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Highland Folklore

Luchd-Stubhail: or Gangrel Bodies

Clearances in Atholl & Breadalbane

Recollections of Dr William Stewart Irvine

The Story of Glenisla - Extract

Perthshire History Put On Line by New Website

HUNDREDS of documents - and hundreds of thousands of transcribed words - have been made freely available online since writer James Irvine Robertson launched his website containing some of his family archives.

Dating from the 1600s, most of them concern Stewart, Robertson and Irvine families and estates in Highland Perthshire, particularly in Tummelside, Struan and Glen Errochty.

“I inherited these papers,” says Irvine Robertson, “and have produced articles and books based on them. One book ‘The Lady of Kynachan’ was originally intended to be a work of pure fiction, but the history that came out of these papers meant that invention was hardly required.

“Similarly a biography of David Stewart of Garth, one of the key figures in the revival of interest in the Highlanders in the early 19th century, would have been impossible without the archive.”

The material will be of interest to family historians since the names of tenants, friends and contemporaries litter the letters and legal documents. Amongst them are letters home from soldiers describing battles of the Napoleonic wars; a run of correspondence from the 1840s from a school girl in Edinburgh; another from a doctor in Canada at the beginning of the 19th century; from a young Glasgow merchant trying to manage the family sugar plantation in Trinidad through the emancipation of the slaves.

David Stewart of Garth wrestles with the incomprehension of the chiefs when he asks them for samples of their clan tartan for the first register. And, as one of the most prominent opponents of the Clearances, also wrestles with the difficulties of providing land for all the folk on his estates who wanted it.

Included are three journals of travels in the Highlands – and to Glasgow.  Amelia Menzies describes her holiday in Morvern in 1838, and the return journey down Loch Sunart ‘a distance of 15 miles, in a four-oared boat, the sea literally mountains high. We were all highly delighted’

“I hope to put more on line as it becomes available,” says Irvine Robertson. “There’s an ever increasing interest in our history, and I know there will be people for whom this material both useful and valuable.

“If some tidy-minded ancestor had put the bundles of papers on a bonfire, as far as this world is concerned many of the people within might never have been alive. But here they are given back their voices, and I felt a faintly irrational responsibility to let as many people hear them as I could.”

jamesir@onetel.com 

www.jamesirvinerobertson.co.uk