In the case of St Kilda, a food surplus was probably achieved from earliest times, but at least since the 14th century most of it went into paying the rent. C. MacLean 1972, 70.
Several writers have noted the primitive ways of the wild Scots. George Buchanan, himself a Gael, wrote in his preface to Dean Monro’s Western Isles, c.1550, that ‘In their food, clothing and in the whole of their domestic economy, they adhere to ancient parsimony. Hunting and fishing supply them with food. They boil the flesh in water poured into the paunch or the skin of the animal they kill, and in hunting sometimes eat the flesh raw, merely squeezing out the blood.’ James Kirkwood (1630-1709) observed that ‘When they are in the Hills they boyl their Flesh in the Belly or Haggas with a fire of the bones and other fuel. They boyl also the Flesh in a Haggis. They live most on milk and Fishes.’1 A more sensational account came from Strathnaver, Sutherland, in 1658, where ‘a rude sort of inhabitants dwell (almost as barbarous as Cannibals), who, when they kill a beast, boil him in his hide, make a caldron of his skin, browis of his bowels, drink of his blood, and bread and meat of his carcase, since few or none amongst them hitherto have as yet understood any better rules or methods of eating.’2 In fact this method of cooking meat in the hide of the animal appears to have been widespread. Burt heard of it as late as 1728: ‘I have been assured that in some of the islands, the meaner sort of people still retain the custom of boiling their beef in the hide; or otherwise (being destitute of vessels made of metal or earth) they put water into a block of wood, made hollow by the help of the dirk and burning; and then with pretty large stones heated red-hot, and successively quenched in that vessel, they keep the water boiling, till they have dressed their food.’3 Moreover, ‘a gentleman of my acquaintance told me, that in coming from Ireland to the Western Highlands, he was reduced by an ague, to the necessity of landing upon the island Mac;4 and arriving at the public change, he observed three quarters of a cow to lie in a shallow part of the salt water, and the other quarter hanging up against the end of the hut. That, asking the reason for it, he was told they had no salt; and it was their way of preserving their beef.’5 In 1764 Barra exported annually ‘about 140 head of black cattle and about 160 salted. For want of cask, they have a very singular method of salting and packing them up in the hides, which preserves them very well.’6 ‘The Lochabermen when they Kil a Cow, hang up the whole carcase, and eat it as they need. This is all over the Highlands.'7
It was normal at the approach of winter to slaughter surplus animals while they were still in prime condition and to preserve the meat by drying, smoking or pickling in brine. Winter supplies might consist of salted, dried or smoked venison, sea-birds, beef, mutton, goat, or fish as well as butter and cheese. Burt, in his first encounter with Highland food, was offered pigeons potted in dirty butter, smoked and dried mutton, fresh eggs, duck, hen and grouse, as well as bread and claret8
St Kilda or Hirta is a group of small rocky islands isolated in the Atlantic which in several ways provide us with a microcosm of Gaelic life.. Its only permanent occupants are now birds, including the St Kilda wren, sheep, including the archaic Soays, and a species of field-mouse, mus hirtensis, that may have been isolated on the island since before the last Ice Age.9 These islands once supported two hundred people in lavish abundance. Their economy was based on an annual harvest of thousands of young sea-birds – gannets, fulmars, puffins, guillemots and razorbills. They provided them with ‘food, medicine, lighting, manure, shoes, a source of revenue, a way of life and often enough, when they broke their necks trying to catch them, a cause of death.’10 The principle element in their diet was young sea-birds; in 1696, the islanders ate 22,600 of them, and that was said to be a poor season.11 They also ate tens of thousands of sea-bird eggs, sometimes fresh but generally stored in ashes to preserve them for up to eight months. This was held 'to improve their flavour'.12
Deer were long extinct on the island, though a memory of them remained. Meat – usually mutton but occasionally beef – was reserved for the winter months and for special occasions. The men cooked joints by wrapping them in the raw hide of the animal and burying them in the hot ashes of a peat fire, with excellent results. The St Kildans did not eat much fish. They considered it ‘a very dull dish; not sufficiently oily, it was thought to have no substance’.13 For vegetables they had dulse and slake (seaweed) and silver-weed and docken roots, boiled and seasoned, as was all their food, with gannet oil. A normal day’s diet included milk, eggs, porridge and sometimes a puffin or fulmar for breakfast, a roast sea-bird with sorrel or potatoes, or mutton, or, rarely, fish for their main meal, and in the evening eggs, porridge, another fulmar and cheese. They made good beer from barley fermented with the juice from nettle roots. Their neighbours on Skye in 1887 believed that the St Kildans were ‘the best fed people in creation.’14
They had more than adequate resources but this productive niche can only have been discovered by trial and error after settlement. Under such circumstances an item of diet, initially eaten out of necessity, often becomes the normal preference. This is true of oats, potatoes, and even fish. The earlier preference was for red meat, and the Gaels rejected oatmeal brose and fish in favour of meat and meat broth, when they could get it.15
’S am bròdhas gur nà leam
’S an sgadan gur gràin leam e ròist;
’S e dh’fhàgadh sinn làidir
Na faigheadh sinn càl agus feòil
Their brose is an insult,
And I loathe their fried herrings;
What would give us strength
Would be if we could have broth and meat.
There is abundant evidence that as long as the traditional way of life prevailed, the Gaels not only preferred red meat but ate very little else except milk. Fish and shell-fish were available in many places but were eaten only where and when meat and milk were lacking, in the spring or in places where hunting was no longer an option. Cereals, where they were grown, were harvested and processed in a casual manner and the supply seldom lasted for more than a few months. In the Hebrides in the third century, according to Solinus, incolae nesciunt fruges, piscibus tantum et lacte vivunt – ‘the inhabitants do not know grain but live solely on milk and fish.’16 Sir Thomas Craig in 1605 said that the Highlanders lived on cheese, meat and milk and had on occasion supplied surplus cheese to the Lowlands when cereals were short there after a bad harvest.17
In 1764 John Walker found that in Jura ‘the people live mostly on milk, butter, cheese, fish, mutton, venison and use very little vegetable aliment. Notwithstanding this, they appear to be rather longer-lived than many of their neighbours.’18 In Rum, ‘as for corn, there is no more of it raised that what serves the people for bread a few months in winter. During all the summer they live entirely upon animal food, and yet are healthy and long-lived. The year before I was there, a man had died in the island aged 103, who was 50 years of age before he had ever tasted bread; and during all the remainder of his long life, had never eat of it from March to October, nor any other food, during that part of the year, but fish and milk; which is still the case with all the inhabitants of the island. I was even told, that this old man used frequently to remind the younger people of the simple and hardy fare of former times, used to upbraid them with their indulgence in the article of bread, and judged it unmanly in them to toil like slaves with their spades for the production of such an unnecessary piece of luxury. So comparative a thing is luxury.’19
David Stewart in 1822 noted that the people of Highland Perthshire lived on meat and milk. ‘In summer the people subsisted chiefly on milk, prepared in various forms; while in winter they lived, in a great measure, on animal food: the spring was with them a season of severe abstinence. Many were expert fishers and hunters. In those primitive times the forests, heaths and waters abounded with game and fish, were alike free to all, and contributed greatly to the support of the inhabitants. Now, when mountains and rivers are guarded with severe restrictions, fish and game are become so scarce, as to be of little benefit to the people, and to form only a few weeks’ amusement to the privileged.’ John Stewart, minister of Blair Atholl in 1844, reported that ‘in former times’, the high ground in the parish had been occupied by numerous tenants who had little meal and no potatoes and survived entirely on animal food.20 He saw the forced clearance of families from ‘the bleak unsheltered wastes of the Grampian mountains’ in favour of sheep as an act of benevolent management.
‘Here is another story of hard times. A very old friend of mine … told me that a great-uncle of his who had a farm at Kenlochewe suffered so badly one spring that he lost all his cattle, with the exception of one black heifer; the meal was done and starvation stared him in the face. Early in May the heifer calved, and he and his wife put up a kind of bothy in Coire mhic Fhearchar … and there they lived on the milk of the heifer and venison. A deer would be killed from time to time, but not very often, as they were scarce in those days, and the venison would be hung up in the spray of a great waterfall, which entirely prevented any flies getting at it. Thus they spent five or six months, the happiest, they always declared, they had ever spent in their lives, till the corn and potatoes ripened down in the glen in October, when they returned to their home in Kenlochewe.’21 In earlier days, such a care-free migration must have been the normal pattern of life.
In Shetland in the seventeenth century, the people ‘fed strongly upon Fleshes’ through the winter.22 Cows, sheep, pigs and poultry being easier to raise than cereal crops in a damp, cool climate. Scotland was known as the source of ‘dear meal and bad ministers’. In 1774 it was again reported that in Orkney and Shetland, ‘all ranks live much on animal food, such as fish, flesh, butter, and milk, with little bread, which is supplied in some measure by Potatoes. Some are a good deal addicted to dram drinking; as must be the case in fishing countries.’23
A primitive and persistent practice was the bleeding of cattle. ‘In the time of scarcity they launce their cows neck and make meat of their Blood; with butter or milk when boyld in time of dearth.’24 In 1623 in Breadalbane, Patrik McWoyllen in Tulliglas and Kaithren McComey, widow of the late Ewin McWein, were convicted of bleeding the Laird’s cattle.25 Bleeding cattle was still resorted to in the eighteenth century, a normal response to a shortage of food. Spring ‘is a bad season with them; for then their provision of oatmeal begins to fail, and for a supply they bleed their cattle, and boil the blood into cakes, which, together with a little milk and a short allowance of oatmeal, is their food.’26 Pennant noted that herds ate ‘oatcakes, butter or cheese, and often the coagulated blood of their cattle spread on their bannocks.’ T. Pennant, A Tour in Scotland 1769, 102.
‘In the hard years, 1782 and 1783, many of the people would have actually perished, had it not been for their milk. They had in several places recourse to the expedient of bleeding their cattle every week or two, in rotation; and, of the blood boiled up with a little meal, they formed a substitute for bread that kept them alive until their potatoes were ready.’27 These sources all explain the bleeding of cattle in terms of dearth but its persistence also suggests a widespread liking for blood puddings. The pastoral Masai bleed their cattle by lancing a neck vein with a blunt arrow shot from a bow at close quarters, and use the blood as a normal element of their diet.
Beef and mutton
Neither beef nor mutton was a common article of diet in the historical period, since cattle were primarily kept for milk or for cash and sheep were kept for milk and wool. Mutton was more commonly eaten than beef but beef was esteemed far above mutton. Burt, exiled far from the good Scotch beef of Smithfield, suffered from a surfeit of delicacies and found himself ‘hankering after beef, mutton, veal, lamb, etc.’28 ‘The little Highland mutton, when fat, is delicious and certainly the greatest of luxuries. And the small beef, when fresh, is very sweet and succulent, but it wants that substance which should preserve it long when salted’.29 Beef in general was difficult to obtain and limited to a short season. ‘There is hardly any such thing as mutton to be had till August, or beef till September; that is to say, in quality fit to be eaten; and both go out about Christmas. And therefore at or about Martinmas (the 11th of November), such of the inhabitants who are any thing beforehand with the world, salt up a quantity of beef, as if they were going on a voyage. And this is common in all parts of Scotland where I have been.’30
As noted above, Hector Boece in 1527 confirmed that the Scots ate fish out of necessity but preferred for red meat, either the ‘wild flesche, won on the fellis be thair hunting’ or ‘thair awin tame bestial, specially beif.’ Hector Boece (c.1465-1536) in P.H. Brown 1893, 97. For long enough beef also was won by hunting in the forests. Latterly wild bulls were parked like deer and the sport of hunting them was reserved for kings and their guests. King Robert Bruce is said to have narrowly escaped death while hunting a wild bull, and guests at the baptism of the future James VI at Stirling were entertained with ‘the hunting of the wild bull’ in the royal park at Stirling. In the time of Bishop Lesley, in 1578, wild cattle, as well as deer, were still kept in the parks at Stirling, Cumbernauld and Kincardine, not for ornament but for sport.31 The sport of bull-baiting, like the Spanish corrida, was training for the real thing.
Fish and shell-fish
The position of marine resources in the Scottish diet is ambiguous. The preferred source of animal protein was venison or beef, and yet fish figures largely in early accounts of what the people ate. According to Cassius Dio the natives of Scotland did not eat fish ‘though their waters teemed with them’32 Solinus said in the third century that the Hebrideans lived on milk and fish. George Buchanan, in his preface to Monro’s Western Isles gives fish equal status with red meat: ‘hunting and fishing supply them with food.’ Logan summarised the position thus: ‘It was an early observation, that among the Celtic race a prejudice to fish existed, and reference has been made in modern times to its still-lingering existence. In some old poems, catching salmon is spoken of as a Highland sport, yet a proverb is retained expressing something like contempt for those who feed on fish; and certain it is that some writers of a former generation who visited the Highlands, felt surprised to find that the trout, with which many streams abounded, should not be molested by the natives. It is to be feared that dire necessity, from their want of cattle and failure of their crops, has since forced such prejudice to give way.’33
This aversion to fish is no longer common knowledge. Visitors to the Rob Roy Centre in Callander, Perthshire, are greeted by a model of a Highland woman, perhaps Rob Roy's wife Mary, cleaning trout. Robert MacGregor (1671-1735), a well-to-do local Highlander who was much involved in the cattle trade, probably never ate a fish in his life. Stable isotope analysis confirms the same dietary preference in three individuals buried in long cists at Galston, Lewis, in the early centuries AD. Despite living, or at least, dying beside the sea, their diet was ‘very high in animal protein with almost no seafood, which is interesting for a coastal population’.34 The same preference for an entirely meat diet has been found in several much earlier individuals who lived in Britain in the Upper Palaeolithic.35 On the other hand, two of the Mesolithic individuals who left their bones on the small island of Oronsay had previously lived for several years exclusively on fish and shell-fish, despite the presence in contemporary middens on the same island of bones of pig and red deer.36 But it is not impossible that they were castaways, or criminals sentenced to servitude on Oronsay. The Hebridean diet evidently varied from place to place and from individual to individual, but it seems that only the very poorest ate nothing but fish, even in the Mesolithic.
In truth, fish was eaten only when more palatable food was not available. Hector Boece in 1527 stated that: ‘The common meit of our eldaris was fische; nocht for the plente of it, but erar becaus thair landis lay oftimes waist, throw continewal exercition of chevelry, and for that caus they leiffit maist of fische.’ But, he added, their normal and preferred food was wild venison or beef.37 To describe a people as fish-eaters or to call a woman a 'fish-wife' was a grave insult. A flyting or exchange of insults between a South Uist poetess and one from Barra ‘illustrates the contempt that the Highlanders had for fish as a diet in the old days; it was associated with extreme poverty.’ The worst thing the Uist woman could say of Barra was that its people were so poor they had to live on sea-food.38 Barra was the unspeakable place -
Where the skates are marinated
And the sunken-eyed dogfish,
Lobsters pulled from hiding-places,
Where they dig the cockles with their fingers,
Where razor-fish are pulled from puddles …
The Barra poetess retorted that her native island was overflowing with oats and barley, beer and whisky, peas, beans, cress, pork, butter, beef and venison (in a rising scale of importance). But the claims of her rival were confirmed by Walker in 1764 who noted that in Barra, ‘they have a greater quantity of several kinds of shell-fish than is to be found perhaps anywhere else in Britain, and if they could be pickled or preserved like oysters, their abundance is such that they might afford a Branch of Trade. They serve as a principle article in the sustenance of the whole inhabitants, for at one time may be seen above 100 people, with as many horses, upon that extensive sand called the Craymore, carrying off loads of cockles and razor fish, which though not the best, are the most easily purchased.’39 In truth, they ate shell-fish to stave off starvation.
The Gaels were ambivalent towards fish but positively antipathetic towards shell-fish, though they ate them in quantities. Whelks, mussels, oysters, cockles, limpets, and crabs of excellent quality were freely available on the west coast and provided a fall-back for widows and orphans and for the whole population in times of scarcity. The mountains of shells left in prehistoric midden deposits, at recent crofting townships along the Scottish coast, and even at inland shielings might suggest that seafood was a popular seasonal speciality but it was never more than second-best. Milk and red meat were the preferred staples, in the Mesolithic and later, but shell-fish, boiled in milk with butter or cream if available, filled the gaps.
The belief persisted among the better-fed that ‘shell-fish must have been good strong food if there was something to take along with it, for I was always told that the finest and strongest family of young men ever known at Poolewe – Gillean an Alanaich (the Lads of Allan) – were a family who above all other families in the place were brought up on Maorach a Chladaich (the shell-fish of the shore).’ Then their place was let to crofters from Melvaig who were accustomed to eat limpets and a white whelk known as Gille Fionn (the White Lad). ‘So when they shifted their abode to the head of Loch Ewe and had to live on oysters and mussels and cockles, they thought the change of diet did not suit them, and, like the Israelites of old, they pined for the shell-pots of Melvaig.’40
The Gaels ate fish and shell-fish when they were for any reason short of food or driven to make economies but they regarded fish with a certain repugnance as a very inferior form of nourishment. Walker’s report on the Hebrides makes sense in this light. In 1764 in Benbecula he found that ‘The shores and sounds about the island abound greatly with mullet; there is cod also to be caught upon the east shore, and, in the season, the Bay of Viskaray upon the east coast is frequently filled with herrings; yet through the year there is not a fish taken and cured by the inhabitants.’41 In Tiree, ‘The fishery might be turned to great account’ but ‘there is not a net nor long line in all the island.’42 In Rum, an impoverished island where the hunting had been expropriated by the landlord, he noted that the people ate fish, but in fertile Tiree they did not. In St Kilda, in the late nineteenth century, 'there were ‘swarms of fish round their shores, but hitherto the greater part of the harvest of the sea has been reaped by strangers.’43 The Gaels preferred sea-bird eggs, fat young gannets, mutton, milk, butter and cheese, all of which in normal times they had in abundance.
Burt noticed this neglect of fish with surprise. ‘It is true, there are small trouts, or something like them, in some of the little rivers which continue in holes among the rocks, which are always full of water when the stream is quite ceased for want of rain; these might be a help to them in this starving season; but I have had so little notion in all my journeys that they made those fish a part of their diet, that I never once thought of them, as such, until this very moment.’44 To complete the confusion, in 1803, at Inversnaid, a local woman assured Dorothy Wordsworth that the people were not Papists – they all ate everything, even fish!45
Birds
‘We desired the landlady to roast us a couple of fowls to carry with us. There are always plenty of fowls at the doors of a Scotch inn, and eggs are as regularly brought to the table at breakfast as bread and butter.’46 The domestic fowl, though not a Mesolithic feature, fitted well into a diet that had always included an abundance and variety of wild fowls of similar size, such as grouse, partridge, black-cock, ptarmigan, capercailzie and gannets. In 1769 James Boswell supped on capercailzie, but it was already described by Pennant as a rare bird47
‘The crops in North Uist and Benbecula, but especially South Uist, are exposed to a very singular Misfortune; being sometimes entirely destroyed by the vast flocks of wild geese which haunt these islands… To these very great hardships, the people of those islands have been subjected only since the disarming Act took place. But since that period, these birds have increased to such a degree, that they threaten in a little time to deprive the inhabitants of bread. To allow them a few arms for the preservation of their crops would be a piece of humanity which their necessity and their distress loudly call for.’ J. Walker 1764, 79. The editor notes that ‘the Disarming Act of 1746 probably only exacerbated an already difficult situation. Martin Martin had found the geese making similar depredations at the end of the seventeenth century, although then they were both shot and trapped.’ J. Walker 1764, 236.
Birds could be exploited in other ways. It was possible, if hazardous, to rob an eagle’s nest of the food brought for the chicks. ‘It was told of a gentleman in Strathspey, near whose residence a couple of large eagles had taken up their abode, that if, on the arrival of guests or otherwise, he was in want of provision, he sent to the eyrie of his providers, where hares, rabbits, poultry, game and lambs were procured. Salmon and trout might even be found.’ Logan 1848, 169. The shepherds in Gairloch habitually supplemented their diet by stealing food from eagles: ‘It was said that they tethered the eaglets to the nest long after they could fly, because until the young birds left the nest, the parents never ceased to bring quantities of all sorts of game to feed them, quite half of which was said to go into the shepherds’ larder. A shepherd admitted to me that he once took a salmon quite fresh out of a white-tailed eagle’s nest. Fawns, hares, lambs, and grouse were brought in heaps to the nest for months – an agreeable variety at the shepherd’s daily dinner of porridge, potatoes and milk.’48 The extract refers to the first half of the nineteenth century. It says something of the times that an eagle chick was better fed than a dependent of the owner of the estate.
Pigs
Wild pigs were part of the Mesolithic diet and even on the remote island of Oronsay the bones of wild pigs were found in Mesolithic middens with those of red deer, roe deer and seal. In the early medieval period, domestic pigs feeding in forest would have mated with wild boar, and attempts were made to preserve the wild population for hunting. But ‘by the middle of the sixteenth century, because of deforestation and over-hunting, the wild population was in decline’. It probably became extinct in the seventeenth century.49
The prejudice against eating pork does not appear to have any religious content. It was referred to by Bishop Leslie in his History of 1578, while a Loyalist song ridiculing the Rump Parliament of 1648 refers to ‘The Jewish Scots that scorn to eat the flesh of swine’. Dr Johnson noted that the pig was held in abhorrence in Skye, and Sir Walter Scott, in a footnote to The Fortunes of Nigel, says that ‘The (Lowland) Scots, till within the last generation, disliked swine’s flesh as an article of food as much as the Highlanders do at present.’ Burt, living in an English colony in Inverness in the second quarter of the eighteenth century, said that ‘pork is not very common with us, but what we have is good. I have often heard it said that the Scots will not eat it. This may be ranked among the rest of the prejudices; for this kind of food is common in the Lowlands, and Aberdeen in particular is famous for furnishing families with pickled pork for winter provision, as well as their shipping. I own I never saw any swine among the mountains, and there is good reason for it: those people have no offal wherewith to feed them’.50 He tells of dining with a chief and a gentleman of his clan in a public house, where both chief and laird refused the pork, but ‘some days afterward the latter being invited to our mess, and under no restraint, he ate it with as good an appetite as any of us all.’51
Wild pigs appear in isolation and in hunting scenes on the carved stones of Dark Age Scotland and boar hunts are commemorated in verse that was still popular at a much later period. Probably the wild pig became a privileged quarry, reserved for the feudal elite as the species became increasingly rare. Whatever its origin, its exclusive status for a long time worked against pig-keeping in the Highlands.
Cereals
The place of cereals in the Highland diet is ambiguous. Evidently in the Mesolithic there was neither oats or barley, but oats and barley are widely assumed to be an indispensable item in the Highland diet. This ignores the fact that in many parts of the Highlands, cereal crops can be grown only with difficulty or not at all. Fenton, for example, claims that ‘in the wet, peaty areas of Highland Scotland, although the main emphasis was on grazing and stock-rearing, nevertheless the people could live no less without bread and ale than their Lowland counterparts, and grain crops also had to be produced.’52 But there are many parts of the Highlands where oats and barley rarely ripen, and many more in which only small quantities can be grown, enough to make the Christmas ale and to ensure that an oatcake remained a rare and desirable object.
The evidence suggests that, though the Gaels became very fond of oatcakes and beer and often made considerable efforts to obtain them, for most of prehistory they lived without cakes and ale. When the Macdonalds of Glencoe raided Glenlyon towards the end of October, 1689, they took everything movable. They drove off all the animals and carried off as much as they could carry by way of blankets, pots, griddles, spits, trenchers, candlesticks and other household plenishings. But there is no mention in the comprehensive and very detailed inventory of stolen items of grain of any kind, neither oats or barley. To avert famine, the laird’s son-in-law, Alexander Campbell of Ardeonaig, borrowed money and bought in oatmeal from the Lowlands, where it was grown principally as cattle fodder.53 This appears to be the first appearance of oatmeal in this area. It came to have the same negative image in Perthshire as shell-fish had in the Isles, no doubt to its use as famine food and its poor quality,
Nevertheless the Scot and his oats have been proverbial since the time of Buchanan (1550), when the Hebrideans made ‘a kind of bread, not unpleasant to the taste, of oats and barley, the only grain cultivated in these regions, and, from long practice, they have attained considerable skill in moulding the cakes. Of this they eat a little in the morning, and then contentedly go out a hunting, or engage in some other occupation, frequently remaining without any other food till the evening.’54 Archaeology confirms that barley has been grown in Scotland since the Neolithic. But it does not show that it has always been grown or that cereals became an indispensable staple or even a regular item of the local diet. There were no doubt many false starts. Many prehistoric farms in the Highlands and in the Hebrides are buried under peat, long lost to unsuitable farming technology, the northern climate, and unsuitable soil. Besides, if Fenton is correct, the Scottish liking for oatcakes cannot be of enormous age since the crop was not known before the Roman Iron Age.55
The Gaelic method of processing grain was very primitive. In the seventeenth century the natives of St Kilda harvested grain by pulling it up by the roots, and this is also noted from several parts of north and west Scotland.56 Processing was equally simple. ‘A woman, sitting down, takes an handful of corn, holding it by the stalks in her left hand, and then sets fire to the ears, which are presently in a flame. She has a stick in her right hand, which she manages very dextrously, beating off the grains at the very instant when the husk is quite burnt; for if she misses any of that, she must use the kiln; but experience has taught them the art to perfection. The corn may be so dressed, winnowed, ground and baked within an hour after reaping from the ground’.57 ‘They burn the straw of the sheaf to make the pats dry for meal; and though the grain is black by the ashes, and the meal coloured, yet it is not unpleasant to the taste, and it is thought to be very wholesome food’.58
Burt also knew of this very primitive custom: ‘In some of the Western Islands (as well as in part of the Highlands) the people never rub out a greater quantity of oats than what is just necessary for seed against the following year; the rest they reserve in the sheaves, for their food. And, as they have occasion, set fire to some of them; not only to dry the oats, which for the most part are wet, but to burn off the husk. Then, by winnowing they separate, as well as they can, the sooty part from the grain; but as this cannot be done very effectually, the bannack or cake they make of it is very black. Thus they deprive themselves of the use of straw, leaving none to thatch their huts, make their beds, or feed their cattle in the winter season… This oatmeal is called graydon meal.’59 When burning did not completely remove the husk, grain might be beaten on a knocking stone, ‘an old device that goes back to prehistoric times.’60 It was a hollow stone, like a large mortar, in which grain was beaten with a stone or wooden mallet. A wooden trough or a hollow cut out of rock might also be used. Gradan survived for longest in Galloway, the Western Islands and Highlands, and North and North-East Scotland, all place where the climate made it difficult to grow grain in large quantities or to dry it effectively.61
In the later part of the eighteenth century, the making of gradan was actively discouraged by improving landlords who reckoned it was reducing their income. (The account assumes that the tough native cattle could live on the straw of oats and barley over the winter.) ‘It is scarce to be credited that in a country where cattle is the chief production, and where there is the greatest difficulty to support them in winter, the inhabitants should burn their provender. Yet this is really the case over all the Highlands and Islands in the manufacture of their graidin bread, in which the best part of the straw is burnt, in order to dry and prepare the corn for grinding. The practice received this year its first check from Sir James Macdonald, who has given orders that after Martinmas next it should be no longer followed on his estates, but that all the corn shall be threshed and kiln dried, as in other places.’62 Walker applauded this as a progressive move but drying kilns used peat, and fuel of any sort was becoming scarce in most parts of the Highlands. Nevertheless, it was the sale of black cattle that paid the rent.
The Gaels disdained oatmeal when it was bought for them and they were obliged to eat it, but where it was not available they worked very hard to earn the money to buy it for themselves. This of course may reflect the fact that most bought oatmeal was of poor quality. ‘The quantity of cultivated land in North Uist is extremely small, compared to the number of the inhabitants. They never therefore have grain to serve themselves, but are always oblidged to other countries, and in the year 1760 imported no less than 1,200 bolls of meal. They consume a much greater quantity of grain since the kelp manufacture was introduced than before. The sustenance of the labouring servants formerly consisted chiefly in fowl, fish and milk, with little or no bread, but they require and consume a great deal of bread and meal ever since they have been employed as manufacturers.’63
To go back to the end of the seventeenth century, the summer diet in a remote part of Argyll still consisted entirely of milk. ‘There was no bread of any kind, till the discovery of some lead-mines, which brought strangers among the inhabitants; who before fed upon the milk of their cows, goats and sheep. In summer they used to shake their milk in a vessel, till it was very frothy, which puffed them up, and satisfied them for the present; and their cheese served them instead of bread. The reason why they had no bread was, that there is hardly any arable land for a great space, all round about that part of the country.’64 This probably refers to Ballygrant in the mountainous part of Islay where lead mines were opened about 1680.65 The miners would be able to buy imported oatmeal with the cash they earned; indeed, they had no other way of feeding themselves.
In August 1803, the Wordsworths, Dorothy and her brother William, stayed overnight at Glengyle House on Loch Katrine, in the Trossachs. Glengyle by then was a tenanted sheep farm. For their tea they were offered cheese, butter, and barley-cakes, the barley being freshly harvested from the fields in front of the house. ‘These cakes are as thin as our oat-bread, but, instead of being crisp, are soft and leathery, yet we, being hungry and the butter delicious, ate them with great pleasure, but when the same bread was set before us afterwards we did not like it’ On the following morning ‘we all breakfasted together. The cheese was set out, as before, with plenty of butter and barley-cakes, and fresh-baked oaten cakes, which, no doubt, were made for us: they had been kneaded with cream, and were excellent. All the party pressed us to eat, and were very jocose about the necessity of helping out their coarse bread with butter, and they themselves ate almost as much butter as bread.’66
Osgood also had an oatcake story. ‘I remember my old faithful servant, George Maclennan, telling me a story which shows how scarce anything in the form of bread was even in comparatively modern times. George’s father was the postman … and a good part of his salary consisted of bolls of oatmeal. Consequently his house often had meal in it when the neighbours’ houses were empty. George as a boy was for some reason wandering over the wild moors up on the Fionn Loch side when he met a very old man, whom even I can remember, who was there with his cows at the shieling near the Airidh Mollach. The old man seemed very faint, and he admitted to the boy that he had not tasted anything in the form of bread for some days, living entirely on milk and the trout he was able to catch with his rod. George had a supply of oatcake in his pocket, and he gave it to the old man, who was more than grateful.’67 One may well imagine that the bodach was grateful, but he was an old fraud, since a diet of milk and fish will support life indefinitely. No doubt he could smell the good thing that George had in his pocket, and knew that the boy could spare it.
Gathering and other minor methods
Mil fo thalamh, brisgein earraich,
Mil es annlan, omhan samhraidh,
Mil is conail, curral foghair,
Mil is cnamhsachd, cnothan geamhraidh,
Harvest under ground, silverweed of spring,
Harvest of spices, whisked whey of summer,
Harvest of fruitage, carrot of autumn,
Harvest of crunching, nuts of winter.
The ‘gathering’ or ‘foraging’ which is invariably if not always accurately attached to ‘hunting’ in defining Mesolithic culture is of little importance in Scotland. If we exclude the harvest of the great sea-bird colonies, which produced thousands of young sea-birds and sea-bird eggs, and the gathering of shell-fish, we have only a few edible plants, berries and nuts, all in short seasons.
Several vegetables were gathered. There are several dozen edible and often tasty green plants in the Highlands, including nettle, sorrel, dandelion, comfrey, and chickweed. To judge by the way they proliferate around old farms, they appear to have been fostered by country people, if not deliberately sown. The root of the wild carrot provides a nibble. Grant mentions that the natives of the islands ate nettles and silverweed in times of scarcity, also charlock, wild spinage, a type of lovage, and the roots of a type of vetch.68 In the Outer Hebrides ‘a nourishing root is commonly dug up by the poor in time of scarcity, out of the arable lands, called brifsean, or wild sherrat.' This in Gaelic was brisgean ‘wild skirret, sium sisarum’, probably silverweed, which 'when boiled, answers the purpose of bread or potatoes.’69 For a few brief weeks in what passes for summer in Scotland, there may be wild strawberries, raspberries, blaeberries and brambles. Hazelnuts were collected and eaten in huge numbers and native herbs and spices, such as thyme, rosemary, juniper, and wild garlic, were also picked and dried.
Of vegetables, Burt reported that he had been told ‘by old people in Edinburgh, that no longer ago than forty years, there was little else but cale in their green-market, which is now plentifully furnished with that sort of provision’.70 Kale or cabbage was the main vegetable in Scotland. It was grown in small walled gardens to protect it from cows and goats, who also liked it very much. Kale was so regular and important an item of diet that 'kale' came to be used throughout Scotland for the main meal of the day. ‘Come and eat your kale’ was an invitation to dine in the Lowland idiom while the more cautious Highland equivalent was An d’ fhuair thu do chàl? – ‘Did you have your kale?’. Kale might be combined with barley, boiled potatoes, butter, milk, oatmeal, and salt meat.71 Another popular vegetable was the onion which was grown as a garden plant in the Highlands from c.1600 and which may have replaced some wild relative. The onion was eaten raw and oatcakes and onions became the standard meal of the poorer classes and of those on the move, such as drovers. The leaders of the Highland Host who descended on Ayrshire in 1678 carried bags filled with onions.72
The popularity of kale and onions and the incentive for their domestication no doubt lies in the prior use of comparable wild vegetables. The wild cabbage, Brassica oleracea, is now a scarce plant of the sea cliffs but is similar enough to the garden cabbage to be a probable ancestor – garden cabbages sometimes revert to this form if they are allowed to go to seed.73 John Buchanan reported: ‘In Uist there is a kind of natural kale, or colewort, called morran, that grows by the seaside.’74 The taste for onions most probably reflects the previous use of wild species such as the sand leek or rocambole,75, whose bulbs and stems are used in the same way as garlic.76 Kale did not grow on St Kilda but the natives ate various sea-weeds and the roots of silver-weed and dock.77 Edible dulse, G. duilasg, Fucus palmatus, is at its best in early May. It is said to be much improved if mixed with pepper dulse, Fucus primatifidus. ‘Some prefer it dipped in scalding water, and we have had it roasted with a hot poker, but when properly boiled it forms a rich, gelatinous sort of soup, a piece of butter being added to it, and seasoning according to one’s means or taste, in which state it may be preserved for some time. It is at times boiled up with milk, or a mixture of cream is added when served up, by which it is much improved. Slaik is another marine plant, less abundant than dulse, which is used in a similar manner.’78 It is by now evident that the pastoral Highlander added milk, cream or butter to everything he ate.
The native flora of Scotland provides a range of herbs and spices. In North-East Scotland a farm kitchen contained a bag of home-grown mustard, bunches of onions, and wrapped bunches of hyssop, peppermint, wormwood and other herbs to be used in decoctions for man and beast.79 Native hunters carried juniper, thyme, cumin, myrtle, rosemary, and rue. They were also familiar with creamh-mac-féidh/ or hart’s tongue fern, //deanntag-ghreugach or fineal-grougach, fenugreek, lus an oìr or meilise hedge mustard, and torman, vervain sage. The small scarlet berries of dwarf cornel were once chewed by Highlanders to stimulate their appetites (or perhaps to assuage the pangs of hunger), and were also eaten by natives in North America.80
There was also some primitive understanding of dietary supplements or vitamins. We are told that, during a long hard winter ‘when the snow blocked the passes and food was scarce’, the men grew pale and lean and some had been prostrated by ‘winter sickness’. They were surprised to find that the women (living apart?) kept their health and colour, and a man was sent to spy on them. He found that they made a broth by using the topmost shoots of fir trees or, in another version, the roots of ferns.81 In a more plausible version, the Feinne find game scarce but when they return to their wives, they find them ‘lusty, fair and comely.’ One of their number, left behind to spy, reports that the women boil hazel tops and drink the bree.82 Was ‘winter sickness’ perhaps scurvy or beri-beri? A diet of lean meat does not provide the nutrients needed for its own digestion and leads to ‘rabbit starvation’.83 This may be the origin of the taboo on eating horses, since the meat of wild horses is very lean.84
Drinks
‘Bere or barley was the drink crop. When John Major described the British skill in brewing ale in 1521, he elaborated on the Scottish technique that produced ale of greater strength. Orkney had a particularly high reputation, for according to Hector Boece in 1527, her malt made the best ale in Albion. A visitor to Orkney between 1614-18 said that the ale was strong, whitish in colour, and tempered with herbs. … In most of Scotland, in the days before tea and coffee, ale was the standard drink, along with milk.’85 The people of St Kilda made beer from barley fermented with the juice from nettle roots, which was said to be very good.86
The Gaels normally drank ‘the juice of boiled flesh’ or broth. But ‘at their feasts they sometimes use whey, after it has been kept for several years, and even drink it greedily; that species of liquor they call bland, but the greater part quench their thirst with water.’87 ‘In the Northern Isles, when the butter had been taken out of the churn, hot water was added to the buttermilk, producing a white, cheese-like substance called hard milk in Fair Isle. This was hung in a cloth, and the liquid left was drunk as bland (G. blanndaidh ‘stale, as milk’). This must be a very old recipe. Bland has the great virtue of being able to be kept for a very long time, and it ferments to a sparkling stage, when it was used as a refreshing drink and as a cure for consumptives.’88 Fermented bland appears to be the same as kumiz. a fermented liquor, made from mares’ milk and commonly drunk by Asiatic nomads. This remote link points to a Palaeolithic recipe both for bland and for kumiz. Kumiz was also recommended in cases of consumption and imitations for this purpose were made from the milk of asses and cows.
Bees
‘In a country abounding with such herbage, a great produce of honey might reasonably be expected, but the two first bee hives that have ever been in the Long Island were brought but last year from the Isle of Skye, to Clanranald’s seat of Ormoclait in South Uist.’89 In Islay: ‘The great extent of rich, flowery pasture, with which this island abounds, especially on the sea shore, renders it capable of furnishing a very great quantity of honey and wax for the supply of other places. But though bees are found to thrive vigorously, there are not as yet above a dozen of hives in the island.’90 Osgood Mackenzie noted that there were once so many wild bees in the Lews that their honey was sold at the Stornaway markets but that wild bees had become very scarce in the West. Hunting for the nests of wild bees to eat the honey and the ceir (bee-bread) was once a favourite ploy for the boys in the autumn, and men cutting hay-fields would often stop to exploit a chance find. A good nest never contained more than a saucerful of honey but ‘nowadays an egg-cup would hold all the honey one could find in a long summer’s day’. O. Mackenzie 1921, edition of 1949, 50.
Table manners
In the West Highlands in 1804: housekeeping was simple. ‘They had just taken from the fire a great pan full of potatoes, which they mixed up with milk, all helping themselves out of the same vessel, and the little children put in their dirty hands to dig out of the mess at their pleasure. I thought to myself, How light the labour of such a house as this! Little sweeping, no washing of floors, and as to scouring the table, I believe it was a thing never thought of.’91
Things were equally basic in Gairloch in 1850. ‘Knives and forks were hardly known in the crofter houses, and everything was eaten with fingers and thumbs. Even now I can hear them say herrings and potatoes never taste right if eaten with a knife and fork… When people chanced to have a bit of meat they could not make what we should call broth, because they had no pot barley and no turnips or carrots, onions or cabbage, to put in it; so they thickened the water in which the meat had been boiled with oatmeal, and this was called in Gaelic eanaraich (broth). It was placed in the middle of the table and everyone helped themselves with their horn spoons.'92 After the meal the spoons were licked clean and hung on the wall.
When a small boy, Osgood Mackenzie was sent ashore on Harris from the family yacht one Sunday morning, with the family butler, to seek fresh milk for their breakfast porridge. They directed their steps to ‘one of the many crofter’s houses which were dotted about among the rocks opposite to where we were anchored. The habitation we selected for our visit was, like most of the native houses, very long, considering its height and its width inside, because these Hebridean houses have to contain not only the family, but also the whole stock of cattle, not to mention sundry pet sheep and innumerable hens, with no division of any kind between the animals and the human beings’. Having squeezing past the rear ends of eight or ten cows they arrived at the end where the fire burned against the gable and where there was a bed.
‘We were most politely and hospitably welcomed. The good wife, like all the Harris people, had most charming manners, but she was busy preparing the family breakfast, and bade us sit down on little low stools at the fire and wait till she could milk the cows for us. Then occurred a curious scene, such as one could hardly have witnessed elsewhere than in a Kaffir kraal or an Eskimo tent or Red Indian tepe. There was a big pot hanging by a chain over the peat fire, and a creel heaped up with short heather, which the women tear up by the roots on the hillsides and with which they bed the cows. The wife took an armful of this heather and deposited at the feet of the nearest cow, which was tied up within two or three yards of the fire, to form a drainer. Then, lifting the pot off the fire, she emptied it on to the heather; the hot water disappeared and ran away among the cow’s legs, but the contents of the pot, consisting of potatoes and fish boiled together, remained on top of the heather. Then from a very black-looking bed three stark naked boys arose one by one, aged, I should say, from six to ten years, and made for the fish and potatoes, each youngster carrying off as much as both his hands could contain. Back they went to their bed, and started devouring their breakfast with apparently great appetites under the blankets! No wonder the bed did not look tempting. We got our milk in course of time, but I do not think it was altogether relished after the scene we had witnessed.’93
In the Borders
The diet of the Scottish Borders as described in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries differed from the contemporary Highland diet by relying more on cereals and root crops and less on fresh meat. Otherwise the scene at a typical meal in the Borders, as described by Fynes Moryson in 1598, did not vary much from the hospitality maintained by contemporary Highland chiefs. ‘They eate much red colewort and cabbage, but little fresh meat, using to salt their mutton and geese, which made me more wonder, that they use to eate beef without salting. The gentlemen reckon their revenewes, not by rents of monie, but by chauldrons of victuals, and keep many people in the families, yet living most on corne and rootes, not spending any great quantity on flesh. Myself was at a Knight’s house, who had many servants to attend him, that brought in his meate with their heads covered with blew caps, the table being more than halfe furnished with great platters of porredge, each having a little piece of sodden [boiled] meate. And when the table was served, the servants did sit downe with us, but the upper messe in steed of porredge, had a pullet with some prunes in the broth… The Scots living then in factions, used to keepe many followers, and so consumed their revenew of victuals, living in some want of money.’94
Early in the seventeenth century, Sir James Pringle could offer his guests barley pottage, long kale, bowe or white kale, salt beef, roast and boiled mutton, a venison pie in the form of an egg, goose, cheese, apples and beer.95 In the first part of the eighteenth century a Selkirk farmer and his family still dined in Mesolithic style on boiled meat, cut up and distributed by the head of the household and eaten by all with the fingers and the broth in which the meat had been cooked. In addition they had barley bannocks, cheese, butter, milk, salt herrings and oatmeal dumplings also cooked in the broth.96
