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THE eviction notices gave rise to much
commotion in
the Glen. Astonishment, indignation, and consternation were all mingled together. The opinion they
had formed of the young laird was wholly contrary
to his unexpected action; and yet that favourable
opinion was upheld by his future conduct. Hot
indignation arose that Culdares, who, unlike his
father, was not a Presbyterian, should use his power
as a landlord to punish people for exercising their
religious liberty, with which none but themselves
should have anything to do. The consternation was
momentary, but bitter while it lasted. The Glen
people were accustomed to take the blows of evil
fortune standing, and to seek at once for self-help
as a means of recovery and an outlet of escape. For
forty years they had been unwillingly feeling that
the old industrial system was slipping off its ancient
foundations cattle and calanas and migrants and
emigrants were going out from among them to seek
their fortunes in Lowland towns and in the Colonies.
When the huge shealings of the Braes and of Lochs had been turned into sheep
runs, a fatal blow was given to the old system from which it could never
recover again, although the high prices of the war times and the still very
flourishing state of the domestic flax-spinning industry threw a veil over
the approaching fatality. In 1845 it was obvious enough that in the
Highlands sheep-farming now paid best, and that the domestic industries were
being made unprofitable and killed by mill machinery and steam power. The
flax industry, however, might have been kept as it was in Ulster had it not
been given up in despair when large sheep-farms became the rule, and when
the old communities were upset by changed estate management, con- formed to
changed conditions of profitable labour, and, finally and worst of all, by
the self-evictions of the people themselves, who poured into the towns and
manufacturing and mining districts, with chances of disappointment if they
went away in large groups and in families, for town-life is not natural to
Highlanders, nor do they take readily to urban industries.
As for individual Highlanders who migrated to
towns sixty years ago, they found free scope for
their various ambitions, and as a class they took
with them, from their glens and isles, moral and
mental qualities which, as a rule, ensured moderate
and, in exceptional cases, eminent success. How
completely sixty years have reversed the then state
of affairs; cities, towns, manufacturing districts,
over-crowded, and urban life and habits undermining
the national manhood; the rural districts desolated
by their people deserting them for uncertain wages,
amenities, and vices of towns; Highland large sheep-
farms no longer lettable at half the former rents, and
not a few of them converted into deer forests, while
"back to the land" is the cry of the people who
would not know how to work the land if they got
it for nothing, and would undoubtedly prefer the
fate of Poplar and West Ham paupers to the simple
and hardy life of well-to-do Highland farmers of the
first half of last century!
Naturally, in consequence of the loss of
the
shealings and the lessening value of domestic industries, there was more congestion of population on
the Roro and Chesthill estates, in the lower part
of the Glen, than there ever was on the Culdares
estate. The Marquis of Breadalbane took advantage
of the impoverishment the losses of sheep in the
hard years had brought upon the Roro tenants to
make a clearance there. On the Chesthill estate it
was impossible that the Innervar crofters should
get on as they did before, when the flax and
other industries helped to keep them in frugal but
cheerful contentment. Their welfare depended on
the now superseded ancient industrial system which
had existed without any important variation from
the time of which we have any fairly full written
records say the reign of Alexander III. until the
sheep regime invaded it in the last thirty years
of the eighteenth century, and manufacturing
machinery and steam power gave it its death blow
in the next century. Highland proprietors and the
Highland people were flotsam and jetsam in the
swirling eddies of a resistless stream of change. In
this twentieth century we are in the back-flow of
that stream, and, horrified by urban congestion, and
the moral and physical degeneracy it entails, we
take up the cry "Back to the land."
Before the 1845 disturbances, the estate
of
Culdares would have suited the present-day land
reformers who wish to see the country divided into
moderately sized farms, interspersed with artisan
and crofter villages. Its farms, where there was
arable land, were large enough without being too
large. The crofters, who were not many, comprised
a carpenter, a smith, a weaver, and some working
men families. As for the Braes, which formerly
were shealings, they have no arable land worth
maintaining, and can only be used as shealings or
deer forests, or sheep runs. Mr Charles Stewart
had them, along with the farms of Cashlie and
Chesthill on the Chesthill estate, until he was
knocked out by the losses of the hard years. He
was a famous breeder of Highland cattle, and his
blackfaced sheep stock was ranked among the best in Scotland. When he
failed, through no fault of his own, but through the inclemency of the
seasons, which ruined many large sheep and stock farmers, the Braes, after a
few years, fell into the hands of Border incomers, who never resided there
permanently, and who, to the end of their long holding,
never assimilated with the rest of the people.
Speaking of the hard years reminds me that
in
one of them, 1839, I nearly lost my life in a snow-
storm. The harvest of 1838 was not gathered in,
and late black oats were not cut, when frost and
snow came early in November, and the grouse left
the hills to cluster on the stocks. A short-enduring
thaw, however, allowed the harvest work to be
finished in a hurried way; but the ice on the river
never broke up. For eleven weeks at a stretch
people who wished to shorten the distance to church
in some places crossed the river on the ice; and no
plough could turn up the frozen glebe until the
seventh of April. There was a succession of snow-
storms up to the end of March, with intervals of
cold winds and sunshine between, which left the
high tops of the hills and the sharp hillocks on the
lower ground bare, while the rest remained under a
heavy snow cover. I think it was at the end of
February, but it may have been March, when I was
sent early one dreadfully stormy morning to tell the
Craigelig men to turn out to gather in the sheep to
sheltered places, and to dig out such of them as they
found in hollows covered with the drifting snow. I
was then a boy of eleven, and, like all Glen boys of
my age, wore the kilt, which is a good dress for
summer mountaineering but not for deep heaps of
snow in which one sinks up to the knees at every
move. I had only a mile to go, and although the
wind had risen to hurricane pitch, and the falling
and drifting snow were blending together, I did not
think of danger, nor did anybody else. The first
and larger part of the distance I got over without
much difficulty, but when I was so near my journey's
end that in calm weather I could send a shrill cry
for help to the nearest farmhouse, I got stuck in a
soft, newly-formed wreath of snow, and when I at
last ploughed through it breathless and exhausted,
it was to find another and bigger wreath barring
further passage. The whistling, hissing wind and
drifting snow affected me curiously. I feared nothing. The only wish I had in the world was to rest
and sleep. But I was the bearer of a message which
ought to be delivered without delay, and so must
struggle on. It then flashed on my mind that as
those heaps had gathered at a bend of the park wall
near the road, if I got to the wall I could walk on
the top of it. That thought saved me. I managed
to struggle in the hollow between the two snow
barriers to the wall, which I reached in a dazed
condition. But as soon as I got upon its rough,
uneven, slippery stone-coping, strength, confidence,
and care of life, absent before, at once returned.
There was no further difficulty. I reached the
houses and delivered my messages. The sheep
rescuers turned out and marched away, not on the
blocked road on which I had so nearly stuck, but by
the wind-swept fields within the park wall. I
remained behind resting and recovering until the
hurricane abated, and followed in their tracks.
One youthful recollection recalls others.
I think
it was in the same winter of 1838-39, the worst of
the whole bad series, that the following incidents
occurred. I had been reading "Robin Hood"
stories, and also hearing from local seanachies the
tale of a wonderful feat of archery when one of the
Malcolms or Calums was king, and Glenlyon was a
royal hunting ground and a place in which there
was a summer mustering of the Feinn. The mound
from which the famous shooting took place is called
"Tullach Calum," or the mound of Calum, to the
present day, and the far away spot on the other
side of the river which the arrow reached is, or at
least was then, kept in remembrance. The archery
stories which took such a hold of me I passed on to
my schoolmates, with the result that a mania for
making bows and arrows seized on us. With the
help of Peter, our ploughman, I made for myself a
stiff hazelwood crossbow, and three arrows with
heads hardened in the fire, and feathered in a kind
of way too. We were forbidden to tip them as we
wanted to do with big pins or headless nails, lest
serious accidents should be the result. Even with
the blunt arrows we were a nuisance while the craze
lasted. We tried shooting straight and shooting
compass, and sometimes killed a crow, but usually
our arrows failed to hit the object aimed at,
although they always struck pretty near it. I only
once in my school life played truant, and this
archery craze was the cause of my doing so. My
cousin, Duncan Macintyre, was my companion in
this affair. We slunk early past the schoohouse
with our bows and arrows, and went away to where
we knew crows to be diligently working for their
daily bread, and sure to be found. We did find the
crows, and worried them with our arrows, which on
a few occasions hit but never killed or disabled
them. In pursuing the crows we came to heath-
clad sands and gravel hillocks on which grouse
gathered, it being a sunny day between storms, and,
tops excepted, nearly the whole land was lying
under snow. We knew well that it was a high
offence in the eyes of our parents, as well as in
those of the gamekeeper, who rather encouraged us
to kill rabbits, and could wink at the killing of
hares, to meddle in any way with the grouse. But
how could boys in possession of bows and arrows
resist the temptation of shooting at birds that
gathered in clusters like targets? We let fly again
and again, and our arrows always fell among them
or very near them, but not one of them lost a
feather by our archery. That day's experience
cured our craze, and our truancy escaped detection
and the punishment it deserved.
My other bit of poaching that year was no
poaching at all, because I went to tell my grievance
to Donald Stalker the gamekeeper, who lent me a
trap and said I was free to kill the depradator if
I could. From my earliest years I had a strong
instinctive, but wholly uninstructed, liking for
gardening. How that came to me I do not know,
for, like most Highlanders, the Glen people,
although the best of farmers, were negligent and
bad gardeners, who cultivated hardly anything
more than curly greens and cabbages, with some
gooseberry and currant bushes among them. At
the same time they were full of nature feeling, and
had a wonderfully wide knowledge of plants, as
well as of wild creatures. Now my father had two
gardens, one close to his house, and what we called
the "Garadh Dubh," or Black Garden, below the
churchyard, which had for hundreds of years been
the garden of the alehouse or inn of Bail-na-h'
eaglais. When the Bridge of Balgie was built, the
inn was removed to the end of it, and a new garden
and croft provided for it. Through the removal of
the inn my father came to have two gardens. He
gave me a part of the Black Garden, in which I
pottered away with my amateur experiments. I
dried potato apples on strings, and raised new
potatoes from the seed of them. With onions,
leeks, and peas I had likewise fair success. I sowed
little beds of cabbages and curly greens for planting
out next spring, and it was to save these beds and
other things that I got a trap for killing a hare
which had made night ravages among them. I set
the trap at dusk with much care, and when I went
to see it next morning what did I find in it but my
mother's best cat with a fore leg broken and the
bones protruding. The poor creature, furious with
pain, scratched my hand pretty badly when I was
opening the trap. When freed he hobbled painfully
to a hollow tree-stump at the churchyard wall, into
the hole of which he sank out of sight ; and there,
being so much damaged, he must soon have died in
the freezing weather. I re-set the trap and kept
silent, hiding as best I could my wounded hand.
Next day when I went to see the trap I found the
robber hare in it, and when I triumphantly handed
over the second catch, I told all about the cat
affair, and having confessed, felt a weight off my
conscience.
Of all the wild creatures the badgers were
the
least troubled and distressed during the hard years.
They had their usual fare in the open season and
slept comfortably in their lairs throughout the long
and stormy winters. We had two badger lairs on
the Eight Merkland hills, one in the Faradh above
Craigelig, and the other three miles away at the
further end of Larig Bhreissladh. Crows and rooks
as well as all the tribes of small birds, pushed them-
selves among the hens and pigs to snap up some
food. The gulls, fortunately for themselves, always
got away to the sea in time to escape the early
winter storms and did not come back until spring
ploughing was going on. I believe it was in the
winter of 1839-40 that a pole-cat came down from
his hiding place on the high hills to forage among
the hen-roosts. At most farm-steadings the hen-roost was placed over a heap of peats at the inner
end of an open cart shed. Now this foraging pole-cat one night killed six or seven of the elder's hens,
and the very next night killed seven or eight of
ours. He did not eat much of their flesh but merely
sucked their blood and left them. There were
lamentations over the ravaged roosts, and fears
about the yet unvisited ones. This sly and rare
pole-cat unless hunted down and killed, would be a
perfect vampire for the Glen poultry. Therefore
men and dogs gathered to hunt him down. The
first day's hunt was not successful. Perhaps he
needed to sleep and rest after having gorged himself
with so much hen's blood. But, if so, he was in a
day or two awake and out at night for further
mischief. This time he killed three hens in the inn
byre, and was disturbed before he could proceed to
kill more. Unluckily for him he had to run away
to his hole under the roots of a tree on the river
bank, leaving foot-marks on the thin cover of new
snow. There in his temporary stronghold he was
besieged in the morning by men and dogs. The
tree was cut down, but he still remained safe in a
recess behind it until he was smoked out and killed
on the ice of the linn when trying to run away. In
the final struggle he had no chance, but he did not
allow himself to be killed before he gave the dogs
and men malodorous proof that he belonged to the
skunk class of animals notwithstanding his fine fur. |
