Britain's Last Frontier E-Book

Alistair Moffat

• Herausgeber: Birlinn
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 503

Beschreibung

The Highland Line is the most profound internal boundary in Britain. First recognised by Agricola in the first century AD (parts of its most northerly portion mark the furthest north the Romans got) it divides the country both geologically and culturally, signalling the border between Highland and Lowland, Celtic and English-speaking, crofting and farming. In Britain's Last Frontier best-selling author Alistair Moffat makes a journey of the imagination, tracing the route of the Line from the River Clyde through Perthshire and the North-east. In addition to exploring the huge importance of the Line over almost two thousand years, he also shows how it continues to influence life and attitudes in 21st-century Scotland. The result is a fascinating book, full of history and anecdote.

Leseprobe

Britain’s Last Frontier

This eBook edition published in 2012 by Birlinn Limited West Newington House Newington Road Edinburgh EH9 1QSwww.birlinn.co.uk

First published in 2012 by Birlinn Limited

Copyright © Alistair Moffat 2012 Introduction copyright © James Naughtie 2012

The moral right of Alistair Moffat to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

eBook ISBN: 978 0 85790 228 3 ISBN: 978 1 84158 829 2

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

For Kate, Sam, Holly, Chloe, Stephen, Charlotte, Tim, Louise, Will and all the Moffateers. You were all much on my mind as I wrote this book.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Map

Acknowledgements

Introduction: A View from the North-east Lowlands

Author’s Preface

1 Roads to Culloden

2 Land of Mountain and Flood

3 Moray

4 The Fire of the Dram

5 The Battle of the Graupian Mountain

6 The History of the Sun

7 Swordland

8 The Furrowed Field

9 The Auld Lichts, Peter and Wendy

10 The First Frontier

11 The Hill of Faith

12 The Wild West

13 Part Seen, Part Imagined

14 The City of the Gael

Select Bibliography

Index

List of Illustrations

The Pass of Leny

Ben Ledi

The Cairngorms near Grantown-on-Spey

The Battle of Culloden memorial cairn

Fort George

The Sculptor’s Cave, Covesea

Pictish carved stone at Hilton of Cadboll

Burghead

The distillery at Glenlivet

Bennachie

Tank traps on the Cowie Stop Line

Stonehaven

The countryside around Arbuthnott

Ploughing near one of the North-east fermtouns

The J.M. Barrie memorial, Kirriemuir

J.M. Barrie

Schiehallion

Dunkeld Cathedral

The site of the Roman fort at Inchtuthil

The Stone of Destiny

Dunadd

Lower North Inch, Perth

A birlinn

Loch Katrine

James Macpherson

Rob Roy Viewpoint, Loch Lomond

Balmoral Castle

The crew of the Vital Spark

Colonel Alistair MacDonell

The Pass of Leny, where the boggy Lowland flatlands give way to the mountains beyond (© Jim Henderson)

Ben Ledi – the beginning of the Highlands (© Jim Henderson)

Where the mountains  rise from the plain: the Cairngorms near Grantown-on-Spey (© Jim Henderson)

The Battle of Culloden memorial cairn, which marks the site of the final confrontation of the Jacobite Rising of 1745 (© Jim Henderson)

Fort George, built in the aftermath of the 1745 Jacobite Rising (© Jim Henderson)

The Sculptor’s Cave, Covesea, the scene of extraordinary prehistoric rituals (© Jim Henderson)

One of the most beautiful of all Pictish carved stones is found at Hilton of Cadboll (Historic Scotland. Licensor www.scran.ac.uk)

Burghead, the site of a key Pictish fortress known as ‘the Bull Fort’ (© Jim Henderson)

On his state visit to Scotland in 1822, George IV refused to drink any other whisky other than that produced at Glenlivet (© Jim Henderson)

Bennachie, where the Caledonian kings gathered their armies to face the Romans in AD 83 (© Jim Henderson)

Tank traps on the Cowie Stop Line, thought to be the most complete of any of the stop lines built in the early years of the Second World War (© Jim Henderson)

Stonehaven, which was expected to see intensive  street-fighting in the event of a Nazi invasion (© Jim Henderson)

The countryside around Arbuthnott, where Lewis Grassic Gibbon was brought up (© Jim Henderson)

Ploughing was one of the main activities for horses in the North-east fermtouns

The J.M. Barrie memorial, Kirriemuir (© Jim Henderson)

J.M. Barrie, whose Auld Lichts Idylls is a brilliant satire on the mores of small-town life (© National Trust for Scotland. Licensor www.scran.ac.uk)

Schiehallion, the ‘magic mountain of the Caledonians’ (© Jim Henderson)

Dunkeld Cathedral, which still displays damage caused by musket-balls during the siege of 1689 (© Jim Henderson)

The site of the Roman fort at Inchtuthil, Perthshire (© Jim Henderson)

The Stone of Destiny featured in the coronations of the kings of Alba. Removed to Westminster  Abbey by Edward I, it was (officially) returned to Scotland in 1996 (© Historic Scotland. Licensor www.scran.ac.uk)

Dunadd, where the kings of Dalriada were inaugurated (© Jim Henderson)

Lower North Inch, Perth, where Clan Chattan and Cameron warriors fought to the death in 1396 (© Jim Henderson)

Birlinns – small, highly manoeuvrable warships – were the key to control of the Isles and North-west Scotland

Loch Katrine, made famous as a tourist destination after Sir Walter Scott published  The Lady of the Lake in 1810 (© Jim Henderson)

James Macpherson,  ‘translator’ of Ossian and described by Dr Johnson  as a ‘mountebank, a liar and a fraud’ (Licensor www.scran.ac.uk)

Rob Roy Viewpoint, Loch Lomond, where the Highlands and Lowlands meet (© Jim Henderson)

Balmoral Castle, where Queen Victoria spent increasingly long periods after the death of Prince Albert (© Jim Henderson)

The crew of the Vital Spark sailed over geological and cultural frontiers every time they made their regular trip from Broomielaw up the Argyll coast (The Scotsman Publications Ltd. Liceonsor www.scran.ac.uk)

Colonel Alistair MacDonell, looking every inch the Highland chief, and who ruthlessly evicted the clansmen and their families from Glengarry. Painting by Sir Henry Raeburn. (© National Galleries of Scotland. Licensor www.scran.ac.uk)

Acknowledgements

Writing in the early morning, filling pages with scribbled longhand in a pool of angle-poise light, focusing closely on the unspooling of an idea or a narrative, those quiet hours are the best of it. What sets apart the writing of a book from all of the other things I do is that it is a solitary activity, something that is entirely my responsibility and, for the period of its writing, something under my sole control. And I like that, wish I could do more not less, and when it has gone well, there is no satisfaction better than that experienced at the end of a good day at my desk. For once, an evening glass of something seems deserved.

But after I change, edit, score through and finally type up my pages of scrawl, the work of other people begins. My agent, David Godwin, is simply the best, not only one of the calmest, most civilized and cheery of men but also now the author of his own book, a beautifully written little gem on the travails of handicap golf. Now we are all sure he feels our pain.

Jan Rutherford of Birlinn made this book happen and it would not have been published without her. Jan’s good sense, warmth and boundless patience have been invaluable. Her colleague, the excellent Andrew Simmons, is the complete professional as he steers manuscripts deftly through the process of production. Nothing is ever a problem to Andrew and it is a pleasure to work with him. And my old friend, Jim Naughtie, surely the busiest man on earth, has done me proud and found time to write a superb introduction to this journey. Thanks, Jim.

And finally to the Moffateers – Kate Andrews, Sam Fowles, Holly Patrick, Chloe Hill, Stephen Kelly, Charlotte Baker, Tim Foley, Will Lord, Lovely Louise and all the others, my deepest thanks for your support. While writing this, I took time out to run for Rector of the University of St Andrews, my alma mater. Calling themselves, the Moffateers, these sparkling young people were the core of my campaign team. It was a wonderful time – and we won! By a mile! Forty years after graduating from St Andrews and 36 years after being married there, Lindsay and I have a better reason than nostalgia to come back, and there are moments when it seems as though we never left.

I hope the completion of that journey has meant the enrichment of the one chronicled in this book.

Alistair Moffat

October 2012

Introduction: A View from the North-east Lowlands

James Naughtie

IN SCOTLAND’S NORTH-EAST, where I was born and raised, the significance of what Alistair Moffat describes as Britain’s Last Frontier – the line that marks in both a physical and cultural sense the boundary between Highland and Lowland Scotland – is palpable. It is borderlands such as these, where different landscapes, languages and cultural attitudes collide, that really make us think about who we are.

In this book, Alistair takes us on a journey through place and time – from the Clyde valley to the North-east lowlands of Aberdeenshire, from the prehistoric peoples of the Moray Firth to J.M. Barrie, the creator of Peter Pan, to explore the histories and cultures on either side of the divide.

In my own home patch, the best place to start to grasp all this is not by the shores of the North Sea or on the farmland that has given the place its character. Much better to step beyond its boundaries and look in. Head for the hills. The walker who approaches the massif of the Cairngorms from the north-west, through the Rothiemurchus Forest, perhaps having come from a little further south through the deep folds of Glen Feshie, sees, opening up in the side of the mountains, a great cleft, where some mighty force has parted the rocks. The effect is surprising because the four mountains that create the plateau appear from almost every angle to be a solid mass, a great obstacle in the sky.

Their height is not the whole explanation because they are modest by the standards of Europe’s high ranges, displaying no spectacular towers of rock or jagged peaks and appearing unlikely to harbour deep gorges, although all that is an illusion. Their visual power comes from the obvious fact that they create a barrier that divides the landscape. No one coming from the north or the west can believe that what lies beyond is the same territory. The hills feel like an end, not a beginning.

They give notice that the high places, the geographical space that we know loosely as the Highlands, will soon be left behind. If there are traces on the other side, they will soon disappear. And, therefore, the V-shaped opening in the massif is enticing, as if it is a passage which will lead to secrets being revealed. The path that leads through it is known as the Lairig Ghru, one of the greatest mountain walks in our islands, and it fulfils its promise because, in the course of only about 25 miles, the crossing is made from Highlands to Lowlands. The Lairig Ghru rises to a modest but often intimidating height of about 835 metres (2740 ft) above sea level. Up there, a subarctic cold can grip you without warning and an icy, unforgiving wind sometimes forces even the sturdiest travellers to take shelter for the night. But it is here that you can observe the sudden drama of our most northerly frontier and its power.

The Lairig Ghru is a walk rather than a climb but a rough one. There are boulder fields and bleak channels where a vicious wind can swirl in without warning and scree slopes where a drenching mist can drop down in a few minutes. You pass the Tailors’ Stone which, legend says, marks the grave of a band of tailors who were said to have promised to dance at both ends of the Lairig Ghru in the course of one Hogmanay night. They perished on the journey, even that great stone having failed to given them enough shelter in the storm. A little further on is the rough bothy at Corrour where walkers can bed down safely for the night and the source of the River Dee that flows all the way east to Aberdeen. The walk, which people are told to attempt in one day only in the summer months when wild weather is intermittent rather than the norm, is a kind of challenge. The knowledge that cattlemen were still using the pass as a drove road in the second half of the nineteenth century, walking their beasts to market by the shortest route to the south, is not much comfort these days. It is tough. So, coming from the north-west, you sense a promise that the hard slog will be worth it in the end and that the rough places will pass away. And so it proves. Descending towards the rich pastures of Aberdeenshire, with only Byron’s ‘steep frowning glories of dark Lochnagar’ to remind you of the mountains, the Highlands are behind you.

The countryside that stretches east along the Dee and northwards to the Moray Firth coast about fifty miles away is flatter, more intimate, and the voices are different. They speak of a distinct piece of territory that, for all its contrasts – fishermen and farmers have always gone their separate ways – is a sheltered part of Scotland, surrounded by mountains and sea, that has a confident sense of itself.

Growing up in the North-east was to understand instinctively that there was a dividing line – geological, linguistic, cultural – that was a natural part of our firmament. It is represented by those mountains in the Cairngorm plateau, the northernmost spur of the Grampians, and by the history that has made the frontier between Lowlands and Highlands such an obvious fact of life. The North-east has always seemed the far north from a Glasgow or Edinburgh perspective but its people think the Highlands are just as far away. They are themselves and the reason is that they are aware of the boundary.

When Johnson and Boswell were heading for the Western Isles in 1773, they had a mixed time of it in the North-east. They found little to interest them outside Aberdeen. They found Banff especially unappealing and, in Cullen, Johnson ordered a dried haddock to be removed from his table. Boswell makes clear that, after they left Aberdeen, where they had been very comfortable, they wanted to get on the road west as quickly as they could. They travelled round the coast and cut in to Elgin, only to find an inedible meal set before them. Never mind, Johnson was still interested in the spare ruins of the cathedral whose fate, typically, he interpreted as ‘another proof of the waste of reformation’, noting that it had first been desecrated by a Highland chief ‘in the intestine tumults of the barbarous ages’.

Boswell noted in his journal that they had travelled about twenty miles westwards from Elgin to Nairn, having indulged their imaginations with pleasant thoughts of Macbeth’s witches along the way at Cawdor and Auldearn, when they first smelt peat fires and heard Gaelic spoken (Boswell referring to it as ‘Erse’, its Irish counterpart). They knew then that they were in the Highlands.

That translation, away from the lowlands to somewhere different, would still be evident to anyone born in the North-east two hundred years after that journey. Growing up in Banffshire – administratively abolished in 1975 but alive in the minds of everyone who knew it as home – was to understand the difference between east and west. Towards Aberdeen there was a familiar landscape, on which the small family farms of the higher, rougher ground gave way to the bigger, richer, pastures of the plain of Buchan. As surely as the cattle were taken to market in Aberdeen or the slaughtered meat, like the whisky, was loaded on the trains that took it south the centre of gravity was in the east. The voices were the same and the music of life in village and farm was familiar. Rough though life had been for generations on some of the inhospitable land and at sea in search of the herring, the place had a harmony of its own – it demanded to be treated as a distinct territory, different from anywhere else.

That feeling was encouraged by the fact that, when you turned west, things started to change. In my childhood, I was aware that somewhere on the way to Elgin voices began to alter. A Highland softness would modify the broad vowels of Banffshire and Aberdeenshire and the cadences would shift upwards. By the time you were beyond Elgin . . . well, you were on the way to Inverness, where people wore the kilt in the street, churches still held services in Gaelic and the rhythms of life took on a Highland pace. My home village was almost equidistant from Aberdeen and Inverness, roughly fifty miles each way, and they were worlds apart.

The cultural distinctions that became a part of our lives are testimony to the persistence of that great divide, without which the North-east, in particular, makes no sense. Its ability to hold on to a kind of territorial identity that has proved surprisingly robust in the face of the ravages of recent times (some of them well-meant and some of them beneficial) is remarkable evidence of a clear-headed set of distinctions that have lingered in the collective mind. They had the force of a divide.

My village was Rothiemay on the banks of the River Deveron, which runs for about 60 miles from the Cabrach moors near Dufftown to the sea at Banff. The river has often been considered a poor relation to the swanky Spey, which is the faster and the broader of the two, but locals will point out that the British record for a salmon caught on the fly (61 lbs) was on the Deveron. For much of its course, it defined the old boundary between Banffshire and Aberdeenshire and therefore meandered through some of the best farming territory in the North-east. I used to know many of its banks and stones so well that I believe that now, several decades later, I could find my way across it in a dozen places without a guide. The river was a place of excitement and calm and a journey along its course – I remember once a daft expedition on a ramshackle raft that had been built without consideration for the rough patches of white water that would pull it apart – is an introduction to the countryside of the North-east, so resonant for anyone who knows it and so particular.

I used to have, on a wall above my desk, a photograph of a cattle pen, showing a vast black beast behind its bars, and tied to the front rail is a simple red card bearing the legend, ‘Turriff show – First Prize’. This is an emblem that conjures up glorious pictures, and memories, and it is an image that will bring to anyone of North-east farming stock something of the ecstasy felt by the Earl of Emsworth when P.G. Wodehouse allowed his black Berkshire sow, Empress of Blandings, to win the silver medal in the fat pigs’ class at the Shropshire Agricultural Show for three successive years. The Turriff Show – like its great rival, the Keith Show – remains a place of cultural pilgrimage in reminding everyone of the story of the farms that were the life of the place and they bring to mind the markets, greatly reduced in number, that were the weekly focus of interest in a dozen and more towns across the North-east. When oil and gas began to turn the economy of the North-east upside down in the 1970s, much of this history began to reek with nostalgia – as if the profound changes that had been happening for a generation had been highlighted by the arrival of a industry controlled from far away. Because the truth is that, for the farmers and fishermen of the North-east, the glory days were long gone.

Those of us who grew up in the 1950s and 60s are aware that these old ways were in decline. The steam drifters were celebrated only in historic photographs, and the North Sea would soon be as much a European political battlefield as a place of threatening storms. The patterns of farming had changed and, although the Aberdeen Angus beef barons and the big farms of Buchan and Mar would still prosper, the tradition of family farming that had been in place for a couple of centuries was in decline.

The memories, however, ran deep. In the heart of the North-east – say sixty miles north to south and the same east to west – this was the character of life that would not pass away, whatever came along. The place was defined by the traditions of the land and, on its coastal strip, by the demands on fishing communities that were drawn together by the knowledge, day by day, that they would continue to suffer even as they prospered. So its characteristic, even at times of great change, was a feeling of solidity. Like the granite from Rubislaw quarry that built 19th-century Aberdeen, life seemed to promise an element of permanence.

The simplicities, of course, are not so simple. Take the language. One of the most outstanding and resilient elements of the culture of the North-east is the Doric tongue, the broad dialect with its own rich vocabulary that acts as a barrier to outsiders and is still a matter of pride in many communities, despite the natural winnowing away of its distinctiveness in an age of mass communication. Yet it should not be imagined that it was always so. At the end of the middle ages, Gaelic was still spoken everywhere in the North-east except on the coastal strip, running from Buckie round Buchan Ness and through Peterhead south to Aberdeen. Norse and Anglo-Saxon were the components of the mixed tongue of the people who went to sea and later became the predominant voice of the region.

The name of my own village, Rothiemay, derives from Gaelic Ráth a’ Mhuigh and many of the farms that make up the parish are a rich inheritance from that source – Auchinclech, Auchencrieve, Retanach, Corskellie, Avochie among them.

So the divide that is now so obvious – the shift in language to the west, the gravitational pull to the east – was not always so simple. It confirms that the best way of thinking of the North-east is to think of it as territory that has always been on the frontier. Highland clans never held sway here – it was the lowland families like the mighty Gordons who shaped its history – yet, in the upper glens of Banffshire, remote places stretching beyond the fabled Scottish chateaux of whisky, in Dufftown, Aberlour and around Glenlivet, Gaelic was still being used at cattle markets into the nineteenth century. The glens, pointing towards the Cairngorms, had not lost their Highland character. But their very remoteness showed how much had changed – from the time Gaelic was outlawed after the collapse of the Jacobite rebellion in the rout at Culloden in 1746, the North-east began to take on the character that its people, say, a hundred years later would recognise.

In the ’45, it was a part of Scotland that was splitting apart. Prince Charles Edward Stuart believed, with his characteristic excess of vanity, that he could count on broad support across the North-east but some of those who had supported the first fight against the Hanoverian crown thirty years earlier were unwilling to rally to his cause. By the time he marched north after his failed effort to take Stirling Castle in January 1746, with an army that was shrinking, bedraggled and ripe for defeat, he found that even the 3rd Duke of Gordon, whose family had faithfully served in 1715, was unwilling to follow him and had turned to the king. Other members of the family did retain their historic Stuart loyalty and raised two battalions, which were duly battered at Culloden, but the idea that the North-east would stand alongside the Highland clans, despite the strong residual Catholic loyalty in those days in Banffshire and Aberdeenshire, was outdated. Even Aberdeen, where the two colleges, Marischal and Kings, showed strong Jacobite sympathy, apparently caused little difficulty for the Duke of Cumberland, the king’s commander, when he rested there before heading west to put Bonnie Prince Charlie’s troops to the sword.

In the century that followed, the divide with the Highlands deepened. In the North-east, it was much easier to accept the assault on the culture of the Jacobites that many further north and west resisted because there was a way of life that was substantially different. It had not been broken and its customs outlawed. The development of the land proceeded in a different way and there would be none of the clearing of the land that became one of the scars of the 19th-century Highlands story. Gaelic would disappear almost entirely within a couple of generations and the North-east feeling of separation – from the west as well as the far south – would intensify.

This was the inheritance of the twentieth century. The North-east spoke differently and its farm life was of its own devising – there was no domination by sheep, as in the borders, and the challenges of the landscape (meagre hill grazing, a tempestuous east wind) meant that techniques and practices were developed that were exported far and wide. Beef cattle were profitable, their superiority unsurpassed and, into the period after World War I, both on the land and at sea, it was a time of expansion, modest prosperity and a settled way of life.

The village in which I grew up would have been recognisable to a generation just after The First World War. There were fewer than 50 houses in the Milltown – the village proper – and a spreading parish of about 700 people. On our short street, running from the church past the school to the working meal mill at the riverside, there were a working bakery, a good general store, a post office, a skilled shoe- and bootmaker and a proper dispensing chemist. I still have some of the Victorian glass jars from the shelves of Geo. Pirrie and Sons, Chemist, and they remind me of a happy, settled time. That pattern would change and, by the mid 1960s, the baker, the chemist and the shoemaker had gone, but the memory of a community that had confidence and a connection with the past is powerful – the parish was flourishing, like the land.

Such obvious features of a past life have a way of becoming boasts and no one, I hope, would wish to argue that there was greater wisdom, enlightenment or innovation in the North-east than anywhere else in Scotland. The case is a different one – these lands have a particular mix in their history and the way their communities grew illustrates an important consequence of Scotland’s geography. They have gone their own way.

Looking at the Highland Line or the last frontier, running with the geological fault from the south-west to the North-east, it is easy to see Banffshire and Aberdeenshire as a vantage point, for they are neither one thing nor the other. Not being drawn to the remnants of a Highland culture and style yet separated from the rest of the Lowlands by a particular social and linguistic history and by the accident of the mountains and the sea gave the land its shape and the people their character.

I have long suspected that one of the aspects of this pride – and a certain gallous bravado underneath the dour exteriors that North-east men and women are supposed to cultivate – is the lurking knowledge that even the Romans found us a little difficult. I can still recall the excitement at school caused by the realisation the battle of Mons Graupius (AD 83–84), the climactic battle between Agricola and his northern enemies, had been fought on our own doorstep. There is nothing remarkable about this. After all, anyone living in London is tramping the streets of a Roman city – just as in Bath you can see the water gushing into their baths or at Inchtuthil in Perthshire you can pick up a nail from their carpentry store – but the excitement at the presence of Roman legions somewhere north-west of Aberdeen, at various points along where the A96 now runs was strangely thrilling. Everyone goes to London sooner or later but not everyone comes to Rothiemay or Grange or Sillyearn – yet they did, in their legions.

Is there anyone who would not be excited by the thought that he had capered in fields on summer evenings without knowing that, on that very spot, Romans were settling down for a few nights, preparing to find a way across the river? (I could have shown them the best place, easily.) It is the thrill of discovery after the event that gives it a special edge. Had we learned the story in a textbook, we might have absorbed it as one more fact for the memory, like the one that Mary, Queen of Scots spent a night in the castle above our village on her way to somewhere unknown (or perhaps not). The Romans raise all kinds of different and intriguing questions.

Why had we not known this before? Tacitus, Agricola’s son-in-law, was historian-in-residence on the conquering march that led to Mons Graupius but he is tantalisingly sparing in his descriptions – as if deliberately making trouble for future historians. Some have suggested he wasn’t there at all. He can certainly not have heard the words he attributes to the leader of the Caledonians, Calgacus – ‘. . . solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant’, famously translated as ‘they make a desert and call it peace’. But we are stuck with him as our only guide and we know this – they didn’t get much further

There are some traces some miles to the west but they fade away quickly. No one has been able to show that they had much interest in going into the Highlands. It is as if the experience of the North-east was enough – the line of mountains, whose eastern side they’d followed north-eastwards through Perthshire and into the Mearns, was not to be crossed. Like the hills and mountains themselves, the Roman passage leaves its mark on the landscape. Theirs was a Lowlands invasion – the Highlands were beyond.

Though an understanding of the history is still sketchy, we know enough of the Roman story to be fairly certain of that. Rather like the stone circle in Rothiemay. Dating from the Neolithic period, this set of stones was perhaps laid out to mirror a particular arrangement of the stars and still is puzzling. From it, we get a sense, in our own secure surroundings, of the backstory. There are Pictish stones here and there, across the parish where I grew up, marked with snakes and broken arrows, crescent symbols, crude representations of what appear to be an eagle and a wild beast. I have not read any convincing explanations of precisely how old they are or who put them there – everything written about them is hedged around with enough uncertainty to leave the mystery greater than the fact.

I crawled around them as a boy, unhindered by fences or warning signs. They sat in fields of corn or gave shelter to sheep on windy days. They remain for me, simply, the markers of a particular place. The people who lived there tilled the same land that was being worked when I was a boy and produces the same crops today. The Romans came, we know, and went. How and why, we are not so sure.

These are the foundations of a territory that is home, the special traces of a history that is unique. As the Romans discovered, the North-east is the deceptive land that divides Highland and Lowland Scotland, apparently spreading out in its own space but connected at different times in its history to both west and south. From there you can understand how important the great divide is in the story of Scotland – its sheer physical insistence, the cultural and linguistic significance, its ability to separate quite small corners of the country and allow them to live in their own spheres.

Whether you come by way of Rothiemurchus, where they spoke Gaelic until not too long ago, and walk through the remnants of the old Caledonian Forest to start the ascent of the Lairig Ghru towards the south or land in the North-east from some fishing boat on a stormy sea in a tiny Banffshire harbour or take one of the long drove roads from the south to reach Deeside and rich pasture, you will know that you have come to a place that has carved out for itself a shape and a spirit that is it is own.

Author’s Preface

THIS BOOK IS INTENDED as a companion to a journey, one that can be made in the mind as well as in person. It is a journey along the line of what was British history’s last frontier, a border between two cultures that ended its political life as recently as 1746 in bloodshed and genocide. At Culloden, the last battle was fought between two armies who could both claim to be subjects of the kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. And when the charge of the clans failed and the killing began, memory also began to fade, disappearing into the mists of romantic fancy. This journey aims to stir what has been forgotten, to tempt the history of what is sometimes called the Highland Line out of the shadows, to remember how divided Scotland once was and how those divisions and their unlikely legacies formed the modern nation.

This is not a straightforward story with a continuous narrative thread that weaves a sequence of pivotal events together in a clear chronological order. Instead, what follows is a gathering of impressions, of atmosphere, but continuity is served by the loose but logical geographic arrangement of a journey of discovery. The tale begins at Culloden, not far from Inverness, and proceeds in an easterly direction through the tumultuous events of the lost kingdom of Moray before turning a sharp right at Stonehaven, where the mountains almost reach the sea, and then it hugs the foothills of the southern Highlands all the way to Glasgow and the Firth of Clyde.

Occasionally the route strikes into the mountains, in a cultural as well as geographical sense. In an overwhelmingly monoglot Scotland with only 58,000 people, just over 1 per cent of the population, having any Gaelic, few are able even to pronounce the names of the lochs and the glens correctly. Locked in incomprehension, the way of life of Highlanders has been documented by many outsiders without a word of their language. It is at best opaque, at worst impossible, for Lowlanders to understand. And, more than that, there exists an atavistic instinct to brand people whose language one does not comprehend as babbling savages. Throughout Scotland’s history, such attitudes have been regularly on show and this book attempts to look in both directions across the frontier.

Over the long story of this dramatic divide, perspectives have been shifted as much by the imagination as by politics or economics. For that reason, the work of four great Scottish writers has seemed more than usually important. Three lived close to the Highland Line and set some of their narratives in the shadow of the mountains. Lewis Grassic Gibbon, J. M. Barrie and Neil Munro all add colour and humour, while Sir Walter Scott has a lot to answer for.

In thinking about our history, neatness, inevitability and homogeneity ought all to be resisted. The past was never tidy and, at various turnings, it was by no means clear that all roads would necessarily lead to the present. And most importantly this story of the last frontier tells us that Scotland is only one version of history.

1

Roads to Culloden

THERE ARE MANY Scotlands. Edinburgh and Glasgow would shudder at being thought similar. Galloway is a place apart, guarded by its sheltering hills looking south to the Irish Sea. The Borders sometimes prefers to share a history with Northumberland, perhaps because the last few miles of its great river flow through England, while Tayside, Angus and the Moray coastlands all have pungent and readily recognisable identities. But the deepest, most profound internal divide in Scotland is that between Highland and Lowland. It is Britain’s last frontier.

Running from north of Glasgow almost to the sea at Stonehaven, what geologists call the Highland Boundary Fault is very obvious. At the Pass of Leny in Perthshire, the road rises suddenly from the boggy flatlands of the meandering River Teith and plunges into the mountains. It narrows and winds as cliffs close in and the landscape changes utterly. Ben Ledi rears up on the left and, across Loch Lubnaig, the ranges of the Lomond Mountains dominate. Forests darken their flanks and the marks of people fade almost to nothing. Few houses or fields can be seen and the row of telegraph poles by the roadside seems somehow forlorn, holding up a fragile thread connecting two Scotlands.

From many vantage points in the south, the Highland Line can be clearly seen, a front rank of sentinel mountains rising abruptly from the plain. Commuters on the Edinburgh bypass can often make out Ben Ledi and sometimes Ben Lomond looms out of the morning haze. And yet the high country behind the mountains is not really familiar at all. Few Scots can pronounce its geography. The lochs, rivers, passes and ranges are named in Gaelic, a language fast fading and now spoken by fewer than 50,000 Scots, many of them the wrong side of sixty. Ben Ledi is one of the simpler names but, like many Gaelic words, it is not pronounced as it is spelled. Those who named it called it Ben Letty not Leddy and behind it rises Beinn Bhreac. Deeper into the mountains, the older spelling of Beinn is now standard on maps but Bhreac is a challenge. In Gaelic, the bh combination is said as a ‘v’ and it means ‘Speckled Mountain’. The English word ‘freckle’ is cognate with bhreac.

As much as geology and geography, language used to change when the Highland Line was crossed. To the north, Gaelic not only described the landscape, it spoke of a different way of life, acted as another lens through which the world could be seen. On the high plateaux and in the narrow glens, herdsmen reared their beasts and lived in a society structured around clan and kinship. To the south, ploughmen tilled the flatter and more fertile land and had stronger cultural links with England than with the north of Scotland. Road signs unwittingly acknowledge the tremendous influence of language difference when they declare Failte do’n Gaidhealtachd. They translate it as ‘Welcome to the Highlands’ but a more lexically tight subtitle would be ‘Welcome to the Land of the Gaels’, the people who speak Gaelic.

This is overwhelmingly a story of mutual misunderstanding – even incomprehension – between two speech communities and it is also a story of conflict between two cultures. Those who live to the north talk of the land below the Highland Line as the Galltachd, the ‘Land of the Foreigners’. And Lowlanders who attack support for Gaelic often call it a foreign language even though it is clearly native and was probably spoken in Scotland for many generations before the coming of Northumbrian English in the seventh century. Gaels occasionally talk of miorun mor nan Gall, ‘the great malice of the Lowlander’, while Gaels themselves are sometimes characterised as lazy, sulky and with a historic sense of entitlement. These attitudes have changed somewhat in recent times but they remain a recipe for misunderstanding and, for many centuries, supplied sparks for bloody confrontation.

History happens at the edges and a persistent theme of this book will be the exchanges between Gael and Gall, between Highlander and Lowlander, between two sets of suspicious neighbours. Too often commentators and historians have felt compelled to take sides. Guilt at the treatment of Gaels during the long period of the Clearances has informed attitudes, not always helpfully. Romance, especially the sort so brilliantly confected by Walter Scott, has wreathed the mountains in impenetrable mist and ignorance has further clouded the picture. And yet something has changed. In the last few years, many Scots have gratefully adopted the iconography of the Gaels so that most weddings now resemble clan gatherings, football crowds are tricked out in tartan and politicians feel compelled to march through the streets of New York wearing a kilt.

My own fascination with the differences between Lowland and Highland may have been an early symptom of changing attitudes and it began a long time ago and a long way away from the mountains and glens of the north.

On a sunny spring day in 1964, I travelled across that invisible frontier, from one Scotland to another, from familiarity to an epic, melancholy strangeness, from the homely geometry of the fields and farms of the Scottish Borders to the shores of the mighty Atlantic where the mountains rise out of the ocean into huge Highland skies. It was a transformative journey and a day whose memory has never left me.

Led by our Latin teacher, Mr Goodall, a party of a dozen schoolchildren departed from Kelso Station in the Easter holidays on what was to be a journey of firsts and lasts. It was the first time I had ever gone far from home without my parents and the last time passengers could catch a train at Kelso. The station closed in June 1964 and our trip immediately became a footnote, frozen in a small corner of history.

Kitted out with rucksacks, anoraks (not yet a term of mild abuse), waterproofs and walking boots, we gathered on the platform for the great adventure, an advance into the unknown. There was a definite sense of expedition, a journey into an interior where nothing should be taken for granted. Perhaps there were no Mars Bars or chip shops, perhaps they had never heard of The Beatles and certainly not The Rolling Stones. Rucksacks were checked and rechecked by touch, fingers fumbling through the narrow neck amongst socks, a spare pullover and an old yellow sou’wester my dad had forced me to take even though I would have had to be rescued by a lifeboat before I would ever wear it. Maps flapped around as we waited on the platform and we worried about storms, gales, days of never-ending rain. Dubbin had been strongly advised by Mr Goodall. Slathered on and rubbed into dried-out boots each morning, it would keep out the wet. Rub-a-dub-dub. Pots of it were purchased by everyone except Ronald Barker. Following his father’s advice, he declared that spit and polish would work just as well. No doubt about it. An Assistant Postmaster in Kelso, Mr Barker strode straight-backed past our window every morning, his shoes gleaming, his socks dry, his demeanour oozing military certainty. After a run of rainy days, we took turns to let Ronald use our Dubbin.

After what seemed like an age, a steam train from Berwick-upon-Tweed puffed into Kelso Station, hissing and grinding to a stop. ‘Change at St Boswells for Hawick and Carlisle. This service terminates at Edinburgh Waverley.’ The stationmaster walked up and down the platform, a whistle in his mouth. We clambered into compartments, shoving rucksacks into the netting shelves above the seats and arguing over who should face the way we were going. The whistle blew, the carriages shuddered and the journey into the unknown began.

Glamour was waiting on the platform at St Boswells. When Sheelagh Drummond and Sandra Black boarded the train, the expeditionary force was complete and attention refocused not on the view out of the windows. By late morning, we were chugging into Edinburgh Waverley and, on the onward service to Glasgow Queen Street, those who hadn’t already eaten them unwrapped their sandwiches. I’d never been to Glasgow before and it was deafening. Because our connection to Mallaig was tight and probably because Mr Goodall wanted to keep the party together, we did not leave the railway station. Incomprehensible tannoy announcements, the slamming of carriage doors, clanking trains and the jarring chatter of thousands of people in a hurry made my head spin.

After perhaps only ten or twenty minutes, as the train taking us north left the sprawl of the city, there was a sudden revelation when the Firth of Clyde opened. And across the glint of the water, not far distant, stood the mountains. In a moment, it seemed, we had passed out of the oppressive, detailed racket of Glasgow and into a place of elemental majesty. The schoolboy talk stilled as we gawped and Mr Goodall smiled. We found ourselves in a Scotland none of us had ever seen before. As the train rattled north along the shore of Loch Long, towns, villages and houses disappeared and we plunged into dense forest before crossing the isthmus to Loch Lomond. The White Heather Club and occasional renditions of ‘The Bonnie Banks’ had not prepared us for such a vast emptiness. There seemed to be nothing and no one in the landscape except a scatter of yews on a far mountainside. To children raised in the market towns, the tree-lined lanes, the tidily hedged fields and the farm places of the Borders, the grandeur we saw at Crianlarich, on Rannoch Moor and in the glowering shadow of the Nevis Range was almost intimidating.

At Fort William we were allowed out to pee and buy crisps and sweeties. Fort? What fort? Where were the Indians? Children habitually accept a great deal without question but I do recall wondering why the trains had stopped at a fort. What kind of fort? From our recently acquired telly I knew what Fort Laramie and the forts garrisoned by the US Cavalry in Boots and Saddles were like. And they weren’t like Fort William.

Even though the train had hugged the shores of several sea lochs, our first powerful sense of the Atlantic opened before us at Arisaig. It must have been late afternoon by then and, despite a tendency to sun-tinted recollection, I do remember bright blue skies when I first looked out over the ocean. I had never seen the Atlantic before. At Morar, the sands are blindingly white and on the western horizon lie Eigg, Rum and the Sleat Peninsula of Skye. When at last we reached journey’s end at the little station next to the large hotel and the even larger viaduct, we assembled on the platform, a little dazed and quietened by all that our train windows had passed. But here we were out in it, in the landscape, in the heartlands of the Highlands at last.

The youth hostel at Garramore was a half-hour walk to the south along a single-track tarmac road. I have never forgotten it. Having crossed the famously short River Morar and passed below the viaduct, we began a walk that has lived in my memory for almost 50 years. As it rose and turned to reveal white beaches or the limitless blue-green ocean, it showed me how heart-breakingly beautiful the Highlands can be. Scattered along the roadside were a few white cottages and a road end for at least one farm but we saw no one and met no traffic. And yet the land and seashore seemed friendly, always there was a sense of people and how they had shaped this utterly lovely place. Having travelled to several continents since I first saw the road from Morar to Garramore, that small stretch of coastline in the western Highlands remains, for me, unquestionably the most beautiful place in the world.

It seemed then a different, otherworldly beauty, very different from the domesticated, pleasing order of a Borders landscape. And, though the sun shone every day we were at Garramore and gales did not make the Atlantic roar on to the shores of white sand, it was, nevertheless, spare, unfussy, somehow Edenic. I had never seen anywhere like it.

After a few days, we moved on to another youth hostel. Further north, Ratagan is by the side of Loch Duich, not far from the picture-postcard castle at Eilean Donan. Soon after we arrived it began to rain. For days. Youth hostels had a policy of expelling residents in the morning and not allowing them back in until the late afternoon. As the endless rain fell steadily out of leaden skies, testing the resilience of Dubbin-ed boots and waterproofs (but not my sou’wester – only Noah’s Flood could have persuaded it out of my rucksack), we mooched around, eking out our coffees in the café at Shiel Bridge. It was closed on a Sunday so, in desperation, I decided to go to church.

A mile or two further along the shore road by Loch Duich, there stood a church and my memory is of a large corrugated iron hut. People materialised, it seemed, out of nowhere and inside it was packed. Raincoats steamed gently in the warmth. At an unseen signal, all went still and an old minister stood up and began to address the congregation in a language that was not English or a Highland version or indeed like anything else I had ever heard before. With a mane of white hair and a jutting jaw, he resembled the actor Finlay Currie when he played God in a Scottish accent in a Roman epic I had seen recently at the Roxy. And then the minister turned to me to welcome a visitor first in Gaelic and then in English. With a mischievous smile, he told me that I could find a hymn book in a pocket attached to the back of the chair in front of me.

And then it began. A tall, cadaverously thin man stood forward from the congregation and started to sing. It seemed like chanting at first and not conventionally melodious, with no recognisable tune. Each time the man completed a line, the congregation appeared to sing it back to him, except that they had made it different. And immensely powerful, almost hypnotic. It was the first time I had heard the Gaelic psalmody.

Soaring and swooping like flocks of birds, the psalms seemed perfectly suited to the land that made them, the steep mountainsides, the limitless horizon of the ocean and the drama of the winds, the rain and the blinding sunlight. Even though it was to be many years before I understood the words, the emotion behind them was entirely intelligible. As the rise and fall of the singing and its apparent seamlessness reverberated in the little church, it felt as though a history and a culture hidden to me was beginning to open.

Many years later I did an immersion course in Gaelic and became a supporter of the Gaelic-medium further education college at Sabhal Mor Ostaig on the Isle of Skye. It is now part of the University of the Highlands and Islands. There I met a lovely man called Donnie Campbell. Gaelic was his first language and I remember him watching Scotland play football on TV in his cupboard-sized office. When a rare goal was scored, he celebrated and exhorted the team in his native tongue, entirely unselfconsciously.

Sabhal Mor Ostaig

In English, and on a map, the Big Barn at Ostaig lies to the west of a leafy road running through the Sleat Peninsula of the Isle of Skye, surely one of the most beautiful places in the world. The Big Barn is, in reality, a small farm steading where a very big idea was made real. In 1973, the merchant banker and entrepreneur Sir Iain Noble came up with the notion of a further education college teaching through the medium of Gaelic. With the help of others, he brought Sabhal Mór Ostaig into being and it has grown in scale and importance ever since. Under its inspirational principal Norman Gillies, the college chimed its ambitions perfectly with the announcement in 1989 of a government fund to make additional Gaelic TV programmes. Expansion followed, the Scottish ITV companies contributed significant sums and SMO, as it is known, became much more than a renovated farm steading on a stunningly scenic island coastline. A large new campus, the Arainn Chaluim Chille, named after St Columba, was built across the road, beautifully located on a height above the Sound of Sleat. By 2010, there were more than a hundred full-time students and many more part-timers and people on short courses. From a small beginning, the Big Barn has inserted itself into the centre of Gaelic cultural life – an extraordinary achievement.

Once we talked of Highland history and he told me a moving story about the battle at Culloden in 1746, the last act of the Jacobite Rising. Donnie told me that, before they charged across the moor into the gunfire, the clansmen had recited their genealogy. When the government army heard the chanting of what is called the sloinneadh the ‘naming of the generations’, they believed that the Highlanders were singing psalms. Instead each man counted back through his genealogy – Is mise macIain, macRuaridh, macIain Mor ‘I am the son of John, the son of Ruaridh, the son of Big John’. Many could count back through more than a century. And once the names had been named, once the clansman had said out loud who they were and where they came from, they prepared to charge, to defend a way of life.

Donnie Campbell’s story has stayed with me as a singular and dramatic illustration of difference, of the cultural as well as the political and geographical division marked by the Highland Line. And, since our journey along it starts in Inverness, it seems appropriate to begin with the nearby battle of Culloden, the climacteric event in the 18 centuries of recorded difference between Lowlander and Gael.

In the early evening of 19 April 1746, a horseman was galloping towards Edinburgh. Three days before, he had watched the Highland army of Prince Charles charge over the heather moor near Culloden House and engage with the government troops led by the Duke of Cumberland. As the rider clattered over the cobbles of the West Port, he shouted news of a victory to those who turned to watch him pass through the Grassmarket. There the scaffolds General Henry Hawley had ordered for the execution of rebel soldiers and sympathisers only a few weeks earlier still stood and the rotting corpses of the condemned swung in their chains. Kicking on his tiring horse, the rider made for houses where he knew his astonishing news would be welcome. The Prince and his brave Highlanders had triumphed once more! The hated Cumberland had been defeated in battle near Inverness.

Capital Cleaning

The most northerly city in Britain, one of the fastest growing in Europe with a 10 per cent rise in population since 1991 to reach more than 61,000 now, Inverness is booming. A true Highland capital, it was recently ranked fifth out of 189 cities in a quality of life survey. In 1746, after Culloden, the Duke of Cumberland thought it a disgusting collection of hovels and ordered that its streets be cleaned. When Edmund Burt asked a town official why this had never been done before, he was told it rained often. And, when officers in the government army wrote home, they complained that Inverness was very dirty indeed, much more so than London, which had no public street cleaning either. Like the capital city, Inverness was a port and ships from France and Holland docked regularly with cargoes of wines, weapons, lace, silver, silk and spices. All of these luxury goods are a reminder of how populous the Highland hinterland was in the 18th century for they were intended not for the burghers of Inverness but for the clan chiefs and their wealthier tacksmen. They, in turn, exported the products of their clan lands through Inverness – wool, hides, salt beef and cereals. Some chiefs had houses in the town but social life seems to have been sparse with only one tavern (perhaps The Gellions – still serving drinks now) and one coffee house for around 3,000 inhabitants. The social focus of the Highland capital was really the Clach na Cuddain, the ‘Stone of the Tubs’, so called because washer-women rested their heavy tubs on it as they came back into town from the banks of the River Ness. Probably a prehistoric standing stone, it is a reminder that not everything in 18th-century Inverness was unwashed.

The Caledonian Mercury reported that Jacobite supporters were delighted and ‘balls and dances were held by the disaffected ladies’. But Edinburgh was not a city sympathetic to the Stuart cause and it had closed its gates to the Highland army only seven months before. A young David Hume had translated his progressive philosophical convictions into action when he joined the muster of the militia to defend the walls.

What the impetuous horseman had seen 300 miles to the north at Culloden was the beginning of a battle. Had he waited less than an hour before galloping off, he would have carried very different news to the disaffected ladies and gentlemen. After a lethal preliminary of government cannon fire that ploughed through the ranks of the Highland army and a fatal period of dithering by Prince Charles, who had taken personal command of the army for the first and last time, the clansmen on the right had broken into the charge.

Probably already on horseback, the courier will have seen the Atholl Brigade, Clan Chattan, Clan Cameron and the Appin Stewarts tearing across the moor, screaming their war cries and clashing their broadswords into the ranks of redcoat bayonets. Steel rang against steel and Highlanders ran through the gaps in the government lines where the cannon had been emplaced. Gillies MacBean, a captain of Clan Chattan, broke through the front rank, killing several men. John MacGillivray also breached their lines, killing 12 men before breaking through the second rank. He was finally cut down by the men of the reserve battalion in the rear.

The premature joy of the courier, circling on what was probably a skittish, terrified horse, was understandable. Not only was it difficult to see through the smoke and chaos of a thousand-metre battle front, there was every reason to believe that the Highland army’s ferocious charge would once again prove irresistible. In a matter of only ten minutes, the clansmen had scattered Sir John Cope’s army at Prestonpans in September 1745 and at Falkirk, only a few weeks before Culloden, the redcoats had again turned and run as the claymores had whirled over the heads. Battles can turn on moments and James Wolfe, a young officer who would later find a brief but fatal fame on the Heights of Abraham in Canada, watched Barrell’s Regiment stand their ground:

They were attacked by the Camerons (the bravest clan among them), and ’twas for some time a dispute between the swords and bayonets; but the latter was found by far the most destructible weapon. The regiment behaved with uncommon resolution, killing, some say, almost their own number, whereas forty of them were only wounded, and those not mortally and not above ten killed. They were, however, surrounded by superiority, and would have been all destroyed had not Col. Martin with his regiment (the left of the second line of foot) moved forward to their assistance, prevented mischief, and by a well-timed fire destroyed a great number of them and obliged them to run off.

Over on the left of the Jacobite lines the MacDonald regiments failed to engage properly with the government troops, having been driven back by intense musket fire. In the centre, boggy ground had forced the charge of some clans to veer right and they collided with the Atholl Brigade, forcing them against the drystane dykes of an enclosure. Firing by rank, the government troops held firm, stopped the careering momentum of the charge and drove the Highlanders back. They had no other tactic, the charge had failed, the battle was lost and a great slaughter began.

An accurate version of events far to the north finally reached Edinburgh just after midnight on 19 April. The Caledonian Mercury