I can scarcely remember my grandmother’s voice

I can scarcely remember my grandmother’s voice – neither of my grandmothers’ voices. Like everyone I had two grannies and in my case both my grannies are now long dead for they were born into a different world, in the late 1900s. I like having that link, however tenuous, with a Scotland that’s gone forever.

My paternal Granny, Harriet (Hetty), was a strong woman, and tall as befits a McHardy from Braemar. In common with lots of folk I didn’t take much interest in either of my grannies lives but filed away in my subconscious were the odd name and incident and these aided and abetted by a few photographs and internet access to census returns, marriage, birth and death certificates have meant I’m able to better place my grannies into their family settings preceding the years I knew them. A wee bit, at least.

Top row: Harriet as a child with her parents at Braemar; at home in Aberdeen, early 1930s; a day out on Deeside with Granda and dog Glen; McHardys at home at Tomintoul, Braemar late 1920s. Bottom row: Harriet with daughter Hetty on Union Street in Aberdeen, 1920s; at home in the 1950s; Braemar pipe band rehearsing; McHardys at the croft on Morrone

Harriet, let’s call her Granny 1, was born on the humble croft her parents worked on the slopes of Morrone, a hill behind Braemar. A bit lower than a Munro, Morrone is a Corbett, which means it’s between 2,500 ft and 3,000ft – an unlikely place to try to farm but somehow a community of five households did just that and they called their wee fermtoun, Tomintoul. This is a different Tomintoul from the well-known village of that name. The McHardys worked 7 acres of this the most elevated cultivated land in the whole of Scotland so it must have surprised a few people that in 1864 Braemar’s Tomintoul had the unlikely distinction of producing the country’s biggest golden yellow turnip – thirty-three inches in circumference and weighing in at a whopping 14 lbs – some achievement for land tilled from under heather, trees and boulders though as far as I know it had nothing to do with my family. For the area to sustain five families would have taken immense effort in clearing a stretch of the hillside of its heather, trees and boulders and neutralising its acid soil – they did this with lime produced from limestone in communal lime kilns. Life on Morrone would have been idyllic in spring, summer and autumn but a mighty struggle to survive in during winter in what is one of the coldest areas of Scotland. Granny’s children – my dad, aunty and uncle – spent childhood holidays on the old croft and retained strong attachment to the area. My husband and I climbed up Morrone one fine summer’s day and were astonished to discover my dad who had driven out to Braemar with us, and was then about seventy and in poor health, struggling up behind us. He made it up that purple remembered hill he’d scampered over all those decades earlier – made it up one last time.

The Tomintoul crofters were poor folk so that everyone had to do their bit. The young tended to go into service – girls became cooks or house servants while boys found work on the big estates of Balmoral and Invercauld or went into a trade. When no local jobs were available the connections made through these landed estates opened up jobs elsewhere in the UK. Granny became a cook to a wealthy London family and on her return to Scotland she cooked for a family in Stonehaven. One of her older sisters, Hellen, became the lifelong companion of ‘a lady’, a Miss Poole from Shepton Mallet, and the two young women travelled extensively abroad and in the UK. When Miss Poole died, as an old woman, the also elderly Hellen returned to Scotland, to Aberdeen near to Granny and the rest of her family.   

Census at Tomintoul, Braemar, 1881

But I’m getting ahead of myself. First there were two world wars to contend with. My grandfather, Granny’s young husband, joined the Royal Army Medical Corps (I have his notebooks from that time in which he scribbled down treatments for everything from shell shock to chilblains along with his wallet containing baby teeth from his children back home). I can only imagine the anxiety Granny suffered during the long years of the Great War guessing what her husband was enduring for he was a stretcher bearer in some of the worst fighting at the Battle of the Somme. But he survived it all. They lived in a tiny tenement flat in Skene Street in Aberdeen until the 1930s when bungalows were built on the west side of the town, off Mid-Stocket Road. It’s a mystery how they afforded to buy one but buy one they did and it remained in the family for over seventy years, nearly unchanged in all that time. It is in this house that I remember the only word spoken by Granny – whenever we arrived on holiday (when I was a bairn) she would pick me up to gauge how much heavier I’d got since our last meeting and call me Tina. I was Tina to no-one else but her. One word isn’t much of a vocal memory but there is a phrase that became something of a family legend though I can’t claim to have heard Granny speak it since I hadn’t then been born. It was during World War 2 when Granny expressed her resistance to the Nazis as the German Luftwaffe flew over Aberdeen dropping their bombs on the city, she’d be out the backdoor shaking a fist at them and shouting defiantly,

“Awa ye buggers!”

I think I take after Granny. Now I can’t claim to have heard her then but I recognise that spirit that stayed with her through her latter years. I don’t know what else Granny was doing through the war while her sons were abroad on military service and her daughter fulfilling her civic duty alerting Aberdonians to air raids but she appears to have made a point of stocking up on food for more than thirty years after her death we found tins of wartime food stored in her cellar. Unopened.

Unusually, my grandmother was ten years older than her husband, my Granda, and considerably taller, but for all their unconventionality theirs was a long, and as far as I am aware, a happy marriage that began in 1911 when my grandfather returned from a spell working in New York to marry his Hetty. He was 21 and she 31 and they had met when he was working as a young baker in Braemar.

Granny was a woman of her time – such a silly phrase as everyone is. She wore her skirts long, often to her ankles, over red flannel petticoats. The beautiful costumes I found in her wardrobe may not have been hers but her sister Hellen’s (though I don’t know for sure).

Harriet as a young woman and with some clothes found in her wardrobe

It is a pity photographs are silent. Sometimes it is a pity. Granny’s voice will always remain in my imagination, an odd word captured in a rather high-pitched, thin, reedy tone and a smile behind each one. If only I could capture more of them.

***

My other granny, my maternal granny (Granny 2), has also been more or less silenced since death. She was about ten years younger than Granny 1 and was also a daughter of a crofting family but hers lived in the Black Isle which enjoys one of the mildest climates in Scotland. A Highlander from Cromarty, Granny 2 was Isabella (Bella), a Miller (sometimes Millar) whose extended family included the geologist Hugh Miller. Like Granny I, Granny 2 was tallish but otherwise they were very different types of women. For one thing, Granny 2 would never have thought of much less uttered Granny 1’s immortal commands to the Luftwaffe.

While not being able to very clearly recall Granny 2’s voice I should because when she was old and had succembed to dementia she would near-endlessly recite rhymes remembered from her childhood or those she shared with her own children. “Here we go round the mulberry bush was often shortened to “on a cold a frosty morning” recited with gusto, as our daughter remembers. “Losh, losh” she’d repeat over and over again – losh being a Scots word for surprise though Granny didn’t say it with any sense of its meaning but more a lament, for what I can only wonder. It was a sad end to her life, drawn out over many years – she seated day-long with nothing to occupy her mind and slipping inevitably into a world of her own, living with her family but separately.

I imagine because I wasn’t there the night she called out in her sleep for her recently dead husband – “John!” was uttered urgently but softly in that light way people with the Gaelic have of talking with a soft palate so that words trickle from the front of the mouth. Bella’s vocabulary was well sprinkled with the Gaelic though she disdained Scots for her generation were encouraged to be ashamed of their own traditional language. A generation before young Bella was born her family were cleared (a polite term for being driven off their land) from Strathconon and ended up in the Black Isle and it was instilled into the people that progress equalled English and backwardness equalled Scots. So Bella venerated the English language and I recall her urging me to say ‘yes’ instead of ‘aye’ – but I cannot remember how she said it.

Bella’s wedding at the Glenalbyn Hotel in Inverness in 1912. Bella and her husband John are surrounded by family and friends – Bella’s sisters on her right. John’s father is the exhausted-looking man with beard fourth left of Bella. He died in 1914, the year following the death of one of his sons of blackwater fever in Mozambique. I don’t know if his son, Rod, is in the picture.

For all that she was a kind and gentle woman, more stoic than her appearance might suggest, encouraging her young farmer husband to take the plunge and rent a bigger farm and in time buy it. They were a team. In common with all farmers’ wives, Bella was responsible for some farm work as well as her domestic duties – eggs and dairy products which she sold at markets each week loading loading eggs, cheese, butter and cream onto the trap and driving the horse the twenty or so miles to Inverness for the weekly market – and presumably Dingwall and Muir of Ord, too.

She and my grandfather married in 1912. Like my Aberdeen grandparents they were 21 and 31 but unlike them the bride was younger than her husband. Unlike Harriet’s husband, Bella’s man was not active abroad during the Great War as farming was a reserved occupation and he had carried out pre-war training in England when he was introduced to the joys of motorcycling but couldn’t work out how to stop his bike so drove round and round the compound until it ran out of fuel. Family members who were at the front included Granny’s cousin whose letters from the trenches are shown here. Many Scottish women were forced to give up their jobs to travel to England to manufacture munitions during the Great War. Bella’s sister, Anne, was one of them conscripted by the government but she was allowed home towards the end of the war to take care of Bella and her children who were suffering from the deadly Spanish ‘flu of 1918. They all survived.

Top row: Bella as a young woman; Bella seated left with family including her mother at Rosemarkie beach in 1923; Bella with mother, daughter and granddaughter c. 1941; in her garden in 1971. Bottom row: Bella at home c.1961; air mail letter for German prisoners of war; on pillion of her younger son’s motorcycle c.1946.

Bella had a passion for auctions or maybe it was a passion driven by necessity. She and John moved into their final home and farm near Strathpeffer in the 1920s and the rambling old farmhouse took a lot of filling. Bella furnished it with all sorts of weird and wonderful pieces purchased from the Dingwall mart, including a large glass display case of stuffed birds I spent so much time staring at as a young child. The house was a magical playground for us children with more than fourteen rooms plus bathrooms. There was a pantry where Granny’s home-made jams, jellies, chutneys and wine (lethal) were stored, a laundry with an enormous timber sink and a dairy where Granny turned the farm’s milk into the butter, cream and cheese she sold at markets. The dairy was always cold irrespective of the heat outside for it was built as a short wing lit by a series of small windows along a single wall shielded from direct sunlight. A row of meat safes and metal presses sat on long wide shelves to keep food cool and insect free. A large room with ample space for food on one side while the other was stacked with decades worth of Ross-shire Journals and editions of the Scotsman. And now I cannot access Ross-shires of that time. I could write a whole blog on the different rooms, some grand and others basic and functional but the lovely building that was always open house to so many in the area, friends, family, visitors and strangers alike was mysteriously destroyed by fire shortly after the farm was sold.

Bella was said to have had the second sight, based on a single incident I believe. The second sight is a phenomenon some believe occurs when someone ‘sees’ an event happening either in some distant place or in the future. In Granny’s case her experience came during World War Two. Her young son who’d lied about his age to join the army disappeared in North Africa after his tank was destroyed. The family didn’t know if he was alive or dead. One morning Bella confidently announced that he was safe for she had dreamt of her son as a baby in a cradle that rocked back and fore, quicker and quicker, until it slowed to a stop. Her confidence was well-founded and her son did eventually return home after four years as a prisoner in Nazi labour camps in Germany and Poland.

Letters to Bella from her cousin thanking her for her parcels sent to him in the trenches during WW1 in 1916 and 1917

Both Bella and Hetty grew up at a time shanks’ pony was the most common means of getting around and horse and trap for longer journeys. They lived into the age of motor cars and motor cycles, the replacement of paraffin and town gas with electricity, from a world in which correspondence meant letters and telegrams to one with near instantaneous communication, the wireless and telephone and eventually television. They lived through a century of incredible societal changes. Of devastating world wars and numerous other wars and conflicts and the crumbling of the British empire. It would be wonderful to be able to sit down and talk to them both about the world’s momentous events and little domestic dramas but that’s just idle contemplation. Now it is easy to record grannies in full flow so their voices can accompany those who care about them into the future and that can only be a good thing.

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A Scot in Africa – victim of Blackwater Fever

Who needs Superman when there is Duncan? The coming of hydro power to Scotland

Duncan was a powder monkey, one of a team of tunnel miners, employed to bring electricity to the Highlands, north and west of Dingwall, through an immense hydro-electric scheme of dams, tunnels, lochs and power stations. While working at Strathvaich Duncan had gone into a shed to fetch blasting gear when the box of detonators he was holding blew up in his hand and with it the whole shed.

Duncan MacRae

“That Saturday afternoon in June 1911, Oskar Johansson lost all his fair hair. His left eye was ripped out of its socket by the force of the blast. The right hand was severed at the wrist by a shard of rock.”

As I read Henning Mankell’s The Rock Blaster I was pulled up short at his description of an explosion and injuries to the book’s hero, Oskar Johansson, for they were near identical to those suffered by a relative of mine, Duncan MacRae, in the 1950s in an accident not dissimilar to the one suffered by the fictitious Johansson and it got me thinking that Duncan, Duncie, deserved to have his story told as well.

My problem was that Duncan is long dead, he died back in 1991. And that generation of the family has gone and with them first-hand knowledge of the tragedy that befell Duncan that day at Strathvaich. Memories and anecdotes survive about Duncie, his horrific injuries – his left hand was blown off, he lost his left eye, his right eye was damaged and shards of metal and pieces of wire were lodged in his thigh, face and eyelids. He was supplied with a metal hook in place of his missing hand. He was twenty-nine.

One of my earliest memories as a very young child is watching my aunt, a nurse, using tweezers to pluck bits of metal out of Duncan’s studded face. They stood before the farmhouse kitchen window to capture the best light, Duncan stoic throughout scarcely wincing though the pain must have been excruciating.

The Scottish Highlands mythologised and derided in equal measure; dramatic, romantic scenery or barren wilderness of no use to man or beast. But the Highlands aren’t called highlands for nothing. Mountain ranges that trap winter snow that melts into the burns, rivers, lochans and lochs. And rain that isn’t unknown especially towards the west. Water in large quantities described as a wasted resource that should be exploited to produce electric power – hydro power to provide light and heat to Highlanders dependent on Tilley lamps and open fires.

The Conon Valley hydro scheme was one of several planned during WWII and the baby of Tom Johnston, a Labour MP who became Secretary of State for Scotland under Churchill in 1941. Johnston was determined that electric power would be provided to people in the north of Scotland who had no access to the Grid which he regarded as unfair and a deterrent to the Highlands attracting industry and employment. Not everyone agreed.

Proposal after proposal to produce hydro-electricity there was blocked by the House of Lords. The greatest opposition to electrifying the region came from influential wealthy interests who were well-represented in the Lords – sporting estates and coal mine owners (the latter afraid of competition from hydro-electricity). Some objectors cited the loss of the area’s dramatic scenery since dam construction would involve ripping up glens to create new lochs and dams. Land that remained more or less the same for eons would be filled with concrete and bird and animal habitats lost forever. There was less concern for the few people still living in the glens being forced off land generations of their families had inhabited. 

A Professor Gruffydd (MP) feared the Highlands would be turned into something akin to a –

“Dublin slum. That has already happened in the rural parts of Scotland and in the Lowlands.”

(27 May 1943, House of Commons)

A habitual critic was MP Sir Gerald Nabarro, a crashing bore with a constituency near Birmingham who took every opportunity to rant in the House of Commons about English taxes having to provide a few Highlanders with electricity. Speaking in July 1958 he had the Strathfarrar scheme in his sights –

“This is not a parochial Scottish issue. This is a matter of an expenditure of £14 million by a nationalised industry.”

One of the bees in his bonnet was his insistence that producing electricity by hydro in the Highlands was far costlier than it would be in England (theoretically) – as if England would agree to such monumental changes to its countryside and ecology and had the physical conditions for such schemes.  His complaint that hydro was costlier than coal and nuclear were challenged on grounds that costs of coal and nuclear production kept rising while they fell for hydro power.

In 1958 Conservative and Unionist MP, David Robertson, must have still been wearing his London constituency hat when he switched to Caithness and Sutherland and described the Conon scheme as –

“the unwanted extravagance in the far north”

Supporters of the Conon hydro scheme worried the intended benefits for the Highlands would be diverted south to the central belt to boost industries, incomes and utilities there. This did eventually happen but not before the great hydro venture provided exclusively for the north of Scotland, to the Highlands and islands and the northeast cities of Aberdeen and Dundee.

Under Johnston’s plan the body set up to operate the Conon Hydro scheme, the North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board (NSHEB), was given temporary ownership of sections of rivers running through the region’s three estates and at the completion of the works the majority of fishing rights were transferred to local angling clubs, but fishing rights on the rivers Conon and Blackwater were sold to private owners (though locals did not always bother going through official channels, including at least one serving police officer who was partial to a salmon from the Blackwater). Three landowners held much of the land between Contin and Ullapool: the Lovat estate, the Fairburn Stirlings and Spencer Nairns of Struy.  They were concerned about intrusions onto their land and loss of revenue from fishing and shooting.

With little infrastructure beyond Contin about 160 publicly-funded new roads were constructed so lorries and materials could get into the glens and straths and on completion of the scheme there was a fair amount of anger when some roads were then handed over to the estates as their private property. 

Tom Johnston was always aware that business interests outside the Highlands would be eyeing up the scheme’s potential money-making opportunities so he ensured the NSHEB was independent and had control over its own finances in order that Scottish people and businesses would benefit first and foremost and lucrative contracts would not be picked off by bigger English competitors. In 1943 a bill to bring light to the Highlands eventually made it through parliament. The whole scheme was phased in three parts; each requiring a parliamentary act.

And so crofts, houses, roads, tracks, bridges, burns, plants from trees to tiny flowering species and the insects, birds and animals they provided for were forever lost beneath concrete and water. Six dams at Glascarnoch, Vaich, Luichart, Meig, Torrachilty and Orrin and six power stations at Achanalt, Grudie Bridge, Mossford, Luichart, Orrin and Torrachilty along with new lochs at Fannich and Luichart were built in 350 square miles of Ross-shire. Rivers were diverted. Land was dug out. Land was raised. Millennia of rock blasted out of the earth. Part of the Dingwall to Kyle of Lochalsh railway line was submerged and rerouted.

Such a huge undertaking required labour. Lots and lots of men and a few women were hired. Many were local – lorries picked men up (including recently demobbed soldiers and former prisoners of war still in the area) from around Strathpeffer, Dingwall, the Black Isle and miles beyond very early in the day and transported them along winding single-track roads to the building sites and start of usually 12-hour shifts, sometimes longer depending on the job that day. Outside work, summer and winter. Labourers flocked in from around Scotland, Ireland and around Europe. The initial involvement of politicians and planners, men in velour-collared coats and Homburg hats, gave way to men in donkey jackets and tackety boots.

Workers who were not local lived in camps that might comprise ex-war Nissan huts or forestry commission cabins previously occupied by Canadian lumberjacks stationed in Scotland during WWII. Through once silent straths and glens save for the cry of eagles and trickle of burns burst the relentless din of industry – explosions, drilling, excavating and hammering.  

Before the coming of the Conon Hydro scheme Duncan ran a mobile shop. His cousin, Don, remembers –

“He had a little Ford van, BGA 555, in which he used to sell fish, fruit and vegetables starting at Brahan P.OW. camp and going up the West Coast nearly up to Ullapool calling at all the crofts along the way. That wee van was an Aladdin’s cave for me. When we stopped to eat, I would have an Arbroath smokie with a choice of Irn Bru or American Creme Soda to wash it down.” 

Don was much younger than Duncan and he recalled getting a hurl to Loch Luichart on the crossbar of Duncan’s bike to poach fish with an ‘otter’ (a sort of wooden kite with baited lines that floated across the water). A few miles beyond Loch Luichart lies Loch Vaich and it’s here Duncan was employed as a ‘powder monkey’ handling explosives to blast a tunnel through the rocky landscape so that water from a dam built at Vaich could flow into Loch Glascarnoch.

The ambitious project succeeded enabling hundreds of thousands of Scots easy access to electricity. Before the Conon complex only 1 out of 14 farms and 1 in 100 crofts had electricity. By the late-fifties the vast majority were linked up. Areas most difficult to connect such as the western isles were provided with calor gas in the interim.

New electricity lines at Elphin on the Ullapool-Inchnadamff road with Cul Beag, Cul Mor and Loch Veyatie behind.
Mrs MacLean hay-making at her croft near Elphin with poles bringing electricity in the background.

One ambition for electrification was it would attract industries to the north but that never really materialised. However, having electricity at the flick of a switch was overwhelmingly welcomed by the majority of people in the north who could largely dispense with paraffin lamps and local industries such as farming and boat building benefitted greatly from the availability of electrical power for operating machinery. 

A decade on from the transformation of the Highlands Tom Johnston’s early concerns remained valid. The nationalised and autonomous North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board was always under threat but it wasn’t until Thatcher in 1989 that the real damage was done when the Board and its sister in the south of Scotland were privatised as Scottish Hydro Electric plc and Scottish Power plc, freeing these companies to sell their electricity anywhere in the UK – and charge the folk of the straths and glens and everywhere else in Scotland more for their home-produced electricity than consumers of it in the south of England.  And so it has remained to this day.

For his devastating injuries; the loss of one eye, one hand, metal shards embedded into his body, his personal and working life devastated, Duncan received £12,000 not the £15,000 his solicitors sued the civil engineering company Reed and Mallik for. Still, it was a considerable sum in 1958 but for a young man with his whole live in front of him paltry compensation. Duncan was invariably upbeat and smiley, a kind and fun man but he must have suffered terrible torment over what his future could have been.

Duncan’s nephew, Rory, at Tarvie Croft which Duncan rented after his accident

I only managed to find one very brief mention of his pay-out, not the accident itself, in newspapers and couldn’t trace his damages case at Edinburgh’s Court of Session (Common law was altered in an 1958 Act to introduce discretionary powers that would allow courts to include interest on damages awards calculated from a date earlier than the decree). Then something odd happened – the name Macrae began to pop up on my computer screen alongside other compensation cases in Scottish courts – Macrae v Reed and Mallik Ltd 1961 SC 68, 74. Lots of claims for personal injury compensation referred to Duncan’s case, including Tommy Sheridan’s appeal for interest on damages he won from News Group Newspapers in 2018 on grounds the pursuer was being deprived of his money through no fault of his own. Duncan’s solicitors had appealed his compensation but in 1961 the court decided greater discretion should be available to the court over the 1958 judgement leaving pursuers of damages back at square one.   

However, my attempt to obtain access to the court papers have been stymied and I’ve been told the record of Duncan’s case is closed under section 38 of the Freedom of Information Scotland Act. Closed until 2061! I may put in a Freedom of Information request but am not confident that will be any more successful.

Duncan’s future life was tragically blighted by the accident but he was not alone. Many men suffered life changing injuries and several died carrying out their work on the hydro dams to bring electricity into Scottish homes, farms and businesses. With none of the plant machinery available today, the Conon scheme was achieved through hard, exhausting labour, often in freezing weather conditions. Men were crushed, buried, drowned and blown up and most are long forgotten except by their families – these are the men in boiler suits and donkey jackets while those men involved who wore velour collar coats and Homburg hats have their names recorded for posterity.

Duncan

Duncan’s cousin recalled the man he’d loved –

“So you can see how much he meant to me and imagine how I felt about the accident and then how I admired his long battle to get back to normality. Who needs Superman when there is Duncan?”

He describes Duncan as “that fine fellow” who “brought a lot of happiness to a lot of people.” I remember Duncan. He was indeed a fine fellow with a constant smile and his good humour sure did bring happiness to old and young. This blog is for Duncan.

Duncan is buried along with his parents, Dunc and Anne, and brother, Roddy at Contin cemetery

Further reading – The Dam Builders, Power from the Glens by Jim Miller.

Isolation Shepherd by Iain R. Thomson.

Guising or Trick or Treat – placating evil spirits and me on soul watch

Halloween or All Hallows’ Eve is big business nowadays. Where I come from in the Scottish Highlands it was always one of the major occasions in a year we children looked forward to; each 31^st of October we went out guising. Guising – or rather disguising – dressed in costumes and wearing a scary face mask we would wander about the village and be invited in from the dark and spooky night to neighbour’s cosy livingrooms  to recite a poem, sing a song or tell a joke. Our adult neighbours would then attempt to identify us. One year one of the older boys had pulled on a white sheet with eye holes cut out which the rest of us thought was cheating as it was nearly impossible to identify him – and this ghostly creature was a terrifying sight back out in the dark . We were invited to dook for apples floating in a basin of water or catch them with our teeth as they dangled from strings. Our reward for entertaining our neighbours were gifts of apples, monkey nuts, a coin perhaps and maybe sweets or cake. I thought of these things as rewards but the Celtic roots of this festival had a more sinister meaning. Contact from a spectral being, albeit a child wearing a false face, had to involve a donation to the spirit to thwart their evil intentions.  

Scots who migrated to America held onto many of their traditions. It has become law in the US that any celebration must be made into a money-making opportunity and so it was with guising. America’s trick or treat hit the shops here. A Scottish tradition that stretched back thousands of years that few south of the Borders had heard of was rebranded as trick or treat in the UK as well. Instead of apples and monkey nuts came commercial sweets, instead of a cardboard or plastic false face and an old sheet came shop-bought costumes and instead of the howked-out neep with a candle in the middle came pumpkins. But the essence remained. A gift to placate evil or have evil done in alive in trick or treat.

Guising took place on the night before the Celtic festival of fire of peace, Samhain (Samhuinn in Gaelic), on 1 November when fires were lit at dusk and musicians played as people danced and chatter was mostly about foretelling the future. Over time the two celebrations merged as Halloween, originally All Hallows’ Eve – the evening before All Hallows’ Day (All Saint’s Day) is the name that lingers but the festival pre-dates this Christian celebration of All Saint’s Day as Samhain was an important event in the pre-Christian calendar.

Lots of similar festivities took place over a year which were participated in by people living through uncertain times with life and death at the whim of the elements, a poor harvest or series of poor harvests spelled illness and death to communities. Where people lack personal control over their lives and there is continuing uncertainty they look for ways to ensure good luck comes their way. In few places in the UK was life more fraught with threats to survival than in the Scottish Highlands. And so where people today might buy a lottery ticket in the hope of getting out of a financial fix, Highlanders in the past curried favour with the spirits they believed were all around and influenced life and death by making them little offerings.

Highlanders were very superstitious. They were also very vulnerable to all sorts of calamities from the natural world to unscrupulous lairds. Perhaps it is this that made Highlanders particularly humble people, not given to boasting and showing off because luck can change. Nothing was taken for granted. For folk who had next to nothing in material terms a loss of, say, their only cow would mean deeper poverty than they already endured and potentially death for the family. They lived life on the edge, at the mercy of evil spirits, gods – whatever. For anyone who dared push themselves forward, get above themselves, there was a price to be paid. An example of this rashness comes in a story concerning Mary Queen of Scots.

Queen Mary (Mary Queen of Scots) was visiting Ross-shire when a Mrs Monro introduced her to her 12 sons and 12 daughters – all strong and healthy young people which the mother pointed out to the queen, offering them as her devoted servants of squires and damsels. The queen quite taken aback that the poor woman had borne 24 children immediately rose out of her chair,

“Madam, ye sud tak this chaire, ye best ‘deserve it.’

The queen praised the large, handsome and healthy family. That was not done in Highland culture. To praise was fair enough but a compliment must be qualified with a nod to god such as “God bless the …” could be a bairn, 24 bairns, or the family’s single cow. The queen, not being a Highlander, did not understand this and the family’s fate was sealed, it is said they had ill-luck from then on.

Parents were particularly concerned over their newborn babies who were thought of as particularly vulnerable to the spirits and evil eyes. Some of those evil-doers were fairies. Fairies were wont to steal babies. To Highlanders fairies were not delightful little creatures but conniving spirits that would harm a person as quick as look at them. Babies were watched round the clock to prevent them being taken by these malevolent influences who would swap them for a changeling infant. And you didn’t want a changeling. Changelings weren’t human and sometimes not even children but elderly fairies disguised as infants to get affection and coddling from human mothers. They were evil beings, recognisable by their precociousness or unusual physical attributes. Only when a baby was christened was it thought to be safe. At the christening gifts were given to placate hostile spirits, simple things such as a piece of bread.  

To help forestall any malicious fairy intending harm or a poor harvest or sickness in the family cow a tribute to the spirits might be left at a place associated with the spirit world, such as a well or loch. In the Black Isle, the Clootie Well near Munlochy has for long been one of these places where fragments of clothing, ribbons and even food such as bread or oatcakes were left and a wish made to protect someone. This tradition goes beyond Scotland. I’ve seen the same in Siberia where bushes and trees have offerings in the form of scraps of material designed to deter bad luck and instigate good fortune.

The Clootie Well

Birth was fraught with menaces and so, too, was death. I learnt from my mother that when a person died their souls rose up to heaven. We lived next door to the village church and graveyard and on several occasions the young me would stand watching and waiting, no doubt arms akimbo, to see the soul of a recently buried person rising into the sky, heavenward. After weeks, maybe months of this, I complained to my mother that I never saw any souls in the sky only to be told they were invisible. What a let down! She did not say, perhaps didn’t know though being from Highlanders whose ancestors stretched back into the proverbial mists of time she probably did know that when a loved one died a window in the house was opened to allow the soul to escape. That information could have saved me hours of standing about in our garden on soul watch. The dead were kept at home in our village; their corpses prepared for burial by the next of kin or someone appointed in lieu of them. Not sure the practice of placing a plate of salt on the body to prevent it from swelling and bursting the bands of the shroud was still on the go when I was young, probably not. Mort cloths were long pieces of plain woven linen that covered the body or coffin. I have one from my Black Isle family that was never used – my mother’s cousin cut up another into dish towels. The linen was grown on the family croft near Cromarty. As with babies, family watched over the newly dead until burial, to prevent evil spirits doing them harm. This was known as the lyke wake during which relatives old and young would dance, slowly, in the proximity of the body.

Evil was likely to escape through someone’s mouth as well as eye. To kiss a mouth could prevent fore-speaking – expressing the future (usually bleak) and anyone suffering misfortune was said to have the ‘uncanny eye’ or ‘uneasy eye’ and nobody wanted to catch that. Any afflicted with the uncanny or uneasy eye were offered small gifts, such as bread, oatcakes or pieces of clothing, to keep them on side and encourage them to cast their evil somewhere else.  

Superstition was an everyday part of life for the Highlander as it was for most folk straddling that fine line between survival and death – think of fishermen, famously superstitious. A few superstitions live on in the 21^st century. Halloween is a capitalist’s dream of a commercial bonanza but I’d like to see how they would handle another Highland tradition on All Hallows’ Eve in which young women were blindfolded and encouraged to select a cabbage to discover the size and physique of their future husbands. I think we can assume that is something that is definitely relegated to the past.

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Year of the Plague in 2020 a far from average year – self-isolation diary Week 9

And here we are again. Week 9. Doesn’t seem too unlike week 8 although each week does have subtle and sometimes not so subtle variations mixed in. It struck me I don’t really say much or, indeed anything, about what I actually do through a week – and that’s not about to change. I’m not one of those let it all hang out types but here’s what I am prepared to tell you.

It won’t surprise you to know I’m still mouthing off at the politics of the Covid-19 pandemic. Machiavelli will be spinning in his grave at the sheer audacity of the lies being dished up daily by government which we are expected to take at face value. My main source of information about coronavirus is the Financial Times which has been unerringly informed and informative on the virus.

No 10 has been spinning like the proverbial top. Matt Hancock is as useless as he looks. No you haven’t ever reached 100,000 tests on any single day – my ref is the FT. And Boris Johnson is now in full Trumpian flow promising even more. It is quite, quite extraordinary that anyone retains any regard for Johnson. He is evidently a lazy, rather stupid man who hides behind other people – occasionally popping up for a photo opportunity such as hypocritically clapping NHS staff and carers and making ridiculous inflated promises.

Another family birthday this week. Mainly virtual but virtual can be good fun. We’re fairly getting into this singing online lark. Presents were actual and delivered as promised by the Aberdeen shop entrusted to do so.

The starlings are still living dangerously, nesting under the eye of jackdaws and rumours of them having given up on the hole in the ash tree have been greatly exaggerated as they are indeed installed there. With the beech next door to them coming into leaf it will become more difficult to see what they’re up to very soon.

The house martins have also being playing games with nest building. Came and seemed to go after a day or two. Then they came back again. We saw them mostly in the evenings for a start and surely they must have been constructing their classy nest under cover of darkness because suddenly it was up. Lots of activity now with them flying back and fore so suspect there are eggs there already or wee ones hatched out. I know why they build under eaves etc – as protection from rain. That probably sounds obvious but it’s a bit strange to build in the open given their nests are made out of regurgitated mud. Last year we had a lot of rain in late summer and the nest collapsed with young dropping to the ground. We tried to save them but couldn’t. The martins then quickly built a second nest, alongside with a late brood being produced. One little one was slow in flying and while the others were champing at the bit to fly away south it couldn’t leave the nest. Fairly sure it did eventually get away but it was late.

Young plants doing well in the greenhouse and the plug gherkins arrived looking in great shape. Those runner beans are now going at a jog. This week we launched our inter-generational radish growing competition. Doesn’t have many rules so far, not even an end date which we’ll have to fix although there seems plenty time since there’s three days after sowing my five seeds there’s no sign of germination. Meant to mention in earlier blogs that our carob tree is looking tip top. It’s kept in the greenhouse, grown from a seed for a bonsai carob, bought by a friend in Aberdeen at least 15 years ago. The carob is also known as the locust tree or St John’s bread and in its natural Mediterranean habitat produces large edible seed pods. Among its uses is as a chocolate substitute. They can grow to up to 50 feet but doubt our little bonsai in a greenhouse in Aberdeenshire will get anywhere near that – or else we’re moving. And I doubt there will ever be a Lenathehyena chocolate. Which is a pity.

Lots of wandering around the garden, in between weeding. Still very dry. The burn is getting lower and lower. Our water supply is, to some extent, reflected by the amount of water flowing downhill. Will be one to watch.

Many of the rhododendrons are passed but several still to come. We have lots of rhododendrons as this is a great area for growing these acid-loving plants. Some are real beauts.

My marsh marigolds have come on a treat. Can’t tell you how I got them but they’ve taken to their habitat in the old sink. I’ve got a soft spot for marsh marigolds since I was a child in the Black Isle and they grew along the burn at Rosemarkie. Here we’ve grown different varieties on the burn bank but one by one they’ve been washed away downstream during spates.

Got another delivery of all sorts of goodies from a wholefood company in England. Our spare bedroom aka pantry aka food quarantine area smells like an eastern bazaar. We’ve almost finished eating the madjool dates we bought from them last time. There is nothing that can compare with a medjool date from Palestine. Big, fat, soft and bursting with flavour.

Our two hours evening screen watch has moved into suck it and see mode since we finished Breaking Bad. What’s that Walt White like!! We’ve finished Outlander. Good last episode after one or two weak ones. Had to give up on the latest Bosch as it’s far too ‘bitty’ and the fast, clipped accents of some actors are too difficult to make out.

Bedtime reading has moved from fiction to the tragic events of the Bavarian uprising in 1919. Dreamers by Volker Weidermann gives an account of the chaotic attempt to establish a worker’s state in Bavaria on the back of the Great War and its horrific impact on the lives of ordinary people. Dreamers because behind the movement and influential in it were writers and poets whose hearts were in the right place but they lacked the ruthless selfish drive of politicians for their movement to succeed. They had some ideas but no roadmap, as today’s parlance goes. Contrary to the impression always presented in the press and by politicians of most stripes it is the right who tend to be most violent and this was true in Bavaria in 1919 when the extreme right started to shoot anyone suspected of siding with the revolution. The intellectuals and workers who supported a people’s revolution and survived the bullets during the rightwing crackdown were hauled off to concentration camps when the right achieved what the left couldn’t in Bavaria following Hitler’s rise to power. He has a bit part in Dreamers though always denying he was anywhere near there. Wouldn’t recognise truth if it slapped him on the face. A true politician. They’re the real storytellers.

Stay safe.

The Power of Scotland

Oh look there’s a creepy guy in camouflage breeks with a mighty big weapon picking on a little unarmed roe deer

Good mixed shooting was once the boast of Aberdeenshire – perhaps it still is – bagging pheasant, partridge, woodcock, snipe, mallard, golden eye, pochard, tufted duck, ring-dove, brown hare, rabbit, curlew, golden plover, green plover, dunlin, little stint, purple sandpiper, turnstone, redshank, moorhen, water rail and coot were given as examples of the sheer variety of species taken on a typical shoot in an article in the Aberdeen and District British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1934. Several of those birds mentioned are now struggling for survival.

Over millennia changing climate patterns in association with human interference have led to the disappearance of Scotland’s elk, the extinction of the auroch, an ox (Bos primigenius) which looked similar to our Highland cattle, lynx, arctic fox, bear and wolf as human habitation encroached on habitats and animals regarded as dangerous or simply fair game were hunted to extinction.  Wolves, greatly feared by folk in the countryside and probably with good reason, found a source of meat fairly easy to access were human corpses which drove some communities to bury their dead offshore if an island was handy. Obviously eating already dead people was preferable to attacking the living and not unlike human practices of picking up bits of animal corpses from butchers and supermarkets though without producing payment, of course. In 1427 a law was introduced in Scotland for three annual wolf hunts during spring and summer to help control/wipe out the creatures at a time that would be most effective – when they were producing and nursing young.

Several claims exist over when and where Scotland’s last wolf was slain. One killed at Kirkmichael in Banffshire in 1644 was certainly not it. Another last wolf turned up in Moray in the middle of the 18^th century and that might have been the sole survivor till then but it’s likely the odd one hung on after this.

Capercaillie

There were herds of little wild horses roaming Aberdeenshire’s forests into the 16^th century. Evidence found at Birse suggested they were likely crosses with domestic horse – similar to the state of our wildcats. How many true wildcats remain is open to speculation but surely scant few. As with practically every other species these lovely creatures have suffered vicious persecution by farmers, gamekeepers, estate workers and the usual suspects that take potshots at anything that moves. It is said the last wildcat on Donside was killed at Alford in 1862 and on Deeside at Glentanar in 1875 but it’s possible they weren’t all wiped out or that some migrated to the area, perhaps from Speyside, for there have been sightings of what may be the wildcat in more recent years.

Gamekeepers have earned a bad reputation as exterminators of wildlife – with good cause. We are all familiar with the curious coincidences of our raptors meeting their deaths over shooting estates while the courts continue to treat such crimes as minor, failing to impose deterrent sentences on those found guilty of illegal killings.

While about the worst that happens to an estate employee convicted of illegal killings is exposure in the press for a day or two life was once far more comfortable for them. Dealing with vermin aka wildlife was part of the job. In 1863-4 a single Donside estate keeper killed 30 polecats. Thirty years later it was extinct in the area. Pine martens were likewise persecuted and are now protected because of their scarcity. There are pine martens around today, including in Ross-shire but they aren’t common.

Outrage over the vast numbers of mountain hares being shot on sporting estates has been met with insistence from estate interests that there are plenty stocks of hares. That they cannot come up with reliable figures for their claims is worrying but not surprising. That Scottish government ministers consort with sporting interests is also worrying but not surprising.

The encroachment of human habitation and agriculture, the drainage of muirs and removal of large tracts of ancient forests force out birds and animals dependent on those habitats.  Vestiges of the old Caledonian forests can be found at Glentanar, Ballochbuie, Deeside and Speyside but what remains is a mere trace of the woodlands that once provided areas of safety and food for our wildlife pushing them upland to less suitable territory which lack food and reduce the chance of survival.  

The red squirrel has become a great focus for protection to the extent that its grey cousins are eradicated by local authorities around the country – the same local authorities who removed trees used by red squirrels so reducing their chances of survival. However, it isn’t so long ago the red squirrel had the same reputation as the grey and was regarded as a pest – rats with long bushy tails and a popular target for the pot-shotter. On the subject of rats the black rat notorious for spreading the plague in the early middle ages having arrived on ships from the East was in time ousted by the common brown rat another immigrant, this time from Asia in the 18^th century.

Rats have proven themselves pretty damn indestructible although many people wish they weren’t. It’s interesting that there aren’t tweedy types who go on rat shoots on a Sunday afternoon but choose something a whole lot prettier and a whole lot less capable of escaping their shotguns.

The capercaillie is/was fairly spectacular with its dramatic plumage provided welcome variety in rural parts of Scotland but they have all but gone. The menace of an armed idiot has all but wiped them out.  Indeed they succeeded in the 18^th century for the capercaillie vanished around 1760 and was reintroduced from Sweden in 1837. By the 1960s these large birds were numerous again and said to be common. I saw one once – in the 1970s near the Cairn o’ Mount. It might have been one of the last ones in the area for they sure aren’t common now. Their future here is on a very shoogly peg.

The extension of farming, grazing sheep and cattle and the prevalence of mono-culture grouse estates that treated every other animal and bird as vermin have been instrumental in stripping away so much of Scotland’s native wild species. We are all too well aware of the targeting of birds of prey over these areas with lots of tall tales circulating about the extent of lamb predation and insistence that high numbers of disappearing raptors over sporting estates is purely coincidental. Rambling types around Alford are only too familiar with aggressive heavies employed on Aberdeenshire estates, other similarly run estates are available, – same gun-toting, shooting jacketed gamies. Ordinary folk out to enjoy the freedom to roam in their own country are most definitely dissuaded from doing just that by these bullies and heaven help any wildlife straying over their property.

I’ve written before about the insatiable desire of types who crave to destroy life. My mother used to tell of fox cubs being bred near Dingwall which were transported down to England and released for fox hunting there – putting to bed the myth that the hunt was to eliminate local vermin. Another myth is that hobby shooters eat or sell to butchers and hotels what they kill. Regulations have all but stopped the hotel trade and huge numbers of birds and animals killed for the sheer hell of it are either dumped or buried.

Rabbits – they are everywhere, mostly dead on our roads, were imported from southeast Europe. In Aberdeen they were first released at the links near Donmouth. Another import this time from Asia is the exotic-looking pheasant. It proved so popular they were shot out of existence and had to be reintroduced

Some creatures turned up accidentally on these shores such as the tropical loggerhead turtle that was picked up in salmon nets at Pennan in 1861. It never made it home, somewhere equally dangerous but farther south, and numbers are now dwindling.  The purple heron that flew to Donmouth in 1872 never made it home either to southern Europe, Africa or Asia but was inevitably shot. A glossy ibis discovered at Fraserburgh was so strikingly beautiful it was also shot. It along with an American killdeer plover, which doesn’t kill deer but got its name from its call, ended their days as curiosities in Aberdeen University’s Natural History Museum – post execution.

Nowadays our Scottish golden eagles are pretty rare and exotic. In the ten years between 1776 and 1786 seventy of them were killed in five Deeside parishes alone, severely affecting their numbers. As for the white-tailed eagle, Scotland’s largest bird of prey, it was once numerous but determined persecution of the bird resulted in its extinction in the 20^th century. It is being reintroduced, to the chagrin of some farmers.   Another recently reintroduced species is the red kite which has become a  fairly familiar sight over Donside and once more around Conon Bridge following a disgraceful episode in 2015 when a large number of raptors including kites were killed, many poisoned, around there. A couple of weeks ago I was thrilled to watch six of them soar over Strathpeffer. Meanwhile those criminals responsible for targeting them are keeping a low profile. The species once so common around Scotland were all killed off by the end of the 19^th century. Peregrine falcons and ravens were all once very common and hen harriers, too, eventually succumbing to shooting and trapping.

It is not only large birds of prey which have fallen victim to the determined farmer, gamekeeper and the odd brainless wonder. Smaller birds have suffered from being labelled as farm pests. In 1930, Aberdeen County Council was responsible for the deaths of vast numbers of them including: 65,000 rooks, 3,563 eggs and 601 nests; 7,442 wood pigeons, plus eggs and nests; 1,992 house sparrows and 704 eggs; 1,108 starlings; 897 gulls and eggs along with 1,500 brown hares and everyone’s favourite – although not Aberdeen County Council’s evidently – 175 red squirrels.

Britain’s biggest rookery was at Hatton Castle near Turriff where some 6,000 nests were counted in old beech trees and coniferous plantations during the 1960s. Each year around 10,000 of them were shot by local farmers. In the 1960s the curlew, lapwings, skylarks were very common and winter visitor, the snow bunting. I still see the odd one but not flocks. I spotted a curlew recently near Kemnay but those I used to see near Alford have disappeared. There’s a skylark hereabouts. Singular.

 Before 1850 the starling was a non-breeding migrant in Aberdeenshire, one of our rare visitors. It liked what it saw in beautiful Aberdeenshire and stayed – actually because the spread of land cultivation inadvertently provided food for starlings such as daddy long legs and grass beetles which meant they did well and so their numbers increased to the extent that within a decade it was classified as a pest. Their numbers have since declined greatly with modern methods of farming. Our farmers plough right up to fences and dykes leaving virtually no green areas to provide habitat and food for birds and small animals. With the disappearance of the starling goes their spectacular mesmeric murmurations.

Whether it was on land, in trees, in the rivers or seas animals and birds have been hunted down and systematically killed for profit, for food, for fun and for fats. Think fat think whales and seals. Northeast Scotland dominated the 19^th century whaling industry in the Greenland Sea and Davis Straits – a dangerous business for all involved. On October 13, 1830 the Aberdeen Journal lamented the decline of whaling and loss of whaling vessels from Peterhead, Fraserburgh and Aberdeen and Aberdeen’s final whaling ship sailed in 1865. Of course that wasn’t the end of whaling, as we know.

A century later there was talk about the disappearance of mountain hares from our higher hills. This was a blow for the sportsman and woman who made do with blasting at the less prestigious brown hare, still numerous on the muirs. Despite being not much valued they were shot in their thousands. Social media has provided reminders that wildlife are not taken in penny numbers with pictures of trucks loaded up with mountain hare carcasses being taken off hillsides for disposal by sporting estate workers who say numbers of the mountain hare are high but have produced no credible evidence to back up their claims.

Our native red deer have consistently been popular with those who take to the hills for a spot of blood sport. In the 1960s around 10% of the red deer population was shot annually i.e. c.2000. There have been conflicting estimates of their numbers and the best means of controlling what are thriving numbers of them.

Roe deer are tiny animals; very timid. They are popular with creepy men in camouflage breeks, wax jackets and flat caps armed with huge guns that look like they’ve done a heap of damage in Iraq or Afghanistan.  In case you were wondering the little roe deer are unarmed.

The encroachment of humans, the adaption of the countryside to provide economic value will always put pressure on our wildlife. Add to this blend hobby hunters and climate change and the mix becomes toxic. Survival for so many species has been easy/tricky/impossible depending on so many circumstances but human interference arguably poses the most deadly threat to nature and that will only increase.

Scottish World War I poetry #1 Recruiting

                    Recruiting

‘Lads, you’re wanted, go and help,’
On the railway carriage wall
Stuck the poster and I thought
Of the hands that penned the call.

Fat civilians wishing they
‘Could go out and fight the Hun.’
Can’t you see them thanking God
That they’re over forty-one?

Girls with feathers, vulgar songs –
Washy verse on England’s need –
God – and don’t we damned well know
How the message ought to read.

‘Lads, you’re wanted! over there,’
Shiver in the morning dew,
More poor devils like yourselves
Waiting to be killed by you.

Go and help to swell the names
In the casualty lists.
Help to make a column’s stuff
For the blasted journalists.

Help to keep them nice and safe
From the wicked German foe,
Don’t let him come over here!
‘Lads, you’re wanted-out you go.’

There’s a better world than that,
Lads, and can’t you hear it come,
From a million men that call
You to share their martyrdom.

Leave the harlots still to sing
Comic songs about the Hun,
Leave the fat old men to say
Now we’ve got them on the run.

Better twenty honest years
Than their dull three score and ten.
Lads you’re wanted. Come and learn
To live and die with honest men.

You shall learn what men can do
If you will but pay the price,
Learn the gaiety and strength
In the gallant sacrifice.

Take your risk of life and death
Underneath the open sky.
Live clean or go out quick –
Lads you’re wanted. Come and die.

E. Alan Mackintosh (1893 – 1917) Seaforth Highlanders

If the CAP fits: time ticking on down on EU subsidies the gift that kept on giving will be no more

Brexit shambles continues apace. That overused phrase of politicians going forward is not applicable to the current state of Brexit negotiations which appear to consist of nothing more than each side eyeballing the other. And is that a nervous tic on the collective face of Britain’s farmers I detect?

A cursory riffle through May’s fantasy Brexit filing cabinet only as far as A for agriculture reveals something of the complexity of the task ahead, as a politician might say.

For an outsider like me it was hard to understand why so many farmers and landowners were quite so keen in voting to leave the European Union and the increasing murmur from these bodies suggest one or two are becoming a little bit sweaty that the future is not as rosy as it appeared when they voted to leave the reviled EU. But hope emerged for some in the guise of the ambitious Michael Gove with his promise of  a ‘green Brexit’ and promise, if qualified, of continuing subsidies. He is not the first person I associate with a commitment to green policies and suspect the green he’s contemplating is a fig leaf and his ‘earned subsidies’ is an early warning that not all will be as it was under CAP.

That it was never on the cards that the generous EU subsidies would continue post-Brexit either didn’t occur to Brexiteer farmers or else they assumed the British government would step in and fill the void left post-CAP – such blind faith.

The National Farmers’ Union of Scotland has pounced on Gove’s words as recognition of its position on the need for continuing support for certain farming communities. It welcomes Gove’s ‘must be earned’ statement and with another leap of faith declares Scottish agriculture  must receive –

‘the same levels of funding as it currently receives ring-fenced and spent in new and more effective ways to improve productivity, efficiency and resilience.’

The NFU Scotland talk of making farming and crofting more profitable but just what that will mean is anyone’s guess – family farms already operate with minimum labour comprising mainly of the farmer and any family he or she has – working from before dawn until late into the night seven days a week. How that could become leaner is not apparent. Food prices could rise, as they are doing, bringing about even more squeeze on farmers by supermarket chains. Where does that leave Scotland’s crofters and hill farmers already eking out scant livings? How persuaded will Mr Gove be that they are deserving of financial support once that falls into Westminster’s lap?

Farming subsidies were introduced in the UK a century ago by the government concerned by severe food shortages during the First World War when 60% of food was imported. Minimum wages for those involved in agriculture and guaranteed produce prices were imposed until 1921 and during the 1930s protectionism was again high on the agenda. At the end of World War Two government intervention guaranteed payments to farmers to encourage an expansion in food production while rationing continued long after the end of war.  

It was in 1958 the contentious Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of the then European Economic Community was introduced to boost food production across the EEC and provide reassurance to food markets. (This was long before the UK joined it.)

The CAP worked well. Too well. It led to a grim landscape of beef, butter, fruit and vegetable mountains and wine and milk lakes as a means of keeping up prices for farmers. Some of this food was simply destroyed to maintain food prices at acceptable levels and some was dumped on poorer countries at a cost to their small-scale farming which could not compete against the collective might of the protected farmers within the EEC.

When I looked at who are recent recipients of the EU’s agricultural subsidies I was astonished to find not only was it a list of the ultra rich but topping the list of payout recipients was sugar manufacturer Tate & Lyle. Along with the British sugar giant were French sugar giants, Spanish sugar giants, German sugar giants and a lesser giant from Poland. Sugar processors have attracted much criticism for their contribution to junk foods and their association with the huge rise in diabetes and because of pressure placed upon these industries in Europe to reduce their output they have been amply compensated by CAP subsidies.

Dairy companies have also been winners in the great EU scoop a fortune lottery. Along with sugar they are implicated in the junk food market and have attracted the attention of aid agencies for being supported at the same time they are dumping milk powder and butter on vulnerable markets and consequently undermining small producers in poorer nations.

In Scotland Balmanno Farms Ltd are lucky recipients of EU subsidies- qualifying for quite a bit in subsidy. Their ultimate parent company is Streetfield Property Company of the same address, presumably property developers.

What struck me was the number of recipients of public handouts who don’t sound like the everyday image of our local farmers: Broadway Tower Country Park Ltd; Execs of the Late Mrs C Campbell, Isle of Sky; Gisburne Park Estates Ltd; J and V Casey and son Ltd of New York – hang on a minute – New York? There is it appears a New York in Lincolnshire.

Because of difficulties some farmers have surviving by traditional agriculture diversification is encouraged and rewarded: rented out land; farm shops; tourism; woodland; improved land management so while Highland Grain Ltd of North Kessock  a cooperative mainly made up of  Black Isle and Easter Ross farmers who grow malting barley for whisky and get considerable amounts of cash from European Agricultural Fund fall firmly into the category of genuine farmers Flamborough Holidays Ltd must surely fall into the diversity grouping also attracting aid. Likewise Tongue and Farr Sports Association at Bettyhill, a community venture running a pool, spa, sauna and fitness suite in the north of Scotland. As for O’Neill’s Caravan your guess is as good as mine – and the same goes for Shield Engineering Syston Ltd. Then again Hound Parish Council at somewhere called Netley Abbey, Southampton appears along with The Royal Farms Windsor. Hello? What? The Queen picks up loadsamoney through her Sandringham Farms.

Trawling through the CAP list is time-consuming for it is very, very long with no fewer than 19,613 recipients listed in the UK and not a few, in fact quite the reverse, millionaires and zillionaires which suggest the EU CAP system is something of a money printing press for powerful agencies. One in five CAP handouts goes to toffs.

Prince Khalid Abdullah al Saud

The last thing you might imagine a Saudi prince really needed was a cash handout from the people of Europe but that’s because you aren’t a Saudi prince. Prince Khalid Abdullah al Saud has expensive pastimes – breeding racehorses and hobby farming on his Juddmonte Farms (registered offshore in Guernsey.) He enjoys CAP pocket money of around £400,000 a year.

the Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/sep/29/the-queen-aristocrats-and-saudi-prince-among-recipients-of-eu-farm-subsidies

Who is/was – delete as appropriate – the richest landowner in the UK? Easy question – it is of course the Duke of Westminster and wouldn’t you know it he is on the list as is vacuum cleaner man Sir James Dyson – sorry, the billionaire Dyson. Why?

From my neck of the woods is Frank A Smart who has done very nicely out of EU subsidies. He is described in the local press as a slipper farmer for he buys up land with subsidies attached and there is nothing at all illegal about this. On being questioned over the huge sums of money he receives each years Mr Smart replied to BBC news, “I don’t want to discuss any part of my business with the media, thank you.”  And why would he.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-37493956

Here in Scotland we are forever being told how much money shooting estates bring to the economy but not what the EU brings to grouse moors. Imagine how much good could be done with equivalent handouts to these barren areas of land preserved for the dubious activity of slaughtering defenceless birds and beasts by improving conditions to develop diversity of flora and fauna. The specious argument that subsidies can be justified as a reward to landowners as caretakers of land hardly applies to grouse moor lairds especially those whose gamekeepers persecute our magnificent raptors and other birds and animals, many of whom are protected (in theory.)

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/oct/28/grouse-shooting-estates-shored-up-by-millions-in-subsidies

Farming in the UK is struggling if figures are to be believed and the average farmer, whatever that may be given who appears on the CAP list, could not survive without hefty payouts. Figures for last year indicated that the average farm made £2,100 from farming and £28,300 from subsidies.

In Scotland the average farm (excluding pig and poultry) made £23,000 profit from their business in 2014/15 which includes subsidies. They lost c £21,800 on agriculture but took in £39,900 in subsidies and other payments.

https://fullfact.org/economy/farming-subsidies-uk/

I noticed this year farms around Alford were ploughed and sown right up to dykes and fences with virtually no wild margins left for birds and wildlife. Is this the future? So much for Gove’s ‘green Brexit’ when cereal farmers post-subsidy will turn over every inch of their land and to hell with nature. Anyway out of the EU those pesky controls over pesticides will be lifted and production will be increased to make up for payout losses at no cost other than to our health and the environment.

The UK government says it will retain subsidies until 2022 by which time the money will have run out. In free-for-all post-Brexit Britain agriculture crops will be even more intensively sprayed with pesticides in attempts to compete with the big boys and will fail because then we will be the little brats. Our grass reared cattle and hill sheep will be reared for a niche market for they will be too expensive for most of us who will have to tuck into US beef pumped full of growth hormones, chlorine washed chickens and Frankenstein GM foods of every description. Gove’s green Brexit Britain will be a poorer and nastier place with horrible unhealthy food where the government will have to sit down and negotiate support for food producers at levels that will enable them to compete not only with the US but the EU as well.  

Last time the UK government stopped subsidising farming agricultural wages fell by 40 per cent in 12 months and then the threat to British cereal producers didn’t come from the US but from Canada. As a consequence people were thrown out of work, poverty increased and fertile land was abandoned and did not greatly improve until after World War Two with the introduction of guaranteed prices.

Back at the list at least one 14 year old received CAP payments but that’s not a category I could fit into although two folk over 100 years old also made it in so there’s a ray of hope for me. The centenarians were both dead – hope for us all – although if I were a farmer, especially a crofter or hill farmer in Scotland, I would be very very worried as 2022 approaches.

 

 

Hugh Miller stepped off the Betsey to find lands visited by terror and evil (Rum and Eigg)

 

Were the people willing to go?

Some of them
Others were not very willing, they did not like to leave the land of their ancestors

Isle of Eigg

A recent discovery of an anchor believed to have belonged to a floating kirk that sailed around Ardnamurchan from the time of the Disruption  coincided with me reading about a floating manse from the same era.

When the Church of Scotland split in 1843 its breakaway congregations set themselves up as the Free Kirk.  When they tried to build their own churches they were often denied permission by lairds still attached to the Church of Scotland, men who governed the lives of those who lived on their land, and so worship was frequently carried out in the open air in all weathers in places they could not be chased off by landlords. However, Free Kirkers at Loch Sunart found money to have a ship built to sail the Western Isles so providing a watery kirk for the folk in the islands out of reach of controlling lairds. The anchor found is thought to have come from it.

Towing the iron church into Loch Sunart

I don’t know how many such vessels were used in this way but loathe to let a coincidence pass by I was pressed to retell a little of what struck my ancestor, Hugh Miller, when he voyaged around the Inner Hebrides on a floating manse in 1858 – a journey recorded in his book, The Cruise of the Betsey.

Miller was a journalist, a newspaper editor, an evangelical Christian, a folklorist and an archaeologist. From Cromarty in the Black Isle he travelled around the Sound of Mull – to Rum and Eigg looking for fossils, the bloodstones of Rum included, and discovered more than a pile of old stones.

Hugh Miller

The evangelical Christian was immensely moved by seeing the impact of the Clearances on these isles. He was, as a Highlander, familiar with the Clearances and, indeed, his own family had been cleared from their glens so he was sensitive to the evidence revealed by the land from some eighteen years earlier when nearly 400 men, women and children, virtually the entire population of Rum, were dragged out of their homes and shipped off to a foreign country leaving behind all they knew and loved.

Ethnic cleansing by Bosnian Serbs of Bosnian Croats and Muslims rightly aroused outrage at the end of the 20th century when people were thrown off their homeland because they were despised for having a different religion and culture from their oppressors. In Scotland in the 18th and 19th centuries people were thrown out of their communities, off the land they worked, to make room for sheep and later deer in acts of economic cleansing that involved a wholesale disregard for them as human beings. Both these despicable acts involved the imposition of cruelty by one group upon another and enforced deportation.

As he stepped ashore on Rum (pron. room from the Gaelic now anglicised to sound like the spirit) from the floating manse, the Betsey, Miller noticed patches of green on the island’s hillsides – places once home to people for generations who had been summarily cleared out as if that was of no significance – “cleared off to the backwoods of America” as Miller phrased it. Several homes were razed to the ground in 1826  so the men, women and children dragged from them would not be able to live there anymore while others were left to fall down over time. Miller was struck,too, by the little patches of corn still growing where once farming had followed the seasons and provided food for islanders. He stared at abandoned cottages; homes that once rang out to the sounds of christenings, weddings and New Year celebrations – and the land about them where the peoples’ loved ones were buried.

“…it seems a bad policy,” Miller remarked, despite the chilling argument from economists at the time “that there are more than people enough in Scotland still.”

On population size being a determinant for clearances Miller commented –

“There are, I believe, more than enough in our workhouses, – more than enough on our pauper-rolls, – more than enough huddled up, disreputable , useless, and unhappy, in the miasmatic alleys and typhoid courts of our large towns, but I have yet to learn how arguments for local depopulation are to be drawn from facts such as these.”

Miller mentioned a solitary shepherd’s house standing at one end of the island where the shepherd and his wife lived-

“the sole representatives in the valley of a numerous population, long since expatriated to make way for a few flocks of sheep, but whose ranges of little fields may still be seen green”.

As the party that disembarked from The Betsey searched the hills for Rum’s renowned bloodstones they were spotted by island’s shepherd and soon he and his wife had clambered up, she carrying a “a vast bowl of milk, and he a basket of bread and cheese” out of kindness and hospitality.

Isle of Rum

It struck Miller that the more remote places were the greater the hospitality – that is certainly true of friendliness among people in Scotland’s small villages where few would walk by another without a nod, smile or a hello.

Miller put it more eloquently –

“[that]…hospitality dwindles and disappears, like fruits in the thick of a wood; but where man is planted sparsely, it blossoms, and matures, like apples on a standard or espalier. It flourishes where the inn and the lodging-house cannot exist, and dies out where they thrive and multiply.”

The 400 souls of Rum were crammed on board ships, Highland Lad and, oh the irony, the Dove of Harmony  to Nova Scotia in Canada to begin their lives from scratch. They left behind their island, one sheep farmer and 8,000 sheep.

“All the aborigines of Rum crossed the Atlantic; and at the close of 1828, the entire population consisted of but the sheep-farmer, and a few shepherds, his servants.”

Those who survived the shocking conditions and overcrowding on-board during often rough passages across the Atlantic had to find whatever way they could to house, feed and clothe themselves and families in unfamiliar territory while back in their homeland the sheep experiment to make money for the laird failed when the price of mutton plummeted. Rum was sold off – another piece of property, like the people who once lived there. At his time of writing Miller believed the new owner was an Englishman looking for an opportunity to make money by turning the island into a deer forest – a sporting estate to amuse wealthy gunmen from the mainland.

Rum had been populated by human beings since the 8th millennium BC. It is surely understandable that succeeding generations of the island’s inhabitants regarded the island as theirs but others held a different perspective so the folk of Rum lost out to speculators investing in “wool and mutton” and then deer. Islanders were pawns in a bigger game that turned a once thriving island into a desert. Rum would be sold several times over in the search for  profit.

The island’s streams that once provided food for its people were found by Miller to be full of fish with no-one to take them. Rum’s former fishers not possessing fishing nets used to bunch heath roots together which they arranged in mounds across burns, securing them in place with boulders then one or two involved would walk downstream beating the water  and driving trout towards the dam where they would get caught up in the heather roots. The bigger fish were scooped out for food while the immature ones were returned to the burns.

Isle of Eigg

The Betsey called in at the island of Eigg whose people were also evicted and shipped abroad and here Miller and his associates came upon the site of notorious mass murder that took place from an earlier time – remnants of civilisation: straw beds, human bones, household objects, the handle of a child’s wooden porringer (a bowl with a handle) with a hole through it to hang it to a wall, strands of grey hair.

One winter, possibly during the 16th century, members of the clan Macleod from Skye sailed to Eigg and having offended the native people, the Macdonalds,  the raiders were strapped to boats and pushed out into the sea. Following their rescue they plotted vengeance on the people of Eigg and returned to the island, well-armed, and so terrified the people they ran away and hid in a large narrow cave. The Macleods searched the island but not finding anyone they contented themselves with ransacking the islanders’ houses and were about to leave with their booty when one of them spotted a figure on the beach. They renewed their hunt and as this was in the winter-time a light fall of snow exposed the lookout’s footprints. The footsteps led to the mouth of the cave. Because the cave’s entrance was very narrow the Skye men were unable to enter it safely so they gathered heather and ferns and packed them into and around the entrance and set fire to them so that in time those hiding – the entire population of Eigg – elderly to babies were smothered to death by the smoke.

Narrow-entranced cave where the population of Eigg took shelter and died

Sir Walter Scott raised money to provide Christian burials for these sad remains when he found out about the massacre.

Miller did discover samples of the bloodstones he was after on Rum – the hard stone once used to shape into tools and weapons by the island’s early settlers. The populations of Rum and Eigg survived centuries of hardship, Viking invasion, occupation by Scots but coarse, selfish, inhuman lairds finally destroyed civilisation on the islands.

Evidence to a government select committee on enforced emigration in 1827 recorded this question:

Were the people willing to go?
Answer:
Some of them
Others were not very willing, they did not like to leave the land of their ancestors

A witness to the deportation of the people of Rum recalled hearing plaintive echoing cries from aboard Atlantic-bound ships as their human cargo watched their homeland disappear from view forever.

Preaching to a breakaway Free Kirk congregation at the seaside

Rum was sold to Nature Conservancy in 1957 as a nature reserve, now under the control of Scottish Natural Heritage.

The Black Isle Poorhouse

Coping with the poor has long been a problem for governments and local communities and, of course, let’s not forget enduring the indignity of relying on others for something to eat and a place of shelter has never been much fun for the poor themselves.

Some hae meat and canna eat,
And some wad eat that want it

It is a truth universally acknowledged that when times are tough those with the least take the biggest hit – an attitude gladly adopted during these austere times by the UK government.

In the not-so-distant past help for the poor came through charities, mortification funds or bequests, personal handouts and assistance usually undertaken by the local presbytery. In the 19th century Poorhouses were introduced to provide an alternative to outside support for those incapable of surviving on nothing: no job, no income, no home. Today we have the safety-net of benefits -albeit they are being whittled away – but before universal benefits were introduced poor relief was applied on a one-to-one basis and was of the merest kind.
There’s slight confusion between Poorhouses and Workhouses. The terms are often conflated but in Scotland indoor relief was provided through the Poorhouse and the more familiar Workhouse was in fact an English institution somewhat different in that inmates had to work for their keep hence the name. The impression is the same system operated throughout Britain which is not true but a legacy of careless and misinformed teaching in our schools. Another difference was that the poor in England and Wales were expected to pay towards their keep whereas that was not so in Scotland.
Scotland’s poor relief was less weighted down by regulation than in England and Wales so that a body looking into improving poor law there looked at the Scottish system before implementing its 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act. And despite another myth taught in schools Scotland was not regulated by the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act.
The Act of Union of 1707 preserved poor relief within the laws of Scotland which gave rise to differences in attitude and application across the nations. However being poor and dependent on charity was no more fun in Scotland than elsewhere.

Prior to the inauguration of Poorhouses which it has to be said only helped a tiny fraction of the destitute the degree of poverty among the people is difficult for us to imagine today. Most people lived on practically nothing but some literally had nothing beyond the clothes they stood up in.
In Edinburgh in 1826 it was found in one beggars’ hotel down one of the city’s closes thirty people sharing one room with each paying between 1 penny and 3 pennies a night.
Twenty years later provision for the poor in Scotland underwent major changes with the introduction of the 1845 Poor Law Act which called for parochial boards to be established to organise local poor relief with the boards’ overall management retained in the capital, Edinburgh, and made up of representative from Edinburgh, Glasgow, Perth, Renfrew and Ross and Cromarty. The Act allowed for neighbouring parishes to join together to build Poorhouses for the needy in their vicinity – those who could not be sufficiently helped through outdoor relief (money, food or clothing and such.) Soon after the 1845 legislation was passed permission was given for building eight new Poorhouses.
Prior to the Act little Rosemarkie on the Black Isle had 39 paupers out of a population of 350 with poverty increasing. The poor at Rosemarkie may have lived in turf houses like many in their condition but were said to be better fed and clothed than in some other parishes and reasonably well-educated with most children attending school though occasionally they didn’t and though it was suspected absence was because of lack of clothing this was never admitted to by families. The next village of Fortrose recorded 49 on the poor roll from its population of 559. Losing your job was the quickest way to becoming a pauper then but age was an important factor as was desertion of women and children by men.
In an echo of recent times when the poorest in our society have been charged more for gas and electricity through pre-payment meters the poor during the 1840s – unemployed labourers – had to plead credit from shopkeepers and were charged more than 5% interest on their meagre purchases, certainly in and around Fortrose.
By the end of the 19thC, in the 1890s, Scotland had Poorhouse provision sufficient to accommodate more than 15,000 paupers although the actual numbers living in Poorhouses at any one time was never near that number.

Poorhouse at Aberdeen

The Poorhouse for the Black Isle was built at Chanonry between Rosemarkie and Fortrose, in the parish of Rosemarkie, and designed by William Lawrie of the Inverness office of Aberdeen architect James Matthews. The Chanonry Poorhouse looked similar to the company’s other Poorhouses at Inverness, Bonar Bridge and Nairn only smaller. The Matthews office designed several Poorhouses, some as Mackenzie and Matthews, notably one for the parishes of St Nicholas and Old Machar in Aberdeen following a blueprint for Scottish Poorhouses that aimed to make them less oppressive in appearance, to give them an air of domesticity and so limit the impression of them being what they were, heavily regulated institutions.
Back in the Black Isle a Combination Poorhouse for some fifty poor souls from the parishes of Rosemarkie and Fortrose, Avoch, Cromarty, Killearnan, Knockbain, Resolis and Urquhart was erected at Chanonry where folk now go to observe dolphins. There may have been a start on building a Poorhouse as early as 1856 but the Lawrie one materialised in 1859 and opened its doors only in 1861. Domesticity is surely in the eyes of the beholder because the Poorhouse remit of an H-form, two-storey building plus attic does not soften its severity, although that might be reading into its appearance what is known of its purpose. Staff were accommodated in attractive single-storey cottages alongside.
The familiar H-shape Poorhouse enabled easy separation of male and female inmates. There was further separation of able-bodied (fit for work) and the infirm. Children were removed from their parents and separated again by sex so that each group had its own area within the H-block. Work areas were provided, again according to women’s or men’s work- a bakehouse in the male part and a laundry in the female area.
Poorhouses were run like prisons without the enforced stay. You entered through a public area where you were checked – your identity and for diseases both physical and mental. Your belongings were searched and your clothes removed for washing and put away until you left, if ever, and you were bathed and provided with a uniform.
The central front area housed the offices of the Poorhouse master and matron along with a kitchen and dining-room which also served as a chapel. Also at the front was a room that could supply clothing to those on outdoor relief who did not stay overnight in the institution. In the yard outside areas were designated for male and female activities and a privy was provided in one corner. The whole area was enclosed by a high stone wall.
The Poorhouse provided both refuge for those incapable of fending for themselves and as a hospital of some kind. You could not just walk in but had to be referred, usually by the local Inspector of the Poor, and although you were free to leave you did not automatically get re-admission so a person had to think long and hard what was best for them for there might be even greater hardship to endure on the outside.
The need for Poorhouses grew through the 19thC because of differences in the social makeup of Scotland, its landholdings and changing work practices and, of course, tied houses – those that went with a job and were taken away once the worker died, left or was sacked. By 1868 Scotland had some fifty Poorhouses, mainly around the central belt.
At Chanonry Poorhouse four staff members are listed in the 1881 census but presumably others were involved working with inmates but living outside. The master of the Poorhouse then was John Fraser of Avoch (pronounced Och) and his Glaswegian wife Agnes as well as two young women housemaids, Ann Mackenzie from Avoch and Kate Noble from Durnish who was also the Poorhouse cook.
The committee running the Poorhouse in 1907 was headed by the master or governor of the Poorhouse, John McKay, and met there at 12 noon on every fourth Monday of May, August, November and February and involved the doctor assigned to the house; A. H . Mackenzie from Fortrose as well as committee secretary Robert Gillanders who was also the local Inspector of Poor.

Medical relief for paupers was often provided freely at the discretion of doctors, certainly in Rosemarkie, Fortrose, Avoch and Cromarty although some parishes such as Kilearnan did grant small sums to pay for medicines.
When the census was taken in 1881 Chanonry Poorhouse housed 21 people ranging from 90 year old farmer’s widow Ann White from Avoch to two abandoned little children – Isabella McIver and Hugh McLennan both 2 years old and both from Rosemarkie.
The sorry list of their fellow-inmates reveals how awful life was for working people before old age pensions were brought in, especially those only scratching a living while fit and others who were vulnerable for all sorts of reasons. Back in ’81 the majority brought low enough to turn up at the door of the Poorhouse were women, and most of them were over 60 years of age though not all. Amongst the 21 recorded at the time of the census we find a fisherman’s widow, a woman shoebinder, a porter, farm workers, a domestic servant, a laundress, a housekeeper, the widow of an iron moulder, a needlewoman, a weaver, a shoemaker.
Widows were liable to find themselves with nothing to live on once their husbands died and especially if they stayed in accommodation tied to their husband’s job and both men and women had to keep working into old age or severe infirmity because until the 20thC there was no alternative. At Alford agricultural workers who did not rent land were found to be particularly vulnerable to hostile landowners who would not let cottages without land attached which the poorest could not afford so became homeless. A couple of miles away at Tough it was found most day labourers did keep a tiny piece of land, a croft with one or two cows, so were better protected from destitution.
Poor relief outwith from the Poorhouse was managed by kirk-sessions. At Rosemarkie old paupers who were not confined to bed were given 4 to 5 shillings annually for their upkeep but widows and children received less. Mostly the poor in the Black Isle lived on nothing much more than potatoes and with the tiny allowances allotted them often turned to begging (which in Rosemarkie was not punished as it was in many other places.)

Poor funds were supplemented by legacies, mortification money or sometimes pockets of land, and these attracted people to move to areas where it was known they had funds for distribution, such as Fortrose.

Looking towards Rosemarkie from Chanonry Point

Cromarty too had mortified funds which attracted its fair share of folk from surrounding areas as well as people in search of work at the town’s hemp manufactory. Ropemaking and fishing were main sources of income for people in that town but many supported themselves gathering sea weed which they sold to farmers for fertilisers and widows could find work baiting hooks for 4 pennies a day for Cromarty’s fishermen. Seasonal work such as harvesting was also a source of employment for women around Cromarty who might earn 6 pennies a day in the fields. That said Cromarty’s poor were said to suffer more extreme poverty and destitution than in other areas. Among those requiring help were people suffering mental illness who were supported from locally raised funds. Amounts paid to recipients varied widely from as little as 2 shillings a year and rarely exceeded 10 shillings but a few payments of 20 shillings were made at Rosemarkie while the average in Cromarty was 12 shillings annually.
Mary Ann Cumming from England was 76 years old and a resident in the Chanonry Poorhouse in 1881. Her fellow-countryman, Ely Thimpeny, a former weaver, was a year older. He was there with his wife, a local woman from Kilmuir in Ross & Cromarty, but of course they would be mostly separated from each other as long as they remained in the Poorhouse. Another originally from outside the area was Charlotte Mackenzie from Glasgow. Donald McDonald was only 18yrs old and described as a pauper on the census. Donald was blind and presumably unable to fend for himself and so found himself at such an early age an inmate of the Poorhouse.
In 1894 Poor Law in Scotland was replaced by the Local Government Board and then in 1919 a Scottish Board of Health assumed responsibility for poor relief. After the end of the Second World War and the start of a proper welfare system Poorhouses became relics of the past. By then the need for the Black Isle Poorhouse had diminished and its name was changed to Ness House in the late 1930s but long after continued to be known as the Poorhouse.

Wi silver in ma pocket an oatmeal in ma scoo
Ah’ll tramp gladly homeward like cadgers always do
An when Ah reach the bothie so sair an tired I am
Ah’ll keep the home fires burnin an fry the ham

An then to bed as usual, three, four pints o beer
It’s best to tak things easy, we’ll no be always here
Oh wha would slave like Storum or stare like Jessie Poose
There’s little sense in savin pence for Chenrey Hoose.

verse taken from The Cromarty Fisherfolk Dialect http://wanderengland.com/images/The%20Cromarty%20Fisherfolk%20Dialect.pdf