefs his immediate plan of campaign. King George's army under Cope had
arrived at Dalwhinnie, about a day's march south of the Corrieyairack, and
the Prince had a pretty fair idea how weak that army was. Cope had marched
north from Stirling, with a great rattle of drums, but what was his next
move to be? If he tried to make a forced march over the Corrieyairack
Pass, the Prince's scouts who lay up in the mountains would have the word
down to Invergarry within a few hours, for they were local men and knew
every corrie and sheep-path in the darkest night. The discussion in the
castle was interrupted by the unexpected arrival of Thomas Fraser of
Gortuleg. He said he had come with a message from Lord Lovat, and Locheil
presented him to the Prince. He spoke of his own loyalty and Lovat's, but
he was there to play Lovat's dangerous game of keeping a foot in both
camps. He told the Prince how Duncan Forbes of Culloden, although a sick
man, had posted north to keep some of the most powerful clans in the
Highlands from joining in the enterprise; and he said that Lovat wanted
the Prince's warrant to take Forbes alive or dead-a difficult task,
because the Lord President had a hundred armed men in his house, with
artillery mounted outside. But the suggestion of a raid on Culloden House
was at that time mere bluff, for Lovat was almost daily sending fervent
letters of friendship to Duncan Forbes.
Fraser of Gortuleg then asked for the
commission of Lord Lieutenant and Lieutenant-General for Lord Lovat which
James had signed two years before. These documents were in the baggage
that had not yet come on from Moy, where the Prince had slept the previous
night. Not that this mattered a whit ; the request for them was but
another part of Lovat's bluff; for if the Rising succeeded, and James came
to the throne, it was a dukedom that Lovat was after, and he knew that the
patent was already signed and sealed.
Gortuleg went on to explain why Lord Lovat had
not called out his clan: Forbes of Culloden had his eye upon him, and the
garrison at Inverness and Fort Augustus were ready to come down on him if
he made the slightest move-in fact, to the old man's sorrow, his loyal
hands were tied. The
oily-tongued Fraser of Gortuleg then slipped away home to Loch More, a few
miles east of Foyers, to sit down and write to Forbes of Culloden, giving
all the information he could about the Highland army. He had not only lied
to the Prince, but had been a spy in his camp.
But something else happened on that Monday
night at Invergarry Castle. John Murray of Broughton came strongly into
the limelight. Two days before at Moy, he had been appointed secretary to
the Prince, but previous to his appointment he had drawn up a bond of
loyalty for the chiefs to sign. This he now produced, and they all put
their hands to it, each pledging himself that he would not make a separate
peace without the consent of the others. If ever a document was
unnecessary, it was surely the one which the over-shrewd Murray of
Broughton folded away so carefully ; and there is a grim irony in the fact
that the only man in the castle that night who turned traitor was the one
who had written out the bond.
I stood within the broken walls of the castle. Some of the stones are
still black from the gunpowder and flames that finally put an end to the
place after Culloden. Ivy is climbing skyward, smothering the place in a
green pall, and a rowan tree has taken root high in the walls where the
Prince had so poor a shelter in the lodging of the departed Rawlinson.
The decay of a noble building damps the spirits, and I was glad to get
away from Invergarry Castle. Set on its Rock of the Raven, this castle
must have been a fine sight when Alastair Dubh gathered below the walls
the flower of his clan and marched them off to join Claverhouse and play
their gallant part at Killiecrankie. But I would rather have seen it -
half-ruined as it then was-on the bleak dawn of Tuesday, 27th August 1745,
when more than seventeen hundred Highlanders rose from the wet grass where
they had slept, and unwrapped their plaids from about them, while the
Prince looked down upon them from a high window, with eyes that were
'still heavy with sleep.
I climbed up the hill into the tiny hamlet of Invergarry. A hotel, a few
cottages, and a church are strung out on the roadside above the burn that
flows down from Loch Garry among the hills. It is a pleasant place, with a
Macdonald here and there, but few of the old clan are now living on these
hillsides. I found a lodging in one of the cottages, and after tea I
sauntered down to the hotel to sample the whiskey. At the door, I fell
into talk with a man in brown knickerbockers. We exchanged a pipeful of
tobacco and sat in the porch. In the course of our talk he learned about
my intention to walk to Edinburgh, and when I explained that I was on a
Jacobite pilgrimage, we began to talk about the 'Forty-five. He refused to
hear a good word about the Prince. A poor fish, he called him, and a
damnable Papist. I tried to point out that, although Charles was a
Catholic, the first church service he attended in Scotland was conducted
by an Episcopalian clergyman, which at least showed his toleration in
religious matters. Then the man in the knickerbockers went on to say that
the Prince brought nothing but bloodshed and oppression to the Highlands.
I admitted the bloodshed and the oppression, but suggested another point
of view-that the 'Forty-five was a pouring out of the spirit of loyalty to
one whom many Highlanders regarded as their king by divine right. I also
suggested-or rather I flatly declared-that Prince Charles was a better man
than George II, and would have made a better king, but the reply was an
explosive "Bah!" The Prince came to Scotland with a few Irish scallywags,
he retorted: since he was such a fine fellow, why did he not find better
men than these to bring with him?
I pointed out that the story about his
companions being mere Irish adventurers was picturesque but untrue.
Granted, he would probably have been better without Sir John Macdonald,
who was fond of the brandy bottle and had a vile temper, and granted also
that the exiled James took a strong dislike to Colonel Strickland, who
fell ill and died at Carlisle; but the worst of the lot was not a
foreigner at all -he was a man born in Moidart. There to this day they
will tell you that Aeneas Macdonald, the Paris banker, got cold feet after
the landing, and skulked around the cottages persuading the Clanranald men
to stay at home. He admitted as much, and a good deal more, after he gave
himself up to the Government : indeed, he declared that he had been on the
point of coming to Scotland on private business when the Prince offered
him a free berth on board the Du Teillay, and he accepted out of
curiosity. Perhaps it was his curiosity afterwards in the French
Revolution that lost him his head in the guillotine, but it was no great
loss, anyhow. . . . As for the other men who came on the Du Teillay, they
were pretty good fellows, and there can be no doubt about their loyalty to
the Prince. "But what
about the Prince's loyalty to the clansmen who followed him?" demanded my
companion.
"Before he came to Scotland, it's said, he enrolled as an officer in the
Spanish army. If he'd been captured, he could have claimed to be treated
as a prisoner of war. But the men under him were bound to be treated as
rebels, and sent to the gallows-as many of them were."
"Whig historians are fond of raking up that
yarn," I replied. "If the Prince enrolled in the Spanish army, it was to
try to put his father's mind at rest. The Pope certainly never believed it
could save him. In coming to Scotland, he was risking his neck, and he
knew it." In his later life, I admitted, he slid downhill from one
disappointment to another. He sometimes lacked money to pay for his food
and lodging, but in his wanderings on the Continent he carried a little
purse of gold that even hunger did not force him to spend: this was to
take him back to Scotland in case the call for his return should come.
But my arguments were lost upon the man in the
brown knickerbockers, and I was rather thankful when by a happy accident
the subject was changed. He jumped to his feet and pointed at a battered
motor-car that was chugging up the hill from the bridge.
"Heavens, man, look at these tinkers!"
And tinkers they were. Tinkers, not straggling
along the road behind a dirty tilt-cart, but packed into a Morris Cowley
that had been shining with new green paint around about the year 1920: a
Morris Cowley that had a regular haystack of gear piled up in the back,
with a two-wheeled trailer bumping behind. And with the passing of it, a
romantic picture went up in smoke, and I foresaw that the old-fashioned
tinker who goes shuffling along with his shaggy pony and even more shaggy
family may soon be gone from the roads of Scotland, and in his place we
will see a brown-faced plutocrat in his motor-car.
A plutocrat the gentleman in the driving-seat
certainly was. His filthy hands gripped the wheel in a manner that was
regal, his elbows jutted out importantly, and his head was cocked back as
he peered through the splintered windscreen. He had a yellow moustache
which curled so hugely round, his jaws that it might have concealed
mutton-chop whiskers below its tea-stained trusses. His bowler hat was
dented and green with age, but the brim had the same august curl as his
moustache, and perhaps one day it had adorned the head of some douce elder
of the Presbyterian kirk. His bedraggled squaw, with gold ear-rings and
spotted neckerchief, sat beside him clutching two children to her bosom.
Packed among the luggage behind was a black-eyed young man with a loudly
checked cap, the snout of which was almost adrift from its moorings, and
on his chin was the dark incipient moss of a beard which was difficult to
distinguish from the grime on the rest of his face. Beside him was a third
youngster with the glittering eyes arid the wise brooding expression of an
elderly chimpanzee: I could not make out whether it was a boy or a girl.
The ragged cavalcade rumbled past, the burst silencer of the car sounding
like a long roll of kettle-drums. Tinkers de luxe ! - bound for
some favourite eyrie in the West. We watched them until they were out of
sight, and then we ordered another whiskey-and-soda and drank to their
fortune. They deserved it, these modernists, who believed in keeping pace
with the times: and perhaps, as they asked for pots to mend and tried to
sell clothes-pegs to reluctant housewives, their mendicant whine was
already giving place to a blustering bravado which fitted their rise in
the social scale.
After we had finished our drink, the man in the brown knickerbockers asked
me to dine with him. I refused, and then compromised by saying that I
would have dinner at the hotel, and we could feed together. I had made- no
arrangements at my lodging for an evening meal, and I was glad of his
company. But I was more pleased still when he rose at the end of an
excellent dinner and invited me to join him on a visit to an acquaintance
of his who lived in a cottage up the road.
"The Sennachie, I call him," he said. "The
most interesting old boy in Invergarry."
We stumbled up a lane in the darkness. At the back of a row of houses, my
companion knocked on a door. I could hear the whimper of dance-band music
from a wireless loud-speaker inside. It was shut off, and presently the
door opened.
Silhouetted against the light in the room beyond stood the man who had
been described to me as the most interesting old boy in Invergarry. He
blinked at us for' a moment, recognised my friend, and upraised his hands
in welcome. "Come
away in with you." He
was a little old man, with dark brown eyes, and his black hair and pointed
beard had a touch of white. He was very broad in the shoulder, and he
walked across the flagged floor of his kitchen with an odd rolling
dignity. He looked up at us in the lamplight, his head tilted back, his
cheeks wrinkled in a smile. "And I am very pleased to see you," he said in
his soft old deliberate voice, and pulled forward chairs for us beside the
fire. "I was listening to the wireless, but it is not very good to-night.
I would rather be listening to your stories."
"We've come to hear some of yours," said the
man in the knickerbockers. "I was telling my friend here I call you the
Sennachie." "The
Sennachie !" The old man put back his head, in the sudden way he had, and
laughed again. "Ho-ho, that is good-the Sennachie ! Well, sit down, and I
will get a little drop of something in a bottle, and we will drink a toast
together." I was fascinated by his voice : it was so quiet and precise. He
spread a white napkin on a chair and brought out three wine-glasses. And
then he very carefully carried a black bottle from a cupboard. He
evidently believed in taking whiskey neat, for he filled the glasses to
the lip ; and then when we were served he raised his own and wished us
good health. "Yes, it is a good dram," he admitted, when I complimented
him on the quality of the liquor. "You will not get a bad dram in
Invergarry." I
remarked that Invergarry struck me as a pretty good place to live in.
Our host nodded. "It is a good place for an
old man to end his days. But it was a better place, I'm thinking, before
all the Macdonells went across the sea . . . All of them ? Ah, yes, nearly
all of them. There is more Gaelic spoken in Glengarry in Canada than you
can hear in this glen to-night." He shook his head. " The old sentiment
has passed away. Once a month we have our ceilidh here-it is good, very
good, but it is not like the old ceilidh when friends are around the fire
talking and singing together."
The man across the hearth asked whether it was
for sheep or deer that the Macdonells were turned out of their homes.
"It was the sheep - the big sheep from the
south country. The Highlandmen called them the 'small cattle.'" The old
man paused to take another sip from his glass, and then lay back in his
chair, the tips of his fingers together. "But there was a great man in
Glengarry at that time, a fine man. He was a Catholic priest. Father
Macdonell was his name. When the people were turned out of their crofts,
it was Father Macdonell who got them work. The only work he could find was
in the Glasgow factories. And he went there to live with them. But soon
the work stopped, and the poor people from Glengarry had not a crust to
eat. It was Father Macdonell who helped them again. He got a regiment
raised-the Glengarry Fencibles - and himself joined as chaplain. But soon
the Fencibles were done away with, and it was sad days once more for the
Glengarry men. Father Macdonell saw there was only one thing to do now. If
there was no living for them in this country, there was a living across
the sea. He took the people to Canada, and he called the district
Glengarry to keep them in mind of their old home, and it is full of
Macdonells to this day."
He replenished our glasses, and flung some
more logs on the fire. We talked of many things, and the old man's
knowledge of the world was astonishing. He lived alone ; he fended for
himself ; and when my friend with the brown knickerbockers called him the
happiest man in the Highlands he chided him gently: "In all Scotland!" he
said, with a laugh. "And why not? I have everything I need-even a friend
who can talk the Gaelic."
I told him some of the old stories I had heard
in Moidart, and he was able to correct me on more than one point of
history ; then, as was almost inevitable, we strayed towards the subject
of second-sight. "Ah,
there are more wonderful things in the Highlands than some folk are
believing to-day," he said slowly. "They laugh at us for our superstition,
as they are calling it. But I'm thinking they are beginning to take notice
of us. They have written in the newspapers about great monsters in the
Highland lochs. Monsters!" He chuckled and shook his head. "There may be
great monsters in the lochs, I do not know, I have not seen one. But I
know there are kelpies in some of them."
"You believe in the
water-kelpie?" asked the man in the knickerbockers, lighting his pipe with
a pine- splinter.
"Why not? There are surely water-bulls and water-horses in, some of the
lochs. Each uisge and tarbh uisge, we call them. When I was a young man a
laird in Wester Ross tried to drain one of his lochs to kill a water-cow
that lived in it. They worked for more than a year, but they could not
empty the loch, so they put tons of lime into the water to poison the poor
animal. But it did not die, for it was seen after that. Ah, yes, there are
water-cows and water-bulls in some of the lochs and tams."
"But why are you so certain ?" I asked.
He sat upright in his chair, and looked me
straight in the eye. "Because I have seen one myself."
"You have seen one?" I repeated, wondering if
he was trying to pull my leg.
He gave a slow nod. "I have seen a water-bull.
It was beside a tarn in Glen Barrisdale. It was, a beautiful summer day,
and the bull had come out of the water, and was standing near some cows.
No, they were not afraid of him. He was a gentle-looking creature. I went
closer so that I could see him plainly. Ah, he was a lovely animal. His
skin was dark and smooth and shining, and he had big soft eyes. He had two
black horns, turned inward. Black and bright they were, and his hoofs were
smooth and black too. He was the loveliest animal I have ever seen. So
strange and gentle-looking, with his wet skin and big eyes, big as the
palm of my hand . . . No, I made no mistake," he went on deliberately. "I
was too close to him for that. He was like no other creature I have ever
seen. I watched him for a long time, and then I had to go on my way, for I
had to meet a friend. I went back to the same place in the evening, but by
that time the animal had gone down into the tam where he lived."
The quiet tones of the old man's voice, and
the gleam of his brown eyes, filled my last thoughts as I lay that night
between cool sheets in my tiny bedroom. There are more wonderful things in
the Highlands than some folk are believing to-day ! For a little while I
listened to the hum of the Garry river in the glen below, and then blew
out the candle. I was asleep before the smell of the extinguished wick had
quite faded in the darkness.
I loafed next day. I loafed in the manner of
one who has all eternity in front of him. The sun was blazing, and I
passed the golden hours by the lochside staring lazily at the summit of
Carn Dearg and at Craig nan Gobhar, from the top of which they say you can
catch a glimpse of both the North Sea and the Atlantic.
It was after lunch before I buckled on my pack
and set out down the hill for the Bridge of Oich. There are two bridges
now, one over the river and another spanning the Canal; but the Prince's
army forded the Oich at the shallows, and then crossed the road that Wade
had built thirteen years previously. The clansmen were in high fettle.
Within twenty-four hours they hoped to confront Cope's men and to show
them the deadly force of a Highland charge. But the Prince decided to halt
for the night at Aberchalder, on the hillside, so that two or three small
parties, already on their way, would have time to join him. He slept in a
farmhouse that no longer exists, and was moving about by the peep of day.
He called for his Highland clothes, and as he fastened the latchets of his
shoes he was heard to declare that he would be up with Mr. Cope before
they were unloosed. Officers and men, to quote from the letter Fraser of
Gortuleg wrote to the Lord President, were "in top spirits and make sure
of Victory in case they meet." By nine o'clock in the morning they were up
in the Corrieyairack.
There was one thing I was quite determined
upon : I was not going to be caught in my predicament of the evening
before. It would have been utter folly to try to cross the Corrieyairack
starting so late in the day. To reach Laggan in the Spey valley before
dark, it would be necessary to breakfast early and lose no time in setting
out. So I decided to halt for the night on this side of the Corrieyairack
Pass ; and if I failed to find a lodging in a house I saw above the
bridge, I knew I could easily make tracks for Fort Augustus, which was
less than five miles up the Great Glen.
The house was empty; at least, no one answered
my repeated knocks; and I descended to the road and headed for the Fort-or
Kilcumein, as the old village at the head of Loch Ness was once called. I
was exhilarated by the thought that I was now tramping along "Montrose's
mile," for it was here his little army had encamped on the night before it
made one of the most astonishing marches in military history. Everybody
was dog tired and in low spirits. Seaforth with five thousand men lay at
Inverness, when lain Lom, the Keppoch bard, burst into Montrose's camp
with the news that three thousand Campbells and Lowlanders had reached
Inverlochy: thus both ends of the Great Glen were blocked. It was then
Montrose made his great decision. He roused his followers and they plunged
up into the snows among the hills. The men were cold and hungry, oatmeal
and water was their only food and drink, but all day they struggled along
behind their indomitable leader. Up Glen Tarff they went, crossed the
river Turret which was choked with snow, and plunged down through the
snowdrifts in Glen Roy, to reach the hillside above Inverlochy in the
chilly dusk of a February evening. When Argyll was told that the enemy was
approaching, he refused to believe it: Montrose was known to have been at
Kilcumein the night before; only a magician could have wafted them to
Inverlochy; these fellows on the hillside must surely be a few raiders
from Keppoch! . . . All night Montrose's men lay up there on the hillside,
they lit no fire, they had no food, and at dawn the tired and hungry
little army joined battle with a force of twice their number and smashed
the Campbells to pieces. Such was the Battle of Inverlochy. And it was at
some spot in this green strath where I was now tramping that Montrose,
caught as it were between the jaws of nut-crackers, decided to attempt the
impossible. If a Montrose had been by the side of Prince Charles, a
Stewart king would almost certainly have been upon the throne of Britain
by December 1745. I
reached the outskirts of Fort Augustus as five o'clock chimed out from the
tower of the Benedictine monastery. |
