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. E Mail
Click on letter, Harold A Ralston.

There was never a time when South Kintyre seemed strange to me, although it was in Renfrew that I was born and grew up, and on the Lanark and Kyle farms of my Lowland father's people that I spent much of the school holidays. Our holidays in South Kintyre were rare enough and short enough. But it seems to me that I have always had before my inward eye that astonishing sweep of land and sea from the mist-crowned bulk of the Mull round by the undulating line of Islay and the majestic Paps of Jura, with gentle Gigha and Cara lying low and closer at hand - and away to the south the hazy blue backcloth of Ireland, from Antrim to the shadowy hills dwindling westward beyond Lochs Foyle and Swilly. It must have been during a charabanc trip up the Largieside, I suppose, that this scene was indelibly imprinted on my mind.

I am looking at the photograph of a family group taken in Campbeltown in 1879. Seated in front are Margaret Laird Mac Eachran, her broad-shouldered, full-bearded husband, Archibald, and between them are their three sons, Martin and Duncan, and between them, taller than either and mustachioed like Vercingetorix, Archibald, my maternal grandfather. The three young men have sprigs of common heath in their buttonholes - the badge of Clan lain Mhor Mhic Dhomnuill nan Eilean - the MacConnells or Mac Donnells or Mac Donalds of the South Isles, Kintyre, and Antrim whom the Mac Eachrans had followed since the time of Regulus Somerled's grandchildren ....... A long time ago!

When that photograph was taken, my Great-Grandfather, Archibald, had the smithy at Stewarton in the Laggan between Campbeltown and Machrihanish. It was a big smithy and he had wrought there for at least twenty years, after leaving Campbeltown. (In 1860 he was paying £9 a year in rent. A little later it went up to £20, but by 1879 it had come down to £15.) Did he and his family know as they froze for that photograph that their days a t Stewarton were nearly done - no more work for the farmers, the carters of peat from the Aros Moss to the distilleries, the chamberlain of Mac Chailein Mhor? Perhaps, for in 1880 the smithy was registered as vacant and the family scattered. Duncan went west to Canada and across it to Vancouver (where his offspring prospered). Isabel, Martin, and Archibald took ship (the Kintyre or the Kinloch it would be) for Glasgow. The first became a nurse and the favourite theatre sister of a famous surgeon. Martin prospered as a business man. And my Grandfather, Archibald - a smith like his father and grandfather before him - became the foreman in charge of the blacksmith's shop in the great works of Babcock and Wilcox in Renfrew, along the banks of the White Cart. In February 1920 at his house in Moorpark, I was born, the son of his daughter, Margaret Laird Hamilton. My father, John, after whom I was named in the Gaelic version, had been an officer in the Canadian army. Demobilized, he failed to find a job, and before my first birthday he departed from us, returning to the farm in Manitoba to which he had emigrated as a child with his parents when life had become too hard on the poor ground they tilled on the ducal Hamilton estate. So Archibald Mac Eachran (who never forgot South Kintyre, and was proud of the long line of the small clan, stretching back to the days before the Norsemen came, before the Gaels came) stood in loco paternis.

On a holiday about 1927, I stood outside the smithy at Stewarton, afraid of the flying sparks and the acrid smoke sizzling in clouds from the hoof of a horse that was being shod, while my Grandfather talked to a man in a leather apron, the boss, who said (I think) that he had come from Islay. Anyhow he knew nothing of my Greet-Grandfather. They could have talked for hours, if at length I had not (bored by the words buzzing over my head and sickened by the stink of burning hoof) made a great nuisance of myself. So we went to Greenlees' shop not far from the smithy. I had a glass of fizzy lemonade. So had my Grandfather, but he had something else poured into his glass first from a brown bottle.

During a summer spent on a paternal great-aunt's farm near Dungavel, I learned that I was descended from one John Hamilton, a fanatical Covenanter who had been killed or wounded at Drumclog in the skirmish with Bloody Clavers' dragoons. At the end of the holiday, my Grandfather came to take me home to Renfrew. As we walked down the farm road, I told him of my discovery. Had he heard of my Covenanting forebear. He had. He frowned. He then told me (or more likely, reminded me) that many years before Crumclog, another of my ancestors had been out with the Marquess of Montrose in the Highland and Irish contingent led by Montrose's chief lieutenant, Alasdair Mac Cholla Chictach, fighting the forces of the Covenant. After the rout at Rhunahoarine, Alasdair departed for Islay and Ireland, to be killed at Cnoc an Dos in Munster in a battle against Lord Inchiquin. His remaining force in Kintyre retreated south to Dunaverty, which was besieged by General David Leslie and the Mac Chailein Mhor. Eventually they surrendered under quarter, but the fanaticaI chaplains (or reverend commissars) accompanying the Parliamentary army ranted in God's name to such an effect that all but a few of the surrendered Highlanders were slaughtered on the spot. The remainder, the daoine usislean ('nobles' or 'leading men') were then done to death more formally after a drumhead trial, being hanged or shot. Among them was a Mac Eachran from whom I am descended. "You must remember," said my grandfather, "that these Lowland people do not see things as we Highlanders do. You may be only half a Highlander, but your Highland half is the better half, and don't you forget it." ........ Which is as it may be.