THE HEIGHTS OF Strathnaver - A Memorial Complex
A journey among the deserted settlements in what is now the Naver Forest reveals a wide variety of memorial texts which are as telling about the changing attitudes towards such sites as they are about the events they have come to recollect as unintentional monuments. Though their names, the outlines of their buildings and their various enclosures and dykes are marked on Ordnance Survey maps, the sites of Grummore, Grumbeg and Achadh an Eas, for example, which feature prominently in the Sutherland Clearance story, are not signposted on the road. They must be sought out intentionally. And yet perhaps because they are not explicitly signposted, and because they are simply there and not encumbered with interpretive plaques or memorial cairns, they seem to have a much greater presence.
Casey suggests that places “gather” both animate and inanimate entities: “experiences and histories, even languages and thoughts” (1996: 24). Having pored over maps and consumed every account of the events one can find, the researcher’s encounter with these most poignant ‘places of memory’ can be quite profound. They are fragments of narratives that are gathered in these places, forgotten details brought to mind as one wanders through the landscape. Because they are not interpreted such places are “open emblems” (Gass 1982: 138), spacious enough to accommodate our own thoughts as well as the images projected on them from histories and oral tradition.
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There our ancestral ghosts are gathered |
We might construct an idea of place from the sparse, dispassionate entries in the archaeological record, but, as visitors to a site rather than archaeologists, we would do as well to leave our notes behind when we go there or else they threaten to distract us from the experience of place. Of Grumbeg I had read in the Highland Council’s archaeological site reports the following:
GENERIC TYPE: Depopulation + kilns
TEXT: The extensive remains of Grumbeg, a depopulated clachan which was cleared, first in 1814 and finally in 1819. In 1873 only a shepherd’s house was occupied. Roy [Military Map of 1747] shows only a patch of arable with no distinguishing buildings, but the existence of an ancient graveyard (HNC 63 NW 008) indicates an early origin for the settlement. The remains all enclosed within an earth and stone bank, consist of building foundations, banks and enclosures. The buildings range from about 40m by 4m to 5m by 3m with walls up to 0.7m high. Kilns were identified at NC 63312843 and in a small building foundation at NC 63543853.
SITE NAME: Grumbeg
GENERIC TYPE: Graveyard + Cross-slab + Cup-marks, boulder
TEXT: An ancient burial ground of the Aberach Mackays, no longer in use. Situated on a rock knoll and divided into two sections; the rectangular part to the South (according to Mr. Maclennan, Shepherd, Grumbeg, Strathnaver) is a private burial ground of the Mackays although it strongly resembles a ruined chapel or meeting house. Both parts of the burial ground are littered with slab-covered graves…
SITE NAME: St Martin’s Well
GENERIC TYPE: Well, holy (alleged)
TEXT: St Martin is commemorated in Tobair Martain (Tobair Claish Mhartain) NEAR Grumbeg burial place, Farr. The shepherd at Grumbeg had no knowledge of St. Martin’s Well. The well shown of the 6” map at NC 63323855 was not located.
SITE NAME: Grumbeg
GENERIC TYPE: Burial cairn, chambered
TEXT: Described by RCAHM as a ‘small circle surrounded by a stony bank measuring about 3ft 6ins across’. The interior space now oval, measures 7 x 9ft, the long axis being N-S. There was a space for an entrance on the S side. In Horsburgh’s MS [1870] is a sketch showing a thin capstone supported on at least 4 boulders with rounded, slightly tapering tops, about 2ft 6ins high. There are a number of smaller stones lying around their bases. The site could not be located when visited in 1958.
(Highland Council site codes: HNC 63 NW 007-010)
With a few exceptions, it is only recently that archaeologists have begun to recognise the importance of Clearance remains and the range of values attached to them by different people.
In 1991 Historic Scotland organised a seminar to discuss management and conservation issues pertaining to MOLRS landscapes, landscapes which include not only the abandoned houses, but often also the “extensive arable field systems, grazing grounds, shielings and associated tracks, mills, roads and churches” of rural populations (Hingley 1993: iii). Historian Malcolm Bangor-Jones recognised the need to select sites for protection not merely on their intrinsic archaeological merit, but on account of their “heritage value” to Highlanders both within the locality and those dispersed throughout the world (1993: 40). Bangor-Jones identifies Badinloskin, the scene of Sellar’s infamous “Damn the old witch, let her burn…”, as one such site worthy of especial attention (ibid.).
The significance of this recognition by official conservation bodies of the role of such symbolic ‘homelands’ should not be understated.
Fairhurst’s excavation and subsequent report of Rosal, Strathnaver (1969) is widely regarded as one of the ground-breaking works of the ‘landscape archaeology’ genre, combining “geography (historical as well as physical),” with “archaeological fieldwork, documentary research and…even folk studies” (Morrison pers. comm.). Fairhurst was particularly keen to investigate the popular assertions made of the Clearances in histories and folk tradition: the alleged violence of the evictions and the claimed continuity of settlement in these ‘ancestral lands’.
Rosal, birthplace of Donald Macleod, first appears in the documentary record in 1269, its name is of Norse origin (Fairhurst 1969: 140). Whilst there is much evidence of prehistoric activity—the site boasts a Bronze Age burial cairn (alleged), an Iron Age ‘souterrain’ and a number of hut circle clusters—Fairhurst emphasises that this does not prove continuous occupation (ibid.). Neither could Fairhurst find any evidence of a violent end to any of the buildings he excavated, no indication of any burnings, and he could only conclude that “the tenants moved out with all their possessions in an orderly fashion” (143).
Aside from its ‘scientific’ remit as an archaeological report, Fairhurst’s article is an evocative ‘place of memory’ in itself, juxtaposing accounts of the village’s demise with the summary of his excavation, with archaeological plans and section diagrams, reproductions of estate maps and photographs of the bared walls of the site. Perhaps most poignant of all is the meagre list of small finds made in the course of excavation which attests to the poverty in which the occupants lived. Fairhurst has been criticised for making “sweeping statements” about the nature of the Clearances—particularly the question of the burnings—based on very little information (Pat Rudie pers. comm.). This has less to do with Fairhurst than the paucity of alternative archaeological data (see Atkinson 1995 for recommendations for a research agenda). Because, until very recently, there have been so few excavations of Clearance sites, Fairhurst’s findings have taken on a disproportionate significance and have sometimes been quoted as representing the archaeological view of the Clearances as a whole.
Indeed considering that Fairhurst only fully excavated one long-house and its associated out-buildings (Corcoran excavated the souterrain at the same time), the excavation itself has become somewhat ‘mythologised’. Rosal is perhaps the most frequently discussed Clearance township, and one is often given the impression that the whole site went under the archaeologist’s trowel. After Fairhurst’s survey, the Forestry Commission preserved the site as an “island of archaeology” in the Naver forest and have subsequently laid out a heritage trail.
The following are excerpts from various texts each describing Rosal. It is interesting to note the contrasts between the accounts and the authorial ‘licence’ the writers have employed in shaping their descriptions according to their differing objectives.
Donald Macleod the stonemason has no memorial except a place in the hearts of every one of his countrymen in all parts of the world. His birthplace and all its surrounding townships have been eradicated as completely as if Timur the Terrible had passed that way in anger, and it is not easy to locate the spot hallowed by so much gratitude and esteem.
The modern road that passes down the unpopulated valley of the Naver divides at the lodge at Syre. One branch of it travels through empty wastes to the almost uninhabited valley of Kildonan, the other continues beside the Naver river to its loch. No human landmark any longer recalls the vanished village of Rossal whose ruins were still visible to Sellar as he travelled that way on his journeys south (Grimble 1993 [1962]: 58).
In the slanting afternoon sunshine which has followed the earlier shower of snow, I inspect the remnants of Rossal, just one among many ‘touns’ to which Angus Mackay directed that royal commission [i.e. the Napier Commission] more than a hundred years ago. The foundations of several homes, together with the outlines of their immediately adjacent byres or cowsheds, can still be clearly seen; and I recall how an archaeologist who excavated the Rossal ruins in the 1960’s told me how, when digging in one of those byres, he could smell cow-dung which had somehow been preserved there, far below the turf, since the morning when Patrick Sellar’s man had removed the building’s roof (Hunter quoted by Mackay 1993: 43).
Before we left Strath Naver we walked through a mile of post-War forest and came out in a clearing which frames in its wide green oval the whole ambience of a township before eviction. This is Rossal, the home of Donald Macleod. The force of the man’s testimony exerted itself 140 years after his native place was destroyed: the Forestry Commission left the townland unplanted and commissioned its excavation in 1962. Now you can walk about through one of the largest townships in the strath (50 acres, thirteen families) and read labels rich in information beside the low stone outlines of long-houses, kailyards and stackyards, corn-drying kilns—all the working parts of a way of life. Looking across the shallow swell of grassland it is not hard to imagine it patched with the motley green of oats, potatoes, and cabbages, the pale sun-glow of hayfields newly cleared, the figure of a neighbour in dark clothes standing at a house end and looking west across the river to the sculpted summit of Ben Loyal, wondering if there is rain on the way. It is excellent that the Commission have seen to it that, for once, the absolutely ordinary fabric of the past is on display in its own right, no art, no monuments, no retail outlet, no custodian—it is a thin substitute for the return of human activity to a habitable place—what would you feel if you came back as a revenant to your own village or suburb after a hundred and eighty years and found it turned into an empty green socket in a sombre forest as though razed by a single bomb? (Craig 1990: 151).
Rosal, in Sutherland should have been a good place to study the dynamics of location and the interaction between a village and its environment. After Horace Fairhurst’s excavations on the site, the Forestry Commission chose to leave the village unplanted, thus creating an island of archaeology, entombed by woodland. The Commission also opened Rosal for public display. This display allows free access to all parts of the village, although a set of routes is indicated by a series of walkways and display panels. Unfortunately, the information panels discourage observation, misinform the reader (particularly in calling six metre wide ridge-and-furrow, ‘lazy beds’) and concentrate in at least three of the panels on stories of bleeding animals to mix the blood with oatmeal so that people could eat in times of hunger (perhaps this is the assumed level of intelligence of the visitor, namely, ‘if it is at all possible, mention something gory’). The panels make little effort to explain or display the excavation findings and generally impose all the common wisdom of the Highland Clearances on this one village. Little specific information about the site is given and the information panels tell a story which cannot be contradicted (Mackay 1993: 48).
| Why is Rosal important? | |
| Forest Enterprise monitor the number of visitors to the site |
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an assertion of continuity: the Iron Age souterrain |
| Interpretation of the excavated long-house cluster |
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Forest Enterprise, the agency responsible for managing Forestry Commission property, is at present evaluating a revised interpretive strategy for Rosal. The current proposal, prepared by an independent heritage management consultancy, includes plaques and solar-powered sound stores to dramatise “the story of Rosal” from the point of view of two villagers, a male and a female tenant (an attempt to introduce a feminine voice into the Clearance story, the history is notoriously masculine). Responding to Forest Enterprise’s brief, treatment of the Clearances is decidedly understated and seems to avoid contention. The consultants recommend the following ‘key topics’:
- Why is Rosal important? - key points of Rosal’s history and Forest Enterprise ownership;
- Who lived at Rosal? - the nature of the community;
- What were homes like at Rosal? - domestic and other buildings;
- How long had people lived at Rosal? - the souterrain, continuity of settlement;
- How did they grow food at Rosal? - food production and self-sufficiency;
- What animals did they keep at Rosal? - cattle, goats, sheep, ponies, poultry;
- How big was Rosal township? - population, groups of buildings, boundary;
- How did they keep warm at Rosal? - fuel, principally peat, also clothing;
- What did they eat in winter at Rosal? - food preparation and storage;
- How did they spend the dark hours at Rosal? - entertainment, crafts, customs;
- What happened to Rosal? - the clearance to the coast;
- Why remember Rosal? - the aftermath and the present situation.
(Touchstone Heritage Management Consultants 1997: 4)
While the most impassioned comment on the Clearance of Rosal is left to the words of Macleod on a final panel—“…the devastators proceeded with the greatest celerity, demolishing all before them”…“the cries of the victims, the confusion, the despair…”—a more resigned attitude is ‘voiced’ by the fictional female character, Seònaid/Janet, on the penultimate plaque:
FUAIM AN DEASAICHAN
If you listen carefully, you can still hear the children laughing.
They have heard little of the torching of the houses up the srath.
They know little about the caora mòr, the great sheep that are
marching northward. They cannot know what life on the harsh
taobh mara, the sea shore, will be like. They do not fear a
future they cannot see.
But I fear the men with their harsh voices and rude ways. They are
not of us. They care nothing for the Gàidhealtachd, our ways, our
people, our language and ar beathan, our lives.
Let the children laugh and let them keep our little sheep out of the
eòrna, the barley. Let them lie awake in the long light of sàmhradh,
summer, and let them enjoy the last days of Rosal, for I know we
shall have to leave before another summer is past.
(Touchstone Heritage Management Consultants 1997: 16)
Regardless of its content, such unashamedly ‘dramatic’ storytelling in the Clearance landscape tends to dominate a site and drive out more personal, less predetermined senses of place. When I visited Rosal, I found it impossible to resist following the route of the (existing) trail. Whereas at other sites my orientation had been to the shapes of the hills on the horizon, or to a loch or river, at Rosal I felt disorientated when I lost sight of the marker posts and interpretive cairns: should I go this way or that way to the next ‘feature’? Neither did I have a particular inclination to read the texts on the plaques, I felt an affinity with Shanks discussing how he collected but never read the guidebooks to castles he visited as a child.
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Mackay argues for the non-interpretation of sites, believing people should be able to experience the landscape “at first hand through direct contact” rather than mediated by what someone else has written. “At the basic level of presentation,” he suggests, “we need do no more than tell people that there are things in that area and encourage them to look for and find more of the same (or different)” (1993: 48).
In the case of Rosal, however, I believe interpretation is justified by virtue of that fact that it is one site in a complex of memorial texts. Fairhurst was careful to note that Rosal was not an isolated, self-sufficient community, but shared moorland grazing and even shielings with neighbouring townships. One such township was that of Truderscaig. Like Rosal, Truderscaig was saved from tree planting and is now another island of grass and ruins in the Naver Forest. It is the destination of a 13 mile Forestry Commission cycle path. Fairhurst describes Truderscaig as lying “far out in a lonely part of the moor,” seemingly “untouched since it was evacuated in 1814” (1969: 160-62): this sense of remoteness has now largely been lost. In contrast with Rosal however, Truderscaig has consciously been left uninterpreted.
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sa bhaile seo chan eileas a' siubhal ach an aor uair 's na clachan a rinn ballaichean a' dol 'nan cairn in this village people only travel once and the stones that made walls become cairns |
Most would agree that the Forestry Commission should be applauded for rescuing settlements such as Rosal and Truderscaig from the plough. Ceann-na-coille, on the opposite bank of the Naver, is an example of a township that was not saved from afforestation. It provides a sobering reminder of what might have happened to Rosal and Truderscaig. Today one has to fight one’s way through the branches of the densely planted conifers to even glimpse the moss-covered, tumble down stones that were once walls. Cleared in 1814, Ceann-na-coille is arguably no less significant than Rosal and was the location of an earlier chapel, or ‘meeting house’, than that at Achadh an Eas. The Ordnance Survey site report of 1978 states the following:
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Ceann-na-coille |
Interpreted and uninterpreted, lost in a forest or promoted as a tourist attraction, occasionally simply forgotten, there is something to be celebrated in the variety of these settlement remains. Rosal, Truderscaig, Achadh an Eas, Ceann-na-coille, Grummore and Grumbeg, the complex of cleared settlements that make up the landscape of Upper Strathnaver, illustrates on a massive scale Young’s assertion that, by bringing their different formal qualities to bear on the memory of the Clearances, each memorial text “generates a different meaning in memory” (1993: xii). There is perhaps a lesson to be learnt here. That one needs both interpreted—‘closed’—sites of memory and uninterpreted—‘open’—sites of memory where one may still seek out and find a more intimate sense of place. The paradox is that in ‘opening up’ a site to a wider public, one ‘closes’ it to alternative interpretation. In popularising the less well-known places—as the Highland Council recommend for Grummore and Grumbeg in their proposed “Gloomy Memories” trail—one also reduces them in some way. For sites which, as places of “encounter, memory, access and vision” (Bender et al n.d.: 2), may be regarded as sacred, the intrusion of interpretive plaques, signposts and car parks may justifiably be considered a desecration.
I have suggested that unintentional monuments, such as those represented by the cleared settlements of Strathnaver, may also become intentional monuments. Riegl suggests that these monuments are defined by their purposeful design: the commemorative meaning assigned to them by their makers is still active. Whilst no monument is singular in meaning—Riegl’s classifications we have dubbed ‘ideal types’—they may feel to be so. This is because a dominant, or normative, definition exists. Koonz describes how this ‘fixity of meaning’ attaches to the sites of the Nazi concentration camps in Germany and Poland: “memory feels monolithic, unambiguous, and terrible” (1994: 259). By interpreting a site—by narrating a landscape—we return to the vivid simplicities discussed in the last section. In this way a site becomes ‘closed’ or ‘monolithic’, its meaning being defined by those who in effect ‘re-make’ it. An “open emblem” may be thus appropriated and used to tell a particular story as if it was the only story.
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