One Valentine to remember
Today is Valentine’s Day and I remember all the fun we had with it in my school days – covering every inch of the cards with home-made rhymes and writing SWALK (sealed with a loving kiss) on the back of the envelopes before sending them off to whoever it was you used to fancy on the school bus at the time. The anonymity of it all made you bold. There were always the older boys who you would dare to send a Valentine’s card – usually the ones who were good at sport – but who you would never dream of speaking to.
I loved Latin and especially Roman history at school and the story of St Valentine is a cracker. I bet there are a lot people who have no idea why we call it Valentine’s Day. Saint Valentine was a Christian priest who lived in Rome in the 3rd Century under the pagan Emperor Claudius II. He hated that Romans were converting to Christianity and believed his soldiers should be devoted to Rome, so he made a law against them marrying.
Valentine married them in secret Christian ceremonies and when Claudius found out, he sent him to prison. But even that couldn’t prevent the love he had for others and he cured his jailer’s daughter of blindness. His last act of love before his life ended was to send her letter signed “from your Valentine”.
He was executed on February 14th.
Dubbed “the well-travelled criminal”, Ann was born in Ireland and moved to Scotland. Records show that in 1851 she was living in Edinburgh’s Cowgate, unmarried and making hats and caps for a living. By 1861, she was wed and living near Trongate, Glasgow, where her husband John Mcgovern worked as a “scavenger”. Ann popped up again in local newspaper in Huntly, Aberdeenshire, in April 1868: “Ann Mcgovern is not unknown to our readers, having been convicted at a Justice of the Peace Court, Huntly, on August 26, 1865, and sentenced to 30 days’ imprisonment for stealing a pair of ladies’ boots from the shop of Mr Yule. She now goes ‘over the water’ for a theft committed in the city of Aberdeen.”
The Granite City crime landed her a seven-year jail term and she was released, aged 51, from Perth Prison on Christmas Day 1872 and she took a lodging in Aberdeen’s Guestrow. But a year later she was sentenced to eight years’ penal servitude for theft. She continues to yo-yo in and out of prison the rest of her life and, aged 70, is back behind bars.
Known as “The Butterfly”, petty thief Isabella Mclaren had more than 30 offences to her name. Born into a respectable crofting family in Turriff, Aberdeenshire, around 1838, she married farm servant William Sievewright at Cairnie, near Huntly, in 1854. But her husband married another woman in 1866, and was given a jail sentence for bigamy.
While in court for her 31st offence, a breach of the peace, Isabella attacked a witness. The local press recorded: “She seized the witness with both hands by the whiskers, and tugged away fiercely, and then… still retaining hold of the whiskers with one hand, she planted the other amongst the hair of his head, and tore out a few handfuls.”
Isabella continued her life of petty crime and in 1891 appeared in court for a breach of the peace in the village of New Pitsligo. An alcoholic and homeless, her last appearance was in a newspaper after she fell into the water at Peterhead Harbour. Two men tried to save her. The report read: “The body was identified as that of Isabella Mclaren or Sievewright, widow, aged 66 years of age. How she fell into the water is unknown.”
The National Trust for Scotland bought the 30,000-hectare Mar Lodge Estate for the below market value price of £5.6 million in 1995 with support from the National Heritage Memorial Fund, the Heritage Lottery Fund, and the Easter Charitable Trust, entering into a management agreement with the then Scottish Natural Heritage over its woodland. The estate – which covers the land to the west of Braemar and to the east of Glen Tilt – forms part of the largest stretch of high subarctic ground in Britain.
It is the largest National Nature Reserve in Scotland, and boasts 15 Munros and
four of the five highest mountains in Scotland including Ben Macdui at 4,295ft. It has the highest source of any river in Britain, is home to one of two of the oldest known Scots pines in Scotland – dating back to 1477 – and to the country’s second largest Caledonian pine, a monster at around 100ft and with a girth measuring nearly 20ft. It also boast the second highest altitude tree – a rowan 3,595ft above sea level. With in excess of 5,000 species recorded on the estate, over 10% of all the species found in Scotland, the estate holds eleven national and international environmental designations designed to protect it.