Largie Castle, A Rifled Nest Day 15

Largie Castle stood secluded on a hill, so that the young boy and his siblings were separated from other families on the estate

Unlike Winston Churchill, who championed Edward’s cause, Lang was opposed to it. In his view the king was flawed, his lifestyle decadent and his friends frivolous. He was unstable and had undergone treatment for alcohol abuse.

The high Anglican priest met my grandfather in 1893 at Magdalen College, Oxford when he was dean of divinity and John a freshman. They became friends and when Lang visited Largie two years later he fell in love with the place.

He wanted to be close to the sea and to look over to the islands, to walk in the woods and stride over the heather on the hillside. This part of Kintyre, halfway down the peninsula’s western sea-board, was where he wished to come for rest and peace, away from the mayhem of the southern cities where he worked.

John chose a site on a hill to the North-West of the castle and, with the help of some men on the estate, built his friend a simple house of wood and stone. “The Tave” (short for Tavantaggart, which means in Gaelic The Priest’s Rest) is still lived in although, after a fire during the Second World War, it had to be extensively renovated. Vital role During Angus’s short life and because he lost his father when he was so young, substitute fathers were important for him. Although distant and preoccupied, Lang served as one. In fact, he played a vital and prolonged role in the lives of all the Macdonalds.

He returned each summer (and sometimes at Easter) to Largie so that, as his biographer notes, all Macdonald children “as they appeared, were his, by christening, confirmation and general adoption.”

I picture him in the Largie chapel with dark, thinning hair wearing a white lawn surplice over a black cassock holding the baby dressed in his christening robe. Leaning over the font and assisted by Burton, who hands him a bowl of water, he draws the sign of the cross on the infant’s forehead and names him Charles Angus. The baby’s mother and father stand to the right while, on the left, George Hutchinson, John’s Oxford friend, pledges his duties as godfather.

Charles was Angus’s official name and it held a special significance. It gave the nod to the Macdonalds’ Jacobite sympathies and therefore a salute to the Largie branch’s kinswoman, Flora Macdonald, who, after the Rising of 1745 and having done her duty by Prince Charles Edward, stayed with her Largie cousins for a year before she set sail for the United States.

The name also acknowledged the baby’s bon viveur, sports-loving grandfather. Most importantly, he was named after Charles Lockhart, who on marrying in 1762 Elizabeth Macdonald of Largie, joined his property to hers.

Later, the two families fell out but in 1913 the Lockhart estate belonged to an old man with no heir. Someone had to inherit and there was a strong possibility that Angus was in the running. So, his parents pragmatically named their boy after the man who had initiated the original Lockhart union with the Macdonalds. However, from the start of his short life, the boy was known to family and friends by his second name, Angus.

Largie Castle stood secluded on a hill, so that the young boy and his siblings were separated from other families on the estate and neighbouring farms. Their home had rooms for all purposes from boot-hole, pantry, larder, study and library to gun room. It even had a small precinct for Christian worship (the chapel of the Holy Spirit, consecrated in 1890). Ancient And, of course at the top of the tower was the Broonie’s room. As young children, Angus and his sisters and brothers learned that if they misbehaved the family spirit was not to be trifled with; it might even carry them away into the hills and they would never be seen again.

On the other hand, if Angus fell and hurt himself his nurse-maid would gather him in her arms and tell him the Broonie would soothe his troubles away. The Broonie could do anything, if he put his mind to it. He made hens lay, urged cows to give milk and made the sun shine.

The Macdonald children learned that the Broonie was far more ancient than their ancestors or Largie itself, even older than the names of the local farms and villages. He pre-dated Christianity and the arrival of saints like Columba. It was as if each Macdonald child was born with a foothold in two spiritual camps: Christian and pagan.

Perhaps that was why Daisy and John promptly arranged the baptism of their babies so that the Highland elf, far more ancient than Christ, made no claim on them. It amuses me that John, a devout Christian, believed in the uruisg. However, bi-spirituality and bilingualism had persisted for aeons in these parts and, although Christianity adopted many native pagan festivals and sacred places, the old religion was never wholly extirpated, not even from the minds of the most sophisticated like my grandfather.

Nevertheless, these two strands of otherworldliness were a given for the Largie children. Possibly the future prelate raised an eyebrow at the Macdonalds’ beliefs. One can only smile at the thought of a capricious Broonie, who chucked stones and pinched sleeping nursemaids, rubbing shoulders with a prince of the church. But I’m sure the moody fairy had little effect on Lang’s enjoyment of his Highland retreat. Fascinating It is difficult to imagine Kintyre before the Great War but Kit (Margaret) McNeil draws a fascinating picture of the community in the MacAlister Chronicles. At the time of Angus’s birth there were only two cars in the district and they belonged to the Mackinnons of Balinakill and the Kennedys of Glencreggan. If a vehicle passed the house (you could hear the car engine from a long way off), people rushed to the window with binoculars to identify it.

Until 1913 the common mode of public transport was the stage coach, drawn by two or three horses that travelled from Campbeltown to Tarbert, carrying the mail and changing horses at Bellochantuy, Tayinloan and Clachan. Adults and children grabbed a box-seat beside Willie Young, the driver. Nobody sat inside, as it was reserved for calves tied in sacks, hens, or goats.

Soon after Angus’s birth, a bus replaced the Kintyre stagecoach, although by that time the family owned a car and used a governess cart for visits to the village and to neighbours’ homes. (More tomorrow.)