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Luchd-Stubhail: or Gangrel Bodies

From Recollections and Reflections of an Octogenarian Highlander by Duncan Campbell. 1910. (From Glen Lyon)

THE PEOPLE WHO travelled about in these far off days were all news carriers, who helped to keep widely-apart Highland districts in living touch with one another. They could be roughly divided into two classes — traders and beggars. But drivers of cattle to Falkirk trysts and harvesters formed another class, and so also did the drovers and cattle dealers.

In our district John Macdonald from Badenoch, called the "Marsan Mor," or big merchant, was seventy years ago at the head of the traders. John travelled about with a cart of drapery goods from Inverness to Callander on the Lowland border. His twice a year visit was something like an event in every glen between the two places. He had been trained to the business, for his father, Alasdair Baideanach, had been long on the road before him. John might have prospered like others to the west of his district, who, starting in the same way, developed into Glasgow merchant princes, landowners, and the fathers of sons who took high positions in State and Church affairs. But John gave long credits, and finally failed to gather in the gear once within his reach.

At a long distance behind this honest, and too jolly and careless "Marsan Mor," came the evident and also honest Irish packman, Peter Bryceland, from Glasgow, and the worthy northern packman, Iain Friseil. The pedlars who came carrying boxes containing reels, cotton balls, scissors, needles, thimbles, watches, chains, and Birmingham jewellery were a less individually marked because a more variable class. Some of them came out as pedlars on commission for the benefit of their health, or from love of scenery and travelling, and they were sure of finding food and lodging without money and without price, except perhaps a trinket to a child or a thimble to the goodwife wherever they went.

I rather think our gypsies, although they had a sprinkling of Romany blood, and a knowledge of the Romany lingo, should properly be called tinkers, or travelling artisans. It seems to me that the tinkers had been a feature in the life of the Highlands long before any "Lord of Little Egypt" with his followers came to Scotland and imposed on James V. and his Parliament, and that afterwards gypsies and tinkers got to some extent intermingled in the Highlands, but to an infinitely less degree than they did on the Borders.

In my young days tinkers mended pots and pans, and made spoons out of the horns of rams and cattle. In the time of my grandfather, and even later, they still retained their old repute for being capable silversmiths to whom people brought silver and gold to be melted down and to be converted into brooches, rings, and clasps for girdles, or to decorate hilts of swords and daggers.

The "Ceard Ross," whose grandson Donald Ross, I knew in Balquhidder, was famous over a large district for the highly finished articles with old Celtic designs which he turned out, specimens of which were to be found in many households as long as the old social order lasted. The tinkers of my early days mended old ornaments but made few or no new ones. With the end of plaid, girdle, and buckled-shoe fashion among the Highlandmen and women came the end of the demand for the neatly finished and artistically designed ornaments the tinkers had been making for untold generations, and when the demand ceased the art was soon lost.

In 1800 there were four corn mills in Glenlyon where there is none now. The sheep regime extinguished the little one in the Braes soon after that date and when I was about ten, a spate from Ben Lawers destroyed the Roro one, which was not rebuilt, but St Eonan and Invervar mills were kept at work many years later on. Of the two, the oldest, named after St Adamnan or Eonan, and said to have been built by him in the seventh century, was the last to give up the ghost. It continued to grind on till 1880, or perhaps some years after that date. The successive disappearance of the mills shows how the sheep regime and large farms operated to restrict the arable cultivation of the former times.

This digression about the corn mills is not so irrelevant as it looks. The grain was dried for grinding in kilns on the farmsteads, and these kilns provided better lodgings for tinkers than tents, which few of them carried about with them. The kiln which my father and the neighbouring farmer had in common was a fairly spacious and well-thatched building in which thirty or forty old and young tinkers would lodge in what they called luxurious comfort. As it was situated near the middle of the Glen, and at the only bridge over the river, it suited them better than any other "ath" except that at Innerwick which ranked second in their estimation.

In childhood I looked on the coming of the tinkers as great and welcome event. They usually had a donkey or two with them, and I got liberty to ride these animals. Peter Ruadh was a good piper, and set people dancing. I liked to sit on the step leading down to the fire-place and watch them at their work, men roasting horns and shaping spoons out of them; women scraping and polishing the moulded and sliced spoons, the better sort of which were not without embellishment; other men making tin lanterns and cans, and old cunning hands mending pots, pans, or rings and brooches. When trade abounded, they were quite industrious. But when money for work came in, they were apt to indulge in a spree and be noisy. Still the quarrelling within a band seldom went beyond words. The serious fighting took place when one band trespassed on the province of another.    A ferocious fight took place on one occasion between our kiln band, who were old and usual visitors, and a band of newcomers in the Innerwick kiln, and I think we were all glad when the trespassers were well bruised and beaten off the ground.

The tinkers could well have saved some of the money they earned at their trade if prudence had ruled their lives, for their living cost them nothing. They lived on the country where-ever they settled for a time. Their old women and young children were persuasive and scientific beggars. Their honesty was curiously crooked and depended on locality. Our kiln band would not touch a hen roost or steal anything within a pretty wide limit of their dwelling-place. But beyond that limit, say two miles on either side, let people be on the watch against small tinker foraging.

Elijah was a lanky, delicate boy, who, both his parents being dead, became attached to our kiln's hereditary band, through his grandmother, a widow with her two sons in the army, who properly belonged to them. My grandmother had great pity for Elijah, who, besides being then physically a weakling, was supposed to be mentally wanting a penny or two in the shilling. Elijah was therefore invited to come up night after night to get a more substantial supper than he was likely to get in the kiln, where he was a sort of encumbrance, although not ill-treated, but, as my grandmother thought, was carelessly neglected.

He grew out of his early delicacy, and in time got a wife and family. He lived to a patriarchal age, with a very good name and character. In the latter part of his life he was a sort of high priest among his people. He married the young ones who entered into wedlock with religious solemnity, for he had learned to read the Bible and had a strong turn for religion. The register might be the legal glue in these unions, but they were not thought complete without Elijah's religious seal and blessing. "The craftsman of the kiln" — which is "ceard na h-atha," literally interpreted — was no respecter of the game laws, but, as he had no fire-arms, his poaching did not go beyond snaring hares and snaring or digging out rabbits. He was an expert angler both by day and night. He added the deft busking of hooks and making of horse-hair lines to his tinker industry. He fished sometimes for pearls in the Lyon, and to the indignation of our old bellman, who looked on that fishing as his own monopoly, seldom failed to get some. It was assumed that the kiln craftsman restricted himself to trout fishing, which was pretty free to all at the time of which I write, but I suspect that early in the season salmon fresh from the sea was consumed in the kiln when owners of streams and lochs could not get that luxury for love or money.

Whatever they might do elsewhere, the tinker women did not dare to spae fortunes in our district, because they feared church denunciations. As herbalists they had a knowledge which was frequently useful to sick persons and beasts. Their eolasan or charms, spells and incantations, had, if spoken at all, to be muttered in dark corners and under promise of secrecy. They were old heathen things to which Christian labels had been incongruously attached many centuries before the Reformation.

The tinkers that travelled back and forward, plying their vocations, called themselves by Highland clan surnames — Maclarens, Macarthurs, Macalpines, Camerons, Toiseach or Mackintoshes, Rosses, Mackays, Gunns, etc. If they were, as I think they mostly were, the descendants of native travelling guilds of artisans who, late in their history, became very slightly mixed up with the outlandish Romany gypsies, their right to clan surnames may, in many instances, have been genuine although the clans were unwilling to admit it. At any rate they went by the same surnames during successive generations. But those of them who called themselves by the royal name were too numerous for credibility in their Stuart descent. Perhaps it was in consequence of James the Sixth's legislation against " broken men that so many tinkers put themselves under the protection of the kingly surname.

The tinkers took their clannish pretension seriously, and were hotly loyal to the surnames they had inherited or long ago assumed. My grandmother, Catherine Macarthur had, because of her surname, and because she knew much about their past history, the controlling influence of a patroness over the band of Macarthurs that once or twice a year visited our kiln, as long as they stayed there. She spoke with respect, and so did others, of Duncan Macarthur, the former patriarch of the band who were nearly all his children and grandchildren and their marriage relations. Duncan, it seems, read his Bible, went to church in handsome clothes wherever he stayed, managed in some way to get a little education for his folk, and kept them under such strong moral discipline that they behaved well during all his days. Duncan's influence survived his death, and sons and grandsons of his, I am informed, took to farming and boating in Argyllshire, where they levelled themselves up to honourable positions among the population of that county.

About 1800, John Mor Macarthur, my grandmother's brother, who was fifteen years younger than she was, took a turn at buying and selling cattle. At Dalnacardoch Inn, then a great station, he and an Atholl man got into a fierce dispute with half-a-dozen men from the other side of the Grampians who were boasting about their own districts and pretending to run down the southern Highlands. The local patriotism which Tacitus describes as existing among the Caledonians, continued to be the source of many a quarrel over drink down to modern days. In the fight John and the Atholl man would eventually have got the worst of it, if tinker Duncan and his band, who happened to be crossing from north to south, had not unexpectedly appeared on the scene and threateningly intervened. When Duncan declared that he and his would not allow Robert Macarthur's son to be ill-used by any set of men in their presence, peace had to be made on the spot, for Duncan was master of the greater force, and although not a quarrelsome, he was a resolute man who would carry a warning to deeds, However welcome it might have been at the time, John did not at all like to he teased afterwards about the way in which he had been rescued by 'his tinker clansmen." He had a high and noble traditional origin for the Macarthurs of Breadalbane and Glenlyon, and refused to entertain the idea that through that traditional origin they might also have some far-off tinker clansmen.