Unbelievably, in a few days it will be seven years since I first came to this coastal Highland village. My “old life” back in the States almost seems like it belonged to someone else; here, in a place where families go back for generations, it is a very strange thing to be brand-new. While I appeared here seemingly out of nowhere, this village and many of the people in it have been around for a very long time.
The village proper was created in the early 1800s during the Highland Clearances, about which I wrote previously. The idea was that crofters from the surrounding glens and hills would move here and learn to be fishermen, and toward that end fishing families were brought in from other places to teach them the ropes. Sounds pretty kind-hearted of the “powers that be” doesn’t it? Except those crofters who were “cleared” from their homes were perfectly happy where they were! I suspect that setting up this village and others like it made the old aristocracy a bit self-congratulatory about how they were looking after their people by providing them new places to live, even though the reality was that they were clearing them off the best land so that they could replace them with sheep. But that is not what this article is about. No, I’d like to tell you a little bit about the village itself.
Today, descendants from that Clearances era still live here, and some of the original fishing families still earn their wages out at sea. The older village buildings generally date from the 1800s though I’m sure there are some earlier buildings around the place. There was a castle here well before that, now long-demolished, known for being the site of the murder of an Earl in the mid-1500s when people liked to poison each other to further their own causes. My husband can remember the remains of the castle before it was bulldozed into the sea, but other than that sad loss, and new housing in the areas surrounding the village, the main streets are very much like they were at the beginning.
A lot has changed but much has remained the same, all between the sparkling sea and the shadow of hills which surround the village in an unchanging (or rather, infinitesimally-changing) embrace. To me, growing up in a place with very few “old” buildings around, this sense of history is fascinating. It is said that every house in the village has been a shop, and every shop has been a house. As so often happens, buildings are still referred to by what they used to be. “That’s where the bakery was,” someone will say, “with the old co-op at the front.” The deeds of many buildings reflect the time in which they were built. As an example, the deed to the home of a friend of mine firmly sets out the requirement that the building never be used as a brothel!
Many homes here have tiny lean-tos at the back which were originally added when people wanted separate kitchens – before that, all the cooking was done over the fire. Little glimpses of those kinds of changes often make me wonder about those first families’ daily lives. What was it like when that building was a stable for the horses which brought people to the village, when they stopped over on their way north for a stay in the old Temperance Hotel? How did things change when the railroad was built? And oh, how I would love to be able to go back in time and see this village in its heyday when the herring were abundant, those “silver darlings” which brought so much prosperity all along our coast and to this village especially. The hills, the harbor, the buildings, the sea… had they eyes, they would have seen much, over the years. There is, of course, the much more distant history of small settlements centuries ago, but even just the relatively short two hundred year history of my wee village has contained soaring highs and desperate lows, and I’d love to have a time machine to go back and see it all.
Though things are changing, the village is still relatively close-knit. Many villagers are related to each other in some way and I’ve heard it said, about the people, “if you cut one, they all bleed,” and I suppose it’s true. It’s like that in other Highland villages, too. They look out for their own. In a remote place, that kind of community-mindedness matters a great deal.
The outside world is definitely creeping in; I’ve seen that already even in my short time here. It’s not always a bad thing, that outside world… but in this little corner, at least, the echoes and whispers of history are never far, no matter where you look.
Deb Segelitz was born and raised in Pennsylvania, and is astounded to find herself living in the Scottish Highlands. Equally surprising to her is that she now has a small business restoring and selling old fountain pens. These two facts have convinced Deb that life is either beautifully random, or filled with destiny created by someone with a sense of humor. She hopes the fine north state residents will accept her as an honorary member, since she has some cousins in California who she visited once, but even more importantly because the north state folks she actually knows are fabulous people, who are also the reason for her presence here on anewscafe.com. An enthusiastic amateur photographer, Deb is grateful that she lives in a place that’s about as point-and-shoot as it gets. Her tortoiseshell cat, Smartie, rates her as an average minion, too slow with the door-opening but not too bad on the food-dish-refilling, and her husband hasn’t had her deported back to the States yet, so things must be going all right there, as well.
