Folklore of the Scottish Highlands (9 page)

Again, he tells of a man at Knockow in the parish of St Mary’s in Skye who was in good health and was quietly sitting in company with his fellow-servants one night, when he was suddenly taken ill, and fell backwards from his seat and began to vomit. Such a thing had never happened to him before and his family were very alarmed. When he recovered from his fit he felt all right. One member of the family had the Sight and told the others that the cause of the man’s sudden and severe attack was a very remarkable one. He named an evil woman who lived in the adjacent village of Bornaskittag, whom he had seen approaching the afflicted person in a violent rage; she threatened him with her hands and her head until she caused him to fall over backwards, unconscious. The reason was, the woman in question was in love with her victim and felt she had been slighted in her affections. Once again Martin states he had this information from first-hand sources. Another person living at St Mary’s told the minister, a Mr MacPherson, and others that he had seen a vision of a corpse coming towards the church, not by the common road but by a rough way which seemed so unlikely that his neighbours thought he was mad. He told them to wait and see; one of his neighbours eventually died and his body was carried over the ground as the man had witnessed because the road was completely blocked by snow. The minister himself told this to Martin. Another Skye man, Daniel Dow (
dubh
‘black’) from Bornaskittag was frequently bothered by the appearance of a man who threatened to strike him. He did not recognise the man, but he could describe him in detail. About a year after this he had to go to Kyle-Rae some 30 miles south-east of his home. As soon as he got there he saw the man who had threatened to strike him. Within a few hours a quarrel developed, blows commenced, and one of the men was wounded in the head. The seer’s master recounted this to Martin on his painstaking efforts to find out the truth about the Second Sight in the west.

Another story tells how some people from the Island of Harris were sailing round the Island of Skye, with the intention of reaching the mainland, when they were astonished to see the apparition of two men hanging down by the ropes that secured the mast. They could not understand what this portended. They continued on their journey, but the wind turned against them and they were forced into Broadford, in the south of Skye. There they found Sir Donald MacDonald holding court, and the death sentence being pronounced on two men. The ropes and the mast of that same vessel were then used to hang the criminals. Once again, this remarkable story was given to Martin at first-hand. Several people belonging to a certain family told Martin that they had frequently seen two men standing at a young gentlewoman’s left hand — the girl was in fact the daughter of their master. They could name the men. Sometime later, they could see a third man standing by her, and this one from then on always stood closest to the girl. The seers did not know the man but they could describe him in detail. Some months later, this man did come to the house and his appearance exactly fitted the description of him given by the servants. And shortly afterwards, he married the young woman.

Seers and augurers were then widely believed in in the Highlands, and even today there and in the Western Isles one can hear tales of people with the Sight, foretelling future events, not always of a gloomy nature, and collect stories of fated boats and doomed fishermen and sailors. Alexander Carmichael, the renowned collector of such traditions in the nineteenth century, recorded a very fine divination. An augurer was known as
frithir
, and the divination was called in Gaelic
frith
‘augury’. This enabled the augurer to look into the unseen. The divination was made in order to know where an absent person or lost beast was at any given time, and in what condition. The divination could not be made at any time; it must be performed on the first Monday of the quarter, just before sunrise. The augurer had to fast, and the augury was carried out in the following manner. The seer must go, bare-footed, bare-headed, and with closed eyes, to the doorstep and place a hand on each jamb. He invoked God to show him the unknown. He then opened his eyes and gazed in front of him; he made his divination from the nature and the position of the objects that he then saw. Apart from the Brahan Seer, there were many famous augurers or seers in the Highlands and Islands. One Gaelic legend has it that when Christ was missing, Mary found out that he was in the temple by means of augury. For this reason the following augury was associated with the Virgin and known as
Frith Mhoire
, ‘Mary’s Augury’:

God over me

God before me, God behind me,

I on thy path, O God,

Thou, O God, in my steps.

The augury made of Mary to her Son

The offering made of Bride through her palm,

Sawest Thou it, King of life?

Said the King of life that He saw.

The augury made by Mary for her own offspring,

When he was for a space amissing,

Knowledge of truth, not knowledge of falsehood,

That I shall truly see all my quest.

Son of beauteous Mary, King of life,

Give Thou me eyes to see all my quest,

With grace that shall never fail, before me,

That shall never quench nor dim.

Seers, as well as those not gifted with this peculiar power, had a strong belief in auspicious and inauspicious days, just as did their forebears in the old Celtic world. Carmichael collected many examples of these.

J.G. Campbell, in his
Witchcraft and Second Sight in the Highlands
, says that belief in the Second Sight is inherently Celtic, and in it he would see a remnant of ancient Druidic practice, for the powerful Celtic priesthood was able to foretell events by various signs and omens. He himself does not doubt the veracity of the phenomenon, and makes the point that
Dà-Shealladh
does not really mean ‘Second Sight’, but ‘The Two Sights’. The capacity to see into the world of spirits is reserved specifically for those having this gift. Ghosts of the dead as well as fetches of the living are seen by such people. Most of the events seen refer to the future, even the distant future. The spectres are seen with as much clarity as living beings. He confirms that no one who had this power was envied and that those possessing it regarded it as a heavy burden. He records that it was believed possible to get rid of this dread power. In the island of Coll the people believed that a person afflicted with the Sight could destroy his gift and bind it away from himself (
nasg
) by giving alms (
deirc
) and then praying that it would depart. A seer in Arinagour, Coll, had two sons in the army. They were away on foreign service and he could see by means of his visions how they were faring. What was revealed to him caused him so much distress that he gave money to an old woman and prayed that his Second Sight may be taken away from him. Thereafter, he saw nothing more of his sons. He was very worried about them and so, having lost the gift himself, he went to Tiree to consult a celebrated
taisher
and took the man back to Coll with him. He stood him beside the fire, which at that time was in the middle of the floor of many Highland houses. The best seers always held that visions could be seen most clearly through fire. After a short time, the Tiree seer began to sweat, and the other man knew that this only occurred when the vision was a painful one; he begged the seer to tell him the truth about what he had ‘seen’ and to keep nothing back from him. The
taisher
said that both the boys had been killed — one by a bullet wound in the head, and the other by a bullet through the heart and neck. Only too soon afterwards the veracity of the seer’s vision was confirmed and the two boys were indeed reported as having been shot dead.

The fate of Mary, Queen of Scots had been ‘seen’ by many Highland seers, as King James notes in his
Demonology
. MacKenzie of Tarbat, later Earl of Cromartie, who was a renowned statesman in the reign of King Charles II, wrote an account of the faculty of Second Sight, and gave the following example of it. He was riding one day in a field where his tenants were manuring barley and a stranger approached the group and said there was no point in their being so busy about their crop, as he saw English soldiers’ horses tethered there already. This came true because the horses of Cromwell’s army in 1650 ate up that entire field of grain. Another early example of the Sight happened a few years after this, when the Duke of Argyll was playing at bowls with some fellow gentlemen at his castle at Inverary. One of them suddenly turned white and fainted when the Marquis bent down to pick up his bowl. When he came to he cried, ‘Bless me, what do I see? My lord with his head off and his shoulders all bloody.’ And this, of course, likewise came about.

Pennant, in his journey through Scotland in 1769, records much of interest concerning surviving customs and beliefs. He makes the following statement in explanation of this:

The country is perfectly Highland (this when he had reached Struan in Perthshire) . . . it still retains some of its ancient customs and superstitions; they decline daily, but lest their memory should be lost, I shall mention several that are still practised, or but very lately disused in the tract I had passed over. Such a record will have this advantage when the follies are quite extinct, in teaching the unshackled and enlightened mind the difference between the pure ceremonies of religion and the wild and agile flights of superstition.

He comments that the notion of the Second Sight still prevails in a few places. He also mentions divination by means of an object, in this instance the speal or blade-bone of a shoulder of mutton, well scraped. He records that when Lord Loudon was obliged to retreat before the Rebels to the Isle of Skye, a common soldier, on the very moment that the Battle of Culloden was decided, proclaimed the victory at that distance, pretending to have discovered the event by looking through such a bone. He also records, of the Sight:

I heard of one instance of Second Sight, or rather of foresight, which was well attested, and made much noise about the time the prediction was fulfilled. A little after the Battle of Preston Pans, the president, Duncan Forbes, being at his house of Culloden with a nobleman, from whom I had the relation, fell into discourse on the probable consequences of the action: after a long conversation, and after revolving all that might happen, Mr Forbes suddenly turned to a window said ‘All these things may fall out; but depend on it, all these disturbances will be terminated on this spot’.

Which, of course, came about when the final battle of the 1745 Rising was fought on Culloden Moor in 1746. Pennant records an interesting belief current in his time that the first person to have the ‘Sight’, according to tradition, was the much-loved St Columba for he foretold the victory at Nechtansmere of Aidan, King of the Scots, over the Picts and Saxons on the very instant that it came about. He also notes an interesting example of Second Sight told to him when he visited the island of Rum:

It is not wonderful that some superstitions should reign in these sequestered parts. Second Sight is firmly believed at this time. My informant said that Lauchlan Mac-Kerran of Cannay had told a gentleman that he could not rest for the noise he heard of the hammering of nails into his coffin: accordingly the gentleman died within fifteen days.

Of the same island he says:

Molly Mac-Leane (aged forty) has the power of foreseeing events through a well-scraped bone of mutton: some time ago she took up one and pronounced that five graves were soon to be opened, one for a grown person; the other four for children; one of which was to be for her own kin, and so it fell out. These pretenders to Second Sight, like the Pythian priestess, during their inspiration fall into trances, foam at the mouth, grow pale and feign to abstain from food for a month, so over-powered are they by the visions imparted to them during their paroxysms. I must not omit a most convenient species of Second Sight, possessed by a gentleman of a neighbouring isle, who foresees all visitors, so has time to prepare accordingly: but enough of these tales, founded on impudence and nurtured by folly.

Collecting examples of custom and belief is one of the most delicate and difficult aspects of fieldwork possible. Highlanders are willing to sing the old songs, recount the ancient proverbs, chant archaic ballads and tell long hero tales. But the question of actual belief is a very personal one, and although an informant may be prepared to say what happened in the Godless past, he will often be unwilling, either for reasons of religion, or for fear of ridicule, or fear that to speak of a thing may bring it about, to admit that the old and powerful superstitions have any remaining meaning for him or his neighbours. Such things tend not to be talked about when strangers are present, and it is remarkable that travellers through the Highlands were able to record deep-rooted beliefs such as the Sight, the Evil Eye, witchcraft and fairy lore at all. Often, of course, their informants were members of the Protestant clergy who frowned on such practices with their deeply pagan undertones, and spoke of them to strangers with scepticism and disapproval.

In Martin Martin’s day Skye was widely famed for its seers; yet later in the same century Pennant was able to write: ‘Very few superstitions exist here at present: pretenders to second-sight are quite out of repute except among the most ignorant and at present are very shy of making boast of their faculties’. And yet the present writer found the island to be full of first-rate examples of custom and belief of every kind, and had direct experience there of people gifted with the unhappy faculty of ‘seeing’. Pennant does, however, record a fascinating instance of divination which clearly caused him much amazement. He states:

A wild species of magic was practised in the district of Trotternish, that was attended with a horrible solemnity: a family who pretended to oracular knowledge practised these ceremonies. In this country is a vast cateract whose waters, falling from a high rock, jet so far as to form a dry hollow beneath, between them and the precipice. One of these imposters was sewed up in the hide of an ox, and, to add terror to the ceremony, was placed in this concavity; the trembling enquirer was brought to the place, where the shade, and the roaring of the waters, increased the dread of the occasion. The question is put, and the person in the hide delivers his answer. And so ends this species of divination styled
Taghairm
.