Calum of the Glen – part one
What’s in a name? Names are more than just names if you are able to look into them as I found out when investigating one near Resipole on the north side of Loch Sunart a few miles from Salen.
Sinclair’s Croft is not a place you will find on any map – it just happens to be remembered locally. Who was Sinclair, I wondered? He must have been an interesting character or did something unusual to have a spot named after him?
The question was answered when out of the blue I received in the post an unpublished manuscript from a colleague who was clearing out an office in Inverness and knew of my interest in local history. It was written some years ago by the late Alastair Cameron, known locally as ‘North Argyll’, whom I wrote about in these columns on March 22, 2018. Not only was he Calum Sinclair’s next-door neighbour but also a friend and knew a good deal about his background. As Alastair was a regular contributor to The Oban Times for over 50 years, it is surely appropriate that what he had to say about him should see the light of day here.
‘I had heard about Calum Sinclair for his pranks and ready repartee before we ever met. It was thus. In his young days proprietors, or more correctly their ground officers, were very strict about the care of the woodlands and nobody was allowed to enter therein to cut a tree or shrub without permission. Breadalbane [1] was no exception. However, one day while one of the ground officers was speaking to someone at the road side at Dalmally, Calum, then in his teens, passed by barefooted and carrying in his hand a nice long straight hazel switch. As he passed the ground officer said to him “Where did you get that switch Calum?” Without as much as slowing his pace he replied, “Just where it grew”. On hearing the story little did I think then, that for close on 40 years we would be acquaintances, and 19 or so of them neighbours.
‘He was called ‘Calum of the Glen’ because he was brought up in Glenstrae in the Glenorchy district. He belonged to the Mac na Ceardadh, now Sinclairs, of Dalmally on the paternal side, but his mother, a Macleod, came from Skye, so that accounts for his Christian name Calum. [2] An early speech impediment kept Calum from attending school, with the result that he could neither read or write, but a vivid memory and keen powers of observation enabled him to exhibit a high degree of knowledge, so much so that casual acquaintances hardly ever discovered that he was illiterate.
‘Though he finished his active working life as a gamekeeper he entered it more or less as a poacher and that at an age so young that after stalking a hind and taking careful aim he closed his eyes before drawing the trigger. Nevertheless, the bullet found its rightful billet, but disappointment and wonderment was to follow for the young huntsman, for when he proceeded to bleed and gralloch his kill after sticking the knife in the proper vein, not a drop of blood flowed. Consternation more than amazement struck him; the hind he thought could not be a natural animal, so he ran home to tell about it to his cousins. They being older and not such novices to the poaching art had heard that such a thing could happen so went off immediately to skin and bring the carcase home.
‘Later in life his keenness for indulging in this sport without permission led him on that memorable Christmas week of 1879 when the Tay Bridge was blown down, in participating in an experience he told me he would not care to undertake again. Himself and a shoemaker acquaintance in the village of Dalmally decided to have a day’s hare-shooting. After getting to the chosen ground they separated. Calum had just shot his seventh hare, when he noticed a keeper from a neighbouring estate making in the direction from which the shoemaker’s shots had come. To escape capture immediate action was necessary, so Calum hid the hares in an old hill drain, shoved the gun into a snowdrift and went to look for his companion. He failed to locate him so made for Glenstrae where he remained until darkness came and then went
to visit the shoemaker to find out the position. The news was not good. The keeper had caught the shoemaker and threatened if he would not divulge the name of his companion he would report the incident to the estate factor. The consequences for the shoemaker, who was a married man, if he did not do this was eviction, so Calum told him to give his name and as he was single he could leave the district immediately. On that fatal Sunday afternoon he left his home intending to pass the night with a shepherd relative at Barran near Kilmore. Crossing the moorland he had often when the gusts of wind would come, to throw himself flat on the ground and catch hold of a clump of heather. When he arrived at his proposed destination he found the house practically roofless, the wife of the shepherd and family huddled in the closet, and the husband gone for help to Duileter in Glenstrae.
‘Passing through some of the woodlands of the Duke of Argyll the following day the scene he told me was one of devastation – fallen trees all around. He reached Kintyre the following day and stayed with friends for three weeks until he thought the incident had become less in the news. A thaw by then had set in and the stock of the gun was visible In the snowdrift when he went to get it. At that time an important feeing market [3] was held at Dalmally in April and the local keepers conjecturing Calum might be looking for a situation there approached all the farmers asking them not to engage him. All promised except Mr Campbell of Duileter whose reply was, “If Calum of the Glen is looking for a situation he will get it from me”. So to Campbell he went, where he remained for a few years until he moved to Lochs at the top of Glenlyon, then tenanted by Mr John MacNaughton. Lochs must be among the highest farms in Scotland yet barley has been known to grow well there.
‘From Lochs he went to Moar and then on to Meggernie home farm as a shepherd. He got to know some of the personalities of the glen such as ‘The Blind Precentor’ Peter Stewart, a Baptist and a composer of spiritual poems. An individual read the line and then Peter chanted it; the well known Baptist lay-preacher of the district, Donald MacLellan, whose son became Professor of the Baptist College in Scotland, and Alexander Stewart (Alasdair Ruadh) author of a Highland Parish – the History of Fortingall [4]
Continued next week.