Martyrs E-Book

Roger Hutchinson

• Herausgeber: Birlinn
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 354

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

In the 1830s and 1840s the district of Glendale on the island of Skye was swamped by immigrants cleared from other north Skye estates. The resultant overcrowding and over-use of land caused simmering discontent - not against the incomers, but against the landowners, who regarded their tenants as no more than chattels. This book is a definitive account of what happened when the powder-keg erupted and a full-scale land-war ensued. Pitched battles with police, factors and bailiffs, military intervention, arrests, trials, imprisonment and the personal intervention of the Prime Minister were to have huge consequences for crofters all over the Highlands, who, ultimately, were the victors. At the heart of the rising was a man named John MacPherson of Lower Milovaig in Glendale, a courageous, charismatic and articulate crofter who was twice imprisoned for leading a rebellion against a system which kept all but the wealthiest in a state of bitter servitude. MacPherson quickly became known as 'the Glendale Martyr'. Martyrs tells the story of John MacPherson, his comrades, his allies, his enemies and his final success.

Leseprobe

MARTYRS

Glendale and the Revolution in Skye

First published in 2015 byBirlinn LimitedWest Newington House10 Newington RoadEdinburghEH9 1qs

www.birlinn.co.uk

Copyright © Roger Hutchinson

The moral right of Roger Hutchinson 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.

ISBN 978 1 78027 322 8eISBN 978 0 85790 880 3

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Typeset by Iolaire Typesetting, NewtonmorePrinted and bound by Grafica Veneta

(www.graficaveneta.com)

To all my friends in and from Skye.You know who you are.

Revolution, n. Complete change, turning upside down, reversal of conditions.

– The Concise Oxford Dictionary

Contents

List of Illustrations

Maps

Preface

1  A Problem in the Provinces

2  The Distant Wings of a Lonely Island

3  The Class System in Skye

4  Tinder-boxes Waiting for a Spark

5  Disturbances in the Braes

6  Who Will Take the Crofters?

7  A Little Ireland in Skye

8  The Crofters Dictate the Terms of their Arrest

9  Skye as an International Symbol of Land Reform

10  The End of the Clearances and the Dawn of Community Ownership

Epilogue

Endnotes

Bibliography

Index

List of Illustrations

John MacPherson of Lower Milovaig.

Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone.

Home Secretary William Harcourt.

Lord Advocate John Blair Balfour.

The young Francis Napier.

John Murdoch.

Charles Fraser Mackintosh, MP.

Soldiers and marines are rowed into Uig Bay on 16 November 1884.

The marines first set foot on Skye soil.

Transferring officers from boat to boat at Uig quay.

Marines march up and over the Trotternish Ridge from Uig into Staffin.

Sheriff William Ivory.

A local elder begins the crofters’ meeting on Cnoc an t-Sìthein with a prayer.

John MacPherson addresses his fellow crofters as the marines approach Glendale.

Preface

Scattered around a shoreline on the most westerly peninsula in the island of Skye, Lower Milovaig is as isolated a village as still exists in the populated Highlands. A seagull flies more quickly from Lower Milovaig to the Outer Hebridean island of North Uist than to its own Inner Hebridean island capital of Portree. Lower Milovaig is at the end of the road.

It is of course a transcendently lovely part of the most beautiful archipelago in Europe. Lower Milovaig is framed by the open Minch, the round hills of the Outer Isles, and in the immediate foreground by its own inshore waters of Loch Pooltiel and the high, riven cliffs of the Husabost peninsula. The hillside behind the township is scarred by the remnants of lazybeds and peat-cuttings. The ground which slopes from the houses down to the sea is still divided into long, rectangular crofts. Those are the vestiges of a lifestyle which, until recently, was commonplace in Skye, and which men and women once held to be so valuable that they would fight for its preservation.

There has not recently been much fighting in Lower Milovaig. Twenty-first-century visitors to the place must send their imaginations on almost impossible flights to conjure moving pictures of men with long hair and beards, wearing coarse, untailored homespun trousers and jackets, carrying cudgels, shouting information and encouragement at each other in Gaelic, running out of Lower Milovaig while alarms were blown on horns from neighbouring heights; of those men, followed by their wives and with their children sprinting at their flanks, racing down the track to join battle with policemen at the Hamara bridge in central Glendale. It is difficult to picture armed marines slipping ashore here in the dead of night and scurrying through the crofts to make arrests. But those scenes, and many others, unfolded within the lifetime of a Lower Milovaig adult’s grandmother.

As a result there are two milestones in the history of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland which require, not diminution, but slight readjustment.

The first is that the Battle of the Braes in Skye in 1882 was the key event in the land war of the late 19th century. The second is that the Stornoway Trust, which was established in Lewis in 1923 largely as a result of the continuing Hebridean land struggle, was the first community-owned estate in a region which is, in the 21st century, bulging with community-owned estates.

Those events and that institution were and remain monumental. The courageous men and women who fought for the return of common grazings in Braes, and the people who founded and continue to run the democratic land trust in and around Stornoway, have earned an indelible place in history.

They were not, however, alone. As several modest voices from the north-west of Skye have mentioned over the decades, it was the revolution (I use the word carefully) on the Glendale estate in the 1880s which forced the hand of the Government and led directly both to the Napier Commission of inquiry into crofters’ conditions in 1883 and the epochal Crofters’ Act of 1886. Glendale also became, in 1905, 18 years before Lord Leverhulme gifted the most valuable portion of his Lewis property to its people, the first community-owned estate in the Highlands.

It is not the case that Glendale has been ignored by historians. The central figure in the Glendale revolt, John MacPherson, has been celebrated for over a century as the Glendale Martyr and occasionally as the Skye Martyr. In more recent times the handle has been made plural and several of John MacPherson’s friends and neighbours have joined him, in death, as a body of brothers-in-arms widely known as the Glendale Martyrs.

It is, however, the case that the pivotal significance of Glendale, in provoking William Gladstone’s administration to instigate a thorough inquiry and then to pass vital legislation, and in trailblazing the crofters’ right and ability to own and to manage their land, has too rarely been acknowledged and that its full story has not been told.

Its full story may not, of course, ever be told. It is several decades since even the youngest players in that fierce drama slipped off this mortal coil. The narrative of what happened in Glendale throughout the 19th century can now be pieced together only from second- and third-generation recollections, from letters in archives, from state papers, from court and other legal documents, from testimony to official inquiries and from the valuable but fallible reports of contemporary journalists and authors.

Whatever the limitations of those sources, they push ajar the door to an irresistible tale. Not only did the late-Victorian people of Glendale change the course of history – of their own history and that of hundreds of thousands of others – they did so in a remarkable manner. For a significant period of time those men with beards and cudgels, and their wives, and their teenaged children, issued a unilateral declaration of independence from the rest of the United Kingdom.

They denied the legitimate power of their landowners to collect rent and restrict their grazings. They denied the right of the authorities to station policemen in their midst. They contemptuously dismissed edicts of the courts in Portree, Inverness and Edinburgh. They drove representatives of the landowner and of the state out of their district with physical might. For a few years the 2,000 people of Glendale were the Highland equivalent of the Paris Commune: ordering their own affairs; enforcing their own laws; keeping their own peace; brooking no interference.

Try to do all that in the 21st century and see where it gets you. As Professor James Hunter said when we first discussed this book, ‘The remarkable thing was the Gladstone Government’s response: they sent a senior civil servant to negotiate with the Glendale crofters as if, for all the world, they were an independent power. Today you’d just get several months in jail.’ In fact, as Professor Hunter knows, the Gladstone Government had no serious alternative to treating the people of Glendale as an independent power. They had already established themselves as one. The Government could either negotiate with them or use military power against them. Ultimately, it would do both.

There are many people in Scotland – you can encounter them without trying very hard – who consider Scottish Gaels to be a defeated people, who believe that Highlanders and Hebrideans meekly surrendered the land war of the 19th century and effectively dumped themselves and their culture into the bin-bag of history. If this story of what happened in Glendale and elsewhere in Skye in the course of the 1880s helps just one of those Lowlanders to reconsider his or her views, it will have served. It is as true a story as I can tell, and it is one of conviction, courage and of ultimate victory.

Over the decades I have taken lessons in the history of Skye from too many people to remember, let alone credit here. This book owes a special debt to six of them. Ian Blackford of Lower Milovaig offered selfless assistance and encouragement while successfully campaigning to become my Member of Parliament, and we both know that the two were not connected. Morna MacLaren was, as ever, the writer’s perfect librarian: direct, knowledgeable, precise and great company. It is admirable in more ways than one that first-source archival material concerning Skye has been moved from Inverness to Portree, where it is now in the excellent hands of Anne MacLeod in the Skye and Lochalsh Archive Centre. Bob O’Hara once again negotiated on my behalf the dusty maze of the National Archives at Kew.

Two old friends proved to be particularly useful. In his retirement from the chair of history at the University of the Highlands and Islands, James Hunter felt free to lend his formidable advisory powers to me. UHI’s loss was my gain. Jim’s enthusiasm and ability subtly to point a student in the right direction were as valuable as his fathomless knowledge.

I have known Allan Campbell for even longer than I have known Jim Hunter. I was always aware that Allan comes from Colbost. I always knew that he had an intimate acquaintance-ship with the astonishing history of Glendale. I could never have guessed that he would be so generous, energetic and unstinting with his time and intellect. Moran taing, Ailean.

Many thanks also to my editor Helen Bleck, to Hugh Andrew and everybody else at that fine independent publishing house, Birlinn, and to my agent Stan.

Roger Hutchinson,Raasay, 2015

ONE

A Problem in the Provinces

THE LORD PRESIDENT of the Court of Session had a problem in the provinces.

John Inglis, Lord Glencorse, was a 72–year-old son of the manse. He had been born in Edinburgh in 1810, educated at the universities of Glasgow and Oxford, and had risen to become Solicitor General for Scotland at the age of 42 years. His distinguished legal career elevated him to the title of Lord Glencorse and then, in 1867, to the head of the judiciary in Scotland.

In the morning of 11 January 1883, John Inglis, Lord Glencorse, Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Lord President of the Court of Session, was told by a landowner’s lawyer that five crofters 250 miles away in the island of Skye had broken earlier interdicts against trespass. They had also, it was alleged, recently assaulted a shepherd. It was therefore necessary to summon them to appear before the bar in Edinburgh.

The petition and complaint were presented to Lord Glencorse’s Court of Session by Thomas Graham Murray of the distinguished Edinburgh solicitors Tods Murray & Jamieson. Thomas Murray represented the trustees of the property of the late owner of the estate of Glendale in Skye, Sir John Macpherson MacLeod, Knight Commander of the Order of the Star of India, who had died two years earlier.

On that Thursday morning in January 1883, the pantheon of Scottish high society which was represented by Thomas Graham Murray, Lord Glencorse and two other law lords found itself debating how best to summon five crofters from Skye to Edinburgh.

‘I have to ask your lordships,’ said Murray. ‘to pronounce an order ordaining the respondents to appear at the bar. In the special circumstances of this case I shall ask your lordships to allow us to send the order by registered letter.’

‘What is the order you ask for?’ said Glencorse.

‘The order I ask for is to ordain the respondents to appear at the bar,’ said Murray.

‘How many respondents are there?’ asked Glencorse’s colleague at the bar, Lord David Mure.

‘There are five of them,’ said Thomas Murray.

The Lord President of the Court of Session said that he could not understand the ‘special circumstances’ which had led Thomas Murray to suggest sending the court order to Skye by registered letter. Lord Glencorse was standing by the letter of the law, but he was also being sophistical. By January 1883 virtually every literate person in Scotland knew of the ‘special circumstances’ which obtained in Skye. ‘Have you any precedent for that mode of sending an order, Mr Murray?’ asked Lord Glencorse.

‘No, my lord,’ said Murray, ‘there is no authority. I think the matter is entirely in your lordships’ hands. The matter is not regulated by any express enactment. The Act of Sederunt that deals with it is 28, which simply says that the procedure shall be, so far as possible, the same as the procedure in a petition and complaint against the freeholders.

‘Your lordships see that this is really simply intimating an order of Court,’ said Murray, attempting a different tack, ‘and one great reason for this, without directing your attention to any other special circumstances, is the very large expense that is incurred by service in such a remote part. The service in this case practically costs £40. Now, there have already been three services. There was first the original service of interdict; and then there was the service of interim interdict; and then, lastly, there was the service of the petition and complaint.’

Despite the expense of delivering interdicts by hand, despite the ‘special circumstances’ in Skye, their Lordships were deeply reluctant to serve Court of Session orders through the mail.

‘Is there any messenger-at-arms?’ asked Lord Glencorse.

‘There is nobody nearer than Glasgow or Inverness,’ said Thomas Murray.

‘What do you say the expense was?’ asked Lord Mure.

‘Forty pounds on each occasion. Thirty pounds of fee, and £10 of expenses,’ said Murray.

‘Is there a Sheriff Court officer in Skye?’ asked Lord Glencorse.

‘There is a sheriff-substitute at Skye if there is not a sheriff officer,’ Lord Mure informed his superior.

At that, the Lord President told Thomas Murray that their lordships would convene in camera and deliver a decision on how to serve their court orders later in the day. That afternoon they reassembled and announced that they ‘did not see their way to grant the request to serve the order by registered letter’. Tods Murray & Jamieson would just have to serve it in the ordinary way.

The court would make an order for the respondents to appear personally at the bar, but Lord Glencorse thought that ‘probably they had better make it so many days after service’. He supposed it was a matter of no consequence whether they authorised it to be done by a sheriff officer rather than a messenger-at-arms.

Defeated in his well-founded efforts to entrust the summonses to the Royal Mail rather than to the person of a sheriff officer, Mr Murray said that it would be better if he had the option of employing a messenger-at-arms. He would not like to be tied down to employing a sheriff officer. He did not say so in the Court of Session, but Murray had very good reasons for that strategy.

In the afternoon of 11 January 1883, therefore, the Court of Session in Edinburgh, ‘in respect of no answer and no appearance for the respondents’, made an order for the five accused to appear personally at the bar on 1 February, provided the order was served on them ten days before that date. The court authorised either a sheriff officer or messenger-at-arms to serve the order on John MacPherson, Malcolm Matheson, Donald MacLeod, Donald Ferguson and John Morrison of Glendale in Skye. They were aged between 22 and 59 years, and all five of them lived in the small adjoining hamlets of Upper and Lower Milovaig.

Later that same day a 55–year-old messenger-at-arms who was living in the Mount Florida district of Glasgow was instructed by Tods Murray & Jamieson to proceed to Skye to pursue an order of the Court of Session. Of all the messengers-at-arms in the Scottish Lowlands, Donald MacTavish was chosen for the task for two important reasons. He had been born and raised in the rural Inverness-shire township of Dores and was a native speaker of Gaelic, which was in 1883 the default or only language of the people of Glendale. He had also recently visited Skye on similar business.

MacTavish’s Highland background and experience of Skye would have given him an even better understanding than Thomas Murray, Lord Glencorse and Lord Mure of the potential difficulties of his commission. He might have been aware that he was approaching a lions’ den. But even he cannot have anticipated the chaos, fury and violence which were to follow, let alone the consequences for the future of the north of Scotland.

Donald MacTavish left on the evening train from Glasgow on the following Monday, 15 January, and arrived in north-west Skye two days later. The remit of a messenger-at-arms of the Scottish Court of Session in 1883 was virtually identical to that of a sheriff officer. Both were responsible for serving documents and enforcing court orders.

The difference was that a sheriff officer was limited to his Sheriff Court district. In the case of Glendale that district was the island of Skye, whose Sheriff Court, of which Lords Glencorse and Mure were happily ignorant, was in the main township of Portree. Under normal circumstances a Skye-based sheriff officer attached to Portree Sheriff Court would have been sent into Glendale with court orders. As Thomas Murray had been so anxious to point out, normal circumstances did not, however, pertain in Skye early in 1883.

A messenger-at-arms was licensed to operate nationally. Having been frustrated by the law lords in their attempt to have the summonses sent by mail, Thomas Murray of Tods Murray & Jamieson and their employers, the trustees of the Glendale estate, had excellent motives for deploying a messenger-at-arms from faraway Glasgow rather than a local sheriff officer. Donald MacTavish was well aware of the source of those motives.

Six mornings after that fateful hearing before Lord Glencorse in the Scottish Court of Appeal, at midday on Wednesday, 17 January 1883, the messenger-at-arms Donald MacTavish left his hotel in the township of Dunvegan in north-western Skye for the rural crofting lands of Glendale. He had attached to his chest his distinctive silver blazon, without which he could not legally assert his authority, and was carrying the rod of office known as a wand of peace. MacTavish was also accompanied by a nervous sheriff officer from Roag near Dunvegan named Angus MacLeod, who had been persuaded to bear witness. MacLeod was known locally as Aonghas Dubh, or Black Angus.

Looking west from Dunvegan, two gargantuan flat-topped mountains stand sentinel over the broad peninsula of Glendale. Those mesas, the 1539–foot high Healabhal Mhor and its slightly taller but slimmer twin, the 1600–foot Healabhal Bheag, are volcanic plugs which, like much of the rest of the hillscape of the north-west Highlands and Islands of Scotland, were thrown up by an eruption 60 million years ago. In 1883 they were already better known as MacLeod’s Tables. They are not hysterical, careless mountains like the Cuillins to their south, or gently beckoning like the hills of Uist across the water to the west. They are brooding and peculiar and somehow out of place, like transplants from Monument Valley. They could in certain lights be seen as ominous.

Donald MacTavish and Angus MacLeod passed the lower slopes of Healabhal Mhor and strode through the scattered thatched crofthouses at Skinidin shortly after noon. They walked northwards, with the hills to their left and the sea immediately to their right. They were still almost six miles from Milovaig, where most of the writs were to be served.

Just beyond Skinidin, in the township of Colbost, Donald MacTavish lost the company of Sheriff Officer Angus MacLeod. The two men called at Colbost House, the large dwelling of the MacRaild family. Its patriarch, the 80–year-old Norman MacRaild, was a former factor of the MacPherson estates. His son, 48–year-old James MacRaild, was currently the ground officer, or local representative of the trustees of the MacPherson estate in Glendale. MacTavish and MacLeod were told that James MacRaild had gone on ahead and was waiting for the messenger-at-arms three miles further along the road, at the bridge over the River Hamara in central Glendale. They were also told that the Sheriff Officer Black Angus MacLeod ‘was threatened by the tenants’. Angus MacLeod prudently decided to wait in the MacRaild property at Colbost House for Donald MacTavish to return. Over in Glendale, James MacRaild could bear witness to MacTavish’s writs.

MacTavish strode on alone, away from Loch Dunvegan, up and over Cnoc an t-Sìthein, or Colbost Hill, a short but shadowy pass across a watershed. He saw nobody, but from the hilltops around him the messenger-at-arms heard horns being blown in warning, and he heard their blasts repeated in echoes far away to the west and north. As he crossed the summit of Cnoc an t-Sìthein he lost sight of the comforting bulk of the rest of the island of Skye. Instead, hundreds of thatched houses issuing peat smoke lay below him in half-a-dozen busy villages scattered around the head of a sea loch, on the broad floor and lower slopes of an isolated glen. He would not have seen his ultimate destination of Upper and Lower Milovaig. They were sheltered by the low hills and meandering shoreline another couple of miles beyond the River Hamara.

But he will have seen, for the first time since entering northwest Skye, a large crowd of people at the other side of the bridge over the River Hamara.

The single policeman based in Glendale, Constable Alexander MacVicar, was watching from below and had reason to fear the worst. That morning Constable MacVicar had left his station and set off on his rounds, ‘and on my reaching the Post Office there were about eighty of the Milivaig tenants there armed with sticks.

‘I called in the Post Office and the most of them followed and the rest were about the door. I found that they were waiting for Mr MacTavish.

‘The people were assembling to the Post Office from all directions for this purpose. I remained there until MacTavish and the Ground Officer came around 1 p.m. The crowd met them at the Glendale Bridge and immediately turned them.’ One man, said Constable MacVicar, ‘ran from the crowd and bawled out to come and turn me, but all the rest told him to be quiet’.

Messenger-at-arms Donald MacTavish did, as had been pre-arranged, meet Ground Officer James MacRaild at the eastern approach to the bridge over the River Hamara. They got no further.

‘I met at the Fasach side of the bridge crossing the Glendale [Hamara] River,’ MacTavish later told the police, ‘a crowd of crofters and others numbering from sixty to seventy who had been waiting at the Glendale Post Office, on seeing us coming down the Brae at Fasach came along to the Bridge to meet us, all this time the horn was blowing which was the signal for assembling the crofters from all parts of the Glen.

‘On meeting the crowd I had my blazon displayed on my breast and held my wand of peace in my hand, one of the crowd took hold of me and placed a short stick to my breast and with the assistance of other two or three gave me a push which shoved me back some four or five yards, saying, “turn back now, you won’t be allowed to go further towards Milivaig”.

‘I said “I am a messenger-at-arms from the Court of Session proceeding to serve the orders of the Court of Session upon some crofters at Milivaig”. I produced and began to read a certified copy of said orders to the crowd and all this time was being pushed along the road back to Dunvegan, assaulted with sticks, pelted with stones, clods, mud and dung off the road, and very frequently tripped, causing me to fall on my face on the road, [and I] was in this manner pushed before the crowd towards Fasach, Colbost and Skinidin townships, a distance of fully four miles . . .’

Back on the westward side of the bridge, the helpless Constable Alexander MacVicar saw the crofters ‘pushing and shoving MacTavish and throwing pail fulls of water and gutters about his head. They had also an old bag full of gutters and they were striking them with this.’ ‘Gutters’ was mud and household waste, possibly leavened with sewage. Donald MacTavish did not mention this particular humiliation. The Glendale postmaster, a 55–year-old Crimean War veteran named Peter MacKinnon from Lephin in the centre of the glen, who was present and was entirely sympathetic with his neighbours, shortly afterwards denied ‘that the people deforced MacTavish, till MacTavish lifted a stick; and then a half-witted lad threw a pail of water about his ears’. The stick lifted by MacTavish was presumably his wand of peace.

Whatever the substance in the pail, the messenger-at-arms noted that the crowd of angry crofters quickly grew to ‘two hundred men and boys’. Two years later, in June 1885, the Oban Times newspaper published a victory chant of the incident by a Glendale bard who called himself ‘A’ Chreag Mhor’ (‘The Great Rock’) and who was possibly among the 200 men and boys. At first sight of the Ground Officer James MacRaild, related A’ Chreag Mhor, there was a cry of ‘Glacadh beo e, Am poll-mona gun cuir sinn e.’ (‘Let him be caught alive so that we can put him in a peat bog.’) ‘Ach ghabh iad doigh a b’ fhearr . . .’ he continued, ‘But they employed a better method: he was very nearly drowned . . .’

Those 200 drove Donald MacTavish and the Ground Officer James MacRaild through Fasach, over the pass again and back through Colbost and Skinidin. ‘When meeting any person on the road going the contrary way,’ said MacTavish, ‘the crowd to show their supposed bravery would renew their attacks of pushing us at our backs with sticks, kicking, tripping, stones and dirt throwing, shouting and hurraying, and this they always did when passing the crofters’ houses along the townships of Fasach, Colbost and Skinidin.’

Immediately to the south of Skinidin the crowd forced Donald MacTavish and James MacRaild over the Brunigill burn. That small tributary of Loch Dunvegan marked the boundary between the estate of the late Sir John MacPherson MacLeod at Glendale and the residual properties of MacLeod of MacLeod. A hundred years later a son of Milovaig who had not been born at the time said that he had been told that MacTavish and MacRaild were ‘vomiting blood’ by the time they crossed the bridge over the Brunigill. Another descendant of the crofters was told that James MacRaild had begged to be allowed to return home to Colbost House, but his assailants would have none of it. They were determined to drive the ‘law-enforcers’ across the estate boundary.

The crofters themselves did then return to Colbost, went to the MacRaild dwelling at Colbost House ‘and took Angus MacLeod the sheriff officer at Roag out of the house and put him on the road.’ ‘Bha Aonghas Dubh a Roag . . .’ recalled A’ Chreag Mhor, ‘Black Angus from Roag was seeking mercy from Norman [MacRaild] and when the pursuers came, they were all pacified . . . Norman said, shouting aloud . . . “One after the other of them was employed by myself, but when they became rebels, they would not listen to me any longer.”’

MacTavish, MacRaild and MacLeod were collected at the east side of the Brunigill bridge in a carriage which had been despatched by the proprietrix of the Dunvegan Hotel. Once he was safely back inside the hotel, Donald MacTavish felt ‘pain on the right leg and on the right side of my body caused by being struck by the crofters’ sticks and the stones with which they were assaulting me. James MacRaild who was also with me was also assaulted in the same way as I was tho’ not to such an extent.’ Angus MacLeod was apparently unharmed.

‘MacThabhais an t-sumanaidh . . .’ wrote A’ Chreag Mhor, ‘MacTavish of the summonsing will never again serve us with a notice; he almost met his death when we left him in Brunigill. It was the hostess in the Dunvegan change-house who provided you with a means of transport, King above, I was amazed that it wasn’t smashed to dust . . . You earned your pay dearly . . . you would have been better gathering shellfish than be engaged in such dangerous officership.’

Back in Glendale, Constable MacVicar, a 29–year-old bachelor from North Uist in the Outer Hebrides who had lodged with a Glendale family, diplomatically ‘could not recognise [any of the offending crofters] at this distance’. With the help of James MacRaild, Messenger-at-Arms Donald MacTavish would later list by name many of the crowd of youths and men, several of whom were from Milovaig and two of whom – Malcolm Matheson and John Morrison – were on his list of summonses.

‘I identified two of the Milivaig crofters, viz Archibald Gillies in the front rank of the crowd then six or seven deep,’ said MacTavish, ‘and Malcolm MacLeod at the end of the crowd[.] Besides these two there were in the crowd who took a leading position in opposing me and assaulting myself and my witness [James MacRaild] Thomas MacLean son of Donald MacLean, Milivaig, Malcolm Mathieson, Malcolm Morrison, Alexander McLean, Roderick MacLeod, Donald MacKinnon son of John MacKinnon, John Morrison, Allan McKinnon all from Milivaig, and Donald Cameron from Fasach who joined the crowd at Fasach . . .’

One extremely significant name was absent from MacTavish’s roll.

As darkness fell in Glendale, young Constable Alexander MacVicar felt very alone. While he had been in the Glendale post office earlier that day, he reported to his chief constable in Inverness, ‘one of them . . . was squaring with his stick to my face and said that he would take my life, but I took this as being in fun’.

‘The whole of the Milivaig tenants were watching last night,’ wrote Constable MacVicar at his desk in the long evening of 17 January, 1883, ‘and some of them were a little the worse for drink.

‘They are also watching tonight. I found them today civil, but threatening by hinting at the affair . . . They were cursing and swearing supposing 600 policemen would come that they would loose [sic] their lives before they would get in . . . They told me that I would do myself here and that they would not allow anymore to come. It is questionable whether I can get to meet the other part of my district.’

That was why Thomas Murray of Tods Murray & Jamieson had wanted to put the summonses in the post. An ordinarily placid and law-abiding part of the Scottish Highlands had become a no-go zone.

TWO

The Distant Wings of a Lonely Island

IF THE ISLAND OF SKYE is, as the poet Sorley Maclean suggested, the great dead bird of Scotland afloat in the western ocean, it is a deceased avian with four or five wings. Skye is composed of sizeable peninsulas of dramatically different shapes and topography, which radiate outwards from the central core of the Cuillin mountain range.

Before and for many years after a modern road network was laid across the island, those peninsulas contained discrete, effectively insular communities, largely disconnected one from the other. A native of Sleat in the south and a native of Trotternish in the north would each regard themselves as Sgiathanaich, or Skye people, and they would certainly know of one another’s existence, but most of them would never in their lives set foot in the other’s townships – if, indeed, they ever left their own.

One of those misshapen floating wings is the 100 square miles of land which is loosely known as Glendale, whose eastern borders are Loch Dunvegan and Loch Bracadale and the isthmus between them. Glendale is the larger part of the old parish of Duirinish, which also includes the township and castle of Dunvegan. Across the tapering head of Loch Dunvegan the townships of Skinidin and Colbost, which face the old castle and its surrounding settlements over a mile of water broken by several stepping-stone islets, are the most easterly villages of the main district of Glendale.

Skinidin and Colbost became part of the 19th-century Glendale estate. But historically and socially they are either the first approaches to Glendale or the last outposts of northwestern Skye before Colbost Hill is crossed and the townships of Fasach and Glasphein stand as gateposts to a thoroughly insular community within a larger island. Before the 1840s Glendale itself was no more than ‘one valley . . . about two miles in length, which stretches from the head of Loch Poltiel [sic] in a southerly direction, until it reaches near the base of the Smaller Helvel. Its breadth is from half a mile to three quarters of a mile; its sides sloping gradually, and covered with very rich pasture. It is divided by a considerable stream, here called the Amhainn Mhor, the Large River [later the River Hamara]; a title which, however, it scarcely deserves to enjoy.’

As the crow flies, central and western Glendale are nearer, over the strip of salt water which was known in the 19th century as Uist Sound, to Benbecula and North Uist in the Outer Hebrides than to Portree, the capital of Skye. During the millennia when travel by sea was easier than travel by land, and when fishing was a primary occupation, Glendale’s link to the Outer Hebrides was even more marked.

The district of Glendale grew steadily until it reached from Dunvegan Head in the north to Idrigill Point in the south, and westward to Neist Point and Waterstein. It contains mountains and glens, a large river, harbours and inlets, a hundred burns, steep cliffs and high waterfalls. It is likely to have been populated as early as any other part of Skye, which is to say in the 7th millennium BC, shortly after the retreat of the last Ice Age.

The modern history of Glendale began in the Middle Ages. Dunvegan Castle, which became the ancestral seat of the heads of Clan Leod, the Macleods of MacLeod, was first raised as a Norse fortress when the island of Skye was part of the Kingdom of Norway. The MacLeods, a Norse tribe by origin, assumed control of most of Skye, including Glendale, in the 13th century AD. The MacLeod chiefs would not relinquish Glendale until the 19th century, and still held some of their Hebridean territory in the 21st century, 750 years after Norway had ceded Skye to the Kingdom of Scotland in 1266.

In 1703 Martin Martin, a native of the north of Skye who transplanted himself to London society, anticipated Sorley Maclean by asserting that ‘Skie (in the antient language Skianach, i.e. wing’d) is so called because the two opposite Northern Promonteries (Vaterness lying North-west, and Trotterness North-east) resemble two wings.’ Martin had probably never crossed the pass into lonely Glendale, which he referred to not once in the Skye chapter of his Description of the Western Islands of Scotland. His omission is illuminative. There was in the 17th and 18th centuries no particular reason for an educated young gentleman of Skye to cross Loch Dunvegan or the pass over Colbost Hill, and there were plenty of comfortable reasons for him to remain on the Dunvegan side of the loch. Even in 1841, when the provision of turnpike roads had improved greatly in the remainder of Skye and in Duirinish ‘there are lines of excellent road traversing it in various directions, and every stream that crosses these lines is spanned by a bridge. The district of Glendale is the only part that is yet left in its original inaccessible state.’

It had not always been so neglected. The track north of Colbost which led to Dunvegan Head passed through the township of Borreraig. In earlier centuries the MacCrimmons of Borreraig had been hereditary pipers to the chiefs of Clan MacLeod, for which they were rewarded with decent tacks of land, and had once opened a nationally renowned piping college in their farmsteadings at Borreraig. Once upon a time the MacCrimmons ‘were well educated, intermarried with highly respectable families, and were universally regarded as vastly superior to the common class of the country people’.

By the end of the 18th century their days of glory were gone. In about 1770 MacLeod of MacLeod removed from the later MacCrimmons their lieu of Borreraig farm and the family was left to fend for itself. Some emigrated, some joined the army, others became indistinguishable from their neighbours. By the late 19th century there were still two MacCrimmon families in Glendale, but their male heads of household were occupied as a tailor and a crofter. In 1883 a 48–year-old crofter and fisherman from Borreraig named Alexander MacKenzie knew about but could not personally recall any of the fabled piping MacCrimmons. There were no pipers in Glendale, he said. There was yet a descendant of the MacCrimmons living in Borreraig, but ‘He is just as ourselves, running north and south for subsistence for our families.’ At least some of the rest were in Canada. The archaeologist Dr Anne MacSween, whose mother was born and raised in Glendale, would write of the occasion in 1830 when the ten families of Lorgill in south Glendale were given 24 hours to join the mv Midlothian in Loch Snizort and be transported to Nova Scotia. One of the families removed were MacCrimmons. It is said that once in Canada the head of that family composed a well-known pipe tune titled ‘The Lorgill Crofters’ Farewell to Skye’.

When the First Statistical Account of Scotland was compiled in the early 1790s, the task of describing Duirinish in Skye fell to a local Church of Scotland minister, the Reverend Mr William Bethune. Reverend Bethune dated his report October 1790, and reported that the number of souls in his parish had risen from 2,568 40 years earlier to a current 3,000. The increase was despite a number of large ships having transported hundreds of emigrants from Lochs Bracadale and Dunvegan to America. ‘The old people affirm,’ he wrote, ‘that they remember land which lay waste in several districts, not only of this parish, but in several parts of the island, for want of inhabitants to occupy them.’

William Bethune described a relatively healthy and active late-18th-century community. There was in 1790 ‘a more judicious and rational treatment of children and women in childbirth, than was formerly observed . . .’ Above all, smallpox, that perennial mass-murderer of humans, had been held at bay in Skye since around 1760 by early techniques of immunisation through a mild dose of the infection. The result was a relatively healthy and long-lived population. ‘There are at present two men, one of them 88, the other 95, and two women, one of them 93, and the other 97 years . . . Marriages here produce, in general, from 5 to 12 children, and upwards. The cottages are full of inhabitants,’ reported Reverend Bethune.

‘In every district of the parish, there are some weavers, male and female, a few tailors, a blacksmith in every barony, some boat-builders and house-carpenters.’ Every married labourer ‘has a small portion of land, he raises a little flax, and has a few sheep’. The flax for linen and the sheeps’ wool were essential ‘so that his wife furnishes him with his whole wearing apparel’. They grew oats, potatoes and barley and there was still plenty of fish in the surrounding sea. ‘The people go a-fishing for their own use, or when they see an appearance of herrings. There are very few bred seamen, but all are expert rowers, good hardy watermen, and skilled in making a boat with sails.’ Over the next few decades Glendale would become celebrated for ‘one culinary vegetable, i.e the cabbage, which thrives better in this parish, I believe, than anywhere else in Scotland.

‘The Glendale Cabbage is known and sought after not only throughout all Skye, but likewise in many places on the mainland; and its immense size, combined with its delicacy of flavour, entitles it to the pre-eminence which it has attained. The seed is said to have been obtained from a foreign vessel which was wrecked at the foot of Glendale many years ago.’

The common people, concluded their minister, ‘are blessed with excellent parts; a liberal share of strong natural sense, and great acuteness of understanding. They are peaceable and gentle in their dispositions, and are very industrious when they work for themselves; but when they work for hire or wages, they are inclined to be lazy and indifferent; they are rather too fond of changes and emigrations; and though they are brave and very loyal, they are averse to the naval and military services, and are extremely disgusted with the idea of being pressed.’

The Duirinish section of the Second Statistical Account of Scotland was written 50 years after the first, in February 1841 by a young minister who had been despatched to Skye from his birthplace in Argyllshire. He may not have realised it, but Reverend Archibald Clerk reported from the district at an historical watershed.