Britain’s Last Frontier Read online

  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 prid
e – 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 f
rontier.

  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.