One biased section almost spoils this otherwise excellent book

Scotland’s Last Frontier: A Journey Along the Highland Line, by Alistair Moffat, jumps around a bit, both geographically and chronologically, but doesn’t suffer as a result, and I enjoyed most of the book and learned a lot from it, mostly about ancient, medieval and local history concerning various parts of Scotland but especially those areas around the ‘highland line’ with which this work is concerned.  I have been to presentations by Moffat in the past, and appreciated his expertise and speaking skills.  I have no idea, therefore, why he practically spoils what is otherwise a good and informative read by including a ridiculously biased section.

The section I object to is about the Highland Clearances.  Prior to misrepresenting the Highland Clearance process, Moffat writes about the bitter harvests and famine in Aberdeenshire in the 1690s which resulted from temporary climate changes.  He writes about the Monymusk Estate, near Inverurie, and the improvements made by the Grants, the landowners in the early 18th century.  Moffat describes the tumbledown houses of the locals, the open grounds divided into small parcels, the inefficient methods of cultivation, the ditches with weeds and stones in them, all of which were essentially an example of the medieval landscape of much of Scotland at that time.  Grant planted trees, millions of them, and he drained the land and cleared stones, making ditches around new fields.  He introduced new crops and new rotations, and better fields which allowed more milking cows to be kept alive during winter which in turn improved the health of the locals.  In addition, the invention of the swing plough virtually revolutionised agriculture by enabling deeper furrows (better drainage) with a requirement for fewer draught animals and labour.  Many areas east of the highland line turned to more efficient cereal production.  Moffat recognises that these agricultural changes often came with a human cost, but he sees them as improvements which transformed society for the better and helped new industries, such as textiles, to thrive.  During this same period, the early 18th century, in the Highlands there were fewer agricultural changes, due to the different geography of that region, though one benefit of the Act of Union in 1707 was to open up new markets for highland cattle.  He writes, “Highland chiefs and landowners were generally paid rents in kind rather than cash and cattle was the main currency.  Landowners also acted as agents for tenant farmers who had surplus to sell or they bought from them directly.  Many crofter-farmers had to sell their beasts on before the winter in any case since they did not have easy access to the new sources of fodder being grown in the Lowlands.  And cattle supplied their own transport.  They walked to market.”

So far, so good.  Moffat has accurately described the process of land improvement, enclosure, and agricultural and industrial transformations in the Lowlands which resulted in economic and health benefits for those concerned, and mentioned that in the Highlands developments had been much more piecemeal with a continuing subsistence-based economy supplemented by the sale of highland cattle (a trade which suffered after the end of the Napoleonic Wars).  Then he turns to the Highland Clearances (Fuadach nan Gaidheal) and rather loses the plot.  He writes “Increasingly absent and anglicised clan chiefs came to value their estates not for the number (and loyalty) of the people they could support but for how much of an income they could produce.”  In truth, the highland chiefs had become no more ‘anglicised’ than any of the numerous landowners elsewhere and in the Lowlands, (many of whom were also absent) who had improved their land, so why suddenly use that term, and in an inferred derogatory sense?  The Highland landowners had the same aspirations as their Lowland counterparts.  The poorer highlanders were also no different from their Lowland equivalents (apart from the language they spoke, as the Gaelic language had become much less common outside the Highlands).  Many of the Highland landowners also tried to improve their land, a little later than had happened in the Lowlands, but the desire to improve was no different.  The differences, however, and these are very important, were that their land was generally less fertile, the pressures on land from population growth by this time were more acute, and, unlike in the Lowlands, the new industries often failed (for numerous reasons).  Moffat doesn’t seem to grasp much of this, but instead falls into a fairly common trap of calling Highland landlords ‘brutal’, ‘ignorant’ and having ‘careless contempt’ for their tenants.  As I have written previously, this is an example of perpetuating some myths of the Highland Clearances.  Sir Tom Devine has written much more accurately on the matter.  Moffat even heaps praise on the ‘historian’ John Prebble.  As I have pointed out in other posts on this blog, Prebble never let actual facts get in the way of his yarns.  Prebble’s inaccurate interpretations have unfortunately had much influence on popular, especially nationalistic, perspectives of Highland history.

In the remaining chapters of Scotland’s Last Frontier, normal service is resumed.  There’s a very interesting description of the archaeological digs that revealed the enormous Roman fort at Inchtuthil, built after the Roman victory at the Battle of Mons Graupius (AD83) and abandoned five years later.  There is also an amusing account of the bungling, ham-fisted removal/theft/liberation of the Stone of Destiny from Westminster Abbey by Ian Hamilton in 1950; another story about a fight to the death between 30 men from Clan Cameron and 30 men from Clan Chattan in 1396; and an account of James Macpherson and the ‘lost’ poems of Ossian.

If only Moffat hadn’t been so biased in his interpretation of the Highland Clearances, this would have been a better book.

The Tall Thin One’s burglar alarm

My friend the Tall Thin One (TTO) had barely been on holiday for two days when Lindsey, who was in Crieff at the time, received an automated call from his security company – “The alarm at xx Royal Crescent needs attention.  If you are able to attend to this, please press 1.  If you are unable to attend, please press 2 and we will proceed to the next contact on the list.”  As Lindsey was in Crieff, she pressed 2, but then phoned me here in Edinburgh to tell me about it.

I was going into town anyway, so I dropped by Royal Crescent to see if everything looked OK at TTO’s pad.  I couldn’t see anything untoward from the front, but knew not how to inspect the place from the rear, as it’s a terraced townhouse.  Then I noticed a neighbour coming out of next door’s front door, so I asked him if he’d heard an alarm going off that morning.  He said he hadn’t, so I explained that I was a friend of TTO and was trying to check things were OK.  The neighbour was about forty, dressed in tweeds and looked wealthy.  You don’t get to own a grand town house apartment in Edinburgh New Town without being wealthy, and you don’t get to be wealthy at forty without being decisive, and the neighbour gave an example of this decisiveness by, after giving me a once-over and deciding that I was legit, taking me round the block to an alleyway which gave access to the back of the town houses.  He showed his decisiveness for a second time by quickly clambering up the six-foot-high wall to get a better view into TTO’s back garden, and said he couldn’t see anything untoward.

Then he told me that he could see from his perch that TTO’s back gate was not locked from the inside, so I opened it and inspected at closer range TTO’s back door and windows.  Nothing was untoward.

All this kerfuffle had obviously alerted TTO’s neighbour in the apartment above.  The window was raised, and a rather dignified older chap stuck his head out and asked us, in a typical plummy Edinburgh accent, if he could be of assistance.  I explained who I was and what I was doing.  It turned out that the neighbour was called Harry, and that the business with the alarm had all been Harry’s fault.

Harry had needed access to TTO’s back garden to let in some workmen to erect scaffolding to his second floor apartment, early that morning.  The TTO had left Harry his front door key and Harry knew the security code for the burglar alarm, but in his rush to attend to the workmen Harry had left his spectacles behind when he opened TTO’s door and could not see which buttons to press to deactivate the alarm, which had then gone off.

Not only that, but TTO’s phone had then rung (almost certainly from the security company to check if everything was OK) but Harry, without his specs, could not find the phone.  He’d picked up the TV remote instead and pressed the green button, which then meant that TTO’s alarm, phone and TV were all going at the same time, early in the morning.  Harry explained to me, as he hung out of his window, that he’d eventually got everything under control, and that peace had resumed at xx Royal Crescent.

The other neighbour, the decisive one, decisively announced that as the situation had been explained to his satisfaction, he would return promptly to his general business, and strode off, decisively, leaving me to chat for a couple of minutes with Blind Harry.

Looking up at Harry poking his head out the second-floor window, with his distinguished look and his plummy Edinburgh literati New Town accent, made me giggle when I thought about wifies of the past having a hing’ oot their tenement windae for a natter.  How things have changed.