Читать книгу Thicker Than Water: History, Secrets and Guilt: A Memoir - Cal Flyn - Страница 11

It started with a departure, as so many stories do.

Friday, 8 September 1837. Angus McMillan stood on the dockside in Greenock, looking for the ship that would carry him across the ocean. All his goodbyes had been said, all his belongings stowed in sturdy wooden trunks. He was an emigrant – or rather, a would-be emigrant. All he needed was to secure his passage to the other end of the earth.

McMillan had a vessel in mind: the Minerva. His friend Allan MacCaskill was already booked to travel on it to the colony of New South Wales. Or ‘New Holland’, as McMillan still called it, an old name that conjured up some of the old mystery: unknown coastlines, islands of knowledge swimming in great seas of empty mapspace. He had seen her too, her great bulk at the quay, the bright flags flying, readying herself for flight. But there was no room, said MacCaskill. All her berths had been filled.

Half of Scotland seemed to have got there ahead of him, and they all seemed to have planned in advance. Men in plaid, cheekbones protruding like broken glass; hollow-eyed women with children hiding in amongst their skirts; families with everything they owned slung onto their backs. All desperate for passage on board, an escape, pouncing upon what tickets there were. They were rats from a sinking ship, and McMillan was one of them; paws scrabbling for purchase on polished decks as an entire country upended beneath them. Those who had lost their grip were flooding out through the ports across the ocean, looking for a new life in the New World: New Zealand, New South Wales, New York, Newfoundland. They’d go anywhere there was room to sit down.

He, like many of his compatriots, had mixed feelings. Sailing out from Barra, only three days previously, he had pressed himself against the rail to watch the retreating shores of the beloved island slipping away from him, not for their sake, as he told his journal, but for the love of some of its ever to be remembered inhabitants.* Clear light danced on a rippling sea, flecked far off with the fins of basking sharks soaking up the late-summer sun. But none of this could cheer him, nor his friend Finlayson Kilbride. Alas he had no cure for the deep wounds of my tortured heart.

Still, it had been set in motion. The future beckoned, and however reluctantly, he had heeded its call. O’er the blue waves I go.

After a long day trudging the docks, from agent to ship and back again, McMillan retired to his inn and MacCaskill with no news to speak of. The ship’s crew had only confirmed MacCaskill’s warning: there were no second-class berths, and all the first-class cabins were already filled. As for going in the hold, he wrote, I could never dream of it. The Minerva had not long retired from her career as a transport for convicts, and conditions on board were little better now than they had been then. He could not face all those weeks below deck: the double layer of bunks down either side, no ventilation, no natural light. Two to a bed. For four months! God only knew the horrors of the hold, the filth and the lice and the disease that would whip through the steerage passengers as they lay packed together at night, waves slamming the hull by their feet. For all this they would pay £21 a head. No. He did not have much, but it had not come to that, not yet.

But what were the alternatives? A whole day’s enquiry had turned up little else. There was space in the cabins on the Bullant, but that would cost £74 – his entire savings. Or he could try Liverpool, and spend yet more of his dwindling funds getting there, with no promise of a better offer. All around him, others were making the same calculation: what worth pride, when with every day their financial position was weakening? But then, to arrive ragged in the port at the other side, one of those pale, faceless hundreds – poor wretches – that could cost a man more than could be bought back at the other end.

McMillan at least was saved the trade-off. A breakthrough came that evening just as he undressed for bed, still wrangling with his own pride and preparing for another day of ships’ agents and haggling. A gentleman arrived at the inn seeking him by name: the captain of the Minerva, he said, had sent him with a message. There was a berth in Captain Furlong’s own cabin, which McMillan could have for £55.

The deal was done. Now there was little to do but write his last letters home, and wait with nervous anticipation as the Minerva finished her toilette. He bought copies of the New Testament in town, and sent them on a boat bound for the Western Isles to the young women of Barra: his sisters, Miss Finlayson Kilbride, and his dear Miss Margaret – his first love, who he was leaving behind. Oh, the agony of waiting! With every passing day he was forced to renew his resolve.

God’s will be done. And God’s will, he reminded himself, was that he must go. On Monday, seeking solace in prayer, he went to the kirk twice, both in the morning and in the afternoon. But it left him cold. The clergymen I heard were strangers.

Hold steady. Tuesday dawned and they filed aboard, heavy trunks stowed neatly under narrow bunks. Anchor up, sails unfurled. Course set for the south. After all the anticipation, all the hanging around, there was a carnival atmosphere. At night the steerage passengers ventured up onto the decks and danced under the stars in delight. But McMillan was in no mood for celebrations. They should employ their time to better advantage, he thought darkly, and retreated to his cabin to scribble in his journal and dwell on the dark coast that drifted ceaselessly by, inch by inch, behind him into the night.

He would never go home again.

At twenty-seven, he was already a man with some experience of the sea. An islander by birth, he had grown up in and around boats; he knew well the whip of the wind and salt spray on the face, the constant shifting of the deck beneath him.

He and his family had spent their lives skipping between the Hebridean islands, as his father Ewen sought out suitable positions to support his growing brood. Angus was the fourth of at least fourteen children, a large family even in those times; and though the McMillans were not poor, relatively speaking – Ewen was a tacksman, a sort of intermediary between clan chief and the peasantry, the closest equivalent to a middle class in traditional Highland society – their position was unstable.

The agricultural revolution sweeping Scotland was rendering the role of the tacksman obsolete as more and more English managers and ‘land economists’ were brought in to commercialise the vast Highland estates. Change was afoot; the McMillans kept on the move. They had started in Glen Brittle on the Isle of Skye, at the foot of the forbidding Cuillin ridge. It was the domain of Macleod of Macleod, the clan chief who – when not in London – lived at Dunvegan Castle, twenty miles to the north-west.

As tacksman Ewen had made a name for himself as a grafter and an innovator, importing new, improved breeds of sheep from the mainland, before he met and married Marion, a well-connected local girl both well educated and deeply devout. Their growing brood had been instilled with the importance of religion and education, of leading a moral life, and the skills for self-sufficiency necessary in a remote community.

But across the Macleod estate, rents were rising like the tide, and there was no extra money coming in to pay them with. When their nineteen-year lease came to an end, the family packed up and sailed west, first to South Uist, and then to Barra, a jewel of an island just to the south, where Angus spent his formative years. The then laird, General Roderick MacNeil, had converted from Catholicism, and brought numbers of Protestant outsiders onto the island after inheriting the estate in 1822; the industrious – and numerous – McMillans took to their subsidiary role as lay missionaries as energetically as MacNeil could have hoped.

It had been an outdoor, practical, windswept childhood; one spent trudging through rain and snow and hail, mending fences and lambing sheep, navigating small boats through the wild gales that howled their way down the Minch. So, on board the Minerva, he stared up at the sails and out to the horizon with a critical eye, and noted the ship’s pace and progress in his journal each day. Within a few hours, his spirits began to sink: our craft does not appear to be a good sailor. But conditions were good, at least. The coast of Ireland appeared within the day, and then Wales. Fine leading under single reef top sails. The wind was behind them, blowing them straight down the Irish Sea, and out into the Atlantic Ocean.

I too was now twenty-seven. It had taken eighteen months to get things in order – or, more accurately, sufficiently disordered – so that I might head off in pursuit of Angus McMillan. I’d left my job, left London, amassed some (already dwindling) funds, and booked my own passage to Australia.

Before I left, I returned to Skye for a last look. I need to get closer to him; to nestle in close to the heart of this strange man and listen for his pulse. I was thinking of the tombstone with his name in absentia, of the black gabbro cliffs of the ragged-edged range that loomed over McMillan in his infancy. I wanted to see it all afresh, start at his beginning and work from there.

I had dragged my boyfriend with me. Well, ‘dragged’ is unfair. Alex loved the Highlands as much as I did – more, even. He was a Londoner who dreamed of moors and mountains, who saw the whole of Scotland as a sort of adventure playground of snow and rock, of peaks to be scaled and troughs to be traversed. He’d been dragging me to remote parts, to the tops of mountains and to icy trig points – fingers of cement rising out of the rock, shrouded in mist, encrusted in windsculpted ice – for months.

It was winter now; we’d been living together since the spring. Our reckless love, a whirlwind of promises and declarations, had culminated in a hasty move to the countryside. Each of us had seen in the other an easy solution to problems we had not yet been ready to voice. But now, in our house in a village in the north of England, each of us had been sitting in separate rooms, making separate plans for the coming months. We had made a deal: meet you back here in spring. ‘We’ll be fine,’ we each said to each other. ‘It’s not so long.’ And we smiled with our mouths but not with our eyes. This trip would be our swansong, but we were not yet ready to voice that thought either.

Since my visit with my mother, my brother Rory had moved to Skye with his wife to start a family. Mum and her siblings had been almost euphoric at the announcement; the family claim to the island had been shored up, brought from the academic into the actual and made solid again. Myles was in the process of handing over the family croft so my brother might build a house on it.

Alex and I drove north, the car packed with everything we owned, love blooming in my heart as the neat dry-stone-wall stitching of Cumbria gave way first to the long slow slopes of the Southern Uplands, and then to the bleaknesses and steepnesses of the Highlands. Winter was closing in, and with it came the all-encompassing dark. At Cluanie we slowed to a crawl, wary of the red deer that had come down off the hills to amass along the roadside, lantern eyes glinting in the darkness like some terrible premonition. I nosed the car into their midst, taking care not to touch one with the bumper and jolt this dream sequence into the real, and slid to a halt as the largest stag stood his ground in the centre of the road. He raised his head, many-pointed antlers silhouetted against the gloom like a great pair of wings opening. Then slowly, insolently, he turned and bounded down the bank, white rabbit-tail flashing in the shaft of headlight.

Poring over the map that night, my eyes alighted on a small grey square near a bay pockmarked with the stippled texture signifying pebble beach. ‘Glenbrittle House’, said the label. McMillan’s childhood home. I waved Alex over, but his eyes snagged instead on the mass of contours to the near east: the Cuillin ridge, all tumbling crags and chutes of scree. He cared little for my murdering relative; he ached instead for the feel of cold rock under his hands. We made another deal.

In the morning we set off again for the hills, heating on full blast and rain blattering at the windscreen. Talking in undertones, still half asleep, we nearly didn’t see the bird hunched in the middle of the road, watching our approach with wide yellow eyes as he guarded some small prey in his talons. Alex slammed on the brakes as the bird took off, but too late and in the wrong direction. He launched and flew directly into our path, glaring in at us through the windscreen. At the last moment he lifted, but not enough – he clipped the roof of the car with one wing. I shrieked and craned around to see him whirl and right himself in the air, wings outstretched and as unsteady as a drunk.

A golden eagle. I’d never seen one before, not in the wild. Only those depressed, scrawny specimens on their Astroturfed perches at game fairs, shackled at the ankle. ‘Is that a good omen or a bad one?’

‘Good,’ said Alex definitively. ‘He survived.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I hope so.’

The road wound a slalom path down into Glen Brittle, through a neat-penned conifer plantation. Stray larches pressed against the wire, stretching their feathery arms out between the strands. Dead pines swayed, monuments to themselves, bare of needles but shrouded entirely in thick white lichen like cobwebs, or lace – bridal somehow, so many Miss Havishams in their veils.

Snow had gathered in this sheltered nook, where ploughs rarely ventured. A single car had preceded us that morning, and its tracks wriggled down over the narrow strip of tarmac, bunny-hopping at places where the driver had nearly lost control. Neat heaps of grit had been left at five-yard intervals along the worst stretches by the council, so the locals could help themselves.

The Cuillin rose up on our left as we descended, recent snowfall exaggerating the terribleness of its crags, each crack picked out in the sharp black and white of a Victorian engraving; the jagged line of the ridge stretching above dark and forbidding, sharp enough to skewer a cloud to its highest peak. At its foot, the hillside was a magnificent technicolour of the clashing orange vegetation, darker bracken and flashes of bright, almost neon green where burns had overflowed and spilled out across the face of the slope.

We abandoned the car and hiked in to where the water rushing down off the mountains rumbled through a series of perfect turquoise ponds: the Fairie Pools. The noise was tremendous as the water crashed between levels, then slowed and stilled in the deep, dark channels between the rocks. I clambered down to a pool partway up the chain that had been split in two by an elegant underwater arch, and dipped an arm in up to the elbow. The water was gloriously, bitingly cold, numbing my fingers almost instantaneously.

Alex was impatient to be on his way, and set off alone towards the start of the ridge. I watched him go, then turned back towards the road, with the roar of the falls in my ears. Water was everywhere, slipping between the rocks, dripping on my forehead, resting in still pools and puddled on the ground, which was sodden as a dropped cloth. Where tributaries had cut down into the hillside, stripped birches huddled for warmth out of the wind, naked branches crimson. Erratic rocks dotted the burned-red hillside, teetering where they had sat so unsteadily for hundreds of years.

I waited at the car until I caught a glimpse of him silhouetted against the sky on the crest of the ridge, then drove down into the township along a single-track road, scattered with sheep-droppings. Here and there amongst the heather and peat bog that lined the foot of the glen clumps of hut circles nudged mushroom-like from the earth.

There wasn’t much to Glenbrittle: a youth hostel, closed for winter; a mountain rescue base; a clutch of cottages, barely enough to call it a hamlet, where the glen opened up by the water’s edge. Three lush fields, spotted with heavy-set sheep, led down to a dark pebble beach. The landscape was stark and unforgiving, the colours rich: the burgundy of the heather, the rusting bracken, the bare purple birch, the hawthorn’s scarlet berries, the gleaming white snow of the peaks.

Glenbrittle House was easy to identify; a somewhat tumbledown, but nicely proportioned stone building, its grey-harl façade patched up in places with concrete. I was hovering outside, considering my options, when a young man stamped across the puddled road, enveloped in thick, kelpy green oilskins.

‘Excuse me,’ I blurted out, stupidly. ‘Do you know which one is Glenbrittle House?’

He paused. ‘The big grey one.’

I nodded and made to leave, but he spoke again. ‘Do you mind me asking why you want to know? Only, it’s my granny’s house.’ He was friendly enough, and about my age, with dark hair crammed under a beanie hat. He led me up the garden path and peeled off his waterproofs at the door as if shedding his skin, leaving his trousers cinched into his rubber boots. ‘I’ll fetch her for you. She often doesn’t hear the bell.’

I stood politely on the doorstep in the rain, craning my neck to get a look inside. The interior was big and roomy, but dated – the hallway papered with photo-detail brickwork. Finally the owner came out, and blinked at me, cautious. She clutched a copy of the West Highland Free Press in one hand, holding it to her breast like a shield.

‘Angus McMillan?’ she said. ‘Oh, no. I don’t know. When was this?’ She was a tiny, white-haired woman.

‘1810?’ I hazarded. She batted the air, letting out a puff of air – ho! – as if to say, ‘Well, I’m not that old!’ and her grandson and I laughed.

‘It’s been in our family, the MacRaes, for seventy years now,’ she told me. ‘Though it’s not ours, you realise. We’re tenant farmers. The whole lot belongs to Macleod of Macleod at Dunvegan.’

I nodded. Some things never change. ‘Who else lives round here?’

She considered. ‘There’s just us, really. Our family.’ She looked fondly at her grandson. ‘There’s a few moved in from elsewhere, but’ – a bit disapprovingly – ‘all just holiday homes.’

Down on the beach, I picked my way across the coloured pebbles and the seaweed lying thick and variegated as autumn leaves. Hailstones drew a white-rim tideline along the shore, like foam swept in off the sea. A band of rain drew across the bay like a curtain.

It was such an isolated spot. A man with thirteen siblings – perhaps more: records from that period are very partial – would never be lonely. But his parents would have been instrumental in the formation of his character. They were his only role models.

Out across the water I could make out the faint outline of the island of Canna. Directly behind it, unseen in this weather, was South Uist, the family’s next stop, and to its south, McMillan’s beloved Barra. Each of these islands has its own personality. South Uist, the flat sandy isle, tucks its head down out of the wind, its back grown thick with a fur of wildflowers upon the machair in summer: eyebright and lady’s bedstraw, harebells and butterfly orchids, corn marigolds and sea bindweed, field gentian and red clover. Barra is a rougher, readier sort of place, its one green peak looming from the sea, slipping the earth from its shoulders like a shawl, smooth rocks poking through the slopes like clavicles, smoothed by the wind.

I visited Barra too, alone this time, and camped on a silver cockle beach unseen by any other; then, tramp-like, on a grass verge on the outskirts of Castlebay, the only village. I cycled the circumference of the island on a borrowed bike, otter-spotting, calling out in greeting to the curious seals that followed me along the water’s edge, singing them nonsense songs and the scraps of pop music that popped into my head.

The McMillans’ solid Georgian farmhouse at Eoligarry, on the north end of the island, has long been demolished, but I cycled up anyway, finding the tide out and the enormous expanse of white sand now employed as a runway for the tiny airport. Wind battering my face, I watched a twelve-seater propeller plane land, wheels bouncing on the sand, sending salt water up behind it in a sheet, carrying the post and groceries. Five figures ventured down the steps and out into the rain, bent double against the wind. Even today, I thought, this is a remote outpost of humanity.

Angus McMillan never explicitly explained in his journals why he left the Hebrides, but it is not hard to paint a picture of the prevailing tides that swept him from their shores. Scotland at that time was in crisis, both financial and existential. In the century since the union with England the ancient clan system had been dissolving, and dissatisfaction among the poor was growing.

Historically, the clan chiefs had held a position of paternalist responsibility over their subjects in a subsistence economy. However, since the advent of the United Kingdom, the lairds were becoming increasingly embedded in the moneyed society south of the border, frequenting the gentlemen’s clubs of Mayfair and dabbling in Westminster politics. Keenly aware of their aristocratic status in Highland society, but without the vast incomes of the English landed gentry, they began to turn their attentions to generating new profits from their estates.

There has been much discussion of the motivations that underlay the turmoil of the subsequent decades, but whether the chiefs’ decisions were driven by personal greed or simply market forces, the transition to capitalism would be a painful one. The great Highland estates underwent a seismic shift which saw unprofitable tenants, who had depended on the lairds for their livelihoods, displaced – initially to provide a workforce for the burgeoning kelp industry, and later to make way for sheep. To the peasantry, these upheavals were a profound betrayal of the trust they had placed in their traditional patriarchs.

Between 1780 and 1880, an estimated half a million people left the Highlands – some under their own steam, many under duress – permanently skewing the country’s demographics towards the newly urban south and sending tens of thousands across the oceans to the New World.

It was not only the destitute who left, although many were destitute. For many young men like Angus McMillan, this was a chance to better themselves in new, more egalitarian countries, where land was cheap, or even free. Coming from a culture where land equated to power more than money ever had, this was a startling opportunity.

Australia in particular was becoming a hub of migration from the Hebrides. Visiting Skye in 1840, the novelist Catherine Sinclair commented that every family she met seemed to have a member settled in or en route there. In Angus McMillan’s immediate family, for example, it is known that four of the brothers lived at some stage in Australia: Angus himself, and his brothers John, William and Donald – who had also lived in Jamaica for some years before he joined Angus in Gippsland. A fifth brother, Norman, travelled to South America, only to drown in the Amazon.

The newspapers of the day were full of advertisements for cheap passages to the US, Canada and the new colonies of the far-off Southern Ocean, Australia and New Zealand. Some offered government assistance towards the cost. One such advert from 1835, placed by the Colonization Committee of South Australia, noted, ‘Commissioners are also prepared to receive applications from such intending Settlers as may wish to have their Servants or Labourers conveyed to the Colony FREE OF CHARGE by means of the Emigration Fund.’

As the rural population dwindled, entire villages fell empty and were abandoned to the elements and to the blackfaced sheep that now grow fat on the grass that grows high amid the ruins. Huge round stones slip one by one from their places in crumbling walls to the ground; roofless buildings shrink and sink as they are reclaimed by the land.

Balnabodach is one such village. It lies on the north-west edge of Barra, four miles from the pier at Castlebay, overlooking a tiny pebbled cove. I spotted it from the road as I cycled back from the airport, left my bike unlocked on the verge, shimmied under the fence where the sheep had got through, and headed down to inspect. A fat-rumped roan pony watched me uninterestedly as I waded through drifts of sphagnum moss, thigh-deep in places, as wet and as soft as a cloud. Within seconds my feet were squelching in their boots, peaty water oozing between my toes, my jeans soaked to the crotch.

The remains of the old village were rendered in texture and colour, most house sites made visible only by the changes in vegetation – rectangles of sheep-cropped grass gleaming amidst crowds of dark, rubbery reeds and the burned-out orange of the bracken. A single cottage was roofless but otherwise almost perfectly preserved, with a doorway and shoulder-height walls, the rocks dry-stacked, slotted together perfectly, its good condition a testament to the skill of its builder. Its windows had been sealed with rocks sometime in the distant past – the mark of the plague.

Across a stream and up a bank huddled four or five more ruins, in poorer condition. The walls had tumbled many years before; now grown over, but sitting proud to the ground, the same rounded humps of old graves.

It is a lonely prospect. In Angus McMillan’s time – the 1820s and ’30s – this would have been a busy, bustling township: a tight huddle of one-roomed blackhouses thatched with reeds, cattle penned at their backs as dogs and chickens roamed loose between the walls. But now there was nothing. Less than nothing; a palpable absence. A negative.

In the course of those two decades, a financial drama unfolded that would see the island’s ownership fall from the hands of the MacNeils of Barra, who had held the title since the eleventh century. General MacNeil, who had brought the McMillans to the island, found he had inherited an estate shackled by legalities and weighted with liabilities. Although he had served with distinction at the Battle of Waterloo, this had apparently not been enough to impress his father, Colonel Roderick, whose lack of faith in his son’s financial acumen had manifested itself in the imposition of a deed of entail upon the estate before his death to prevent its being sold off piecemeal; it had then been further bound with a large number of settlements to the colonel’s other children. At the time of his death it was already foundering.

That same year, 1822, the bottom fell out of the Scottish kelp industry when the lifting of import restrictions after the defeat of Napoleon saw the market flooded with cheaper European alternatives. Until then, lairds had been able to produce a ton of kelp for around £3 – gathering seaweed from the beaches and burning it down to create soda ash – and sell it on as fertiliser for £20. By these vertiginous profits the MacNeil accounts had been buoyed. Without them, it sank without trace.

MacNeil the younger turned to ever more desperate means of staying afloat. He established an alkali works, so the kelp could be processed on the island and thus sold at a higher price, at which the islanders were forced to work. It failed miserably. He threatened local fishermen with eviction if they sold their catch in Glasgow or to passing boats rather than at Castlebay, where he could take his cut. He seized his tenants’ cattle, and later their sheep. There was not much else to take: ‘The poverty of the people is beyond description,’ their parish priest wrote in 1831.

For all of the islanders it was a time of enormous stress and uncertainty. Even the tacksmen, like Angus’s father, were not safe: his counterpart in the south was evicted from his farm at Vatersay, which had been passed down in his family for generations.

The estate reached crisis point in 1837, when the general finally admitted defeat. As MacNeil was facing bankruptcy and preparing to sell up, Angus McMillan packed his bags and sailed for the mainland with the intention of joining his friend Allan MacCaskill on the boat to New South Wales. He was not alone. That same year, 1,253 other emigrants left Scottish ports for Australia, 2,391 for the American colonies (including Nova Scotia), and 1,130 for the United States.

This sorry tale forms the backdrop to McMillan’s departure. He was, however, fortunate to have left in time to miss the very worst the Clearances had to throw at the island.

The Barra estate was sold to an outsider, Colonel John Gordon of Cluny. Gordon was a notoriously ruthless man of vast means – ‘the richest commoner in the kingdom’ – who on his death would leave £2 million and numerous estates scattered across Scotland as well as lucrative plantations on Tobago. Over the following decade the destitute tenants would be pushed from the estate, initially in a trickle and finally in a great torrent now regarded as one of the most brutal clearances of the period.

During the 1840s, a series of crop failures left the island in a constant state of near-famine. In one particularly bleak period, the minister reported ‘a scene of horror’ as starving families scratched in the sand for cockles, without which ‘there would have been hundreds dead this day’. Gordon found that, far from the estate being an investment, he was now responsible for supporting the majority of its two-thousand-strong population. And so he began to evict them.

By the winter of 1850, the piteous state of Gordon’s expelled tenants had attracted the concerned attention of the Lord Provost of Edinburgh, who heard reports that a number of families from Barra had arrived in the city ‘in a state of absolute starvation’. A few months earlier, 132 families had been removed from their crofts, a feat accomplished by ‘demolishing their cottages, and then, after they were cast out desolate on the fields, getting them shipped off the island’. None ‘could speak a word of English’ – only the heavily accented Gaelic of the island.

These wretched families had been dumped on the island of Mull, and from there some had struggled to Edinburgh in the hope of appealing to the colonel himself, who kept his headquarters there. But Gordon was not to be found.

Even if he had been present to meet his former tenants, it is unlikely that compassion would have been forthcoming. The next year he would call his poorest tenants to a public meeting to ‘discuss rents and arrears’, with a threatened £2 fine for non-attendance. The meeting was a ruse: 1,700 people from Barra and nearby South Uist were forced – begging, pleading and struggling – onto an emigrant ship bound for Quebec. Those resisting were dragged from the caves and mountains and handcuffed together on a boat that carried them from the tiny, windswept island to a vast, unknown wilderness of dense, dark forest and frozen wastes. When, finally, they were let loose on dry land there was an ocean between them and everything they had ever known.

In Balnabodach, all eight families still resident were forced on board ship, with only the clothes they had on. Not one of those recorded as living there in 1841 was to be found in the census of 1851. Today the name Balnabodach can still be found on maps – a label for the smattering of modern white-harled cottages set high and apart along the road, far back from the ruins at the water’s edge, to house people who have come here for the peace, the quiet, the tranquillity.

Standing there in the dell, out of sight, I realised that I had not spoken to another person all day. For the first time I appreciated the bittersweet nature of that Highland solitude I had thought so quintessential, so central to its character. Many of the most silent spots in the Highlands and Islands today were once the most densely populated – indeed, the devastating impact of the crop failures and the kelp-industry collapse had been attributed by some commentators to overcrowding. The emptiness of the glens is as artificial as once was its congestion.

I was alone that trip, but I had not felt lonely until now.

These lost generations maintain a presence in Scottish culture more than 150 years later. Songs and poetry written in the times of the Clearances circulate and recirculate, the hot breath of each singer taken in by the next, a constant oral reliving of that turbulent age.

The most famous, perhaps, is Sorley MacLean’s 1954 Gaelic poem ‘Hallaig’, an elegy for an abandoned village on the author’s native island of Raasay (‘Mura tig ’s ann theàrnas mi a Hallaig/a dh’ionnsaigh Sàbaid nam marbh,/far a bheil an sluagh a’ tathaich,/gach aon ghinealach a dh’fhalbh’; ‘I will go down to Hallaig,/to the Sabbath of the dead,/where the people are gathered,/every single generation gone’). Or perhaps it is The Proclaimers’ hit 1987 song ‘Letter from America’, which addresses the emigrants directly (‘I’ve looked at the ocean/tried hard to imagine/the way you felt the day you sailed/from Wester Ross to Nova Scotia’).

They are songs of loss, of heartbreak, of the pain of being left behind. The departed wrote songs too, songs filled with the crash of the sea and the tug of the heart. Thoughts of home pull from deep inside, behind the navel, somewhere delicate and bruised and inarticulate. The emigrants are rootless, anchorless, their homesickness trailing like a long lead behind them, with no one holding on to it. Oh! for our dispossessed brothers. Oh! for the land of bleak beauty. Oh! for the touch of soft rain on the skin, for the peat smoke from the hearth, for the mud of the well-trodden path.

They have a saying in Nova Scotia, an expression of longing: Ach an cuan – But for the sea. But for the sea we’d be together again.

At Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, the Gaelic college in Skye, I watched a group of singers who stood stiff-armed at the centre of the dance floor; their leader alone at first, tapping her foot, eyes to the ceiling, harsh Gaelic consonants chopping through the low, rich tones of her voice.

Thoir mo shoraidh dhan taobh tuath

Eilean Sgithanach nam buadh

’N t-eilean sin dan tug mi luaidh

Àit’ is bòidhche fo na neòil

Thoir mo shoraidh dhan taobh tuath.

Bear my greetings to the north

To the Isle of Skye and all its graces

That island to whom I gave my love

The most beautiful place under the clouds

Bear my greetings to the north.

From those exiled abroad, this song had crossed the miles and the years to pop up among us like a message in a bottle. Heard now afresh, it was a mournful keening to a long-lost homeland which sat only a few miles to my north, behind the Cuillin ridge, the Macleod estate: Dunvegan, Duirinish, Glenbrittle. The land of Angus McMillan’s childhood.

A sharp intake of breath, and then the others were singing too, the warbling, flat-noted melody calling to mind the nasal tone of the chanter. And then, all around me, one by one, the voices of the audience were coming together too, soaring loud and clear and high up into the rafters above:

B’fheàrr leam fhìn na mìle crùn

Mi bhith nochd air tìr san Dùn

Mi gun coisicheadh le sùnnd

Rathad ùr aig clann MhicLeòid

Thoir mo shoraidh dhan taobh tuath.

I’d pay a thousand crowns

To be tonight ashore in Dunvegan

I would happily walk

Clan MacLeod’s new road

Bear my greetings to the north.

Many of the singers that night had themselves travelled from what was once the New World back to the Old World, to rediscover their lost links to the Highlands. So many studying at the college were Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, with names like MacDonald, Fraser and Munro.

They felt a tie, they confided by the bar late at night, a complex bond that is difficult to explain or understand. They felt compelled to return to a homeland they had never seen. Thousands of the diaspora return to Scotland every year; I watched them in my childhood, trooping through the village in their tour groups, keeping the tweed shop in business, cheering for the pipe band. Many are better-informed on the ins and outs of Scottish history than Scots themselves. Clan membership, particularly, is now dominated by overseas members who trade notes on the minutiae of family trees that have spread their branches across continents. Perhaps the locals feel they have nothing to prove; the visitors, with their foreign accents and long-lensed cameras, much.

But it was hard too for those left behind – those left standing in empty glens, watching first as the thatch of the empty homes collapsed, and then the walls. Imagine the desolation of the empty township, the abandoned schools, the silent churches. In Croik church in Sutherland, the dispossessed scratched messages in the glass of the windows as they sought shelter from the driving rain: ‘Glencalvie people, the wicked generation’. They thought they were being punished for their sins.

The old ways were dissolving under their feet. The warriors who had once commanded fear amongst even the most stout-hearted Englishmen now found their skills and courage in battle repurposed for the furthering of the British Empire. What else could they do to earn money, in a world that now seemed to revolve around it? They knew of no other way to live.

The old tongue too was in the process of being phased out. Since the seventeenth century, the Highland nobility had been obliged by law to send their children to English-speaking schools in the south; more recent attempts to Anglicise the wild and rebellious population of the Highlands and Islands had resulted in the prohibition of the Gaelic language in schools, even in solely Gaelic-speaking areas – a ludicrous policy resulting only in classrooms filled with uncomprehending faces and dire literacy rates.

By Angus McMillan’s time, Lowland policy had been relaxed somewhat, in that it allowed the teaching of the scriptures in Highlanders’ mother tongue, so as not to inhibit their religious education at least. As a result Gaelic had begun to take on the quality of a spiritual mode of communication, a speaking in tongues. It was the vernacular of the church and the home, an unwritten language of confession, of conviction, of off-the-record conversation, while English became established as the language of the learned, the landed, the future.

But only the old language has the vocabulary to describe that particular flavour of Highland melancholy. Edward Dwelly’s great dictionary, Faclair Gàidhlìg (1911), records forty-nine different words for sadness, each with its own special quality. Snigheadh sadness: also the act of falling in drops, the shedding of tears. Mùig sadness: darkness of mood, gloom, also snot, snivelling nose. Mì-fhuran: a churlish sadness, joylessness, a disinclination to welcome or congratulate. Aithridh: the sadness of repentance.

Longing finds twenty-four ways of expressing itself. In fonn, a carnal longing, also land, earth, plain, the drone of a bagpipe. Leid: uncomfortable longing, also a shake-down or bed made on the floor, a temporary fireplace. Deòthas: the longing for a loved one, as of a calf for its mother.

There are other words too, more subtle descriptions of a land that finds itself emptied of life.

Aibheis (noun): An expanse of sea or air, an abyss; a place full of fairies, or in ruins or unkempt.

Tannasgach (adjective): Abounding in spectres or ghosts.

Sporthail (noun): A subdued rattling noise, such as is made by a stone wall about to fall.

* Italicised text is directly quoted from McMillan’s own journals.