Avoch – women carrying men on their backs, the Spanish Armada, Scottish Wars of Independence – and so much more

Avoch was famous back in 1951. In its quest for curiosities to entertain the public the BBC broadcast a radio programme about this Black Isle village on the Moray Firth. So, what was so interesting about wee Avoch? First of all, its name which trips up many an unwary tourist. Avoch is pronounced as Och (as in loch not couch) and is thought to be a corruption of the Gaelic word Abhach meaning mouth of the stream (the Killen burn). If this is correct then Avoch might once have been pronounced Avach for the letters bh together make the sound v in Gaelic, as in Beinn a’ Bhuird. But it isn’t, certainly not now and the v is silent as in Milngavie. A very long time ago my uncle, a soft southerner, was driving through the village when he stopped to ask where he was. “Och” came a helpful reply. “Och, aye,” replied my uncle, “but where is this?” It amused him, and possibly the Auchie.

Once it got beyond the village’s name BBC listeners heard that Avoch’s roots, or some of them, could be traced back to England’s war with Spain in the sixteenth century when scores of vessels from the Spanish Armada were wrecked in Scottish waters while trying to evade England’s navy. One of those Spanish ships foundered off the coast near Avoch in 1588 and because it would have been hazardous for survivors to try to return to their homeland some Spaniards settled in the area marrying local women. This international population was later supplemented in the 19^th century by more unfortunate folk when fellow-Scots were driven out of their homes and off their land during the Clearances, forcing them to adapt to a very different way of life on the coast, as fishers.  

Given the amount of different folk settling here it might have struck 1951 wireless listeners as odd that the majority of Avoch dollies – yes, that’s their nickname – shared just three last names: Patience, Jack and MacLeman. Rival football teams could comprise either all Patiences or all Jacks. With so many folk sharing the same name in such a small community a practical solution to identity confusion meant additional names were given – nicknames or tee-names or by-names. Tee-names might relate to someone’s job, the name of their boat, in much the same way as farmers are known as, for example, John farm name, or their physical appearance and so on.  

Avoch dollies – let me try to sort this one out. Dollies has nothing to do with dolls but is an old Scots word (also dowy or dowie) for someone who is melancholy or full of woe and fisherfolk with their hazardous occupation might sometimes fit that description. Where were we? Ah, dollies and names had an easy/uneasy relationship. Despite the village’s reputation for comprising just Jacks, Patiences and MacLemans there were hundreds of people in Avoch and its surrounding district with different names – a lot of Mackenzies because of the Clearances. One famous son left the village as plain James Jack and returned years later as a wealthy Liverpool merchant and big noise around Avoch, as James Fletcher. He purchased a large and lovely piece of land just west of the village called Rosehaugh (its name came from the little sweet scented wild Scottish rose, the Burnet, that flourished there).

Not all had smelled as sweet as the Burnet rose in Avoch. During the 1800s the Fishery Boards Supervision Inspectorate reported –

“The effect of the present arrangement is that the village of Avoch, from having been one of the most slovenly and filthy, has now been transformed into one of the most tidy and clean fishing villages to be found anywhere. . . Instead of dirty lanes, tenanted by pigs – instead of dung-pits, dung-heaps, and scattered domestic refuse, ashes &c., being found throughout the village, every lane and street will be found to be in good condition, and clean and free from all these things.”

Transforming the village must have been achieved by sheer hard slog, something the folk of Avoch were familiar with. Not that hard work always pays off. It wasn’t only in Ireland that the failure of the potato harvests resulted in terrible suffering. Scots underwent awful hardships in the mid-19^th century when blight destroyed the potato harvest. In Avoch in 1847 emergency measures were put in place to create what today would be called a foodbank except back then those starving had to pay for the emergency supplies of basic essentials, oatmeal and barleymeal. Help came in that prices were controlled and no meal was allowed to be exported from the district until those in desperate need had bought up enough to prevent their starvation.

Arguably the most famous person associated with Avoch is Andrew Murray. No, not that one – Andrew de Moray of Ormond Castle raised a force of fighting men at Avoch during the First Scottish War of Independence, as the Scottish army’s northern leader with William Wallace the campaign leader in the south. Moray was badly wounded at the Battle of Stirling Bridge in 1297 and died later that year as a result. His castle was destroyed several centuries later during another English invasion, when Cromwell’s forces pulled it down, transporting the stone to Inverness to reinforce the castle there where the invaders were ensconced.  Another contender for its most famous inhabitant is Sir Alexander Mackenzie of Avoch. Born in Stornoway this explorer became the first European to cross North America while searching for a route to the Pacific Ocean, an achievement recognised in the naming of the Mackenzie River. He returned to Scotland and at the age of 48 married a wealthy 14-year-old heiress to the Avoch estate, Geddes Mackenzie and a few short years later was buried at Avoch.

Gaelic was widely spoken around Avoch though not so much within the village where English predominated, as might be expected since it and not Gaelic were taught in schools in the drive to anglicise Scotland. Boys were also taught Greek, Latin, arithmetic, book-keeping and reflecting Avoch’s predominant occupation, navigation. Church music was taught for a time but disappeared from schools by the middle of the 19^th century. On the other hand, by this time bibles were as common then as they had been scarce a hundred years earlier when barely one could be found in Avoch.

While English was widely spoken in the locality each of the villages of the Black Isle had their own distinctive dialect and vocabulary. Avoch English was combined with distinctly Avoch vocabulary.  Words such as kyout for child, damiki for a girl, schielickie for a boy, leam for a food plate and prunnels were crumbs that might be left on a leam. Damiki is easily understood as women were often referred to as dames in the Highlands and adding a diminutive such as iki gives damiki in the same vein as a wee lamb (and small child) was a lamiki when I was growing up in the Black Isle.

Avochies were also very superstitious as I think all fishing communities tended to be because of the hazards of life at sea. No point in taking chances. For example, they regarded anyone called Ross as unlucky which in a district of Ross and Cromarty must have given a complex to quite a number of innocent souls. Rosses were lumped in with pigs and rabbits as kaulironies or caul iron(cold iron) and if an Avochie stumbled across anyone or anything they suspected was an ill-omen an item of cold iron had to be found to touch to cancel misfortune – in much the same way as folk cross their fingers when walking under a ladder – and who can blame them for in June 1871 fourteen died, including many women. Early one morning a small boat packed with men and women pushed away from the shore to prepare a catch for selling in Inverness which had been stored overnight in a fishing boat anchored just offshore.  A sudden stiff breeze swept the boat out into the firth creating panic. In no time it capsized throwing everyone into the sea. The catastrophe that left a large number of children motherless could be seen happening from the village.   

But Avoch was not solely a fishing village. Crofting was the mainstay of most Black Islers. From the land came food other than fish as well as wool. Local wool was prepared and woven into cloth and tweed for a time. Everything grown and manufactured that wasn’t consumed locally was exported. Linen was another crop grown around Avoch which had its own lint mill. Avoch hemp was manufactured into rope and canvas which provided sails for Moray Firth boats. But for the majority in Avoch the sea provided their income with hundreds employed directly or indirectly – sometimes without caution. For example once bountiful oyster beds were destroyed by overfishing. Catches of sprats, herring, salmon, whiting and haddock were sold around the Black Isle by wives and daughters of fishermen and in Inverness’s markets.

Age and infirmity were no barriers to work. As there were no old age pensions until the 20^th century if you didn’t work you didn’t eat. The elderly and sick were forced to work their entire lives changing from what had been their occupation to easier and more menial tasks such as making and baiting fishing hooks and mending fishing nets. This didn’t mean the community did not pull together to provide extra assistance when needed such as when fishermen were lost at sea and their widows and children found themselves without their main breadwinner. This happened in 1792 following the loss of several fishers including the husband of a nineteen-year-old lassie, pregnant with her first baby who also lost her father and brother in the same accident. As well as receiving help from her fellow-villagers money flooded in from miles around; from Nairn to Fort George.  

Only the wealthy escaped a lifetime of unrelenting back-breaking toil but all work and no play make Jacks a bunch of dull boys, to misquote the proverb. Play included village football and another ball game enjoyed over Hogmanay which involved carrying a four-pound ball for some distance before seeing who could chuck it farthest. Whether women and girls participated I’ve no idea but don’t run away with the idea that ordeals of strength were confined to the male sex. Avoch’s women were renowned for being robust and hardy souls. It was a village custom for wives to carry their men on their backs out to their boats to keep the fishermen’s boots and clothing dry before setting out to sea. And in common with fisherwomen all around Scotland, Avoch women shouldered very heavy baskets packed with wet fish for miles across country when selling catches at inland farms and cottages.

So there you have it – Avoch distilled. The village of three family names – Patience, Jack and MacLeman – those names have been taken across the world. It is astonishing the number of folk with the name Patience who live in Africa; the British Empire was a vehicle for more than wars and trade. Patience sometimes said to derive from England or France may also be traced to the Gaelic Páidín – a diminutive of Pádraig. Jacks there are in plenty. Several notorious. MacLeman or McLeman and innumerable variations certainly has roots in Ireland. One man whose name incorporated both Jack and a variation of McLeman was the late actor, Jack Lemon, whose family were Irish. And the only thing to beat that for being cool is that there is a font called MacLemon.

None of this has much to do with Avoch and I’ll end with something else that’s only tangentially connected with Avoch but a good story. Around the turn of the 20^th century Avoch was on the circuit for a sheriff called Thoms. The poor man had issues, as they say. I don’t know what she served up to him but Sheriff Thoms insisted on giving his Avoch cook cooking lessons when he stayed in the village. Neither do I know if he travelled with his pet cat – the one he fined up to a penny for misbehaving. Thoms was a celebrated flirt but perversely he kept unpleasant smelling camphor in what he referred to as his laughing waistcoat to deter women who might take his advances seriously. And finally, he arranged that he be buried in a wicker coffin so that when Christ returned to earth at the resurrection, he would be ready for a fast escape to beat the crowd to witness it – but then he changed his mind, deciding to be cremated instead and his ashes kept in the ladies’ room in St Giles’ Cathedral in Edinburgh. And on that note, perhaps it’s time to stop.

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

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