Playmates: An Eighteenth-Century Boyhood

This is the second of Kate MacFarlane’s two-part examination of the boyhood of Donald Sage. Kate says ‘I am a retired civil servant living in Ottawa, Canada. I had a long career with the Canadian government, working primarily on the designation and preservation of our built heritage. I am currently pursuing an MLitt in history through the University of the Highlands and Islands and serving as a volunteer board member with Heritage Ottawa.‘

In all his childhood and school boy adventures, Sage was accompanied by his older brother Eneas. Only fourteen months apart in age, they were the closest of brothers and friends. Speaking of his very early years he wrote “…of my sisters, I have no recollection. My only brother with whom I played all day and slept at night, did attract my notice.”[1]

As boys, Donald and Eneas enjoyed constructing miniature houses and mills, fishing expeditions, exploring and berry picking. They were often joined by John MacThomais, son of their father’s principal farm servant who was close to them in age. According to Sage, John “was our constant companion, counsellor, and associate. He was a pleasing and talkative companion, and was furnished with an abundant store of old traditions, which he had rather a knack of telling, and which made many a day, “merrily to go by.”[2] Throughout his childhood, however, it was Eneas who featured most prominently in his memories and affection.

In 1801, the brothers left home to attend school at Dornoch. There, Sage made numerous friends, including Hugh Bethune, “a forward, smart boy” but, unfortunately, Hugh and Eneas “could not agree, nor in any way pull together.”[3] A disagreement as to who should take “the place of leader and principal adviser in all the amusements of our play hours” was settled in “the ordinary way of deciding such differences between school boys” with a boxing match.[4] Apparently, Eneas won hands down as poor Hugh “was far from being on an equality with him in muscular strength.”[5]

Dornoch Burgh School – at the site where Donald, Aeneas and his friends would have studied. Photo 1907 – over a hundred yeras after they attended. Historylinks Archive Cat 2002_011 Picture 993.

According to Sage, “some of my school fellows with whom I was most intimate when at Dornoch were three young men of the name of Hay. They were natives of the West Indies; the offspring of a negro woman” and a Scotsman.[6] The oldest Hay brother, Fergus, “was very handsome…had all the manners of a gentleman, and had first rate abilities.”[7] Sage met Fergus under unfortunate circumstances when “merely to save the skins of Walter Bethune, Bob Barclay and others,” Fergus falsely blamed him for something that resulted in thirty unjust lashes from the school master.[8] Fergus, however, was “conscious of the impropriety of his conduct though his pride would not allow him to say so” and from that point on, he “behaved…with very great kindness” toward Sage.[9]

Donald and Eneas returned home from school in the spring of 1803. In the autumn of 1804, following a serious disagreement which caused “an open rupture” with their fractious stepmother, Eneas went to sea. Parting from his brother was traumatic for Sage. Years later, he wrote that he felt as though his “very life was gradually deserting me” when they said good-bye. Eneas too was “almost stupefied with grief.”[10] Sadly, the brothers never met again. Eneas wrote to let his family know when he arrived in London and sent along “a few prints of ships in gilt frames…as a peace-offering to his stepmother.”[11] A second letter, sent from Philadelphia, turned out to be the last. A footnote in Memorabilia Domestica notes “what became of [Eneas] afterwards was never known.”[12]

Sage’s memories of his childhood and school years focus almost exclusively on masculine pursuits and masculine company. He recalls, with affection and amusement, the housekeeper who lived with them before his father remarried and he attempts to give his difficult stepmother her due. He says next to nothing about his sisters. It is a boys’ world he looks back on, at home and in school and of all his companions, it is Eneas who stands out, who “impresses himself strongly on my reminiscences.”[13]

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[1]Sage, Donald. Memorabilia Domestica, Or, Parish Life in the North of Scotland, p. 79.

[2]Ibid, p. 94.

[3]Ibid, p. 115. More on Donald and Aeneas’ journey to school in previous posts beginning with https://historylinksdornoch.wordpress.com/2013/02/25/donalds-journey-part-1/ (February 25, 2013)

[4]Ibid.

[5]Ibid.

[6]Ibid, p. 117.

[7]Ibid.

[8]Ibid.

[9]Ibid.

[10]Ibid, p. 128.

[11]Ibid, p. 129.

[12]Ibid.

[13]Ibid, p. 107.

Childsplay: An eighteenth-century boyhood

Kate MacFarlane is a retired civil servant living in Ottawa, Canada. I had a long career with the Canadian government, working primarily on the designation and preservation of our built heritage. I am currently pursuing an MLitt in history through the University of the Highlands and Islands and serving as a volunteer board member with Heritage Ottawa.

Donald Sage (1789-1869) was a minister and a minister’s son, born and raised in Kildonan. His memoir, Memorabilia Domestica: Or, Parish Life in the North of Scotland provides a rare and fascinating glimpse of his late eighteenth-century boyhood and the pastimes and playmates that filled it. Looking back on his early childhood, Sage recalled a world of gloriously unsupervised, adventurous and unstructured play, most of it in the company of his older brother Eneas. At the ages of just four and five, the boys – unaccompanied – “crossed the burn, and, for our own amusement…called in at almost all the tenants’ houses, where we met with a kind and cordial reception.”[1] Fussed over and fed “a half cake of oat-bread, larded over with cream,”[2] they were then carried home, Eneas not being in the mood to walk.

From early on, the boys were “of a mechanical turn…always building houses and mills, in imitation of those at Kildonan.”[3] They “built a clay house at the back of the manse” and “mills as closely resembling their larger and more useful prototypes as our limited capacities could approach.”[4] They also enjoyed fishing for (or as Sage put it, butchering) trout, either catching them in a home made weel or using “another and still more barbarous method of killing,” impaling the trout “with all our force [so] the wretched victims of our pursuit often came up in fragments!”[5]

At the ages of twelve and thirteen, Donald and Eneas left for school at Dornoch, where they stayed for a year and a half. Life at school was more structured and rigidly disciplined but it did allow time for play which, by then, had evolved from their childhood rambles into more competitive team sports and activities. Chief among them was “club and shinty” which Sage describes as a “game, or battle.”[6] He notes that during his youth, it was universal in the north. For men only, it was played “with all the keenness accompanied by shouts, with which their forefathers had wielded the claymore.”[7] It was physical to the point of danger and “in not a few instances, actually proved fatal.”[8]

‘Game of Shinty’ from Old England: A Pictorial History (1845) [out of copyright]

Another fond memory from his school days was of cock fighting which “took precedence over all our other amusements.”[9] Then a wide spread practice throughout the parochial school system, cocks were begged from households throughout the parish and brought by school boys to the local court room or “battle-field where the feathered brood might, by their bills and claws, decide who among the juvenile throng should be king and queen.”[10]

Sage says very little about toys in his memoir, recalling only a handful of special ones. For example, at a very early age, he was given a windmill by John Ross, an admirer of his housekeeper who hoped to gain her favor. The gift, he said, “rivetted [sic] my affections to him and I followed him like his shadow.”[11] The servants were amused by his devotion and “to put my attachment to the test…one stormy evening, as I was seated by the kitchen fireside, told me that John Ross was dead, that he had been drowned in attempting to cross the burn.”[12] Poor Sage, “giving full vent to my feelings…made the kitchen rafters ring with my roaring.”[13]

Sage studied Latin from a very young age, progressing quickly and working his way through a wide range of classical works. A bright, imaginative little boy, he took inspiration from his reading and set the stories and characters in local settings: “The gay and elegant Athens,” for example, “with its orators and heroes, its classic buildings, its Acropolis and its thoughtless and polished mob…were all located in the village of Kildonan.”[14]

Memorabilia Domestica, is rich in detail and an excellent source of information on 18^th century childhood in the north of Scotland. Sage gives his readers a fascinating glimpse of one boy’s world of play – full of exploration and adventure – and highlights the pastimes, toys, reading materials, sports and games that he enjoyed.

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[1]Sage, Donald. Memorabilia Domestica, Or, Parish Life in the North of Scotland (Wick, 1899), p. 79.

[2]Ibid.

[3]Ibid, p. 94.

[4]Ibid.

[5]Ibid.

[6]Ibid, p. 118. See a previous post for more on this: https://historylinksdornoch.wordpress.com/2013/03/19/dornoch-diversions/ (March 19, 2013)

[7]Ibid.

[8]Ibid.

[9]Ibid.

[10]Ibid, p. 119. See a previous post for more on this: https://historylinksdornoch.wordpress.com/2014/02/03/cock-o-the-north/ (February 3, 2014)

[11]Ibid, p. 78.

[12]Ibid.

[13]Ibid, pp. 78-79.

[14]Ibid, pp. 86-87. See a previous post for more on this: https://historylinksdornoch.wordpress.com/2018/09/18/a-landscape-of-the-imagination-kildonan-and-the-classical-world/ (Septmeber 18, 2018)

‘tossed back and fore on the Moray Firth’: a sea voyage in 1805

A teenager from Kildonan, Donald Sage, was a student in Aberdeen. He had walked the whole distance from Tain to Aberdeen to get to university, suffering a collapse at Inverurie, as it was too much for the fifteen year old. At the end of session he needed to get home and decided to travel by sea. Poor Donald’s three-day experience sounds almost as bad as his footsore journey at the start of the session! His account provides a great insight into travel around the north as well as how Sundays were spent and what people ate at sea.

‘I took my passage for Helmisdale, on a salmon-fishing smack, which was in the service of Forbes and Hogarth, who then held the Sutherland rivers in lease from the Marchioness of Stafford … The smack which bore me homewards was the identical one by which my brother sailed to London, but had a different master; Coy had been replaced by a rough fellow of the name of Colstone. I went on board about 2 o’clock in the afternoon, and dined before we set sail. Feeling hungry I partook largely of a coarse, greasy dinner at the skipper’s table. It consisted of very fat broth and still fatter meat. Colstone, not content with swallowing the most enormous quantities of clear fat I had ever seen attempted even by a famished mastiff, after all was over greased his face with it, to keep out the cold as I supposed. This sappy dinner, as well as the remembrance of the skipper’s face, served me for a strong emetic during the voyage homewards, which was both tedious and tempestuous. On going out at the pier-head the billows rose ‘mountains high’, and as they rose, both my spirits and my stomach fell. The dinner with its associations presented themselves before me every half -hour, until I became grievously sick, and my very ribs ached again with the pressure of vomiting. The wind blew a hurricane from the west, and in the course of twelve hours we were close on the Sutherland coast, opposite Helmisdale, the place of our destination.’

Helmsdale in the 1920s. Donald spent three days ‘tossed back and fore’ somewhere on the left hand edge of this photo. Photo courtesy of Timespan, Helmsdale.

‘But here again the wind chopped round in our very teeth, and we were for three days tossed back and fore on the Moray Firth in view of the harbour, without being able to enter it. The storm was so violent that even the skipper himself became sick. I was a Sabbath at sea; and although the wind blew contrary, the day was fine. The sailors observed the day with great decorum. There was nothing like social or public worship, but when any one of them got a spare hour, he laid himself face downwards on the floor of the cabin and conned over the New Testament. We left Aberdeen on a Friday, and landed at the mouth of the Helmisdale River on the Tuesday morning thereafter.’

The river as it enters the sea. Map inset from 1815. Image courtesy of Timespan, Helmsdale.

‘I shall never forget the strong and penetrating feeling of joyous safety with which I leaped out of the ship’s boat on the pebbly shore of the river near the Corf-house. Mr. Thomas Houston, now of Kintradwell, met me on the beach, and with him I went to the house of Mrs. Houston, his mother. After a cordial welcome and a hasty breakfast I walked up the Strath to Kildonan, where I found my worthy father [Alexander Sage] engaged in the annual examination of the Parish School. He received me with a father’s kindness, took me into his large embrace, and kissed me before the whole assemblage.’

Donald Sage, Memorabilia Domestica: or parish life in the north of Scotland (Wick, 1889), 134-144.

Parlours and Sofas: Houses, Status and the Emerging Highland Middle Class

This is part 3 of our short series on the life and times of Sheriff Hugh MacCulloch who is memorialised just outside Dornoch.

Prior to the Clearances, most people (with the exception of the poor and the aristocracy) lived in longhouses. With thick walls of stone and turf, roofed with heather or reed thatch, they gave warmth and shelter to families and livestock. Most were furnished with home-made chairs, benches, chests, and maybe shelves, beds or a bookcase, alongside the spinning wheel and the central fire. People with more money and power, tacksmen and ministers, were however beginning to emulate southern counterparts with two-storey houses of stone, mortar and lime. Their very design not only marked these families out as prestigious, but created a sense of class division and promoted the networks which were so vital to advancement in marriage and the professions.

In the little capital town of Sutherland, Dornoch, Hugh MacCulloch was an important man. As Sheriff-Substitute for the County he lived in the civic centre, close by the court and next to the cathedral ruins, part of which served as the parish church. ‘His house was situated to the south of the town, and at the foot of what was called the Vennel, a small pathway leading from the churchyard.’ This house ‘of an antique cast’ may not have been new but it displayed MacCulloch’s status as a man of status. It was organised for genteel entertainment and networking. ‘The parlour or dining-room had three windows, and on its wall hung several prints. In the north-west corner of the room and near the door, stood a handsome eight-day clock – a present which the Sheriff had received from the Sutherland Volunteers, of which he was Major. A large sofa stood on the opposite side, near the fire-place.’ The house was also a place of work. The Sheriff’s ‘study was a small room upstairs … crammed with books and papers.’

1783 map of Dornoch. Presumably McCulloch’s house was one of those in the bottom right hand corner of what is shown on the map. Image: Historylinks Museum.

Two floors of attics topped it off. In November 1801 twelve- and fourteen-year-old Donald and Aeneas Sage arrived to lodge. ‘Mrs. MacCulloch showed us to our bedroom. It was at the top of the house, an attic above an attic – a dreary, cold place, having all the rude finishings of a coarse loft.’ Rude perhaps, but when the Sheriff returned that evening ‘he received us with the most fatherly kindness’.

Donald and Aeneas might have been a bit frightened and homesick, but a large stone house was familiar. Their parents, Isabella and Alexander, lived in the Kildonan manse, the house provided for the minister, some three days walk to the north-west. Their home rose tall on the fringes of the cluster of their neighbours’ longhouses. Like the MacCullochs’, their ground floor was occupied by a parlour, bedroom, and a closet. Upstairs were a dining-room, bedroom, and another closet. It also had an attic with two garrets: one a bed-room, the other a storeroom for lumber. Unlike upper class houses there was no wallpaper. Walls were ‘cat and clay, plastered over with lime’, finished with white-wash which came off on everything that touched it. Outside the main house were two low buildings with turf roofs, one containing the nursery, kitchen and byre, and the other, a barn and stable. Like the Sheriff’s house, this building was more than a family home.

The manse at Kildonan in 2018. Image: Elizabeth Ritchie

One reason ministers were provided with spacious houses was so they could provide hospitality. When Hugh MacCulloch came to investigate a riot in the heights of Kildonan in October 1801, he stayed at the manse. Donald recollected: ‘On the evening of his arrival … he was drenched almost to the skin, as it had rained heavily through the day; he especially required dry stockings, and he preferred putting them on at the kitchen fireside … he took particular notice of me, and asked me many questions about my progress in learning, particularly in Latin. He was much pleased with my answers, and said that, if my father would send my brother and me to school at Dornoch, he would keep us for three months in his own house.’

In the years before the clearances, it is possible to see the emergence of a distinct middling, professional class in the rural Highlands through their houses. As elsewhere in Britain they began to mark themselves out with homes in non-indigenous styles, partly built with materials not available locally. Specialised rooms provided spaces for professional men to work with books and papers; promoted privacy; and separated domestic life from hospitality. Parlours and dining rooms, rather than a shared domestic space where family and visitors were cooked for, ate and entertained alike, meant domestic rituals were formalised, and visitors were separated into those catered for in the kitchen or formally entertained in the parlour. Spare bedrooms made providing hospitality to travelling gentlemen easy. So along with the new houses were built the networks which promoted the careers, marriages and opportunities for the families who lived in them.

Sources:

Donald Sage, Memorabilia Domestica, chapter 9

Ideas about homes, respectability and the rising middle class particularly inspired by Catherine Hall and Leonore Davidoff, Family fortunes: men and women of the English middle class 1780-1850 (London, 1987, 2002).

The Highland Land League and the School Boards in Clyne and Kildonan

Alison McCall’s love of history was fuelled by tales of family history told by her grandparents. Her PhD thesis The Lass o’ Pairts: Social mobility for women through education in Scotland, 1850-1901, includes a section on east Sutherland.

Two acres of croft land in West Helmsdale barely sustained the Bruce family: the ‘Widow Bruce’, young George and Mary, and her widowed mother. Jane Bruce’s husband had died in 1848, aged 32, when their children were aged four and one. The family were poor, but they were not alone in this. Poverty was endemic among families whose forebears had been cleared down the Strath of Kildonan to the area around Helmsdale.

George became a baker in Helmsdale. He joined the Highland Land League, which campaigned to have politicians sympathetic to the crofters’ cause elected to Parliament. In 1888 George was elected onto the Kildonan School Board. Elections had been held throughout Scotland every three years since the Education (Scotland) Act 1872 transferred control of schools from churches, charities and private individuals to locally elected School Boards under government control. Clergymen, businessmen, landowners, academics and other pillars of society were returned as School Board members. Women were eligible to stand, but were elected only onto the larger city Boards. In East Sutherland voters recognised the School Boards gave them the opportunity to vote politically. And they voted for men such as George Bruce.

George Bruce outside his shop on Lilleshall Street, Helmsdale. Photo: Courtesy of Timespan Heritage Centre

Unfortunately the first minute book of Kildonan School Board is missing, but the rise of Land League influence can be traced in neighbouring Clyne. As the Land Leaguers gained strength and confidence the composition of the School Board changed. The first was chaired by the Duke of Sutherland’s factor, Joseph Peacock. The second included the Hon. Walter Stuart, the Duke’s grandson. In 1877, one matter was referred to “the Duke of Sutherland, being the principal ratepayer, and being also deeply interested in the educational welfare of the people.” Regardless of the voters’ wishes, the Duke was the ultimate authority. The crofters’ breakthrough came with the third Board. In 1879 were elected George Grant and George Murray, both tailors, George MacKay, Joseph Peacock and George Lawson, a farmer. The three crofters’ candidates elected Grant as chair. Grant was out of his depth. Apparently unused to using a pen, he proposed to take minutes in pencil, to be written up later. Peacock and Lawson objected. Grant said that “he could not even dictate a minute” but hoped to learn in the next month. Lawson asked Grant to withdraw as chair in favour of Peacock, but Grant refused. School Boards members throughout Scotland were usually well educated and highly literate. Clyne may have been unique in having a Chair uncomfortable using pen and ink. However, the community regarded him highly. He was re-elected in 1882, 1885, but were always in a minority. Voters had subverted the educational purposes of School Board elections for political opposition to the Duke, and the furtherance of land politics.

Back up in Kildonan, by 1888 when George Bruce was elected, the rest of the Board was largely composed of those sympathetic to the crofters cause. James Fraser, fishcurer, was chair and the other members were Robert Hill, farmer, William Cuthbert, fishcurer, and Joseph MacKay, crofter. Hill farmed 102 acres at Navidale, and was one of those who had benefitted from the cleared land. By contrast Joseph MacKay was one of eight crofters threatened in 1882 with eviction for grazing sheep. The eight employed a solicitor and the summons was withdrawn. Cuthbert and Bruce were prominent local Land Leaguers. Cuthbert was re-elected in 1891, 1894 and 1900. Bruce was re-elected in 1897 and 1900, indicating ongoing political support.

Gaining control of the School Boards and using them for political control was a unique tactic of the Land League in East Sutherland.

This gravestone was erected by ‘our’ George Bruce. Photo: Alison McCall

Post script. George Bruce died in 1922, but the family bakery firm continued. In 1932 they baked a wedding cake for George’s great niece, Mary Bruce MacLeod. It was decorated with silver horseshoes. In 1989, Mary’s granddaughter, the present writer, had one of horseshoes sewn onto the sleeve of her wedding dress.

The sleeve of Alison’s wedding dress. Photo: Alison McCall.

In 2022 the author’s daughter got married in her grandmother’s dress and the horseshoe made another appearance at a family wedding!

Sources
MacLeod, Joseph, Highland Heroes of the Land Reform Movement (Highland News Publishing Company, 1917)
Obituary of William Cuthbert in John O’Groats Journal, 9 January 1931

‘Successful and prosperous’: The Middling Years of William Keith, Golspie (part 2)

Thirty five year old William Keith had taken up the job as minister at Kildonan in 1776. This easy-going man’s life of salmon fishing, sermon preparation, good food and company was augmented by marrying seventeen year old Isabella Grant. He probably got to know her when he was assistant at Fearn, as her father was minister of Nigg. Their first three children, Peter, William, and Margaret, were born at the manse in Kildonan. But by 1787 the living at Golspie was vacant. Keith applied personally to the Countess of Sutherland and the young family moved to the coastal village. There William and Isabella’s brood grew: Sutherland, George, Elizabeth, Anne, James, Sophia then Lewis were added to the nursery. The Keiths were now settled. William would stay in Golspie for the next 29 years. Apart from his writing the statistical account for the parish, we know a few things about his life in Golspie in decades of profound change for the region. We know that in 1794 he was down in Edinburgh at the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, because he co-signed a letter to the King supporting the war against the French. We know that back home he pursued his role as community leader: in 1801 he wrote to the Justice of the Peace recommending the removal of the parish fox hunter, a man so inefficient that he had managed only to kill one fox in the last year, and that with the assistance of forty volunteers! And we know that there was heartbreak. He and Isabella lost a total of six babies, including six month old Anne in 1793. They also lost three adult sons. In 1803 nineteen year old William died in Bengal. Although he was probably with the British army, death by disease was more likely than by military action. In 1808 George died, again at the age of nineteen. Between these two, in 1805, twenty four year old Patrick died in Berbice, a part of South America that is now in Guyana.

Map of Dutch Guiana and of Curacao, Bonaire and Aruba 1781. By http://maps.bpl.org [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

Patrick’s business in the British Empire was even more sinister than young William’s. Berbice was a slave colony. Many Highlanders were involved in the slave economy of the Caribbean. Not all were plantation owners: there were merchants, doctors and managers as well as tradesmen. It seems Patrick was a plantation manager. David Alston of Cromarty has done enormous work on these people and has made his research available on his website http://www.spanglefish.com/slavesandhighlanders/ He suspects that Patrick was the man who managed Lord Seaforth’s Brahan plantation. Seaforth’s secretary, Peter Fairbairn, says Keith had been in the colony from at least early 1803 before he ‘quitted at a moments notice’ in October 1804 and went ‘to the East Coast to conduct a task gang’. Sutherland Keith seems to have followed his elder brother across the Atlantic. By 1819 we know that he owned six slaves and three years later he had ten. He died in Berbice in 1825 at the age of thirty eight.

I was unable to find William Keith’s grave, however this is the Golspie church that he preached in. (Photo from collection of Elizabeth Ritchie)

In 1811, after the death of three sons, William lost Isabella, at the age of forty nine. He lived on another five years before Sutherland was required to pay for a tombstone to commemorate the life of his seventy six year old father, in the graveyard of St Andrew’s church, Golspie. William Keith was an unexceptional man but whose life epitomised a changing Scotland and the international connections of Highlanders. Born just before the country bitterly divided itself over Bonnie Prince Charlie’s claim to the throne, in middle life he became a pillar of the establishment, supporting King and Country during the ructions after the French Revolution. He was concerned more with social status and the gentle pleasures of life than with the radical religious revivals affecting the Highlands. In this ordinary man’s pursuit of career, family and betterment for his children he tests the stereotype of the Highlander as insular and impoverished. He had studied at two of Europe’s great universities, Aberdeen and Edinburgh; he would have been fluent in Gaelic and English, was at least competent in Greek and Latin, and perhaps had a smattering of modern European languages; he took up jobs in various parts of his home region as well as several hundred miles away in Argyll; his daughters married locally and in London; and his sons took advantage of the financial benefits the British Empire offered to white men in places as far apart in India and the Caribbean. This very ordinary, middle class family, based in Golspie two hundred years ago, was better travelled and with more world-wide connections than many of us today!

Sources:
Fasti Ecclesiae Scoticanae, Vol 7, p 87-8.
Principal Acts of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, (Edinburgh: James Dickson, 1794), 17. [available on googlebooks]
National Archives of Scotland, JP32/7/5/48, William Keith and John Polson, Golspie, to justice of the peace in Accounts, affidavits and letters concerning payments for the killing of foxes and eagles in Strathnaver, the parishes of Lairg and Farr, the Reay and Skibo estates and other places in the county, including details of claimants names, the time and place of killing and the animals’ ages. April 28 1801.
NAS Papers of the Mackenzie Family, Earls of Seaforth (Seaforth Papers), Letters from Peter Fairburn, Seaforth’s secretary, GD46/17/26 cited in http://www.spanglefish.com/slavesandhighlanders/

‘Society, good living, and the luxuries of the table’: The Youth of William Keith, Golspie (part 1)

Sometime in the 1790s William Keith sat down at his desk in Golspie manse. He picked out his quill, selected some sheets of paper, opened his ink bottle and began to write out the results of his research into his own parish. He, along with all other Church of Scotland ministers, had been sent a lengthy questionnaire by Sir John Sinclair of Ulbster who was hoping to collate a statistical account of the nation. The results of this remarkable survey can be read today online at http://edina.ac.uk/stat-acc-scot/

William knew the area well. He had been minister in Golspie since 1787. Before that he lived in nearby Kildonan. Indeed he was born only some miles to the south, in Easter Ross, in 1741. We don’t know his origins, but it is likely that he was the son of a farmer or tacksman and was educated at the parish school. He did stints at the universities of Aberdeen and Edinburgh in his teens and into his early twenties. By the age of twenty six he was fully qualified in an academic sense and was licensed by the Presbytery of Tain. It was common for university-educated young men to become teachers for a while. William Keith took over the education of the young people of Creich, a long parish stretching from the fertile low lying country on the northern banks of the Dornoch Firth west towards Assynt. At some point in the next six years he was offered a job by Mrs Ross of Daan and exchanged the public classroom for the life of a private tutor. He probably resided at the ‘old mansion house of Meikle Daan’, a mile or two south of the village of Edderton. There are records of a house there since 1592, though the one William lived in was a two-storeyed modern building surrounded by a walled enclosure and out buildings connected with the farm. In case the young clergyman was likely to forget, he was daily reminded by the lintel above the fireplace to ‘Fear God in hairt’ along with the motto ‘servire Deum est Regnare’. This injunction, dated 1680, was issued by a carved man ‘in what seems to be a Geneva hat, cloak and band with the long peaked beard and moustachios of the seventeenth century’. The lintel is now in Balnagown Castle.

Similar to the view William would have had from the house at Meikle Daan where he tutored. Picture from collection of Elizabeth Ritchie.

By 1773 Keith had decided to pursue his ministerial career more specifically and was appointed as assistant or a missionary minister in the far south west of the Highlands, in Kilbrandon. The differences between his Gaelic dialect and that of Argyll might have caused some initial adjustment, but Gaelic speaking ministers were scarce so he would have been a prized commodity! He returned to home turf to take up an assistantship with Rev Donald Ross of Fearn. A close friend who later wrote his memoirs suggests that this might have been a trying and perhaps entertaining time. William had many anecdotes about Mr Ross whose judgement had apparently been ‘considerably impaired’ by a narrow escape from some ‘sudden and violent death’! His work in aiding, and possibly containing and mitigating, Ross came to perhaps a thankful end when a job arose in Kildonan. The system in those days was that ministers were presented by the landowner, in this case the guardians of young Elizabeth, Countess of Sutherland. This girl was later to become famous for her clearance policies of that very parish. William’s friend, Donald Sage who was brought up in Kildonan, provided a kind and friendly description of his time in Kildonan:

‘He was a man of good ability and sincere piety. His ministry as well as his temporal circumstances at Kildonan were successful and prosperous. Eminently practical, his doctrine did not enter very much into theological details, but it was sound, scriptural, and edifying. He was on the best ministerial footing with his parishioners. The living was very small, but his wants were few. He lived frugally, and the parishioners filled his larder with all sorts of viands, such as mutton, eggs, butter, and cheese. He had also, as minister of the parish, the right of fishing in the river of Helmisdale to the extent of seven miles down its course.’

Keith was what might be called a Moderate, a brand of Presbyterian interested in the arts, in farming, and in living the life of the rural middling classes, and less concerned than their Evangelical brethren with preaching, pastoral care and encouraging Christian conversion. Even his friend Donald commented that he was ‘not very active among his people, being of an exceedingly easy temperament. He was also of a very social disposition; this indeed he indulged in to a fault. Society, good living, and the luxuries of the table, although they never led him into any excess, yet presented such attractions to him as often brought him in undue intimacy with the worldly and profane.’

To be continued…

Fasti Ecclesiae Scoticanae, Vol 7, p 87-8.
Canmore
http://canmore.org.uk/site/13886/meikle-daan-rheguile
Donald Sage, Memorabilia Domestica, or Parish Life in the North of Scotland (Wick: William Rae, 1899), 53.

Isabella’s Story, Part 4: Family Crises

In that first year in Kildonan, Isabella and Alexander struggled with a big house, managing a glebe and a farm, contracting debts, and their two young children. It also fell to them to manage a building project. The old chapel was heather-thatched and housed the burial place of the chiefs of the clan Gunn. The new church was erected on the same site, just down from the manse so Isabella, with Betty and Jane, would have watched the walls rise each day. That first year must have been exhausting for Isabella. Not only was she managing the house, probably significant parts of the farm, trying to improve the poor impression Alexander had made on the parishioners, and raising the girls, but she was again pregnant. Just over a year after their move Angus, or Aeneas, was born. This first son was named, as tradition dictated, after his paternal grandfather. Slightly more than another year later, in October 1789, Isabella gave birth to another boy in the manse at Kildonan: Donald, named after her father. Isabella, perhaps unable to feed the babies herself, or perhaps to assist with childcare, or perhaps to build up relationships locally in the traditional way through fosterage, perhaps all three, sent both boys out to be nursed. Marion Polson, married to the parish catechist, took in Angus. Donald was sent to Barbara Corbett who lived with her husband at Lonn-riabhach, near the rock of Marrel. Donald was very fond of Barbara’s care and the family connection persisted to the next generation when Donald employed her daughter Barbara, his foster-sister, as his servant. Isabella’s decision was not at the expense of loving ties with the boys. It seems that after they were weaned they largely lived at home again and Donald remembered Isabella’s tender attitude to him when he was a petulant toddler.

The new Kildonan church building with the manse (significantly refurbished!) behind. The ruins of the township of Kirkton are just to the right of the present farm buildings. Photo: Marjory Harper

The three year old’s demands were part of daily life as the dank November days closed in around Kildonan’s manse in 1792. Having lost a baby since Donald’s birth, Isabella was again pregnant. There were four children under the age of seven in the big smoky, dusty house, and the new baby was due at the end of the month. Her contractions began on the 26th or 27th. When labour really took hold she retired to one of the east-facing bedrooms. Someone would have sent word to the local midwife. There may have been one living in Kirkton, just a few minutes up the road, or she may have come from one of the further off townships. Several women would have gathered at the manse. Marion Polson and Barbara Corbett might have been there, and any other friends or near neighbours, all of whom would have had experience helping each other give birth. Things did not go well. The baby died and Isabella was losing a lot of blood. It became clear that she was not going to make it through the night. About an hour before she died, all the children were called to her bedside so she could see them and bless them. Donald later recalled that he was her favourite and he was told that she took particular notice of him that evening. Her feelings choked her as she prayed that he ‘might yet be useful in the vineyard of Christ.’ He did not remember the deathbed scene, but he did remember creeping in to her room a few hours after Isabella had died.

‘On the bed lay extended, with a motionless stillness which both surprised and terrified me, one whom I at once knew to be my mother. I was sure it was she, although she lay so still and silent. She appeared to me to be covered with a white sheet or robe; white leather gloves were on her hands, which lay crossed over her body.’

Alexander was sitting in the corner. He had been quietly weeping. When he caught sight of his little boy, the favourite son of his Isabella, the floodgates opened. He caught hold of Donald, his whole body shaking and the tears rolling down his face. Donald didn’t know that grown men could cry and, as his father held him he stared at Isabella’s body, her gloved hands engraving on his memory. Isabella was forty two. Alexander buried her by the wall of the church building that she had watched grow out of the ground a few years earlier.

Isabella’s children were given the loving mothering they needed for the next few years by Eppy, a servant. Within two years Alexander had found a new wife. She was a local woman, Jean Sutherland of Midgarty. Isabella’s boys stayed at home, being educated by the parish schoolmaster and by their father until they turned twelve and thirteen when Alexander took them to school in Dornoch. Doubtless largely due to Isabella’s smoothing over his early difficulties, Alexander eventually became a well-respected and loved minister in Kildonan. Today he lies beside his church, between his Jean and his Isabella.

Isabella Fraser Sage’s gravestone. Photo: Jacquie Aitkin.

Sources:
Hew Strachan (ed), Fasti Ecclesiae Scoticanae
Donald Sage, Memorabilia Domestica

Isabella’s Story, Part 3: Of Babies, Houses and Husbands

After her wedding, Isabella travelled north to take up residence in the ‘low, uncomfortable cottage of two rooms and a closet, not far from the old ruin of Dirlot’. There she ran her household for three years as her husband traversed the district, mainly on foot, accompanied by his gillie or kirk-officer.

A later set of buildings at Dirlot, Caithness. Not far away is an old graveyard and a little further along the road the ruins of a church. Sometimes places that seem remote today were community hubs not that long ago. Photo: Elizabeth Ritchie

Almost a year and nine months after her wedding Isabella gave birth to her first-born. Elizabeth was followed in March 1787 with Jane. A few months later Isabella and Alexander bundled the babies and sticks of furniture onto ponies and carts for the move south to the vast parish of Kildonan. Their income rose from a relatively humble £40 to £70: a lot to many of the people to whom they ministered, but not in comparison to other ministers or gentry. Isabella became mistress of Kildonan manse, half way up the fertile Strath, scattered with cattle, grain and whisky producing townships. Unlike the longhouses that everyone else occupied, the Sages had a lime and stone-built house bracketed with gables and chimneys which smoked instead of drawing the fumes upwards. On the ground floor were a parlour, bed-room, and a closet. Upstairs were a dining-room, bed-room, and another closet. In the attic storey were two garrets, one fitted up as a bed-room, the other a storeroom used for lumber. The house was nightmarish to keep clean as the walls were ‘cat and clay, plastered over with lime’, finished with a coat of whitewash which came off on everything that touched it: on visitors’ coats, on Isabella’s skirts, and on every part of active toddlers. There were not just those three floors to heat, light and clean, but also the two low buildings stretching out from the manse which contained, on the west, the nursery, kitchen and byre, and on the east, the barn and stable. Each compartment was divided from the next by the inadequate ‘cat and clay’, so fairly soon humans and animals could eye each other through the gaps. Like their neighbours’ longhouses, the office roofs were constructed of turf and finished with clay and straw, never quite keeping out the worst of the rain. Muck was constantly trailed in from the rick-yard, the kiln and the cattle-fold. The manse was the centre of an active farm. Ministers were granted the use of a glebe as part of their pay. In Alexander’s case this was fifty acres. He was not terribly interested in the agricultural improvements that so excited many of his colleagues so the land continued to be operated without many changes.

Despite the promotion from missionary to fully-fledged minister, the move came with major financial challenges for the young couple. They had to buy furniture for a larger house, stock a considerable glebe, and they decided to lease a farm. They contracted debts and money was extremely tight. Isabella, blessed with a sense of humour, would say, ‘is bochd so, is bhi bochd roimh’ (out of the fire into the embers).

Money was not the only challenge. Alexander was not immediately accepted by locals. He was rather uncompromising and rather willing to challenge people’s wrongdoing. He was a slow thinker, needing much time to study a matter. His difficulties with catching on and finding words to express his ideas was exacerbated by a shyness which confused him, often rendering him speechless. A number of his parishioners were far more pious than he. His faith deepened as he increased in age, but Kildonan’s key church members were not impressed with the new man. His problems were compounded by his temper. Isabella was vital in smoothing his path. Unlike him she was reflective, with a deep faith and a sharp mind. She was patient and mild. It was she who had the difficult job of checking her husband’s anger, protecting both him and others from it.

To be continued…

Sources:
Hew Strachan (ed), Fasti Ecclesiae Scoticanae
Donald Sage, Memorabilia Domestica

Wandering in the Strath: A History Fieldtrip

Alison Kennedy, a fourth year Scottish History student at UHI, writes about her experience of a fieldtrip in Sutherland.

Recently students and staff from the Universities of Highlands and Islands and Aberdeen, met in Helmsdale to explore the landscape of the clearances and other historic sites in the Strath of Kildonan.

First stop was Lower Caen which was the subject of a community archaeological excavation in June 2013. The dig focused on the final phase of occupation and the abandonment of a longhouse and its outbuildings. Later, displayed at Timespan’s Museum, we saw some of the artefacts discovered at the township: pottery, the remains of shoes and parts of a whisky still. The site is up a steep incline from the road and the settlement would have been exposed to the elements. Often cattle were kept under the same roof as the family, especially during the severe winter months. In the spring of 1807 200 cows, 500 cattle and more than 200 ponies died in the severe conditions in Kildonan alone.

Next stop was Kilphedir and the clearance settlement of Chorick. Here we are in the corn drying kiln!

The fieldtrippers in the corn-drying kiln

These were often built into the slope of the hillside and were used to dry cereal crops. At Eldrable, on the opposite side of the River Helmsdale, we spotted horizontal cultivation terraces which farmers had used to grow their crops. Some agricultural critics suggested that terraces like these produced poor crops and encouraged farmers to draw furrows up and down the slope to improve drainage.

Remains of runrig field systems, Eldrable

We then stopped at Baile an Or, site of the Sutherland gold rush in 1869. Robert Gilchrist’s find of an ounce of gold, worth £3, prompted a host of prospectors to arrive. Now no evidence remains of the extensive settlement of rough huts built to house as many as 500 hopeful people.

Last stop for the morning was Ach-na-h’uaidh at the southern end of the Strath of Strathnaver. The Rev. Sage preached at this meeting house for the last time in 1819 when he and his parishioners were cleared to make way for sheep farming. The walls and adjoining graveyard partially survive, together with three headstones marking the final resting place of some shepherding Chisholms and a Gordon.

Gravestones at Achnahui

Our picnic lunch was eaten in the shelter of Kinbrace Cemetery’s wall as we endeavoured to find a spot away from the wind. A circular sheepfold stood in the distance, and a brightly coloured corrugated iron roof of a disused shepherd’s house was a few yards away. One of the table stones in the graveyard is dedicated to George Grant who died on 1 May 1857. George served with the 93rd Sutherland Highlanders at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815. Many men from Kildonan were away serving with the regiment when the Clearances swept through their native land.

By Kinbrace Cemetary

Retracing our steps, we visited the broch at Upper Suisgill. Many of the stones used in the construction have been robbed to use elsewhere but the remains, measuring 12m in diameter and walls up to 4.5m thick, show what an impressive structure this must have been.

Our last stop was Kildonan church where a sermon on the clearances and emigration was preached by Professor Marjory Harper from the imposing pulpit to all the students. Today the church is used for special services and events. The plaque commemorates George Bannerman of Kildonan, great-grandfather of the Right Honorable John G. Diefenbaker, Prime Minister of Canada 1957-1963, whose ancestors probably came from the nearby township of Learable, as well as commemorating the settlers who migrated to the Red River Settlement.

Plaque at Kildonan Church

Arriving back at Helmsdale we had a look at the exhibits in the excellent Timespan Museum and Arts Centre and immersed ourselves in the virtual world of the reconstruction of Caen township.

Part of the Diaspora Tapestry

Our day finished with visiting the Scottish Diaspora Tapestry Exhibition hosted by local needle-workers in Helmsdale Community Centre. It depicts Scotland’s global legacy through tapestry. Although by now dark, our goodbyes were made fittingly under the Emigrants’ Monument erected in memory of the people who went to the Red River Settlement. A very enjoyable day!

Sources:
Clerk, Archibald, Second Statistical Account for the Parish of Duirinish, Skye 1834-45
Discovery and Excavation in Scotland Vol. 14 (Archaeology Scotland, 2013)
Inverness Courier
Sage, Donald, Memorabilia Domestica; or Parish Life in the North of Scotland (Wick, 1899)
Timespan – Museum without Walls, Scotland’s Clearances Trail App, Helmsdale Heritage and Arts Society (2012)