30 12 07

In Cill Chaluim Chille,
near the Camerons and MacLeods,
among the MacLeans and MacInneses,
in ‘the big graveyard above Loch Alainn’,
I chanced on MacLachlan’s grave,
not knowing it was there.

I know fine well where John MacLachlan, the Doctor of Rahoy is buried, since Sorley MacLean writes of it in his praise poem. I also know that there’s another grave over at Rahoy, & that intrigues me, as there’s no church or burial ground there.

The day’s not good for a foray to Rahoy, the other side of Loch Sunart at the inside length of Loch Teacuis; wet, cold, grey & blustery, but the grave is calling & I want to see what the Doctor would recognise there 130 years after his death.

At Kinlochteacuis birches & oaks show a distinct tendency for corkscrewing their growth into the air with the passing years, which I’ve noticed elsewhere in the woodlands, but it’s a clear pattern here. Despite the wet & the cold & the season, the woodbine is beginning to tenderly leaf &, oddly, there’s some delicate white bramble blossoms. Spring may come early for its own reasons, but the first signifiers I see have the imprimatur of ownership – Estate signs with stay away as a not quite hidden undernote: Private Road, Deerstalking in Progress During . . . the usual dreary preoccupation of people taken with the notion that Rahoy (& Kinlochteacuis, Morvern, Ardnamurchan, Scotland outside cities) is a sporting estate for the enjoyment of a few whose traditions enable them to escape thought & conscience.

“ . . . I cannot get a plot in my native country
though I’d pay a crown for a mere shoe-breadth.” writes the Doctor.

As the rains wet the woods & hills indiscriminately, my thoughts, gloomy to begin, are lifted by the knowledge of the reefs in Loch Teacuis here, which John MacLachlan probably never saw, but neither do the current landowners have control of. The land & sky is grey, but there are rare serpulids beneath the grey loch water, at only ten feet down. The home of tubeworms, the shell-like reefs twist up from the seabed at perhaps the same rate of growth as the corkscrewing birch & oak on the slopes that move down below sea level. There’s only four sites in the world for Serpula vermicularis reefs. The worm’s colours, bright red & orange, displayed in bronchial crowns outside the coral-like tubes, brighten my day immeasurably. Even the MacLachlan one would have smiled, taking a moment from his sadness & anger at landowners’ disregard of his culture.

The squalls set in once again from the southwest, with dusk not far behind. The grave, when I find it near the dun, is to a Naval officer who died in 1933, fifty nine years after John MacLachlan, & who is buried under a stone cairn topped with a cross. Nearby (“not knowing it was there”) I find another, newer grave, of a young Army Captain who died while climbing Ben Nevis in 2000, Colin Campbell his name.

The irony of a Captain Campbell’s final resting place being Morvern would not be lost on the Doctor; who would have known of the burnings on the Morvern coast: a retribution against those who joined the Jacobite cause in 1745. Philip Gaskell in Morvern Transformed records: “On the 10th instant, (March 1746) at four in the morning” [the writer is Captain Duff, in charge of the sloops Terror & Princess Anne, after having burned every boat he could find on the coast of Morvern & Loch Sunart, in a letter to the Duke of Argyll] “ I landed Lieut. Lindsay ... [&] Captain Campbell with twinty men from Mingary Castle, a lieutenant & fifty five men from my ship with orders to burn the houses and destroy the effects of all such as were out in the rebellion.” [Camerons, MacLeans, MacLeods] “They began with Drumnin M’Clean’s town and by six o’ clock at night they had destroy’d the Morvern coast as far as Ardtornish.” As well as 400 houses, several barns “well fill’d with corn, horse, cows and meal” [adds Captain Hay, another RN officer] were torched. The woodlands surrounding that entire part of the coast also went in flames – a scorched earth policy for sure – and in the ensuing two centuries, whatever else has been healed, the woodlands from Drimnin to Lochaline have never fully recovered.

The Doctor would not know the houses, holiday cottages here today (& I suspect he may have been as bemused as me by the welded steel stag on the big house lawn) but he would recognise the heavy hand of alleged landownership. The hills, the loch, the woods, remain unchanged.

In the scant oakwoods of Rahoy, Captain Campbell’s grave is marked by the planting of half a dozen small specimens of what looks to be an exotic species of pine, clustered round the bronze plaque and seat with fine views along Loch Teacuis & the hills.

My way home is lit by the white throat of a pine marten crossing the path.