‘One generation of ignorance effaces the whole series of unwritten history’. Samuel Johnson, his Journey
Bheil dad agus air na Fian? ‘Can you speak of the days of the Feinne?’ David Stewart 1822, 95.
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Martin Martin (Western Isles 1703; Visit to St Kilda 1698)
Both Johnson and Boswell read his book and took a copy of it along with them on their famous tour in 1773. Johnson felt Martin had failed to record the more interesting aspects of life at the time, and suggested that this was because Martin was unaware of just how different the social structure of the Western Isles was in comparison to the modern world. Wikipedia, 21.12.2009.
Taigh na Banaghaisgeich = Amazon? Warrior? gaisgeach: warrior.
Archaeology
A problem facing any research into early settlement in Scotland is that, since human settlement in the Mesolithic, the most desirable settlement land in the west of Scotland, including the Hebrides, Orkney and Shetland, has very largely disappeared beneath the sea. What were once large islands or extensive plains are now sea-invaded archipelagos or have vanished altogether. The 100m sea-depth contour gives an impression of what has been lost. Consequently a great many prehistoric sites have vanished. But, remarkably, a memory of this lost landscape was still alive on the remote island of St Kilda in the seventeenth century.
St Kilda (properly Hirta) is a very isolated small island in the Atlantic Ocean, fifty miles from the nearest land and one of the most remote spots in the British Isles. It is surrounded by cliffs and rocks and difficult of access and, until 1932, was home to two hundred Gaelic people who lived mainly on sea-birds and their eggs. However it is probably wrong to see its population as the descendants of a pioneering group of settlers who arrived across the sea, as Polynesian settlers did, to form a new settlement in this remote place, where they evolved a new way of life from scratch. This is inherently improbable. Their way of life had many unusual and refined features which cannot have evolved in situ, as they were immediately needed to survive in situ. A boatload of sailors, ship-wrecked on the island - even if we allow these hypothetical castaways their seed-corn, ploughs, fishing lines and sheep - would not survive through their first winter. It is more accurate to see the first people who lived on St Kilda as Mesolithic people who were able to walk to this distant point most or all of the way across what is now the sea-bed and who had a wide range of survival techniques in place long before they got there. In particular they knew how to harvest and store sea-birds and their eggs, as they did in the north of Lewis, to which St Kilda was at one time connected. The modern population was a remnant, a handful of refugees, clinging to a remote rock that had, more or less by accident, survived above sea level. This gives the few scraps of information that survive an added interest and relevance in any search for Mesolithic traits. What we appear to find is a surviving memory of Mesolithic events.
One of their great losses was hunting but there is some evidence that red deer were once hunted on the land of which Hirta was an outlying high point. Martin Martin reported a tradition about a Female Warrior, a giant or Amazon who once lived on the island.1 He describes the Female Warrior's House as a type of bee-hive house, entirely built of stone: 'This Amazon is famous in their traditions: her house or dairy of stones is yet extant; some of the inhabitants swell in it all summer, though it be some hundred years old… She is said to have been addicted to hunting, and that in her time all the space betwixt this isle and that of Harries, was one continued tract of dry land.' 'There was some years ago a pair of large deers-horns found in the top of Oterveaul Hill, almost a foot under ground; and there was likewise a wooden dish full of deer's grease found in the same hill under ground. 'Tis also said of this warrior, that she let loose her greyhounds after the deer in St Kilda, making their course towards the opposite isles.'
Then, alas, he adds: 'There are several traditions of this famous Amazon, with which I will not further trouble the reader.' However he has said enough to suggest that in St Kilda in 1695 people remembered stories about the time before the land was flooded, when there was a single deer forest linking their island with the Long Island. They cannot have had the slightest idea of what this story meant and would hardly have been able to understand such notion. It matches much more recent accounts of the continued inroads made by the sea in Uist and Benbecula.
There is another reason why archaeology is a poor source of evidence for anyone attempting to research the folk-culture of Mesolithic hunters in Highland Scotland. The Highlanders produced almost nothing for archaeologists to find. A people who use wood and wicker may pass thousands of years in a place and remain quite invisible. This has the effect of diminishing their importance in contrast to later farmers, for example. They may have been transient immigrants with inappropriate technology but they left graves, farmhouses, fields, ard marks, and other interesting artefacts for archaeologists to find. Despite living in Scotland for eight or ten thousand years, Scottish deer-hunters are practically invisible. Folk museums instead focus on the material equipment used in arable farming, fishing and dairying, all relatively recent attempts to fill the gap left by the demise of hunting in the Gaelic-speaking areas of Scotland.
In the following story I have invented nothing except the first incident. The story concerns two Mesolithic tribes, A and B. At the end of the Upper Palaeolithic, as the glaciers melted, they were still a single tribe of reindeer hunters. Then, by accident, the tribe was permanently divided by a sudden rise in the level of the Rhine. Each group continued to migrate, following their surviving reindeer as they moved gradually into virgin territory. Tribe A wandered east into what is now Siberia and tribe B wandered north and west into what is now Scotland.
Tribe A eventually found its way barred by impassible marshes and came to a halt. They still live there, on a vast sub-Arctic plain with poor soil, dense forest, and an extreme climate. In winter the soil is frozen, Arctic winds blow, and the land is covered with snow but it is possible to hunt in the forest. During the summer months life in the forest is made intolerable by biting insects and they escape to the shores of the larger rivers where they live on fish. The tribal territory is huge and ill-defined and the density of population has always been very low. The members of tribe A have no clearly defined identity, since they seldom meet anyone from any other tribe. They live in small, unstable groups, since there is seldom enough food for more than two or three families at any one place at any one time. In consequence, the entire population – men, women, children and old people – are continually on the move, with all their belongings, even in the depths of winter. But they have trained various animals - dogs, reindeer, even elk - to pull their sledges, which are elegant affairs. Their hunting routines are elaborate but high-risk and they have invented a great many good-luck rituals and superstitions. They eat things that most other cultures reject, including dogs and wolves. Their equipment is also elaborate for, in order to survive, tribe A have had to solve many problems. They have invented protective clothing in the form of boots, trousers, parkas and snow-goggles. To be able to move around and hunt in winter they have snow-shoes and skis. Their houses are energy-efficient. Their techniques of food preservation are likewise varied and efficient and include freezing, freeze-drying, smoking, and pulverising. Their hunting weapons, fishing-equipment and domestic equipment are varied and complex and their personal items are decorated with a variety of occult symbols, endlessly reworked. Tribe A is extremely devout. They bury their dead with expensive rituals to prepare them for the next world, which is warm and green and full of food. Their abiding problem is to find enough to eat and they live with the fear of extinction as they are very few. They have memories of famine and death and this adds to their worries.
Meanwhile, their cousins in tribe B moved slowly north and west into Britain, still following their reindeer who led them into a fertile area beside the western sea before it got too warm for them and they died out. Before then in any case reindeer had been replaced by red deer and cattle and life was somewhat easier, as there was no longer any need to migrate all year with the herds of reindeer. The winter climate was mild but wet and the summers were cool but relatively dry. Once they had reduced the forest cover by controlled burning, there was excellent grazing. Their numbers grew considerably and tribe B split up into twenty or thirty self-sufficient local branches or clans all living in their own territories. The individual clan territories are carefully defined and carefully managed to avoid over-grazing and disputes. The young men enjoy the occasional skirmish or cattle raid but bloodshed is taboo. The clans generally find all the food they need close to their main settlements but every autumn several neighbouring clans meet for a collective hunt in the hinterland, where they kill and process enough deer and other game to see them through the winter. Tribe B's hunting routines and equipment have become simpler over time. Much of the time they kill deer by driving them over cliffs or into bogs and pelting them with stones. Hunting is the focus of their lives and the subject of all their many stories, songs, poems and dances. They disdain all other food. They have a rich and complex oral culture and a hereditary elite but their material culture is uniformly simple. They live in temporary shelters, they make no pots, they have no art other than body painting and they often use rough stones rather than prepared projectiles. Their religious observances are perfunctory - they believe that the deer are the children of a Big Woman and that they must kill as few as possible and that is about it. Both men and women spend their time eating, drinking, singing, telling stories, creating poems, rehearsing their genealogies and their laws, playing musical instruments, dancing, embroidering their dresses, training their dogs, their horses and their pages. At the end of the evening, they burn all the leftovers. At the end of the season they burn their old shelters and the bones of their dead.
Several thousand years later no-one would suspect that tribe A and tribe B (who are not imaginary) had a common origin. Nor would one draw the right conclusions from their archaeology. Tribe A, of whom only a few hundred survive, is very popular with archaeologists, ethnographers and museum curators, who love its fancy equipment, burials, art, and its shamans. Tribe B, virtually devoid of archaeology except for a few flint tools, is seen as a primitive and marginal society who lived from hand to mouth, and had no culture to speak of. There is nothing to suggest that, of the two, tribe B had by far the higher standard of living, was a thousand times more populous, had an evolved social structure and a copious oral culture, while tribe A, despite its elaborate material culture and distinctive art, was a small struggling group, forever facing failure and disaster.
The reason most often advanced for the paucity of evidence for deer-hunting, or even of people living in Mesolithic Scotland is that the population was small and struggling. The absence of artefacts suggests rather that the population was in easy circumstances. It may even have been quite large. A small population struggling to survive in difficult circumstances (as we saw with tribe A) can leave nothing to chance and evolves elaborate equipment, sophisticated weapons, lavish personal decoration, and much religious or superstitious ritual.2 The converse argument is that a hunting society in easy circumstances (such as tribe B) needs very little equipment and so leaves very little for archaeologists to find.
This story suggests that in a hunting society ease of survival and material complexity are inversely related. This is one of the messages of English Passengers. Lost in the Tasmanian forest the over-equipped English starve while the half-caste Peevay, armed only with a fire-stick, camps in comfort invisible but so near them that they can smell his supper roasting.3
The kind of archaeological silence that we find in Scotland is compatible with a long-established and reliable subsistence routine. Is silence perhaps diagnostic of such a society, at least in Northern Europe? A surplus of food may also be deduced from the diet, where this is known. Some early settlers in Scotland ate fish and shell-fish but the Gaels could apparently afford to neglect marine resources. They ate fish and shellfish only as a cultural aberration, as famine food, in spring, as castaways, or not at all under any circumstances.
Cultural anthropology or ethnography
This provides a few clues but sources are dated and unreliable. David MacRitchie, in The Testimony of Tradition (1890), looked at archaic survival in Scotland but was more concerned to support his belief that a race of Eskimos had, until recently, been the dominant population in western Scotland. His book has some value, for his Scottish Eskimos were a reasoned attempt to explain the use of wigwams, stone oil lamps, skin boats and other items by circumPolar hunters in Scotland, Scandinavia, north Asia and North America. (To these items we could add hunting in circles, deer-skin boots and sledges.) In the light of what is now known about world settlement, it is more plausible to suggest that all these items were invented by our common ancestors in Palaeolithic Europe after 50,000 BP, during the most recent glaciation, and that they remained in continuous use in northern climes, moving with the human population into Scotland and Scandinavia and east through Asia into North America. The only alternative is an improbable series of independent inventions.
Language and Place-Names
The Gaelic place-names of Scotland are currently devalued and neglected but they regain their proper place as soon as Scottish Gaelic is recognised to have been the native language of Scotland since it was first settled. They then offer an immense resource of archaic language and cultural information. This makes it possible that we will be able to reconstruct a single map of land-use to which topography, settlement patterns, prehistoric monuments, Gaelic tradition, Gaelic culture and place-names all contribute.
The main reason for the eclipse of Gaelic culture by Irish culture, as noted in the previous chapter, is the eclipse of the Gaelic language by Irish, a similar but by no means identical language used by a similar but by no means identical people. Since the emphasis in Celtic studies has always been on language and literature4 and since the Gaels of Scotland produced no documents to witness to their own existence, this has left them and their language and culture very much in the shade. The energy of scholars in Scotland, Ireland, Germany, America and elsewhere, since the nineteenth century, has been preoccupied with the study of Irish - in particular the immense quantities of early pseudo-history, hagiography, heroic poetry and imaginative fiction that its literate monks produced. Celtic studies have never recognised the possibility of archaic survival in Highland Scotland and are not equipped to understand its archaic aspects of the Gaelic language.
History
We cannot expect conventional historical studies to tell us very much about a non-literate native population. As Barrow notes, ‘our picture of medieval Scotland is almost wholly derived from documents designed to guarantee the future security of newly-founded institutions and newly-arrived individuals and families’.5 This is a recognized difficulty facing anyone investigating early Scotland, where literacy was for many centuries a monopoly exercised by clergy whose native language was Irish, English, French or sometimes Norwegian. This is sometimes evident. Barrow notes that ‘de Lereuach’ for Dalreach in 1279 was ‘presumably written by a clerk more used to French than Gaelic’.6 In the petition addressed by Archibald Dalzell to the Secret Council in 1603, the Gaelic collective Puderach meaning ‘people of Balquhidder’ is given as Pudrenois, a French form.7. And in 1681 John Campbell was created Earl of Brea d’Albane and Holland.8
Any study of feudal or medieval Scotland is bound to reflect the bias against Gaelic culture in the written sources, whether Irish pseudo-history or feudal court-books. Only the occasional mention of a rebellious native chief or a body of native men points to the existence of a substantial and surviving but invisible native population. Literacy – now in English – spread among the Gaels after the Reformation but was again used mainly by landowners to record their financial, legal and domestic affairs and by the reformed Church to record its dreary disciplinary procedures. Apart from their lapses into fornication, such records have little to say about the lives of the native Gaels whose names, abbreviated and anglicized for ease of transcription, appear in passing.9
Those seeking information about the Highland way of life from native writers like Martin Martin face a more subtle barrier. If the Gaels have left us with little information about their peculiar way of life, this is not primarily because they were unable to read or write, but because it is more or less impossible for a tribal people to describe their lives and social habits to outsiders, or even to understand what an outsider would find interesting. Moreover it appears that literate Gaels, almost by definition, were not interested in their native culture. They were more concerned with Lowland politics and Lowland fashions.
The value of these native sources is not proportional to their rarity. In 1549, Dean Monro left a brief catalogue of more than two hundred Hebridean islands. In or about 1695, Martin Martin, a native of Skye, wrote a longer account of the Hebrides but has little to say about the archaic aspects of daily life. The thousands of Gaels who moved to live in Lowland Scotland from 1600 onwards were well able to compare Lowland ways with the very different life they had been born into, but they were anxious to distance themselves from what they rapidly learned to see as primitive heathen savagery.
The loss of knowledge resulting from change within and migration out of the Highlands was considerable. The main damage was done by the centralising effect of feudal government. Feudal kings deliberately destroyed the old centres of Gaelic culture, preferring to look outside Scotland for their inspiration. Incalculable damage was also done by the conversion of large tracts of tribal lands into royal forest. When oral learning quite rapidly became redundant with the advent of feudalism and the demise of the native elite, the lack of literacy in Gaelic ensured that Gaelic oral culture (unlike that of Ireland) dwindled into a debased and fragmentary folklore without being adequately recorded. The destruction was accelerated by the promotion of education in English, by the Reformed religion, and by the Disarming Acts. By 1750 the end-game had begun; by 1950 it was over. Between these dates, for better or for worse, we had tourism.
Tourists
The curiosity of early tourists was aroused by stories of the 'remarkable things' to be seen in the Highlands. This is fortunate as otherwise we would know much less about it. Popular accounts of their travels written in English by visitors to the Highlands in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are by no means an ideal source: few if any of them spoke Gaelic and they were in any case too late to record the more complex aspects of Gaelic society but tourists, perhaps surprisingly, are among our best sources. They had enquiring minds, a good education, and generally published reliable accounts of their travels in the hope of paying their expenses. Their arrival was largely a coincidence. After 1715 a steadily improving network of roads was built to improve access to the troublesome North for the British Army and easier communications encouraged the first tourists. As more and more arrived, there was less and less for them to see - a familiar dilemma in heritage tourism. When Dr Samuel Johnson undertook his journey to the Highlands and the Hebrides in 1773 he was hopeful of encountering remarkable things, since he was familiar with the principle (which I have already defined), that ‘mountainous countries contain the original and oldest race of men, who from the nature of their territories, and their warlike habits, are not easily conquered’. The Lowland Scots he had met gave him the impression that ‘the state of the mountains and the islands is equally unknown with that of Borneo or Sumatra; of both they have only heard a little and guess the rest’. But he was disappointed, observing with his usual acumen: ‘We came hither too late to see what we expected, – a people of peculiar appearance, and a system of antiquated life. The clans retain little now of their original character… Of what they had before the late conquest of their country, there remains only their language and their poverty’.10 Like other visitors, Johnson could only record the surviving aspects of a system he did not himself experience. And since he understood not a word of the language he had to rely for all his information on members of an anglicised elite. He does at least confirm that a remarkable culture had once existed, that ‘a system of antiquated life’ had recently disappeared.
Folklore
Many of the 'supernatural beliefs' attributed to the Gaels turn out, on examination, to rest on bad translations of archaic words. The English versions were never corrected by the Gaels, who were themselves only too happy to believe in marvels and miracles, and so they were repeated ad nauseam in the popular English press in the declining years of Gaelic culture. This can best be shown by two case studies: the Taghairm and Beltane. Their value emerges only when we adopt a rational approach to the superstitious or pious mish-mash which is generally presented as 'Gaelic folk-lore'? Our ancestors were not daft; it is rather we who are daft as we repeat undigested everything we read. The quality of the published material, even at the basic level of providing a sensible translation from Gaelic into English, ranges from poor to abysmal. But when it is possible to recover the original scraps of Gaelic they become a very valuable source. This decoding process can be demonstrated very easily. In the case of the Taghaim, a pedestrian account of a hunting routine has been translated from archaic Gaelic into nonsensical English by someone with a very imperfect knowledge of Gaelic and a keen delight in the irrational.
The oldest known account states that the Gaels of old practised a method of divination called the Taghairm. It involved roasting a series of live cats over a fire for three days and three nights and it was performed as recently as the seventeenth century in Mull, when the sound of the cats could be heard in Morvern beyond the Sound of Mull. The folklorist, George Henderson, accepted this rigmarole as literal truth and adopted it into his scheme of Celtic belief as ‘a special form of sacrifice connected with the cat.’11 He was not the first to be misled. He copied his information from an ‘authentic' but anonymous source in the London Literary Gazette of March 1824. It may have been contributed by the novelist Walter Scott, who was notoriously ignorant of Gaelic and wrong in almost everything he wrote about Gaelic culture. Perhaps believing that repetition constitutes a form of proof, Henderson noted the appearance of the cats in J.G. Campbell’s Superstitions, Norrie’s Loyal Lochaber, and Armstrong’s Gaelic Dictionary. Dwelly repeated the story, citing Nicholson’s Gaelic Proverbs and Armstrong, but, being a more competent lexicographer, he also said that taghairm also means 'gathering summons’. This and the involvement of the ‘cats’ make all clear. We can now decode this appalling nonsense. In any archaic Gaelic context, a cat is not E. cat but archaic G. cath ‘hunt’ or ‘hunters’, in modern Gaelic ‘battle, fight; company of soldiers’. The fire lit for the cats in Mull was a gathering beacon which regularly burned for three days and three nights and which was visible as far as Morvern, beyond the Sound of Mull. It invited the men of Morvern to come to Mull to take part in a communal deer drive, one of the year's great events.
That this interpretation is correct is suggested by another garbled story, which confirms that the men of Mull crossed periodically to Morvern to hunt.12 As a bonus we can now identify in Morvern their muster stations, beacon sites, camp sites and other landmarks. It is also more than likely that the mysterious hut platforms found in their hundreds in Morvern and in other inaccessible corners of the western deer forests were campsites used by these transient deer- hunters'
A second example of the benefits of a rational approach is the annual event known as Beltane 'bright fire' celebrated on 1 May. It was until perhaps 1950 a popular bonfire festival in Lowland Scotland as in the Highlands. But at some time in the nineteenth century it was elevated to the status of a great Druidical festival in favour of the god Belus, when ‘fires were kindled on the mountain tops for the purposes of sacrifice; and between these fires the cattle were driven to preserve them from contagion until next May-day’. All the fires in the township were extinguished and then lit again by tein’-éigin ‘force-fire’, created by rubbing bits of wood together. The new fire was carried from house to house and from field to field and so the settlement was purified for the coming year. It is unlikely that any of this ever happened.
A review of Gaelic fire customs gives no hint that fires were ever extinguished and ceremoniously relit on 1 May or at any other time. On the contrary, it was a matter for pride that a fire had stayed alight on the same hearth for many years. This showed that the family concerned were thriving, provident, numerous, careful, and well supplied with peat. Again: ‘Take not the ashes from off the hearth,' said an old person. 'Nothing else is so “blasting” as to wipe the hearth clean. I would prefer the fire to be alive thereon than not.’13 Such attitudes do not change overnight.
Lighting a fire has a certain magic about it but it is a daily magic. There is nothing to suggest that it was seen by the Gaels as a supernatural activity, only as important in certain contexts. If a fire went out, the problem was easily solved by fetching a red peat in an iron pot from a neighbouring house. That this was a common event is shown by the joking question: ‘Did you come to fetch fire?’ addressed to someone who had visited in a house but was in a great hurry to leave again.14 If a burning peat was not available, every Gael carried a strike-a-light and dry tinder and could kindle a fire almost as easily as we do ourselves by striking a match. Being so much out and about, living in the hills, the Gaels were expert at lighting fires. Henderson reports many folkloric uses of fire, notably for healing, but also the low-key folk saying Cha tig olc a teine ‘No evil comes from fire’.15
The truth about Beltane can be deduced from the fact that 1 May marks the transition from winter to summer when the herds and flocks migrate to their summer pasture. Both the people and their beasts looked forward all winter to this day. If the entire township was going to leave the township for six months, there was nothing supernatural or even symbolic about extinguishing all the fires: they would go out anyway. No-one says so but one would presume that an iron pot full of red coals would go with them. If not, lighting a new fire was not difficult.
Other fabulous elements of Beltane lore are also capable of rational explanation. We are told by folklorists that a bonfire was lit in the township and at this fire children baked bannocks and broke off bits and threw them over their shoulders as offerings to the crows and foxes. One of them, chosen by lot, jumped over the dying bonfire. Henderson discerned undertones of human sacrifice to Baal.16 If we stick to ascertainable fact, the settled farmers of north-east Scotland farmers still habitually lit a bonfire on 1 May, low down and near the farm, which they used to burn old thatch and straw – the leftovers of the winter.17 Beltane in fact was the great spring cleaning, the proverbial mucking-out of the winter byres. This suggests that when transhumance was still the norm, they lit a bonfire in every winter township, not on a mountain top, not for luck, not to burn a human victim, but to get rid of infested bedding, old thatch, and other rubbish accumulated over the winter. At one time they may even have burned the dried bones of those who had died over the winter: that after all is what bonfire means. Cattle and children were driven through the smoke to cleanse them of parasites.
There is more. The children baked special bannocks at the fire, not for luck or to select a victim for sacrifice but because the fires in their own homes had been put out so that the thatch could be pulled down, the pots and girdles were packed up, and it might be some time before they had another meal. Far from throwing bits of bannock to feed the foxes and the crows, it is unlikely that they wasted a crumb. Oatmeal was never abundant in the Highlands and oatmeal in May had no doubt been saved up for this last special occasion. There would be no more all summer. They used the bannock to bake a caudle of eggs and milk. This used up the last of the eggs found around the homestead (before the hens, also, were packed) and the last drop of milk from the cow. The ashes were spread over the fields, not for luck but because ashes were known to add to the fertility of the soil. The manure which had accumulated over the winter was cleared from the byres and spread on the fields but no-one made a great magical ceremony out of that.18
The ‘bright fire’ of Beltane was certainly a great event in the pastoral year. It signalled the transition between the winter hunting season and the summer pastoral season on the hills, disposed of rubbish, cleansed cattle and people. It was even used for cooking a picnic and its ashes were spread as a fertiliser. A memory of this great event persisted in the settled communities of Lowland Scotland into the twentieth century. But there is not a scrap of irrational behaviour in sight.
