The serial: Largie Castle, A Rifled Nest Day 27

“Students sat cross-legged on the grass by the east end of the building. Some smoked and others drank beer from a can

Although the Castilians won the Battle of Teba against Uthman it was a Pyrrhic victory for the Scots, who lost their leader and many other brave knights. On managing to recover Douglas’s body with the casket holding Bruce’s heart, the remaining knights and squires decided to return home. Before Douglas’s body could be repatriated, the party had it boiled in water to separate the flesh from the bones as only the latter, with Bruce’s heart, could be transported on the long sea voyage back home.

Loccard and Sir William Keith of Galston undertook that task. Back in Scotland, the heart was buried at Melrose Abbey and Douglas’s remains at St Bride’s Kirk in South Lanarkshire. Sir Symon changed his name to Lockheart, later Lockhart, as he was the sole holder of the key to the locked casket.

He added the image of a heart and fetterlock to his family coat of arms and introduced the motto “corda serrata pando” (I open locked hearts). Sir Symon died at the ripe age of 71.

As with survivors of war, particularly the conflict of 1914-18, he had to live with regret and possibly guilt in having escaped death in battle when many of his friends perished.

Curious

Angus, therefore, would inherit the curious amulet, supposed to protect him from all perils, as he too, like his older brother, stood in line to become the owner of a castle, Lee Castle or The Lee.

He would gain also the land surrounding it, farms, silver, jewellery, and a painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds.

Situated at Auchenglen in the Clyde Valley in South Lanarkshire, the original castle (extensively rebuilt in the 19th Century) had been the seat of the Lockharts of Lee from the 13th Century until 1919, when Sir Norman Macdonald Lockhart died.

When Angus’s younger brother Simon became the owner of the estate 30 years later, he sold the castle. In 2004 it was put on the market and there were rumours that film star John Travolta, a wealthy French duchess, and a website entrepreneur were interested in buying it. It sold for $8.5 million, much less than the asking price.

For this figure the new owner became the 35th baron of Lee and acquired 261 acres, a castle, where Bruce signed a charter under the Pease Tree in its garden, and where Oliver Cromwell had once dined.

The Lee has two lodge houses, a banqueting room, ballroom, 14 bedrooms, a heated swimming pool, and a 25 member band: the pipes and drums of the Barony of Lee.

At six years of age, Angus was unaware of what was meant to fall into his lap when he came of age.

On a hot June morning I stepped on to the platform of Winchester railway station. Making my way through the barrier, I followed instructions – downloaded from the internet – to the building that once housed West Downs preparatory school, where the Macdonald boys had been educated.

I trudged uphill from the town centre, past the police station and prison on my right and the county hospital on my left, until I reached what is now the West Downs campus of Winchester University.

West Downs as a school fell short by nine years of reaching its century, when it closed in 1988.

The forbidding building seen in a photograph of 1897 when Lionel Helbert, the school’s founder bought it, had changed beyond recognition.

Ordeal

A gravel sweep frilled with cars had replaced the lawn. The sash dormer windows were swopped for modern ones. A privet hedge grew close to the ground floor windows, and pyracantha climbed the walls, adding a touch of greenery where it had once been dingy and bare.

Students sat cross-legged on the grass by the east end of the building. Some smoked and others drank beer from a can.

It was hot and sticky, yet I felt a chill rising from the base of my spine, until it reached my chest. This was where he was sent, as were his brothers, Jock and Simon.

I had heard about the ordeal, not from my uncle of course, but from my father, who entered West Downs in 1922, the same year as Angus.

“I was always cold,” he said, “and hungry.” He demonstrated how he made the yoke of his boiled egg go further by cutting toast into soldiers and dipping each piece into it. No amount of sun could displace my father’s chill.

Evidently it wasn’t enough for the Macdonald brothers to stay at home and go to the local school at Rhunahaorine, a mile from the castle. I’m sure they would have liked to sit on benches at rough, inkstained desks with the other children and play tig with them in the school yard.

But, like their father before them, Angus and his brothers were sent away to school. As early as the 1820s, most upper class boys from all over Britain went to private boarding schools.

I’m sure Angus’s parents never questioned the practice although John hated being sent to Eton, which tended to savage boys from the fringes of the British Isles.

Daisy was accustomed to the tradition; while her four brothers attended boarding school, she and her sisters stayed at home, where they received their schooling from carefully-selected governesses.

In 1895 when the Crabbes lived at Guildford House, Farnham, Daisy’s parents, anxious to appoint a Protestant, employed “a North German finishing governess with advanced English skills, Parisian French, and fluent Italian (acquired in Italy)”.

Less fortunate

Two years later the family found a Swiss Protestant governess with no knowledge of Italian.

I wondered how Angus had felt about his new school. Destined to enter West Downs in 1921, he was reprieved on account of John’s sudden death.

Jock was less fortunate and set off hot-foot from his father’s funeral for his first term at Winchester College.

When the following year Angus made the long journey to his new prep school in the south of England, he must have felt he was travelling to a different planet.

Kintyre, its traditions and way of life, was and still is worlds away from the English home counties. For the nine year old, probably accompanied by his mother or Jock, it was an exciting, arduous expedition.

Taking the boat from Tarbert they sailed to Gourock on the Clyde, then caught a train for Glasgow, whereupon they boarded a night train to London’s Euston station.

(More tomorrow.)