Folklore of the Scottish Highlands E-Book

Anne Ross

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Folklore
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 290

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2000

Beschreibung

The folklore of the Scottish Highlands is unique and very much alive. Dr Anne Ross was a Gaelic-speaking scholar and archaeologist who lived and worked in crofting communities. This enabled her to collect information first hand and to assess the veracity of material already published. In this revised new edition of a modern classic work, Ross portrays the beliefs and customs of Scottish Gaelic society, including seasonal customs deriving from Celtic festivals; the famous waulking songs; the Highland tradition of seers and second sight; omens and taboos, both good and bad; chilling experiences of witchcraft and the Evil Eye; and rituals associated with birth and death.

Leseprobe

For Berenice

Women at the quern and waulking

Pennant, T., 1772, XXXIV, 286

First published 2000

This edition published 2025

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© Anne Ross, 2025

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CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Preface

1    Introduction

2    Clan lore

3    Seers and Second Sight

4    Witchcraft, black and white

5    Supernatural beings, omens and social customs

6    Life and death

7    The seasons and the archaism of calendar festivals

8    Epilogue

Bibliography

1   Distribution map of Gaelic speakers in the Highlands and Islands, 1991. The western, northern and central mainland is defined on the east by the old county boundaries of Nairn, Moray, Banff and Aberdeenshire with Inverness-shire, then through Atholl and Breadalbane to Loch Long. After G. Price 1998, map 16

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Frontispiece: Women at the quern and waulking

1Distribution map of Gaelic speakers, Highlands and Islands

2Map of peoples of Caledonia, Pictland, Dalriada

3Map of the peoples of Scotland, first century AD

4Map of the colonisation of Dalriada

5Pictish figures – fish, snake, birds

6Alexander Carmichael

7Pictish figures – deer, horse

8Highland army officer

9Map of the distribution of the Highland clans

10Leather front of a targe

11Dirk, claymore

12Piper

13Shinty player

14Pictish figures – bulls

15Pictish figures – sow, boar

16Clach-na-buidseach

17Callanish – stones and chambered cairn

18Callanish – oblique view of the whole monument

19The Witches' horse

20The Witches' crow

21The Witches' hare

22The Witches' cat

23The Witches' frog

24The Witches' raven

25The Witches' eagle

26Direach ghlinn eiti

27Smith god

28Bronze cauldron

29Iona

30Fortingall Church gatepost stones

31Map of the distribution of NEMETON- in Scotland

32Ballachulish figure

33Harp

34Lewis chessmen

35Coins of CUNOBELINUS

2   The names of the peoples of part of Caledonia, first centuryAD. Pictland succeeded Caledonia; Dalriada colonised by Scotti from Ulster, third centuryADonwards. Caledonii was a group name applied collectively to all the peoples later known as Picti, and was also the name of a single people. F.T. Wainwright, 1955, 1980

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

It is not possible to express adequately here my deep affection for the people of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland and the delight that their unique heritage of folklore and folksong never fails to bring to me. I would wish to record my sincere gratitude to the numerous Gaels who, at home in the Highlands, or in exile elsewhere, have given up hours of their precious time in conversation about the old traditions and superstitions, and have patiently and generously recited tales and legends, poetry and song which reached them through many generations of their ancestry. Their hospitality is unrivalled and their company without equal. It is not possible to name them all, and to select a few would imply that others, equally deserving of thanks, have been forgotten. I would however like to pay tribute to the people of North Uist, and especially the Ferguson family, from whom I learnt so much. They introduced me to the charmed life of the Island and its people in a way which would otherwise have been quite impossible. I must also acknowledge with humility and gratitude the work of all the great collectors of the past who battled heroically to salvage as much of the still-rich tradition as they could, without the aids with which present-day field-workers are equipped.

The dedicated work of the School of Scottish Studies, a teaching department in the University of Edinburgh carries on the valiant work of recording and preserving as much of the rapidly-dying tradition as it can. Many friends have helped me in a variety of ways, and to them I likewise extend my grateful thanks. To the late Bob Bissett, shepherd of upper Glen Lyon, whose death I have recently learnt of with much sorrow, and the people of Glen Lyon and Fortingall for their invaluable assistance and for the further insight they gave to me I offer my gratitude. I wish the recently founded Killin Heritage Society and the Fortingall Group of Researchers all success. I thank my family for their help and support – Richard Feachem for his fine drawings and maps and Berenice for her invaluable assistance in preparing this edition for the press. I thank David Clarke for generously allowing me to use his fine photograph of Glen Lyon.

Anne Ross

3   Map of the peoples of Scotland, first centuryAD

PREFACE

There are many factors which, down the ages, have contributed to the evolution of the oral tradition of Gaelic Scotland. Moreover, we are now working with the remnants of what was, even a century ago, an invaluable source, not only of folklore – which had for centuries been handed down orally from generation to generation – but of many other aspects of an archaic way of life which continued well into the twentieth century. Even today, living traces of it are still to be found, kept alive by those Highlanders who continue to treasure their own unique past. This preface, then, consists of a fleeting view of some of the early historical peoples of Scotland who undoubtedly must have had some influence on the later Gaelic tradition.

4   Map of the colonisation of Dalriada in the seventh centuryAD, after J.W.M. Bannerman 1983, 55

The importance of Irish Gaelic, from which the bedrock of Scottish Gaelic must ultimately have sprung, is incontestable. The Irish (or Goidelic) language (later known as Gaelic) was in all probability introduced to the West of Scotland from Ireland in the third-sixth centuries AD, the time of the settlements of the sons of the Irish king Erc in Dalriada (4). Gaelic may well have been spoken in some areas of the Scottish Highlands prior to this historical event. We certainly know that it was not unfamiliar at a later period to the Picts of the more easterly Highlands as their commemorative standing stones or boundary markers inscribed in both Pictish and Goidelic Ogams would suggest (5). These stones, of course, are dated to a later period than that of the colonisation of Dalriada, but both Picts and Gaels – or Scots, as they were known at an early period – may already have been familiar with some form of Ogam script.

5   Pictish figures engraved on stone – fish, snake, birds

Any culture which comes into permanent contact with another is inevitably affected by that contiguity. So it was with Irish and Scottish Gaelic, Norse and the enigma of the Picts – a society whose origins and language still are not fully understood by scholars. Nevertheless, the Picts undoubtedly exerted some influence upon the Gaelic communities and vice versa. For the purposes of this book, however, it is the Gaelic language which was spoken and is yet the Gaelic culture with which we are concerned and of which intrepid collectors have left us such a rich and rare heritage.

1

INTRODUCTION

Two boys, whose birth beyond all question springs

From great and glorious, tho’ forgotten kings,

Shepherds of Scottish lineage, born and bred

On the same bleak and barren mountain’s head,

Jocky with mickle art, could on the bagpipes play,

E’en from the rising to the setting day;

Sawney as long without remorse could bawl

HOME’s madrigals and ditties from FINGAL.

In these lines from his Prophecy of Famine, the strongly anti-Scottish priest-poet, Charles Churchill (1731–64), writing from his living under the shadow of another Celtic stronghold, South Cadbury in Somerset, revealed a subtle knowledge and grudging appreciation of an ancient tradition, the rich heritage of Gaelic Scotland. In his day Highland folklore, story and superstition were still very much in evidence. And in the somewhat scathing lines above, Churchill has noted subtleties of that archaic culture which are still discernible, albeit in aetiolated form, down to the present day. The Celtic pride in ancestry and belief in the ultimate nobility of their forefathers (forgotten though these regal forebears may now be except to those who immortalise them in the recitation of their sloinneadh, ‘naming of ancestors’); pride in their Scottish nationality; the cultivation of the ancient arts of their country in physical discomfort and humble circumstances; the tireless playing of the bagpipes, their musical variety of pattern as ingenious and as amazingly varied as the designs their forebears wrought with infinite skill upon the metal, wood, pottery and stone of the past; the ancient chanted tales of the Fingalian heroes, still to be heard vestigially in the glens and islands of the West; all these fundamental aspects of the tradition were observed, if not approved, by the great English writer.

As in ancient pagan times, when the classical writers were commenting on the customs and habits of their Celtic neighbours in Europe and Britain, and the splendid repertoire of Irish and Welsh legend and myth was receiving written form by the early Christian scribes, the life of the Scottish Highlander was, up to comparatively recent times, not only rich in lore and legend, music and song, but completely hedged round by tabu – things to be done, things to be avoided. Everyday life would seem to have been circumscribed by powers, good and evil, that were believed to be everywhere present, to be placated by ritual or exploited by magical processes. The Otherworld forces, and the fairies, spectres and monsters of moorland, hill and water were as real, substantial, and infinitely more menacing than were one’s own human fellows. Every place had its name and its legend – how it got its name; what famous hero or infamous criminal, savage, supernatural animal, or shaggy, semi-human sprite was associated with it, were stories known at one time to all. This Celtic obsession with immediate locality, the love and knowledge of not only the homeland, but every detail of the familiar landscape, is an absolutely fundamental characteristic of the Celts. This undoubtedly stems from their ancient and passionate love of nature and their deep feeling for the world of birds and animals – which were frequently accredited with the powers of human speech and understanding – and manifests itself early in their recorded history. Ancient tales about the gods and goddesses and heroes long dead and gone are still told with simple sincerity and total dedication by those in whom the tradition still lives; those who, like the ancient Celtic god Ogmios, hold the ears of their listeners enchained by the eloquence and fluency of their native tongue. Each community would have its own seanachaidh, ‘tale-teller’ par excellence. The Highlanders have always loved stories and a whole group from a township would gather together in the tigh-cheilidh, ‘house of entertainment’, to pass the long, dark and often wild winter nights listening enraptured to tales, many of incredible length, some of almost unbelievable antiquity, which formed part of the rich store of oral tradition, which itself is commented upon in the writings of Julius Caesar.

These stories were handed on by word of mouth, from generation to generation, the archaic nuclei gathering to themselves new elements from a wealth of external sources. Some sprang from international folklore and folktale motifs, and were blended skilfully with the old, indigenous elements. Over and above the story-tellers – who tended on the whole to be men in the West of Scotland – were those who could chant the ancient ballads, many of which contain legends common to Ireland and Scotland, and can still be recorded today, although the rich heritage of such material is fast losing ground. There were also the experts on the proverbial sayings, of which hundreds must have circulated at one time in the remote Celtic world; and those with powers, good and evil – people who were believed to be able to practise witchcraft and woe, and others who were known as ‘white’ witches, the charmers and healers who could undo the spells of malice and replace them with healing and protection. Then there were the singers of songs, much loved by the whole community. At one time, communal labour, or individual chores, were accompanied and made less burdensome by traditional songs, and the repertoire of these is one of the richest features of the Gaelic folk tradition. There were rowing songs, reaping songs, milking songs, churning songs; songs to soothe the tired infant, songs to lighten the heavy task of querning the grain (see frontispiece).

But the richest and most important group of songs in the entire tradition are those known as òrain luadhaidh or ‘waulking’ songs, sung to facilitate the heavy labour of ‘waulking’ or shrinking by hand the tweed to make the sturdy Highland cloth proof against rough country and wet, inclement weather. Many of these are still extant, for the communal occupation of waulking did not die out until the twentieth century when the electric looms and factory facilities rendered redundant the old, heavy, but happy work of the strong, competent hands of the Hebridean women. In the waulking songs are preserved some of the most ancient historical and mythological material – ballads, fairy songs, clan lore, songs of love and stories of heroism; fights against monsters, human and supernatural; and witty local anecdotes, some with a naughty dig against the men, or a particular local character. In these songs alone lurks a wealth of information on the traditional life of the Highlands and its ancient tales and customs.

The waulking songs themselves are of profound interest and are unparalleled elsewhere in the west of Europe. The whole process of the communal shrinking of the handwoven cloth, thus preparing it for the tailor’s shears, is fascinating. It was, and remained, an occupation reserved for the womenfolk and the men were firmly excluded from the activity. Originally the women sat on the ground and pounded the cloth on a wooden trestle with their feet (see frontispiece); later the hands alone were used for this purpose, the women sitting, or standing on either side of a table. The astonishing impact of this unfamiliar ritual on a stranger to the west is well expressed by Martin Martin, in his description of North Uist. He relates how a party of people from an English ship landed on the island and one of them came upon a house in which were 10 women, behaving, in the opinion of the Englishman, in an extremely strange manner. Their arms and legs were bare and they were sitting, five on either side of a board which was placed between them; on this was a length of cloth which they were thickening with their hands and feet, and singing the whole time. ‘The Englishman presently concluded it to be a little Bedlam, which they did not expect to find in so remote a corner.’ The episode was recounted to the owner of the island, a Mr John MacLean, who said he had never seen any mad people in the islands. This did not convince, so the leader of the party and the proprietor went to the house where the women were working. Mr MacLean then told the stranger that this was merely the common way of thickening the cloth in those parts; the Englishman had to accept the information but remained astonished at the scene he had witnessed.

The wool from which the tweed was woven was first dyed to the desired colour in a dye made from vegetable matter of various kinds. When it was ready, the loom was set, and, as with most important everyday activities, there were lucky and unlucky days for this – another archaic Celtic belief. One of these, in the Island of South Uist, was St Columba’s Day – 9 June – perhaps the most beloved of the saints in the Catholic Highlands:

Thursday the day of kindly Columba,

The day to gather the sheep in the fold,

To set the loom, and put cows with the calves.

When the cloth is woven it is soaked in a vat of hot, stale urine, which has been collected for the purpose for some time. The ends of the length of cloth are then sewn together to make a complete circle which is next placed on a trestle table, or even the door of the byre if nothing better is available, and about a dozen women sit at the table, an even number on either side, and pass the heavy cloth to each other, sunwise, kneading it vigorously in four decisive rhythmic movements. As they work they sing, the leader telling the story of the song and the others chanting the refrain. It is a fascinating scene to witness, the heaviness of the labour (to which I can personally attest) lightened by the enjoyment of the singing, and the whole vast repertoire of songs enshrining and preserving some of the most rare and ancient aspects of the folk tradition. Songs originally used for other communal activities, which have become redundant, often found their way into the stock of waulking songs; thus, over and above its importance for the anthropologist and the musicologist, the practice of waulking the cloth to the accompaniment of song is one of first interest and value to the folklorist.

The Highlands and Islands of the west contain both Protestant and Catholic communities. In the Outer Hebrides North Uist and the Islands to the north are Protestant, part of Benbecula and all the southern Isles Catholic. Like the early Celtic Church in Ireland, the Catholic priests had a greater tolerance for the old customs which were at one time feared and disliked by the Protestant ministers as being representative of pagan decadence. As a result, the extant traditions in the Catholic areas differ from those of the Protestant regions, being, in many ways, more archaic and rich; but the Protestant areas retained much of their lore and made their own valuable contribution to the preservation of tale, custom and belief which is so astonishingly rich and varied in the Scottish Highlands.

Calendar festivals have always been closely observed by the Celts and in these, much that is purely pagan has survived, blended often almost inextricably with Christian feasts. Festivities connected, for example, with the ancient pan-Celtic god Lugus (Lugh), which we know to have taken place on 1 August in Gaul at the time of Caesar’s wars there, survived vestigially all over the Celtic world down to the present century and have been the subject of a fascinating study by Máire MacNeill. The feast, which took place on or near 1 August and was known as Lughnasa, ‘the feast in honour of Lugh’s birth’, was not a harvest thanksgiving, but a feast of propitiation – a blessing of the harvest to be reaped. The festivities customarily took place on a hill or eminence; there was often a ‘patten’ – a procession – round a holy well, led by the priest; games, markets, races and communal activity of every kind ensued. At the various calendar festivals in the Protestant areas the Trinity was invoked; in the Catholic regions pagan deities metamorphosed into local saints were added to the Trinity and the more common orthodox saints; and in the southern Outer Hebrides St Michael was sometimes invoked as the god Michael. Hallowe’en, the ancient feast of Samhain, the night before 1 November, continued to be regarded as the most awesome period of the year, a time when the powers of the Otherworld became visible – and often dangerous – to mankind, and when human sacrifice and propitiation were essential according to the belief of the pagan Celts, to make benign and satisfy the dark forces of the unknown.

Many of the ancient beliefs and superstitions can still be glimpsed in the treasure-house of the surviving oral tradition, their power gone, their continuity due entirely to the force of the strong folk memory and the longevity of the traditions from which they originally sprang. Stories of the rebellion of 1745 and the evictions of the following decades are related as if they had happened yesterday. Belief in the power of Second Sight is more or less universally present; and the association of prehistoric monuments with past battles fought by gigantic foes is equally widespread. There are still people living in the Gaelic West who claim to have had direct experience of the fairies, and others who assert that they did exist until comparatively recently but, like the great shoals of herring that seasonally frequented the seas round the Hebrides, have now, for some mysterious reason, gone.

It is due to the devoted, tireless and often hazardous work of the great collectors of Gaelic folklore that we have a repertoire of recorded tradition of considerable size and variety, one which provides a yardstick against which to measure the by now infinitely more fragmented body of lore still current in the West today. The persecution of the Gaelic language and all that it stood for began long ago. As early as 1567 John Carswell, Bishop of the Isles, wrote: ‘Great is the blindness and darkness of sin and ignorance and of understanding among composers and writers and supporters of the Gaelic in that they prefer and practise the framing of vain, hurtful, lying, earthly stories about the Tuatha Dé Danann and about the sons of Milesius and about the heroes and Fionn MacCumhail and his giants and about many others whom I shall not number or tell of here in detail, in order to maintain and advance these, with a view to obtaining for themselves passing worldly gain, rather than to write and to compose and to support the faithful words of God and the perfect way of truth.’ In this castigation of the oral tradition, Bishop Carswell gives us valuable information, not only about the vigour with which it was practised, but the nature of its contents. The Tuatha Dé Danann were the pagan gods of ancient Ireland, known to us through the stories of their deeds, recorded by the scribes of the early Christian Church. They were clearly still popular with the people in the sixteenth century; and even today fragmentary stories of their heroic and magical deeds can still be found in remote corners of Gaelic Scotland. The stories of the sons of Mil likewise belong to the early Irish Book of Invasions, that great corpus of semi-historical, semi-mythological material accounting for the coming of the different races – some of them deities – to Ireland. Hero tales, about characters ancient and modern, were, and perhaps still are, the most popular of all the long stories. Amongst these rank the stories telling of the fabulous deeds of the semi-supernatural Irish hero, Fionn MacCumhail and his giants, as Carswell calls them, the characters who played the leading rôle in MacPherson’s Ossian (Fionn’s son by a woman in the form of a hind). This led to the great Ossianic controversy in the eighteenth century and the subsequent focusing of attention of the whole of literary Europe on the Gaelic West. All these subjects are treated in greater detail in the relevant sections of the book.

In spite of persecution by the Protestant Church and by the education authorities, the Gaelic language and some of its great heritage of oral tradition has survived. Ancient customs and beliefs were commented on, inadvertently as it were, by travellers to the Highlands such as Edward Lhuyd, the Welsh geologist and Celtic linguist, the first collector of Gaelic folklore and compiler of the first Gaelic dictionary in the late seventeenth century; natives like Martin Martin, protestant minister in the Island of Skye, visited the Outer Hebrides a few years later and recorded much valuable material. Again, strangers such as Dr Johnson, making his famous tour of Scotland with the Lowland lawyer, James Boswell in 1773, stimulated by the writings of such as Martin, whose original Description appeared as early as 1703, have valuable fragments to add to the testimony of the surviving oral tradition and the comments of native writers.

The systematic work of collecting extant popular lore in the Scottish Highlands really began in the nineteenth century with the great work of John Francis Campbell of Islay (Iain Òg Ìle, ‘Young John of Islay’). A gentleman by birth, and living at a time when the Gaelic language was despised as being the speech of peasants and the poor, he learnt to speak the native tongue of his island and dedicated himself to travelling far and wide, laboriously writing down every fragment he could find of the once rich folklore. He worked in every kind of condition and left to posterity a unique corpus of material which would otherwise have soon perished under the strong pressures operating against it. In his edition of the Dewar Manuscripts, the Rev John MacKechnie says of Campbell:

The collecting of folklore was but one of J.F. Campbell’s many activities. He it was who had seen the need of gathering the material and who set up the machinery for doing that; but it was not so much what he actually collected that is important, but rather the example he set before others and the inspiration which fired all who came into contact with him. At a time when Gaelic was neglected and regarded as unworthy of a gentleman’s attention, he pointed out its charm and the inestimable value of much that was enshrined in the Gaelic language. He showed that a gentleman might well be proud of his knowledge of Gaelic.

The nature of the great collector, the first of many eminent scholars in this field, is well illustrated by his own comments on his work:

My wish has been simply to gather some specimens of the wreck so plentifully strewn on the coasts of old Scotland, and to carry it where others may examine it; rather to point out where curious objects worth some attention may be found, rather than to gather a great heap. I have not sought for stranded forests. I have not polished the rough sticks which I found; I have but cut off a very few offending splinters, and I trust that some may be found who will not utterly despise such rubbish, or scorn the magic which peasants attribute to a fairy egg.

John Campbell was primarily interested in the tales told in the Highlands, and these he classified into various types. Another important contemporary collector was Alexander Carmichael (6) who was mainly concerned with the charms and incantations current at the time, although he recorded every piece of Gaelic lore which it was in his power to do. Recently, several boxes of previously unknown material which had been collected by Carmichael were discovered in the library of the University of Edinburgh, and these are in the process of being examined. Other distinguished collectors added to the growing body of oral material; today, the School of Scottish Studies in the University of Edinburgh, and other organisations, are endeavouring to collect, by the much more efficient medium of the tape recorder, the last fragments of the rapidly dying tradition. The Gaelic language is seriously threatened by all the forces that are putting at risk minority cultures all over the world; even so, it is astonishing that so much has survived into the present century of a language and its traditions which spring directly from that spoken by an ancient Celtic people whose culture was archaic long before the English ever set foot in Britain and which the Romans must have found so strange on their exploratory trips to Ireland.

6   Alexander Carmichael, after the second edition of his Carmina Gadelica, Edinburgh and London, 1928, frontispiece and p. xxxvi

In order to understand anything of the formative elements that have gone into making Gaelic Scotland a distinctive cultural unit, it is necessary to glance briefly at the early history of the country and the nature of the various peoples who inhabited it. The area covered in the book is huge and varied. It includes districts which were at one time Gaelic-speaking and, at an earlier period, were inhabited by British- or Pictish-speaking peoples; regions which were Gaelic-speaking until comparatively recent times; and territory where the Gaelic language is still in everyday use to some extent or another. It includes areas which have had a totally different historical evolution from each other, where external influences of different types and of differing degrees have operated, and in which the religions have been, and still are, very mixed. We may note that, in similar fashion to the languages of other Celtic countries, there is a firm educational policy to retain the Gaelic speech and to ensure that it continues into the foreseeable future.

In Roman times a people known as the Caledonii occupied land extending from the Valley of the Tay to the Great Glen. Two place-names in Perthshire still bear witness to the presence of these people – the mountain Shiehallion on the Moor of Rannoch, ‘the Fairy Mound of the Caledonians’, about which has accrued much legend, and another hill, Dunkeld, ‘the Fort of the Caledonians’. The original Caledonian confederacy included many other tribes: the Taezali of the far north-east, the Lugi of Sutherland, the Decantae of Easter Ross, the Smertae between the Lugi and the Caereni of north-west Sutherland. These powerful Caledonians constituted a strong threat to the Romans and constantly harassed them and raided into territory which they had occupied further south. Scots from Ireland came in their ships and raided the western coasts; the Picts from northern Scotland also joined in the attacks. The Caledonii spoke a language which was the ancestor of Welsh, that is, British; the Picts used a speech containing an admixture of elements including British. Their language has not, as yet, been satisfactorily deciphered. By the end of the fifth century AD Scotland had become a land, not of 17 or so tribes, but of four kingdoms. The largest of these was that of the Picts, extending from the Forth to the Pentland Firth; they were divided into the northern and the southern Picts until eventually they became amalgamated into one kingdom.

The second people are those who most concern us here – the Scots, for they gave the Gaelic language to Scotland, and the name to the country. They came from Ireland to the west coast of the Highlands bringing with them their own Gaelic form of the Celtic language; Scotland means the lands of the Scotti or Scots. They settled in Dalriada, Argyllshire and the adjacent islands, naming the land after their own territory in Ireland. It is of some importance to note that the Irish settlers were not pagans, as were the three other peoples who occupied Scotland at that time, but Christian, although many pagan traditions still lurked beneath their Christianity, as they have done down to the present day. And, although Dalriada was the smallest of these kingdoms, it was from this Gaelic settlement that the first king of a united Scotland was to come. The third people were the Britons of Strathclyde, and the fourth kingdom was that of the Angles, whose territory reached as far as the Firth of Forth.

7   Pictish figures engraved on stone – deer, horse

These four kingdoms were constantly at war with each other, but the conversion of the three pagan factions to Christianity made ultimate union possible. In AD 843 Kenneth MacAlpin became King of the Picts as well as ruler of the Scots; any threat from Anglian power had been destroyed in 685 at the Battle of Nechtansmere in Angus. Kenneth MacAlpin extended the boundaries of his territory, but he could never finally conquer the Angles and he remained King of Alba, as the united kingdoms were called. It was not until the victory of Malcolm II at the Battle of Carham in 1018 that total victory came to the Scots, and the four peoples became united under Malcolm’s grandson, Duncan I, and Scotland came into being. This did not include Orkney and Shetland, or parts of Northern Scotland and the Hebrides which were at that time under Norse rule – another important cultural factor influencing the subsequent development of Highland history and its traditions.

It is at the boundaries between Gaelic and non-Gaelic areas that some of the most interesting folk material is to be found, for traditions pay no respect to geography, and there must always be some peripheral region where they mingle and blend into each other. Settlements too, of one people into the territory of another group, can bring about the introduction of stories and traditions which rightly belong to a different district or milieu. But, even so, there is a fascinating universality and consistency in the legends and superstitions in the Highland areas of Scotland, in spite of the different influences and ideas that have been gradually introduced down the centuries. The result of all this amalgam of cultural contacts is well-expressed by John Campbell in his introduction to his Popular Tales of the West Highlands:

In the islands where the western wanderers settled down and where they have remained for centuries, old men and women are still found who have hardly stirred from their native islands, who speak only Gaelic, and cannot read or write, and yet their minds are filled with a mass of popular lore, as various as the wreck piled on the shores of Spitzbergen.

8   Highland army officer, eighteenth-century. After F.A. Macdonald 1983, 140

2

CLAN LORE

In order to fully understand the nature of surviving tradition in Gaelic Scotland, social as well as historical factors must be taken into account. Until the final breakdown of the clan system in the eighteenth century, after the disastrous Battle of Culloden in 1746, Highlanders were organised in tribes or clans (from clann