Haunted Scotland (20 page)

The dog gazed up at her in a friendly manner and rubbed his head against her leg before disappearing behind the croft. Moments later, the stranger arrived.

‘Are you looking for your dog? He went in that direction,’ said Naomi, gesturing towards the rear of the building.

‘So you’re back,’ said the man. Once again she was struck by the sky-blue of his eyes. ‘My name’s Calum MacLeod,’ he added.

‘Naomi Lockhart,’ she responded with a broad smile. He was rather handsome, she confirmed to herself.

‘I see you’ve been fixing up the old croft,’ Calum observed approvingly.

‘Yes, it’s quite a challenge, but we love it. Do you live nearby?’

‘Over there.’ He pointed vaguely to the southwest.

‘Beside the Sleeping Beauty?’ she found herself asking and, for some inexplicable reason, felt the colour rush to her cheeks.

‘That’ll be right,’ he said, not letting on if he had noticed.‘Remember the morrow’s the solstice.’

‘I’d completely forgotten,’ she lied. She was not entirely sure what the solstice was, or why it was significant.

Calum nodded, raised his hand in a cheerful salute and set off.

Naomi watched him as he did so, his long athletic legs striding purposefully over the uneven turf. ‘Don’t forget your dog,’ she called after him.

When Ewan returned, she told him they had had their very first visitor. ‘I hope he doesn’t become a nuisance,’ he said dismissively.

‘That’s not very friendly. He was only being neighbourly. He came to tell me it’s the solstice tomorrow.’

‘What a chancer,’ chided her husband. ‘All that lunar nonsense. He must fancy you.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Naomi retorted, her face reddening. ‘If I didn’t know you better, I’d think you were jealous!’

Ewan laughed and snapped open a can of lager.

The next day dawned fine and clear, and Ewan, having made contact with the landowner, passed an idyllic day with his fishing rod on a nearby lochan. In the late afternoon he returned to the
croft having landed a dozen medium-sized silver trout by mid-afternoon. That evening, regardless of midges, they sat outside and shared a bottle of Chablis.

‘Are you coming with me to the standing stones tonight?’ asked Naomi.

‘You must be joking,’ snorted Ewan, pulling a face. ‘If you’re going to go in for all that New Age nonsense, you’re on your own, girl.’

How infuriating it is when a good mood is deliberately spoiled, reflected Naomi as the indignation swelled up inside her. ‘All right then, I’ll go on my own,’ she snapped and
stormed indoors to change her clothes. Ewan remained indifferent.

It was after ten o’clock and still light outside. Stuff Ewan, she thought to herself. He had been off on his own all day having a rare old time while she had been left behind to clean up
the mess he had made in the kichen. Tonight, she was going to do something she wanted to do for herself. Nothing and no one was
going to stop her. She loved Ewan, but there
were times – and this was one of them – when she wondered why she had married him.

Having made the decision to go to the standing stones on her own, Naomi grabbed a torch from beside the front door. ‘Don’t wait up for me,’ she called out as she departed.

Beneath her feet the ground was alternately rough and spongy, and she cursed her sandals for their ineffectual protection. There was still enough light for her to make out the recognisable
outlines of the landscape. As she approached Callanish, she turned round to admire the far-off silhouette of the Sleeping Beauty mountain range sketched inkily against a steely sky.

And then she fell over, her body succumbing to the soft springy undergrowth underneath her. She giggled, blaming it on the third glass of Chablis.

So far as Naomi Lockhart was concerned, what took place over the following six hours remains a complete blank in her memory. As she lay flat on her back against a soft bed of heather and peat,
peaceful and strangely unperturbed by her predicament, she heard heavy breathing and felt the wet sensation of a rough tongue licking her face.

It was the collie dog. His breath smelled unexpectedly sweet, and his presence was curiously comforting. Very gently, he lay down on the turf beside her with his head on her shoulder.

How long they remained there under the night stars she could later not recall, only that the dog kept her company as the new moon catapulted into the heavens. At long last, almost too soon, the
dawn broke and Naomi awoke to find herself alone.

Surprised by an overwhelming feeling of well-being, not to mention the realisation that her ankle no longer throbbed, Naomi returned to Tigh na Hag where she found Ewan snoring in their bed.

‘How did you get on with your summer soltice?’ he asked her as they packed up the van that afternoon.

‘Unforgettable,’ she announced, smiling to herself.

Ewan and Naomi Lockhart have returned to Tigh na Hag every summer since that first holiday. Sometimes, when Ewan’s work allows, they go in the autumn and early spring. Eight months to the
day of that first Summer Solstice at Callanish, Naomi gave birth to Mhairi, their first daughter, a strikingly beautiful child conspicuous for her jet-black hair and sky-blue eyes.

23

Harbingers of doom are intertwined with the culture of the Celt. Mock them at your peril. On the Isle of Arran, the birth of a white stag heralds the demise of a duke of
Hamilton; a ghostly galleon is seen on Loch Fyne before a duke of Argyll faces mortality; a decapitated horseman known as Ewen of the Little Head warns of impending death in the Clan MacEwen on
Mull; an orb of light hovers over Loch Linnhe when the death of a Stewart is imminent.

At Barnbougle Castle on the Dalmeny estate at South Queensferry, a mysterious hound is said to howl through the night as an earl of Rosebery approaches his end. A story then unfolds from the
twelfth century, when the castle’s owner was one Sir Roger de Moubray, who had gone to the Holy Land to fight in a crusade. His favourite dog was left behind to guard Barnbougle in his
absence and on the very night that its master was struck
down in a foreign land, the disconsolate beast was heard to bay inconsolably for hours on end.

Everybody knows the apocryphal tale of how a saltire of white cloud miraculously appeared in the sky before the Battle of Athelstaneford. Hardly anyone noticed when a similar
phenomenon occurred during the International Gathering of the Clans at Holyrood in 2009. An omen to do with Scottish independence? We shall have to wait and see.

Superstition is the oxygen of the supernatural. Talismans, lucks and crystals are its tools. In
Supernatural Scotland
I wrote about the Colstoun Pear, the Lee Penny and
the Faerie Flag of Dunvegan. But there are other contenders.

The Glenorchy Charmstone, a polished pyramid of rock crystal, was picked up on the Greek island of Rhodes during a battle with the Turks. Today, it sits safely in the National Museums of
Scotland, alongside the Clach na Bratach, an unmounted ball of rock associated with the Jacobite Clan Donnachaidh. When a flaw in the latter appeared in it the night before the Battle of
Sheriffmuir, the Jacobites lost.

Dipped in water, the healing properties of the Clach Dearg, or Red Stone, which belongs to the Stewarts of Ardvorlich, became so famous in the Victorian era that people came from all over the
world to seek cures for skin diseases and liver complaints. I am surprised that nobody has thought of bottling it.

Curses are efficacious because people genuinely want to believe in them, whether they admit to it or not. Thankfully, most of the ones we know about were set in motion a long
time ago, so there are few surprises when they come back to haunt us.

The MacAlisters of Kintyre descend from the mighty Somerled,
a fearsome warlord who led the Gaels to victory against Norway. The clan has occupied Loop and Glenbarr on the
Kintyre Peninsula for centuries, but at one time held Ardpatrick at the entrance to West Loch Tarbert. And it was here that the Curse of MacAlister came to its climax.

During a skirmish in the seventeenth century, MacAlister Mor took prisoner the two sons of a widow and, despite her entreaties, hanged them both from a gibbet in front of her door. As the
victims gasped their last, their heartbroken mother turned angrily upon MacAlister Mor and cried out, ‘The House of MacAlister Mor shall have no more sons.’ And so it came to pass.

For 100 years, only daughters were born to the Chiefly House of MacAlister. Then to the universal joy of the clan, a son was born at last.

The boy grew up and married, but when the Jacobites rebelled against the government in 1715, the Younger of MacAlister rode off to enlist with them at Perth. Months passed without a word from
him until late one night the household was awoken by the sound of a horse entering the courtyard. The horse was riderless and when it reached the front door, it fell down dead.

Overjoyed, the young Mrs MacAlister waited in her bedroom for her husband’s return, but when the door swung open there stood before her a headless man.

A brief and indecisive battle had taken place at Sheriffmuir. The young MacAlister had been captured, put on trial for treason and executed. With the stroke of an axe, the Chiefly line of
MacAlister Mor passed to a distant kinsman.

The hamlet of Glenuig in the West Lochaber parish of Morar is a popular destination for hill-walkers and sea kayakers. Close by is the 200-year-old crofting community of
Smirisary, where many of the dwellings have been renovated, and it was in one of these
that the sculptor Andrew Kinghorn found himself staying one summer.

Creative, but certainly not suggestible, Andrew had set off to explore the rocky foreshore, but on returning to the croft was gripped by the most terrifying feeling of pure evil.

When he discussed this with his friends who owned the croft, they remembered being told that the next-door croft had fallen into ruin when its occupant had failed to return from the market. He
had gone there to sell his beasts, and it was rumoured that he had been robbed and murdered. Allegedly, his killer also came from Smirisary, and the crofter had cursed him with his dying
breath.

Admirers of Sir Henry Raeburn’s iconic portrait of Colonel Alastair Ranaldson Macdonell of Glengarry in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh rarely
associate this handsome, plaid-clad figure with the remote and empty glens of Knoydart on the Sound of Sleat.

Macdonell inherited his estates aged nineteen and squandered his inheritance. By the time he met his death leaping from a canal steamer in 1828, he was virtually bankrupt. As a result, Aeneas,
his son, was obliged to sell the Glengarry estates, but he managed to retain Knoydart. Still unable to make ends meet, however, he emigrated to Australia in 1840; it was not a success, and after
two years had passed he returned to Knoydart. He died at Inverie in 1852. It was then that the situation really became fraught.

In 1853, Alastair, the colonel’s eldest grandson, inherited Knoydart under-age and, pressured by his mother Josephine, allowed the 17,500-acre estate to be sold to pay off family debts.
For the incumbent crofters, it was a catastrophe.

Many of them were substantially in arrears with their rent and, with the blessing of the British Government, the land was cleared
for sheep farming. In 1852, 400 crofting
tenants at Knoydart were evicted and, as compensation, offered passage to Canada and Australia. Few of them wanted to go, but, being landless and poverty-stricken, they had no option.

On 17 September 1853, the
Sillery
, bound for Nova Scotia, weighed anchor off the Isle of Oronsay. An eye-witness observed that, ‘The wail of the poor women and children as they were
torn away from their homes would have melted a heart of stone.’

Apparently not the heart of Josephine Macdonell, who had come with her factor to witness the evacuation. Those who refused to go quietly saw their homes set alight and levelled to the
ground.

In 1997, the Knoydart Foundation was established by Highland Council in partnership with the local community, the Chris Brasher Trust, the Kilchoan estate, and the John Muir Trust. A new pier
was installed in 2006, and self-catering tourism, appealing to those drawn by the isolation and intense beauty of the landscape, has developed into the principal source of local income.

Staying at Inverie, Andrea Forbes from Pollokshaws was conscious of an overwhelming sensation of sadness as she approached by motorboat. ‘I may just have been imagining it,’ she
said. ‘But it all started when we saw that amazing white statue of the Virgin Mary rising from the hillside overlooking the loch. It made me think that she must have been placed there to
symbolise atonement.’

As you sow, so shall you reap. The curses on the Chiefly House of Macdonell cannot be rejected lightly.

In 1855, Aeneas, Josephine’s second son, died in a drowning accident at the age of twenty. In 1857, Alastair, seventeenth Chief of Macdonell, sailed for New Zealand, where he died of
rheumatic fever at the early age of twenty-eight.

Having also emigrated to New Zealand, Josephine’s third son Charles became the eighteenth Chief in 1862. He died at sea six years later, aged thirty-two.

After this, the Macdonell Chiefship passed to a cousin. By then the headland and glens of Knoydart lay deserted, silent and haunted forever.

24

As the moon revolves around the earth and the earth circumnavigates the sun, the great clock of our short existence measures out our lives. Seasons and centuries come and go in
the pitiless marathon of time. There is nothing to hold onto but the past as we are swept along into the passage of eternity.