I remember that he remembered: family history stories from Culloden

Story two – Juliet Maclay

When a very young woman, my grandmother Kathleen Boswell-Brown, known by us as Gala, had a conversation with an ancient shepherd in the Highlands of Scotland. She understood Old McFie to be well over 100 at the time. He could remember being told, when a very small child, about the Battle of Culloden by his great-grandfather – who had been there (probably as a boy)!

Her uncle bought a couple of ancient crofts and a smallish estate with a farm just after the First World War. It was called Gaskmore, and is a mile south of Laggan in the direction of Newtonmore. The house you see now on Google Images is a hotel, and is a pale imitation of the original. My grandmother sold the estate in the late 1960s and the house was later rebuilt.

Her uncle, Donald Macpherson, was a rather grand Englishman of Scottish ancestry. He was descended from the Cluny Macpherson of the ’45, who hid in a cave on Creag Dubh just outside Newtonmore for many years after Culloden. He built the original house as a sort of ‘alternative Clan Chieftain’s residence’. His connection was certainly alternative, having been derived from an affair between Cluny of the ’45’s son and our ancestor, Isabel – whose house is still in Laggan (it was the manse originally, I think). The fruit of these liaisons were referred to locally in Gala’s day as ‘prickly-bums’, having been conceived, no doubt uncomfortably, on the heather.

Donald’s son, Euan, didn’t inherit the house as he had been badly injured in the war and didn’t live long, so it was offered to Gala – though with little money to go with it. She opened it as Gaskmore House Hotel and bar – and I have wonderful memories of this period. As a teenager, my mother had assisted in the ‘drunks’ bus’. As the pub was a mile from Laggan, they used to drive the inebriated clientele home after big events (or scrape them off the road or out of the ditch if they’d made an attempt at it). One regular was so enormous that they didn’t pick him up off the road if he fell, but just put road builders’ lights around him so he wasn’t run over. As a 4-year-old, I remember a big fight breaking out about Culloden (real fisticuffs in the car park!) – these memories indeed run deep.

Old McFie, somewhat feudally, she ‘inherited’. He lived in an earthen-floored croft that I can remember (it’s probably still there). And even in my day (I was born in 1958), it had a pile of peat and a pile of coal on the floor. A later shepherd slept in a box bed. There was no running water or bathroom or anything. He told Gala the story of his great-grandfather when she first visited Donald. It’s always been one of our most amazing family memories.

One of the other stories we heard then was how when the Duke of Cumberland was approaching the Spey Valley and Cluny Castle, one of the servants was sent up into the hills to bury the family silver to protect it. He was killed on the way back, so it was never recovered. Gala used to suggest (when times were hard) that we should get digging and find it!

I still have a photo of the original crofts there and also still have lovely old peat-cutting tools from those days.

Juliet Maclay lives in Devon and has a long association with the Highlands, with family living there until the early 1980s.

Story three – Libby Troy

Only since I have been working on my family tree have I found my 2nd great-grandfather was John Cameron. I have attached the census for 1901 showing that he was a farm servant at Leanach Cottage. So, you can see why I am very excited about coming and seeing where he lived. I know that the cottage there now is a rebuild after a fire.

My paternal grandmother was Alexandrena Fraser Cameron, who was born in Ivy Cottage, Dingwall on 13 April 1901. She graduated from Glasgow University in 1924 with a MBChB. She emigrated to Australia in March 1939 where she lived in Hunter’s Hill, Sydney until her death in 1976.

Her father was Malcolm Cameron (1871–1954), and his father was John Cameron (1844–1912).

I am definitely hoping to visit Culloden in May 2022 to see Leanach Cottage and the whole battlefield site. I must say how brilliant the anniversary events were online, which we watched as we had dinner here in Australia. It was so well done!

View our 275th anniversary films

Libby Troy and Noel Haupt live in Australia. They are so keen to visit Culloden when travel is possible again!

Story four – Hugh Miller’s grandfather

The Trust cares for Hugh Miller’s Birthplace Cottage and Museum, which was the home of inspirational geologist, folklorist and fossil hunter Hugh Miller. Here, Property Manager Alix Powers-Jones takes over the story.

Hugh Miller in his biography My Schools and Schoolmasters vividly retells accounts of the Battle of Culloden that had been told to him. These ‘glimpses of the past so unlike the present’ are eye-witness history. Miller’s grandfather was a boy of 14 when he stood with his neighbours and friends to watch the battle unfolding across the water. I have reimagined the scene, based on Miller’s descriptions:

The touch of sound.

Toiling hill-ward, upward, on a familiar geological prominence, timelessly weathering firth waters beyond: an island fisher community. Old and young, brow-bound as viewpoint witnesses. Waiting.

Waiting for drizzly fog to revoke its blanket muffle. Waiting for a distant reveal across firth waters. (Was there a reveille call to summon men at arms?)

Look! The mist is lifting. Dark, low sea-bound hills emerge from diaphanous mist.

See, there! Soft, round puffs of smoke rise mute above the moor.

It has begun.

In the blink of an eye, innocuous, bewitching smoke bestowed solid reality by an insidious, deadly underbelly soundscape, rolling across the firth. Cannon mouths boom destruction and ‘sharp intermittent patter of musketry’ (Miller, 1850) sound out their deadly prattle.

Watchers, gripped in helpless thrall. Safely remote, but nonetheless involved. Gone, any youthful anticipation of spectacle. This is not history being written. This is real battle, real death, enacted on Highland hill. Death hidden by distance, but real enough to mark its unwary distant prey. Along the island, a young shepherdess tending sheep tries in vain to comfort a terrified dog howling back to cannon’s roar. Lives scoured by the touch of sound, minds filling in missing images of this reality.

Did Miller’s grandfather climb the hill in excited anticipation, not knowing what to expect? If he did, the events were a sobering reality that remained with him all his life. Miller records that, when he was in his mid-eighties, his grandfather’s earliest (and most vivid) recollections remained those of the Battle of Culloden. When age and infirmity erased memories of middle years lived, the scar of the battle remained etched deep in the mind of this Highlander. He was a remote bystander, but a witness all the same.

The same was true of an un-named lady tending her sheep on Munlochy common ground. This ‘ancient woman’, as Miller rather unflatteringly describes her, must also have been a youngster on the day of the battle. Her grazing location meant that she would have had no sight of the battlefield and was instead assaulted by the noise of weapon fire and the terrified reaction of her howling dog who ‘looked as if he saw a spirit’ (Miller, 1850).

We often think of bystanders as spectators or witnesses, who could intervene but choose not to do so. Theirs is often a passive role, their decision not to intervene driven by disinterest, apathy, a lack of understanding, misplaced support, or perhaps a fear for their own safety. However, what about another type of bystander: the witness to whom any chance of intervention is removed? The one who witnesses, but does not necessarily see; who is remote, too far away to intervene – what of them? Today, we might name their reaction as post-traumatic stress disorder. But whatever it is called, this eye-witness narrative moved Hugh Miller when it was retold to him; and we, in our turn, are moved by its retelling to us.