back to MISCELLANEOUS HISTORY index
Preface
In the late 1970s, Dr Isobel Grant, founder of the Highland Folk Museum at Kingussie, contracted with the publishers, Shepheard-Walwyn Ltd. to write a book, to be entitled Periods in Highland History, based on the prestigious Rhind Lectures that she had delivered some years previously. The work of bringing the lectures up to date took longer than expected and, as the contract delivery date loomed closer, Dr Grant offered a stopgap and ‘dashed off”, in her own words, (at the age of 94) “Along a Highland Road” which tells the story of the Great North Road, now known less romantically as the A9, as it passes through her native Strathdearn. As the direct connection between Edinburgh and Inverness, the importance of the Road will be understood; it has seen war and peace, calm and storm and in its length one constantly stumbles upon, even trips over, history.
As the Road threads its way through the hill passes and along the river banks, minor roads lead off, up into the hills and down into the glens and straths where they serve isolated communities or served communities that are now no more than piles of stones. These roads, too,have their stories, and this is an attempt to tell a little of one of them.
In partially borrowing my title I do so out of respect for a good friend who herself left her mark on Highland history, and also to underline the fact that history is still to be uncovered.
James D Scarlett,
Milton of Moy, Moy,
Inverness. June 2007
Another Highland Road
My road leaves the current A9 a few hundred yards south of Dalmagarry Farm, which is about half-way between Moy and Tomatin, both of them on the Old A9 (now B9152). It doubles back sharply and runs along the shore of what would, in prehistoric times, have been a loch and nearly became one again in historic times, when a hydro-electric scheme was proposed. Then, crossing to the other side of the loch, it follows the Funtack Burn and then the River Findhorn to Pollochaig, nowadays more often known as Shenachie, after the burn that joins the river there. It is the SHENACHIE road.
In 1790, the whole of the area of the erstwhile loch was still marsh and Sir Aeneas Mackintosh of Mackintosh undertook massive drainage works, canalising the Funtack (Fionntaig) Bum and part of the Dalmagarry Burn. It is to this era that the Funtack Bridge belongs and the bridge is a convenient place at which to start our ramblings both physical and mental; it is, as far as I have been able to ascertain, a ‘parliamentary’ bridge built to the Caulfeild specification, which ties it to time fairly closely, but we can do better. There was a local character known as ‘Malta’, because he had been in the Army there and, it seems, could talk of little else; there was an old Miss MacDonald who lived in a cottage, of which no trace remains, adjoining the Miller’s house; and, most recently, there was Angus Dunbar, a great repository of local oral history. Angus, then well into his eighties, told my wife that, when he was a small boy, Malta had told him that when he, Malta, was a small boy, old Miss MacDonald had told him that her earliest memories were of the bridge and two trees still on the hillside, which takes us pretty dose to 1790 – 95. I have heard that ‘Malta’ deserted from the lnniskillen Dragoons but have no certain knowledge.
That the bridge should have stood for two hundred years, and in recent times stood up to the onslaught of seventeen-ton refuse lorries and three thousand gallon oil tankers is a tribute both to Its specification and its builders. Caulfeild succeeded Wade as the maker of roads in the Highlands and built most of the ‘Wade’ bridges; he was followed in tum by the Parliamentary Commission, which began to function in 1803 but perhaps took a few years to become functional.
The Dalmagarry burn runs close beside the road and the Funtack cuts across the fields further away. The two meet at the bridge and just before the junction the Dalmagarry burn is joined by what is now called the Caochan na h’Uan, the Streamlet of the Lamb. The streamlet rises somewhere on the lower slopes of Tom na h’Ulaidh, the Hill of the Treasure, of which legend has it that the first ray of sunshine on New Year’s Day will strike a treasure wrapped in the skin of a foal. There’s gold in them thar hills and it is known that the ancient Greeks used fleeces to filter gold dust from mountain streams. I do not know if a foal’s skin would be as effective but I do know that gold-bearing water reflects green and have often wondered if the Caochan na h’Uanit is really Caochan Uaine, the green burn. A hairy skin, sunk in a stream and held in place by a couple of rocks, would intercept any gold-dust that was going and early on New Year’s Day would be a good ritual time to visit one’s catch.
The road divides at the bridge, the main part turning sharp left and crossing the burn and the other continuing as a rough track, much rougher than it was thirty years ago, to the Estate Mill, Milton of Moy, of which now only part of one wall remains. It is convenient to take this track now but if, by chance, it is about mid-October, also to pause and look over the parapet and watch the salmon gathering to spawn. This is one of the local sights and indeed the sight of those great fish huddled together like a gigantic tin of sardines while they wait their turn at the redding beds is something to remember.
From Funtack Bridge the track continues along a ledge cut out of the side of the hill. A short way along it, a side-track, locally known as the Gaick, comes over the hill, sweeping round upstream in the direction of the road junction. Grassed over remnants of stone walls show that the path originally came straight down the hill and, if projected, joined up on the other side of our loch with the track that leads over the hill to Tullochclury, where there was a Free Church School. There must have been a causeway at some time and a ford across the burn, but I have seen no traces and the ground may, even now, not dry out sufficiently to show crop marks.
From Tullochclury the track goes by the east side of Loch Moy and the Moy Hall policies to join with the line of the last A9, now the B9152, at a point near to Meallmore Lodge. At Tullochclury a branch to the left leads to Moy Church and the hamlet of Moybeg. The beginning of this track is hard to trace but it seems to have been part of an earlier Edinburgh road which ran closer to the Findhorn, away from the line of the later Wade road, and joined up with the old route south by way of the River Findhorn through Glenmazeran (the glen of the alder plain) up to Coignafearn (the ‘fifth’ of the alders) and then down to Pitmain in Badenoch. General Roy’s map hints at something of the sort, but my black and white photocopy is hard to interpret; however a much more meandering Funtack Burn is clearly shown.
The track we are on leads to Milton of Moy, the site of the Estate Mill and the Miller’s house. Iron age hut-circles show that the site has been occupied over a period of at least three thousand years and in those days it must have been a prime site indeed, a peninsula an acre in extent, protected by the hill behind, with good lookouts, difficult access and plenty of fish, flesh and fowl; almost a natural crannog. Occasionally, in times of exceptional rainfall, the whole of the little valley fills up and shows how things must have been in those times.
The mill was of the breast-shot type and last worked in 1919; the ironwork was taken during the Second World War; only a small part of one wall and the mill lade remain. Of the several buildings shown on the first Ordnance Map, which was surveyed in the 1890s, before the railway came, there are only the Miller’s house and the steading. The Gaelic name is Culfuntack (Cuilfionntaig), meaning something like the ‘comer of the Funtack’. If you consult a book of place-names,you will probably find that ‘Funtack’ means ‘the little white one’ but if you look at the burn you will see that it is quite big and black; in the days when it was named it was probably just a peaty current through the bog. Actually Fionntaig is the Gaelic name for mat-grass, a straggling grass that spreads and dies and bleaches like raffia and abounds around the valley. Whether Culfuntack means the comer of the grass or the comer of the burn is open to argument, but the buildings lie within a loop of the burn and the mill lade lies neatly across the loop.
A site that has been in occupation, even discontinuous, for so long might be expected to yield some archaeological fruit but no searches have been made and all that was discovered during the conversion of an area of rough pasture into something resembling a rough garden were a few fragments of horse harness, a 1943 penny and a round-bottomed glass bottle bearing the name and trademark of a firm at Camberwell, in south-east London.
The track continues past the entrance to Milton and climbs obliquely up the side of the hill – locally called Tom-an-Inver, the Hill of the Confluence, it being situated between the junctions of the Funtack and the Free Burn with the Findhorn – and returns along the top to join the ‘main road’ at the head of the Gaick. Now wooded, the top was once cultivated and there was a cairn at approximately the highest point. The cairn is marked simply as a ‘stone’ on the earliest Ordnance Map and there is no indication that it had any map-making purpose. It has been suggested that it was a clearance cairn; I can only say in answer to that theory that if I were clearing stones from a site I would throw them downhill rather than carry them up. The cairn was just off the path along the top of the hill and very overgrown, so it is not surprising that the Forestry Commission put a bulldozer through it; they stopped when told about it, but the damage had been done and it has ceased to be shown on the newer maps. Legend tells of an effort to build a church on top of the hill, an effort that was frustrated by supernatural powers that, each night, carried back down all the materials that had been taken up during the day. This is a recurring legend in the Highlands and one can only wonder how it began.
The Funtack bridge is a typical Highland hump-back bridge. On foot or on horseback it appears reasonably wide and one can see over the hump, but from the driving seat of a car the parapets are almost claustrophobic and the nose of the car points to clear sky, so that for a fraction of a second everything depends on pointing in the right direction and staying that way.
Once over the bridge, the road curves round to follow the opposite bank of what would have been a spur to our loch and at just about the point where it begins to straighten out (not that it ever gets very straight) the track to Tullochclury begins with a short steep climb. At about this point also a track from Dalmagarry joins in, giving further weight to the notion that this was the route of the ancient, long pre-Wade, road system. Along the top of this sharp rise are the remaining traces of the settlement of ‘Tullowchemakcare’, which was required to have men ready to serve in the Queen’s army in 1545. Conventional spelling of Gaelic names in English was not established in those days and the name occurs in various forms, from that quoted through Tullochmakerie, Tulmagarie to Dullmagerrie to Dalmigari. One can only speculate if these are all the same place; Tulmagarie and Dullmagerrie apparently were.
There is a levelled patch cut into the hillside below the ruins; known as the ‘old garden’ one supposes that it had some function in connection with the work of the settlement. Tullochmakerie is certainly a ‘Tulloch’, the present Dalmagarry is a ‘Dal’. Again, speculation is all we have to tell us if the name was taken, distorted, from the old settlement to a new or if, at some time ‘Magarry’ boasted both a dal and a tulloch. Once, by heavy use of guesswork, I managed to make out ‘Tullochmakarre’ to mean the ‘Hill of the Repairing’ (or Mending) and the far boundary to the site is marked by the Ceardach burn; though ‘ceard’ now means tinker its strict meaning is ‘mechanic’ and it is tempting to think of an Industrial Estate here, centuries before the word ‘Enterprise’ came into the Highland vocabulary. There is a fairly well preserved corn kiln up there too, which shows permanent habitation.
Before Milton, there was a mill on the Ceardach. It was a ‘clack’ mill, driven by water falling on to a horizontal turbine wheel and, although less crude and primitive than is generally supposed, it was slow and its capacity was limited. When you had humped your sack of corn to the mill you had a healthy thirst and plenty of time in which to slake it. Others also knew it, so each mill had its ale-house and the ale-house for the Ceardach mill was at Ach-an-tigh-lanna, situated high on a bluff of the hill with superb views in all directions to be enjoyed until the ale got to work. Ach-an- tigh-lanna gradually became Achandallan and the billing department of the Electricity Board turned it into Achnadallan; the owner at the time was German, an ex-POW who had stayed behind rather than return to East Germany, and he gave in to bureaucracy; it has since been put back to Achandallan but it would have been interesting to see what the place-name translators would have made of it. It is a tidy climb to Achandallan from our road but it is right on the older road that left the Tullochclury track to pass Tullochmakarre and continue at high level to Ruthven.
My German friend was killed on the road, knocked off his scooter at the very place where he was hoping there would be a bus-stop which would enable him to give up the scooter, but he left a legacy in the shape of a swathe of lupins of all colours from seeds that he scattered at the road- side.
Two modern houses have been built between the Ceardach burn and Achandallan. They suit their surround- ings well but show a mild incongruity that the Town Planners, for all their concentration on ‘unobtrusive’ colour schemes and dummy chimney stacks, have seemed not to notice.
Highland houses were built to a fairly standard format – three square rooms in a row; the end rooms are full-size and the middle room is divided longitudinally to form a small room and an entrance lobby which is also a passage joining the ends. If there is an upper storey the layout is the same but the middle room is squeezed in a bit to make room for the stairs; the upstairs ceilings are combed to an extent that depends on need and opulence, as does the size of the rooms. The effect of this layout was to produce a long, low building with minimum heat loss through the roof and minimum exposure to the winter gales and blizzards; only the very wealthy, like the innkeeper of Dalmagarry, went as far as ‘two storeys and a garret’. The big all-through lounges now fashionable make wider houses and bigger roofs and the houses no longer nestle into the land. In modern times the middle rooms of the traditional houses have been turned into kitchens and bathrooms and bits have been built on here and there; the first of these was probably a porch, as a second line of defence against the weather.
Soon after Achandallan the Funtack burn joins the River Findhorn and the road continues in sight of the river to Ruthven, the grandfather of whose present occupant was the last miller at Milton. The place-name translators will tell you that the name means Red Mountain but as Ruthven is neither red nor a mountain this lacks conviction. It might conceivably be a Rath (a circular fort) in the mountains, but Ruthven is a recurrent place name and needs a less superficial approach; comparison with the Welsh Ruabon might be illuminating. A few steps beyond Ruthven, on the river side of the road, is East Ruthven, a much modernised old farm- house, and here the tarmac surfacing of our road ceases, with a gate, openable, across the road.
From here on the country takes on a wilder look, so much so that a visitor from the South, suffering Range Rover trouble, carefully locked his wife in the car before setting out to find help. A precaution probably more necessary in darkest Surrey than in our civilized parts. I was reminded of a story, too good to be untrue, of two elderly ladies out for a quiet Highland drive, who put their car off the road into a ditch. Unknown to them a film was being made about Culloden or the Clearances or some such and they were suitably alarmed when a mob of eighteenth century Highlanders emerged from the bushes on each side of the road to lift the car back on to its wheels and melt back in silence into the undergrowth.
There is little but peace and quiet to be seen between here and Pollochaig, just the odd sheep or, perhaps, deer. There are prehistoric remains, hut circles and so on but they are not spectacular and have to be sought out. About half-way to the end of our quest are the remains of Inach, between road and river. Another interesting thing about Highland settlements strung out in this way is that they are nearly always situated within sight of the next smoke. To what extent this was intentional could probably be argued for a long time, but in days when the fire was always on, absence of smoke would be a clear indication that all was not well.
Pollochaig is at the foot of a short slope. The river can be forded there but it is treacherous; the ‘box bridge’ is a safer way but you have to think ahead or go back to Ruthven to get the handles needed to operate it. The Allt an-t-Seanachaidh – the storyteller’s burn – joins the river here. Who the story teller may have been I cannot tell, perhaps one of the MacQueens of Pollochaig; at least one of them had communication with the fairies. Another was summoned by the Mackintosh to join a hunt for a wolf that had been causing devastation in Moy; he was late for the meeting and when upbraided by his Chief opened his plaid and unwrapped the head of the wolf that they had been going to hunt.
The place-name people would have it that Shennachie is Sean-achadh, the Old Field, but this is another false premise. In Gaelic the adjective follows the noun and in cases when it is used as a prefix the new word is a compound with a connotation conferred by the prefix; a seanach- aidh is a teller of folklore and history, seana-cheann, ‘old’ and ‘head’, signifies a wise or experienced person. Gaelic purists get cross when English spelling is used on maps but these phonetic spellings often give a better rendering of the gaelic than would an unskilled attempt at Gaelic spelling.
The road ends at Pollochaig, which is a popular place for a summer picnic. You can take to the hinterland and bypass the narrows called The Streens as, in days gone by, did funerals headed for Moy Church, but we have gone far enough.
Jamie Scarlett, 2007