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The disorder of Agnes and David’s early life in Grimsby was due in part to the alcoholism of their father and the worn-down compliance of their mother and stepmother. But now that I’d been to the Eyemouth fishing museum and read the local history books, I was beginning to see a bigger picture. The chaos and bereavement the Stotts had lived through was also caused, at least to some extent, by the Lowland Clearances that propelled so many Scots from their farms into a migrant life in search of work or towards one of the emigration ships sailing to New Zealand, Canada or America. The destiny of the Stotts, like millions of their fellow Scots, had been determined by violent historical forces.

From the mid-eighteenth century, as part of what historians call the Clearances, the owners of large Scottish estates began to clear the ‘peasants’ off the land and put sheep in their place, to maximise profits. In the Lowlands, near the Borders where my family lived, small tenant or landowning farmers were forced off their farms not by violent eviction, as happened in the later Highland Clearances, but by stealth. Landowners hiked rents, and eventually farms and businesses went bankrupt. Tens of thousands of Lowland cottars moved to newly-built villages or to cities in search of work or to the coast to fish, and thousands emigrated.8

The Stotts had once been tenant farmers too. I’d found Robert’s grandfather, James Stott, listed as a tenant cattle-farmer living in Gairmuir near Lauder in the Borders in the 1790s, thirty-five miles inland from Eyemouth. He’d been declared bankrupt in 1799, five years after the Earl of Lauderdale’s agents had decided to hike the rents. Like thousands of other bankrupt labourers and tenants, James gave up his farm and went to the city to look for work. He set up as a butcher in Edinburgh, while his three sons later left for Eyemouth to look for work as fishermen or drovers. The family had stayed put until the storm of 1881 forced them to migrate again.

I stood on the edge of the remote drovers’ road etched into the hills in the rough high moor at Gairmuir, watching it undulate through the heather and gorse and disappear into the mist. This was the road my drover ancestors walked alongside their cattle to the Edinburgh cattle market. They’d called it the Thieves’ Road, a farmer told me. Robbers attacked the drovers at night when they returned from the city carrying the money they’d made at market.

The rain began, lashing diagonally in great lines, bringing the night down with it. Up on the hill a mile away, lights glowed in the windows of a remote farmhouse. You’d be glad to see the light from your home, I thought, if you were a young drover out here alone in the rain with the dark closing in on you. You’d be glad to get inside and bolt the door against the robbers and the night.

Of course the displaced labourers and tenant farmers weren’t just looking for security when they joined the Presbyterians, the Baptists, the Free Church, or the Open or Closed Brethren in their thousands in the religious revivals of the 1880s. Joining a non-conformist Church must also have been a way of rebelling, of closing their doors on all outside authority, refusing to rent a seat in a pew or to pay tithes to a corrupt Church or to kowtow to a landowner who had cleared them off their land.9 What looked like an act of extreme religious dissent was also a political one.

By the time Agnes and John Wilson arrived in Port Seton in 1885, five years after the new harbour had been built there, and at a time when migrants from all over Scotland were flocking to the town, there were hymns being sung out of six buildings on Sunday mornings, including two Brethren Meeting Rooms, a Methodist Hall and a Mission Hall. Around the corner local builders were digging the foundations for what is listed as a Fishermen’s Bethel, a chapel for sailors.

Brethren were kin; they were in fellowship together. They shut out the rest of the world, but they looked after each other. Brethren married other Brethren and had large numbers of children. They worked hard. They prospered. They kept themselves apart. After the chaos Agnes and David had lived through, they must have been looking not just for stability and faith, but also for a door to close defiantly against the turmoil. Of all the religious groups in Port Seton they might have joined, the Closed Brethren offered them the greatest degree of separation from the world.