Love Scotland podcast – Season 5

Transcript

Four voices: male voiceover [MV]; Jackie Bird [JB]; Jonathan Faiers [JF]; Kathi Kamleitner [KK]

[MV]
Love Scotland – brought to you from the National Trust for Scotland. Presented by Jackie Bird.

[JB]
Hello and welcome. If you took a random sample of people from around the world and asked them to depict Scotland, I’m pretty sure the word ‘tartan’ would make an appearance. We are inextricably linked. This instantly recognisable textile and pattern is as enduring as it is ubiquitous. It’s found on the battlefield and on the catwalk; it links punk rockers to Bonnie Prince Charlie. It’s a symbol of tradition and of rebellion.

And this year, tartan is getting the chance to strut its stuff as it’s the focus of a wide-ranging exhibition at V&A Dundee, which is showcasing more than 300 defining tartan objects from across Scotland and beyond. The exhibition also includes items from the National Trust for Scotland, notably the Weaver’s Cottage in Kilbarchan, highlighting the globally appreciated talents of one Willie Meikle. But more of that later.

So, to talk all things tartan, I’m joined by Jonathan Faiers, the consultant curator of the exhibition. He is Professor of Fashion Thinking at the University of Southampton and his book, simply called Tartan, is the inspiration for the show, which opens in April 2023. Jonathan, welcome to the podcast.

[JF]
Hello.

[JB]
Now, after reading your book and thoroughly enjoying the lavish photographs particularly, I don’t think the question is why the V&A Dundee is taking a look at tartan; it’s why it’s taken so long?

[JF]
That is an interesting question. I think that V&A Dundee were looking for a particularly fresh approach, perhaps, to the subject. They were keen to put on an exhibition that understood tartan as both an intrinsically Scottish phenomenon but also to understand it as a global phenomenon – and also how it has influenced art, design, literature worldwide. I suppose they found some of that approach in my book, which is why they approached me to be the consultant curator and work with the three other curators at V&A Dundee on realising the exhibition.

[JB]
Something I found particularly interesting: the exhibition is described as ‘radical’. What’s radical about it?

[JF]
I think, more or less, what I hinted at just now, that a lot of people would expect an exhibition about tartan to include all the usual things: military tartans, tartan worn at weddings, Highland games – all of that kind of aspect – which is there in the show. But, we are also showcasing tartan as a global phenomenon and actually as something that transcends textile history and looks at tartan really as a pattern that has influenced designers and artists worldwide, and also is very much at the forefront of new developments in design thinking. And so, that’s perhaps where the radical aspect lies.

[JB]
I don’t want to spend too long therefore on the very early history of tartan – you say yourself its origin is the subject of fierce academic debate. [Yes!] For obvious reasons, I probably want to stay clear of that one! However, can I touch on the various views of how tartan originated and ask you: is there a prevailing one?

[JF]
I would say at this current moment, no, there isn’t. There have been examples – perhaps the most well-known being what’s called the Falkirk tartan, which is on display in the National Museum of Scotland, which many people believe to be the first example of what could be understood as a tartan. But increasingly, through scholarship and research, I think what has now occurred is the idea that checked woven textiles are a global phenomenon. You can find examples in all sorts of indigenous cultures and textile outputs.
I think what is perhaps of more interest is how tartan relates to other textile traditions across the world and how far back that indeed goes. So, there have been many examples of where people have found tartans from all over the globe, even places such as China, that have been suggested that these are forerunners of tartan or related to tartan. I suppose what myself and the other curators are interested in, in the exhibition, is not trying to pinpoint origins but actually talk about how incredibly influential and how widespread this checked pattern and checked textile can be.
And so, the short answer would be: I think there are many points of origin now for tartan and all of them are up for grabs.

[JB]
Ok, so perhaps an easier question then! When did it become an expression of Scottish-ness?

[JF]
Ah. I think again, without being too difficult, I think that there are many moments, but I suppose one perhaps of the seminal moments is following the Battle of Culloden. Because with the defeat of the Jacobite cause at Culloden, as I’m sure many listeners will know, there was what was called an Act of Proscription. That was an edict that tried to curtail the influence of Highland culture, and tartan as part of Highland dress was part of that Act of Proscription, where for certain sections of the community, it was outlawed for a brief time. Now, this wasn’t a particularly effective or widespread ban, but I think it had the effect of propelling tartan into a broader arena. Because, as we all know, if anything is proscribed or prohibited, it makes it instantly desirable. I think it’s that moment when tartan became associated with an idea of nationalism to people outside of Scotland particularly. I would say, for me, 1746 is this pivotal moment when it becomes crystallised as associated with ideas of Scottishness and nationalism.

[JB]
I suppose that also makes it a sort of visual representation of history, and there aren’t many textiles that can claim that!

[JF]
No, indeed. It’s difficult to avoid the puns but I think there’s a whole sweep of history that is woven into tartan patterns. We can understand it as a cloth that has been associated with insurrection, the idea of the Jacobite cause, the Scottish claim to the throne – but at the same time, it has also been an expression of a united kingdom, conservatism perhaps, Establishment ideas. We can see that literally in its pattern. And I think that that is part of its power – it is able to be read like this, like a series of narratives. Again, what we are trying to show in the exhibition is that there isn’t just one narrative, there are many many narratives in the same way as there are many different sorts of tartans that we could look at, follow and find examples of.

[JB]
And is there something specific that makes a tartan tartan, rather than just a check?

[JF]
Ha! That’s a really great question and I find it very difficult to answer. People always ask me it!

[JB]
I’m glad I’m testing you!

[JF]
I think for me, and this is only my personal view, it is the combination of certain colour ways in certain kinds of checked arrangements – the sett as it’s known to tartan historians – the particular arrangement of colours and widths to produce the particular tartan pattern. I think it’s very similar to other checked textile traditions, as I’ve said, that you can find all over the world. But for me, what makes a tartan particularly look like a tartan, perhaps, are certain kinds of colour combinations that perhaps you don’t find in other indigenous cultures and checked woven traditions. But, this is very very subjective. Also, what makes a tartan a tartan is exactly what you pointed out: that we can recognise it as something more than just cloth. It is about history; it is about culture; it is about particular moments in the development both of Scotland and also nations far abroad. I think a certain colour palette with a certain kind of set of narratives that we bring to it, according to our own interests or knowledge, I think is what makes up the tartan.

[JB]
I hadn’t realised truly until I read your book and really looked at the pictures – you have one striking picture of the Ogilvie of Airlie tartan, which has 180 colour changes. And that’s done just by the weaving process?

[JF]
Yes. Obviously, the more colours you introduce in the tartan, due to the formation of twill weave as it’s called, where warps and weft threads are woven together, you get indeterminate shades. The amount of shades you get where one colour crosses another increases incrementally the more colours you introduce. So obviously, with a two-colour simple check or tartan, you get maybe black, red and a black-red shade in between – two colours produces three shades. But as soon as you start introducing six or seven colours, you get a huge amount of shades. And that’s part of the beauty and the allure of tartan. When you look at a tartan closely, the bold colours you see from afar you suddenly realise are also accompanied by loads of shades of very beautiful, subtle gradations of colour. That gives it its richness and its vibrancy.
Again, we are hopefully demonstrating that in the show – that you can have a very bold, simple two-colour/three-colour tartan or you can have these immensely complex, very subtly coloured tartans. But they are all tartans.

[JB]
And from the sublime to the somewhat ridiculous, because I read with horror, Jonathan – horror! – in your book, that the huge, belted tartans, the Highlander historical tartan that we see with the brooch on the shoulder, gave way to the kilt that we know today because of an Englishman … or so we think. Is that the case?

[JF]
Yeah. Well, again this is another example that you’ve hit on that one of the unique things about tartan is that it’s full of controversy in terms of its history. It inflames passions, as you can understand, that run very deep. But, I think a lot of the accepted thinking as to the development of what we would understand as the modern, shorter, tailored, pleated kilt came about through economic necessity. Lots of researchers conform to the idea that workers in an English-owned factory around the time of the early Industrial Revolution who would be traditionally wearing the belted plaid as part of their Highland dress, were fined. Or at least the owner of the factory suggested that it would be a lot safer, and probably more productive, if they wore a shorter, more neater (I suppose) kilt that would not be so dangerous because it doesn’t have so much volume of cloth that could be caught in machinery. And so, the research suggests this this particular English factory owner approached a military tailor and had produced shorter, tailored kilts for his workers to wear in the factory. And so, as contentious as that might sound …

[JB]
I do hope it’s true! It’s such a great story.

[JB]
… we perhaps owe the modern-day kilt both to an Englishman and also out of economic more than any other reason.

[JB]
Let’s bring it back to home territory, shall we? We’ll talk about the rich history because it’s inextricably linked with industry in Scotland, specifically the small cottage industries. And in my introduction, I talked about Weaver’s Cottage. [Yes] Can you take up the story? Tell me about Willie Meikle.

[JF]
Willie Meikle was an amazing weaver who came from a whole family of weavers, who were based in the weaving town of Kilbarchan in Renfrewshire. As I say, he was one of a whole family of weavers. He inherited a handloom from his great-grandfather, which is now to be found at Weaver’s Cottage in Kilbarchan. At the high point of weaving in that area, from about 1820 to 1860, it was an amazing seat of production of tartan. But what we are borrowing for the show from Kilbarchan is some of the amazing collection of samples that Willie Meikle wove and collected. All sorts of different kinds of tartans that he produced that we are now going to display in the exhibition.
Willie Meikle was, I suppose, quite a celebrity in his own day. He produced cloth both for the late Queen and her father George VI. In 1938 he was invited to demonstrate his craft at the Empire Exhibition in Bellahouston Park in Glasgow. And later on, in 1949 I believe it was, he demonstrated his loom at the Toronto Fair in Canada. So, he was quite an international celebrity. We have some of his samples on display; we have a film of him weaving; and I think it’s a real testament both to the idea of tartan as a traditional handwoven craft but also in Meikle’s own career in the 30s and 40s – how that travelled the globe, how it became an international phenomenon. I think again that makes it the perfect exhibit for us – it encapsulates both tradition and an idea of modernity and internationalism.

[JB]
There are two points from that I’d like to pick up on. One, I looked at some YouTube footage – I haven’t seen the Willie Meikle footage – of handloom weaving. It is so fascinating to watch; it is enormously complex. [Yes.] I would heartily recommend anyone who is interested in this at all to go on and find it, because you really see the expertise of these tiny cottage industries.
But we were talking about the international phenomenon that is tartan. And it’s so beloved of Scots abroad, or of people of Scots descent abroad, that it actually provokes an emotional reaction. Again, that’s something that I can’t imagine any other textile or pattern evoking.

[JF]
I’d agree with you. I think what it means for Scots abroad, it is literally a textile that speaks of home; it speaks of belonging. I do think the reason for its popularity around the world, both in ex-pat communities and for other people who’ve chosen to adopt it, it immediately produces a sense of community amongst its wearers. Again, I think it’s difficult to untangle this, but I think it has that sense of community because of all the tradition that’s placed upon it – the idea of Scottishness, the idea of clanship, the idea of togetherness.
But it also has a visual unity which I think is unique amongst other textiles. If you are wearing a brightly coloured tartan and you’re standing next to somebody in an equally brightly coloured tartan, you are literally unified by your textile in a way that I can’t think of any other textile, printed textile or pattern textile that does that. You could argue spots perhaps, or you might argue Paisley, but I do think that tartan is unique in being understood and recognised globally, and having this power to unite people who wear it, whether they are Scots or not in fact.

[JB]
It is absolutely multi-layered, and that is tartan; that is the story of tartan. We’ll take a break for a moment, Jonathan. And when we come back, we’ll talk about a big part of the exhibition – and that is tartan and its effect on fashion. We’ll be back in a moment.

[KK]
Hello there! My name is Kathi Kamleitner and I’m here to tell you about my podcast: Wild for Scotland. If you enjoy travelling, spending time outside or simply relaxing to a good story, check out Wild for Scotland and join me for inspiring journeys from the cobbled streets of Edinburgh to the sandy beaches of the Western Isles. This spring, we’ll explore the historic heart of Fife, wild lands in unexpected places, and up and down the West Coast. Think of it like story time for adults, that inspires you to pack your bags and head out to explore. So, join me on the Wild for Scotland podcast. Listen now, wherever you get your podcasts.

[MV]
Are you a whisky lover or a nature lover? A fan of Burns or a good ghost story? No matter what you love about Scotland, there’s an episode of Love Scotland just for you. Take a look through our archives to hear the in-depth stories behind Scotland’s history, people and places. Don’t forget to review, like and share.

[JB]
Welcome back to the Love Scotland podcast. I’m talking tartan with Professor Jonathan Faiers and specifically about the V&A Dundee’s Tartan exhibition. Jonathan, in your book you say tartan has never been in or out of fashion. How has it achieved that?

[JF]
I think because of the way it can be utilised, the way it can be read and understood both by wearers and designers, has made it something that transcends, if you like, the vagaries of fashion. It’s an element of fashion that is always there. Sure, there are certain seasons and there have been certain periods in history when it has been more or less fashionable, but I would argue that you would be hard-pressed to find a lengthy period where no designers have chosen to work with tartan. I think the reason for this is, because of its incredibly rich and complex history, it can work very, very well for relatively traditional, conservative, classic tailoring and fashion design, as well as the most extreme, the most radical, the most cutting-edge. That is due not only to its visual boldness and recognition, if you like, but I think it’s also because it carries with it so many different kinds of narratives that can be both deeply traditional or very very subversive and almost revolutionary, I would argue.
So, it appeals to designers of all sorts. I think that’s what makes it unique and that’s why you can always find it appearing on runways throughout the world and indeed I would argue ever since what we understand really as the contemporary fashion system. Certain designers have particularly had an affinity with it; certain nations of designers have had a particular love for it – the French especially perhaps. But for me, it’s not something that is actually about fashion; it kind of transcends that, I would say.

[JB]
Well, here’s an example of it being all things to all people. My first brush with tartan – and I’m dating myself here – was in the 70s, the Bay City Rollers. For any millennials listening, or older than that, ask your parents or your grandparents! Their outfits were bedecked in tartan, edged with tartan. They were very cool. They were globally famous, but at the same time as I and my friends were dressing like the Bay City Rollers, tartan was derided as part of Scottish country dancing or The White Heather Club. So, it was all things to all men, even then.

[JF]
Yeah, indeed. I think the global success of something like the Bay City Rollers phenomenon is an example of how adaptable and easily employable tartan can be to unite you in fandom, to provide the badge of your loyalty. And, at the same time, at that moment, appealing to a younger generation while, as you say, their mums and dads were watching The White Heather Club and all the other kinds of things that we associate with a perhaps slightly kitsch aspect of Scottishness.

[JB]
Can I say very, very swiftly – before I’m lynched – there’s nothing wrong with The White Heather Club!

[JF]
Absolutely not!

[JB]
Or a bit of Scottish country dancing! But then Jonathan, we had the Bay City Rollers. And then a few years later, punk took tartan to another level. Why so much tartan amidst the safety pins and the zips and all of that?

[JF]
I think again we have to go back to probably the Jacobites and Culloden. In the hands of Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood, who were very shrewd and erudite about their references, they perfectly understood the power that tartan had then in the 18th century, how it was seen by the English particularly as a cloth of insurrection – literally a seat of sedition. Hence, they called one of their shops Seditionaries. I think that is the reason they particularly loved the idea of tartan because at that particular moment in history it was seen as a dangerous cloth. Perhaps it was seen as something that was encouraging insurrection and encouraging rebellion, which after all was what they were trying to do down the Kings Road dressing people in safety pins and tartan. They were cocking a snook at the establishment of the time just as much as it was felt tartan was doing back in the 18th century. I think that is the reason why – now whether the average punk would understand that particular aspect of its history is doubtful. But that almost doesn’t matter. For Westwood and McLaren, it was a cloth that had that kind of power. It had that political weight and I’m sure that’s what attracted them to use it … as well as its beauty and the fantastic patterns it produces when it’s cut into kilts, bondage trousers or whatever.

[JB]
Oh, the ageing punks listening to this will look back and think, hmmm, I didn’t know I was wearing it for those reasons then, but I certainly do now! What fashion pieces are you particularly proud of in the exhibition?

[JF]
We’ve got a range. We have a top from Alexander McQueen that was made expressly for his stylist and assistant Katy England. It is actually one of the pieces that McQueen himself actually made, because obviously in his later career, as he got more and more famous, he had workers to make his pieces. But this was actually made for him and so we were particularly pleased to have that because it has a particular significance and it was worn by one of his closest associates.
As I said, we also have an evening dress from the 1930s by the French designer Jean Patou, which I think will be quite a surprise for people. It’s a very elegant, typical 1930s dress but made in an incredible tartan that’s made out of a synthetic material – it’s made out of rayon, which at that time was very unusual and very modern. Today perhaps, we might think of it as slightly less desirable but at that time it was seen as cutting edge. Probably one of my favourite examples is an amazing 1955 (I think it is, certainly mid-50s) completely beaded dress by the American designer James Galanos. It makes a tartan pattern completely out of beads and sequins.

[JB]
Oh, that sounds gorgeous.

[JF]
It could be worn today; it’s timeless. But it epitomises total New York, 1950s/mid-century glamour –and to find tartan being used to make that kind of dress I think will be a real eye-opener for people. It’s quite a special piece and we’re really pleased to have it. We borrowed it all the way from the Philadelphia Museum.

[JB]
Looking at the history of tartan in pure economic terms, it’s been a marketing masterpiece. Because many companies who have nothing to do with Scotland have used it in their uniforms and in their marketing. What did it achieve?

[JF]
Obviously, it promoted an idea of Scottishness worldwide. I think it’s been especially successful in doing that. I think it achieves an idea, quite unique I suppose in terms of a contemporary idea of branding, that it can convey tradition, it can convey craftsmanship, it can convey the sweep of history – but again, because of its unique colour combinations, because of its very very basic grid structure, it is able to be produced in a number of different kinds of objects. It can be applied to all sorts of different surfaces, and so it can ‘brand’ (if you like) almost anything. It has a peculiar sense of modernity as well, alongside its idea of tradition.
I think that is because, again as we explore in the exhibition, tartan is basically formed of a grid pattern, and grids are one of the basic building blocks of design. So, we look at tartan’s influence on architecture, on contemporary art, on graphics, on product design. I think because it has this ability to be at once recognisably historic and also ground-breakingly modern, I think it’s the most perfect kind of branding exercise and fabric that you could find. And what that says about Scotland is carried with that. It has an idea of tradition, but it also has this idea of modernity literally woven into it. I think that’s been its success. That’s why so many organisations have adopted it as a uniform or as a branding device.

[JB]
Let me end by chucking you a bit of a googly. I only ask this because it cropped up in a newspaper I was reading just the other day. You’re a professor of fashion so I’ll be very interested to find out what you think about this. The piece in the paper said there’s now a worry about foreigners wearing the kilt, and it could be classed as cultural appropriation. Jonathan, your thoughts?! They can’t be serious, surely?!

[JF]
No, I don’t think so. Because again, I think the kilt, yes of course it’s deeply associated with Scottish history; it’s deeply associated with forms of Highland dress – but it is now, I believe, a universal garment. Rather than cultural appropriation, I would say it’s an act of cultural admiration, you could argue. It’s a beautiful garment to wear and I feel that the world should be entitled to wear it. There’s nothing quite like wearing a kilt. And as a celebration of a textile, such as tartan, the kilt is the perfect form. I understand why people over the world want to wear a kilt. It’s something that is unique. It can be worn by both men, women and children, and it says whatever you want it to say. And I think that, again, makes it something that almost transcends a narrower idea of cultural appropriation. It’s something that now is part of universal culture, I would argue.

[JB]
I like that. It certainly stands out because, very briefly, some years ago, 1996, I was at the Oscars, reporting on the Oscars after Braveheart was up for some awards.

[JF]
Right!

[JB]
I was in the media scrum on the red carpet, and we were all waiting for Mel Gibson who didn’t give interviews to very many people. He wanders up the media scrum, and I’m standing there in the crush, and I had tied an enormous red tartan scarf to my microphone, which stuck out like you wouldn’t believe. And whaddya know? Good old Braveheart himself stopped and gave me an interview. So, I have good reason to be thankful for tartan!

[JF]
Ha ha! You see! It’s the magnet, it’s the gateway to all things, so there …

[JB]
Well, you’ve certainly done a brilliant job of selling the exhibition. Professor Jonathan Faiers’ book Tartan is published by Bloomsbury. It is the definitive account, and the photographs are great. Jonathan, thank you.

[JF]
Thank you very much.

[JB]
The V&A Dundee Tartan exhibition runs from April 2023 until early 2024 – it is not to be missed.

As we heard, the National Trust for Scotland has lent several of its items to the exhibition, including those from Weaver’s Cottage. You can find details about the cottage on the National Trust for Scotland website. If you’d like to take a deep, historical dive, scroll back into your Love Scotland feed to February 2023, to our two-part look at the history of the clans. Don’t forget to hit the subscribe button wherever you found this podcast. It’s free and it means each new episode will appear without you having to go searching for it. But that’s all from us for now. Until next time, goodbye.

[MV]
Love Scotland is brought to you by Think and Demus Productions, on behalf of the National Trust for Scotland. Presented by Jackie Bird. For show notes and more information, go to nts.org.uk and don’t forget to like, subscribe, review and share.

Transcript

Four voices: Jackie Bird [JB]; Dr John Reid [JR]; Kathi Kamleitner [KK]; male voiceover [MV]

[JB]
It’s a crisp Sunday morning and I’m bouncing across a piece of undulating land. I got here by following a stony path up from the famous Falkirk Wheel, that celebration of industrial Scotland. But my walk has taken me much further back in time – to the very edge of the Roman empire. This is Rough Castle Fort, part of the Antonine Wall, built across Scotland to control entry into Britannia. At its peak, thousands of Roman troops patrolled and were garrisoned here. Today though, apart from a few geese and the odd dog walker, I have the place to myself. Although there are no physical remnants of the fort, excavations have revealed its layout and notably the huge deep ditch in front of me – a hallmark of the wall, aimed at halting the momentum of ferocious attackers. It would also have had some sharpened stakes and some thorn bushes, plus a few other uncomfortable surprises. Standing here, even though the weather is pretty benign, you wonder what it was like for the lowly Roman soldier garrisoned in this hostile territory during long, sub-zero patrols.

Not quite as harsh was the life of the Fort Commander. The visitors’ guide tells me he enjoyed a two-storey house with double glazing and his own baths. Use your imagination here. With the help of an artist’s impression of the fort, it is an impressive site. It is a World Heritage Site and owned by the National Trust for Scotland, and it’s the catalyst for today’s podcast. We’re aiming to find out more about that fractious relationship between Rome and this wild outpost – a story that’s still being debated to this day.

Hello and welcome to the Love Scotland podcast. I’ve abandoned my lonely garrison on the Antonine Wall and I’m now in the heart of Melrose, but actually just as close to Roman history because I’m in the Trimontium Museum where incredible Roman artefacts abound. As does deep knowledge, because I’m very pleased to say that my guest today is Dr John Reid. John is a former NHS consultant who is also an expert on Roman Scotland. His book, entitled The Eagle and the Bear: A New History of Roman Scotland, is published in April 2023. John, thank you for inviting me into the museum.

[JR]
Thank you, Jackie, for coming along and asking me to take part in your great podcast.

[JB]
I’m looking forward to our chat. I’m certainly having the full Roman experience – an atmospheric hill fort and now I’m surrounded by absolutely fabulous Roman artefacts. Tell me a bit about the museum.

[JR]
The museum has been around for about 3 decades now, Jackie. It was formed in the late 1980s. We had the benefit of a small collection of material from the National Museum, which they didn’t require for their own displays in Edinburgh. Over the first 25 years, we had a really good start to the museum – it was well-attended, but it became clear that the displays needed updating and so on. So about 4 years ago, we raised £1.4 million, which was no mean feat at the time, and we started the rebuilding just in time for COVID. Since it opened, it’s opened to great acclaim, and we’ve now been awarded 5 stars by VisitScotland!

[JB]
It’s an absolute gem. If you’re interested in Roman history at all, I heartily recommend it. But we are here to talk about your book, which I said is entitled A New History of Roman Scotland. This is because you’ve said you want to change the conversation around that period in history. What do you want to change?

[JR]
I think what’s happened over my working lifetime, the conversation has actually shifted from my understanding of Roman Scotland when I was a teenager. What’s happened over that period is that the conflict element of Roman Scotland has been dumbed down to the extent where things like Hadrian’s Wall (for example) are no longer seen as great defensive barriers against these tribes from the north – the sort of Game of Thrones scenario of the great wall. That story has effectively been flipped round to it being a customs barrier, a barrier to control immigrants and so on. I felt our history had become too affected by the zeitgeist of what was going on in Europe and in Britain and other countries around the world in the last quarter of the century. I thought it was time to re-examine that time period because it’s a very important time period for our history in Scotland. It’s foundational: it’s the first 400/500 years of recorded history. It was time to re-examine that and perhaps look at the archaeological evidence that had come to light over the last 3 or 4 decades, and take a fresh look at perhaps what you would describe as the collateral damage.

We’ve become very cuddly with the Romans over the last 100 years or so in Britain; we’ve become quite adept at explaining away all this wonderful engineering and all these wonderful things that they did, the civic buildings and so on. But actually, we forget that they were an occupying power. They were the world’s first superpower, truly inter-continental superpower. They arrived here with great flourish when Claudius invaded Britain in 43 AD and then moved inexorably northwards. Eventually they came into Caledonia in 79 AD and then all hell broke loose for three centuries. Somehow, we’ve lost that section of our history; it’s not well-known, it’s not well-understood. I thought it was time to re-examine that.

[JB]
So much to unpick there. We’ll start that in a moment. Firstly though, how does an NHS consultant become an expert in Roman history?!

[JR]
[chuckles] I was destined to be an archaeologist, and particularly a Romanist archaeologist when I was a child. My very first visit to a Roman site was Housesteads Fort on Hadrian’s Wall. The entrance fee for a child was 9 pence in old money. I was 12 then.

[JB]
So that was just after the Romans left?!

[JR]
Yes! It sometimes feels like that, looking back!

[JB]
Me too!

[JR]
I was absolutely hellbent on a career in archaeology but my father put his foot down and sent me off to do medicine. For 40 years, it was full on. I retired a few years back and I’ve turned my attention back to the archaeology and history of early Scotland.

[JB]
Another broad question: why are we so interested in Roman history? What is it about the Romans?

[JR]
Oh, everybody loves the Romans. When you’re running a museum, for example, if you’ve got mummies, dinosaurs or the Romans, you can’t fail!

[JB]
I forgot about the mummies … yes!

[JR]
The reason I think that the Romans grab our imagination is because they were so magnificently prepared to adopt technology, to adopt the latest trends and things – they were behaving like a modern superpower. They would take everybody’s best ideas, adapt it and adopt it. We see resonances there with the modern world and with our own lives. We also like the extremes of Rome. We like the beauty, we like the splendour, we like the magnificence; but we also like the sex and the violence and the blood and the thunder and the Coliseum, and all of that sort of thing. There is no other empire in the world that has produced such a wide spectrum of attractive or alluring ideas to get involved with.

[JB]
You say in your book, in the introduction, that much of the history is polarised, either pro-Roman or pro-Caledonian. Can you explain that and what it means as regards our efforts to understand the period?

[JR]
I think all of our understandings are affected by who we are, where we come from and what our backgrounds are, and so on. I think that plays through into the views of Rome, particularly a frontier situation like Scotland. Scotland was literally on the cusp of the empire. If you were in the south of England for example, you had villas and civic development, you had aqueducts – all sorts of fripperies that Rome would have brought with it, that we would term today evidence of civilisation. But as Tacitus said, those badges of civilisation were actually just badges of enslavement, because what Rome was doing was drawing people into their ideological purpose. When you then come up against people who are so culturally asymmetric to the occupying power, that’s when you get friction and that’s when you get major problems in trying to get people to do what you want them to do. That then creates trouble.

The one thing Rome did not like was trouble. Rome liked everybody to be paying their taxes and worshipping the emperor and doing all the things the Romans thought you should do as a good citizen. Just get on with it, and it would mean the army wouldn’t have to be an expensive necessity to keep you all under control. If you take provinces like Spain, for example, they only had a single legion to control the whole of Spain! That huge land mass – a single legion based in Leon. Well, in Britain, we had 3 (and at one time) 4 legions continuously based here. In fact, there’s an alarming figure that 1 in 6 of all Roman auxiliaries of the whole empire were at one time serving in North Britain. 1 in 6!

[JB]
Good grief. As you describe it, you’ve got two very different cultures colliding. They were always going to be trouble. And also you mentioned Tacitus, the Roman writer and historian, and I suppose part of the difficulty in terms of getting your source material, in getting the other side of the story, is that the Romans were writing history but we weren’t. Principally because we couldn’t write at that stage.

[JR]
Exactly. We had no written tradition; it was all oral. All of that, of course, has been lost. So, the only people who were writing the story effectively were the Romans, and to an extent the Greeks, because the Greeks were the Romans’ scribes. But there was one writer – and I highlight this in the book – who wrote the story from the opposite side. It’s a writer who I think has not received the due attention that he should do, in relation to our own history. And that’s Flavius Josephus, who was a Jewish commander of the Jewish forces during the First Great Revolt against Rome. He was a Galilean and he commanded the Jewish forces in Galilee. Ultimately, he didn’t do it very well because he was an amateur; he was actually a diplomat and a religious man. He didn’t do it very well and he eventually found himself trapped at a siege where his garrison was besieged and all his compatriots committed suicide. He was the last man standing and he decided to defect to the Roman side. Because he was an articulate and very educated Jew, he was able to describe that Jewish Revolt against Rome and what Rome did to people who were recalcitrant subjects, what they did in detail – and the devil really is in the detail. You have to read it to believe it.

[JB]
So, the great engineers, the road builders, were also barbarous.

[JR]
Yeah, they were brutal beyond your imagining. If you just read what they did in Judea … And that was the First Jewish Revolt. The Second Jewish Revolt takes place under Hadrian, when Hadrian’s emperor. Under that, Cassius Dio, the great Roman historian, records that the Romans slaughtered 500,000 Jews in one go during that particular revolt. One of the Roman generals who was part of that great slaughter was none other than Lollius Urbicus, who is given the job to invade Scotland by the emperor Antoninus Pius.

[JB]
So, they sent the tough guys.

[JR]
They sent the guy who already had form.

[JB]
In terms of the source material for everything that you have written in this re-evaluation, you’ve had to depend a lot on archaeology. But even that is difficult, because in your book you detail in Edwardian times – now we think of archaeologists finding a site and going with a small brush and pan – they were going at it with pickaxes! Even that wasn’t easy!

[JR]
Absolutely. We’ve lost a lot of the fine detail because much of Roman Scotland was investigated during that early archaeological period, in the time of antiquarians or the very early part of the 20th century when it was literally picks and shovels. We’ve lost a lot of the detail. For example, the Antonine Wall, there are less than 200 coins found right across the Antonine Wall during excavations. If you compare that to the 4,500 from Vindolanda, a single fort, you can see that we’ve got problems with dating events, because coins are one of the most important dating tools to get your facts and figures right about when places were occupied.

[JB]
Alright, let’s go back in time then. As you’ve already started telling me, the first serious colonising Roman invasion in southern Britain: AD 43 by the Emperor Claudius. Why did it take 30 years to turn their attentions to the north?

[JR]
That’s a fabulous question. You might think, was it because it was too difficult? Was it because there was resistance? I suspect it was because of the way Rome did things. They did things, wherever possible, by trying to get the local tribes to become vassal states. And then that meant that you didn’t have to go and occupy the territory, and very soon the elites of that vassal state would start feeding into the Roman way of life and the Roman ideology. If you look at which stories we do know, it’s that piecemeal they picked off tribes or states, heading northwards over 20 or 30 years. Until eventually they come to what is in effect the Borders of modern Scotland in the late 70s.

Now, there is a misconception that the people up here suddenly woke up and saw all these gleaming banners and heard the trumpets and went ‘oh my gosh, what’s that?’ Absolutely not the case. If you think about how information travels, say at the time of the Battle of Waterloo, information travelled on foot and horseback, written on a piece of paper carried by a person. There was no telegraph. The information about Waterloo would have reached Stornoway at the same speed that the information that the Romans had landed in the south of Britain would reach up here. It would have reached here within weeks or months. The people here in Caledonia would have known what the Romans were doing, and they would have known the Romans were coming for three decades before they ever appeared.

[JB]
And is there any evidence as to what the Romans thought of the Caledonians?

[JR]
There is a literary trope about the Caledonians being naked savages and woad-wearing, woad-covered fighters and so on. You will find that same description is applied to many of the peoples on the boundaries of the empire, particularly Germans. There’s a bit of a conflation with Germany, because Tacitus says that the red hair and the big limbs of the Caledonians must suggest that they’re of German stock – he makes that association with Germany. There was an understanding in literary terms that people beyond the boundaries of the empire were ‘barbarians’. But of course, you have to remember that there were thousands of years of civilisation in these peoples – they had their own developed societies and their own way of doing things before the Romans arrived. They just weren’t Roman in their attitudes, or their behaviours or their engineering, or whatever.

[JB]
Was the Roman point of view, was that spin (to use a clumsy word), if you have to characterise your enemy then you have discredit them first of all. You almost dehumanise them.

[JR]
You inferiorise that occupied power and then eventually get them thinking that they have to eat fish suppers and be drunk all the time, which is what goes on today. There is a self-inferiorisation then takes place. Eventually it looks as though the occupying power is something you really need to aim for, to improve your life, to move up in the world.

[JB]
Alright, let’s get into the nitty gritty. There was an early notable battle: Mons Graupius, AD 83. Why was that significant?

[JR]
It was significant for a number of reasons. Historically, because Tacitus describes it in quite a bit of detail, we think that that battle took place quite far north because it was at the end of the campaigning season for that particular year. Agricola had taken his troops on quite a long journey, so their supply lines would probably be quite fragile by that point. He says so; Agricola points out that they’re quite exposed where they are at the time in the battle. The battle is significant in that it’s the first major confrontation between concerted action by the Romans and a group action by the Caledonian or Scottish tribes. Remember, Scotland wasn’t called Scotland then – there was no name for it. Modern Scotland was really only founded in the 9th century.

[JB]
You say a group effort, because there were lots of tribes, probably warring tribes. Did they come together at that point?

[JR]
Yes, absolutely. That is something that we see history repeat, time and time again. We know, even from Roman times, that German tribes coalesced as a response to Roman aggression. The individual German tribes fused to produce credible resistance to Rome. There’s no reason to believe they weren’t doing that here. In fact, Roman historians record that the many tribes of North Britain coalesced into two eventually: the Caledonians and the Scoti, who were probably partly from Ireland, the tribes on the western part of Britain. And then eventually the Picts appear in the 3rd century, and then you have effectively the Picts and the Scots until the early medieval period.

[JB]
When the Scots all came together, did that give the Romans a fright?

[JR]
Oh yeah. It didn’t just give them a fright – Rome was then, for about a century, for the last 100 years of Roman rule, Rome was on the back foot. From about 300 to 400 AD, Rome was in trouble.

[JB]
Alright. We’re jumping ahead a little bit. We haven’t even got to Hadrian’s Wall! So, the Romans had a go, the tribes all came together, they gave the Romans a fright. They thought ‘we’re up against something here’. How come such a well-organised superpower could be challenged by a disparate group of native peoples?

[JR]
Again, that’s a very good question. Recent research has shown that where you have asymmetric warfare – that is where you have effectively a superpower and then an indigenous people – if you look at prolonged warfare between these two groups, the superpower loses or comes to a stalemate in about 1 in 3 cases. You’ll see that around the world to this day – in Afghanistan, in Vietnam and other asymmetric wars, where you have superpowers pitched against the indigenous population. Even though they’re smaller in number and they’re not as technologically advanced, they can hold the superpower to a stalemate.

[JB]
You mention Afghanistan. One of the fascinating parts of your book is that you detail the correlation between what happened here, and you describe Scotland as ‘Rome’s Afghanistan’. We’re going to have to stop for a break, but I’d really like you to expand on that before we do.

[JR]
I use the term because there are parallels that I think are quite apposite to what happened during the Roman Iron Age. If you think about long supply lines, difficult terrain, pronounced cultural asymmetry, you have this conflict and clash of quite different cultures. But one side, the smaller side, being really sure of its territory, being really sure of its terrain, knowing where it can go and hide or come out and fight, and so on. It will learn ways of dealing with the technological and numerical superiority of the superpower. And that is I think what happened to Rome. Rome came to Scotland, and they got stuck. They couldn’t go forward and they couldn’t go back because they couldn’t leave the northern flank of the province unprotected. So, the high-water mark of imperial powers is usually to build the frontier, to build a wall. And that’s exactly what Rome did. They built Hadrian’s Wall.

[JB]
And they were up against insurgency. And that idea – those parallels with Afghanistan – from my first-hand experience. I was in Afghanistan during the war and I was in Helmand Province. I was told ‘we are in charge; the war is going great’. I said that’s fine, can we travel beyond Camp Bastion? And they said ‘not on your nelly’. And that was the same as Hadrian’s Wall. We have a wall. They’re the insurgents, but it’s not entirely safe to go out unless you are heavily armoured.

[JR]
Absolutely. And the archaeology in Scotland confirms exactly that. If you look at the civilian settlements around Roman forts in Scotland, they’re all heavily fortified. They’re armoured; they are impermeable. If you look at the civilian settlements around Roman forts south of Hadrian’s Wall, they have no fortifications around them. The archaeology tells you that the civilian (or non-combatant) settlements round about the Roman forts in Scotland were dangerous places.

[JB]
Well, let’s take a break on that point. And when we come back, we will talk about the mystery of the fate of the 9th Legion. We’ll be back in a moment.

[KK]
Hello there! My name is Kathi Kamleitner and I’m here to tell you about my podcast: Wild for Scotland. If you enjoy travelling, spending time outside or simply relaxing to a good story, check out Wild for Scotland and join me for inspiring journeys from the cobbled streets of Edinburgh to the sandy beaches of the Western Isles. This spring, we’ll explore the historic heart of Fife, wild lands in unexpected places, and up and down the west coast. Think of it like story time for adults, that inspires you to pack your bags and head out to explore. So, join me on the Wild for Scotland podcast. Listen now, wherever you get your podcasts.

[MV]
A donation to the National Trust for Scotland, no matter how small, will help to protect the places that make Scotland so special. With your help, we can respond quickly to mountain wildfires or fix damage from winter storms, and we can carry out vital work to ensure historical sites and fragile wildlife survive for future generations. Just search National Trust for Scotland and click Donate.

[JB]
Welcome back to the Love Scotland podcast with my guest today, Dr John Reid. Now, John, before the break I touched on the mystery of the 9th Legion. It’s one of the most enduring stories of the era. It’s the unknown fate of a legion, around 5,000 would you say, Roman soldiers?

[JR]
Yes, around about that.

[JB]
More or less. Who mysteriously disappeared, as the tale goes, in the mists of Caledonia. It’s a story that’s spawned books, movies, and even now there’s a great debate as to what happened. Are we any nearer finding out?

[JR]
I think we’ve probably narrowed the possibilities. We can exclude some of the wilder ideas about what happened to the legion. We know the legion definitely was written off the books of the Roman Empire by the 160s because there’s a famous column in Rome that lists all the legions – and the 9th is missing from that list in the 160s. The 9th was an old legion; it was originally formed by Caesar and then was reconstituted in the early part of the empire and became one of the first legions to invade Britain under Claudius. So, the 9th was here for quite a long time from the 40s AD right through until they disappear from Britain.

The legion, we know, vanishes in the sense that it goes off the books – there’s no record of what ultimately happened to it. It has two near misses that are recorded. One under Boudica, when the 9th Legion is given an absolute pasting by Boudica’s forces; and their legate, the commander in charge of the legion, barely escapes with his life and a remnant of the cavalry of the legion. And then again during the Agricolan campaign into Scotland in the early 80s AD, the legion is again attacked, this time by the Caledonians and nearly comes a cropper. We think probably somewhere in Angus or Tayside. The legion almost comes a cropper then and is only rescued by Agricola arriving with reinforcements in the 20th Legion. We know that the legion itself had a bit of bad luck following it. Then, by the time it comes round to the building of Hadrian’s Wall, the legion is not attested on any of the inscriptions.

[JB]
So, what do we think happened to them?

[JR]
I believe, as do quite a few academics now, that the legion did face some major conflict, probably in the north of England or the south of Scotland. It was badly mauled at that time. One of the things the Romans did when a legion was mauled was to effectively disband it if they couldn’t replace the number of casualties and so on; the legion would be disbanded. The Romans didn’t usually record that! That was not a thing that they liked to broadcast.

[JB]
This was a huge loss of face. This really didn’t happen across the empire, because the stories abounded that they were massacred. But others have said no, they were just broken up and they were sent to all corners of the empire. At the end of the day, you think they took another pasting.

[JR]
I think they probably did. It’s not unreasonable to think that the huge outburst of violence at the start of Hadrian’s reign – and that’s recorded in the archaeology; it’s recorded by historians that there were great violences. It’s recorded that the violence that took place in Britain at that time was comparable to the Second Jewish Revolt, which I mentioned was a major, major event in Hadrian’s lifetime. I think that, as a response to that, the 6th Legion was brought from Germany to fill the gap. We know that it definitely was, and it filled the gap by taking up residency at York. Hadrian then institutes the wall that still carries his name to this day.

[JB]
So, we have Hadrian’s Wall. And then how many years after do we get the Antonine Wall?

[JR]
Well, Hadrian’s Wall is started in about 122; it may have been started just slightly earlier than that. But the Antonine Wall gets going under the reign of Antoninus Pius, who’s the emperor who immediately succeeds Hadrian. That invasion starts about 139, less than 20 years after Hadrian’s Wall is initiated.

[JB]
The activity from Rome in Caledonia had waxed and waned. They had a push, it hadn’t worked, they came back – because as you said, ok there were no settlements but they did get as far as the North East. There were strings of forts and garrisons right up to, how far?

[JR]
They got up almost to Inverness.

[JB]
That’s amazing! So, why the decision to build (or dig) the Antonine Wall? What was the aim?

[JR]
Ah. Now, I think the aim behind the Antonine Wall was two-fold. Part of it was to move the frontier forward.

[JB]
About a hundred miles, isn’t it?

[JR]
A hundred miles, yes. There is some reasonable arable land that would be taken in by that, mainly in the Forth and Clyde areas and in the Tweed Valley Basin. Also, there would be friendly tribes in that area that may have colluded with the Romans. We know round about Traprain Law, there’s evidence that they were doing business with Rome, very unusually. They stand out as a very unusual situation in Roman Scotland. They were almost certainly a client kingdom, a puppet kingdom. What you have then is Rome’s desire to take that territory to within the boundaries of the empire. It shortens the length of the frontier; the Antonine Wall was only half the length – it’s only 37 miles long. It means that you can garrison it more effectively; it’s more cost-effective. And also it gives Antoninus Pius, who effectively is an aristocrat with very little military credibility, it gives him a big win that was pretty well assured. Because he’s only taking 100 miles of this province, but it’s seen as a barbaric, wild province where he’s going to get some military kudos. It was known by the Romans in the Latin term as provincia ferox – a wild or ferocious province.

[JB]
And we come back to one of the themes of your book, because although they had moved 100 miles, what happened to the indigenous people, the opponents who were still there? Were they moved? Were they overcome? Were they imprisoned? What happened?

[JR]
There have been a lot of theories about that. There was a theory prevalent for a number of decades that the people had been moved en masse to the German frontier, that they had been extracted from the area and moved out – the way we’ve seen happen in more modern times with frontier movements, where tribes are literally rounded up and moved on or put on reservations or moved out of their own tribal lands. R G Collingwood, the great historian, thought they had been moved to Germany because inscriptions start turning up in Germany round about the time of Antoninus Pius suggesting that young men had been conscripted from Caledonia or northern Britain, and conscripted into the auxiliary regiments of the Roman army and posted to the German frontier.

We think that’s not so likely now. Probably, more brutally, they were either just simply moved out en masse as refugees – we see that happen to this day – or there was genocide. People were moved but we’re fairly confident that the settlements between the two walls were pretty well deserted. Some new work from the Northumberland Plain suggests that there was definitely a catastrophic change in the life experience of people north of Hadrian’s Wall. There’s no doubt about it now, archaeologically.

[JB]
They think that only after about 20 years the Antonine Wall was abandoned. Why?

[JR]
I suspect the Antonine Wall, unlike Hadrian’s Wall, was more of a vanity project for Antoninus Pius. The Antonine Wall was built from turf and timber, which is not as durable obviously as the stone wall of Hadrian’s Wall. I think the Romans pragmatically decided to pull back, mainly because it was probably easier to refurbish Hadrian’s Wall than to do something serious with the Antonine Wall and then start building it in stone and regarrisoning it, and so on. It was probably easier just to pull back.

[JB]
So, the Romans pulled back from the Antonine Wall, but they weren’t finished. They had one final push?

[JR]
Yeah, the biggest push of all actually comes under another famous emperor; this time Septimius Severus, the famous African emperor. He was from Libya, modern-day Libya, a place called Leptis Magna. He came with the full imperial entourage to Britain to deal with the Caledonians. He came with his two sons – Caracalla and Geta – probably the Praetorian Guard and the full ensemble, including the Empress Julia Domna who came with him. He was made emperor after a bitter period of in-fighting. Roman on Roman was often what happened when the succession was challenged. He emerged the victor towards the end of the 2nd century, and in the early 3rd century brings this massive land army, probably the biggest land army that Britain’s seen, to fight on British soil, which clatters through Hadrian’s Wall on its way north to deal with the Caledonians.

[JB]
So, what happened? How could … well, we think we know what happened – because we’re not Roman! Why did it fail?

[JR]
Why did it fail? I suspect partially logistics, partially because guerrilla warfare was not what the Romans were used to fighting.

[JB]
But these were the conquerors of the world!

[JR]
They were indeed; there’s no doubt about that. I’ve always though had this childhood vision of the Romans rather like Daleks. They’re ok on the flat, but the minute they’re faced with stairs, mountains or forests … !

[JB]
Very good!

[JR]
They’re completely stuffed! When they go north of Hadrian’s Wall, it doesn’t matter how many men they’ve got, the Caledonians can fall back and fall back and fall back until eventually the Romans are into territory they can’t deal with. The Highlands of Scotland were never populated with Roman forts; there isn’t a single Roman fort in the Highlands of Scotland. Despite them skirting around Strathmore and getting up to Inverness by the east coast route, they don’t penetrate the Highlands.

[JB]
This must have been an incredible loss of face.

[JR]
Oh yeah. There is a temporary appeasement with the emperor. Severus takes this ‘surrender’ from the local tribes. Obviously, his wife has dinner with the Caledonian chieftain’s wife, where they swap stories about the virtues of their menfolk. But at some point, the Romans consider the treaty to be broken and then Severus really does lose it. He decrees a genocidal campaign for the final year of ‘kill everybody and leave no-one alive to memorialise the dead’.

[JB]
Why don’t I know about that? Why isn’t that taught widely?

[JR]
I don’t know the reason for that. That’s one of the reasons why I think we need to re-visit this period of our history. It may be that it’s not attractive; it might not fit in with our old ideas of empire and what good emperors should do, and the improving nature of Rome. I don’t know. I think it’s one of the great mysteries why that’s not part of our Scottish history.

[JB]
There is a scorched earth policy, almost, to end this last push, which doesn’t end in colonisation. So, ultimately, it’s not successful. When do the Romans eventually give up on the northern territories?

[JR]
Well, Severus dies actually on campaign. He is cremated in York, and his sons Caracalla and Geta take over. They scuttle back to Rome to establish their power. Rome is a military dictatorship – you have to get right in there with the legions and get the power structure sorted out. But it’s not the end. There are multiple other incursions as the Picts gather pace. The Picts appear for the first time round about this time.

[JB]
Which is when?

[JR]
The start of the 4th century, round about the 300s, the early 300s. They get going really in that final century of the Roman occupation. The Romans, for that century, are on the back foot. The Picts coalesce as a single unit, and that single unit has obviously learned something from this 250-year onslaught of warfare with Rome. And then Rome is in trouble. At one point, Rome always loses grip of the whole province at the time of what’s called the Barbarian Conspiracy.

[JB]
You argue in your book, which I found fascinating, that this 250–300 years of resistance from Caledonia may have had a lasting effect on the Scottish psyche that’s become (and I quote) ‘an indelible trait of northerners’. So, no sewage system or town planning to enjoy from the Romans – but is the argument that the Roman legacy left us a bit thrawn?

[JR]
Thrawn is exactly the word I would have used actually, if I had thought more people would understand it. You’re right; I think it does leave us thrawn, and part of that is because of the duration of this onslaught. We’re talking about a martial onslaught on Scotland much much longer than the Wars of Independence, much much longer than the Hanoverian period, much much longer (as I said) than the Berlin Wall or that sort of ideological conflict in Europe. We’re looking at something that went on for nearly four centuries, right at the birth of this nation. Of course, Hadrian’s Wall splits Britain in two. The Romans actually made the first border. There is absolutely no doubt that the people beyond that barrier, beyond that cordon, are seen as ‘other’. The people south of that are seen as something different. I think that has a permeative effect on people’s behaviour. That went on for 300-odd years. It’s only a small leap then until the Wars of Independence.

[JB]
That explains such a lot. There is so much more to talk about. I heartily recommend your book. John, thank you very much for your time.

[JR]
Thank you, Jackie, for those wonderful questions.

[JB]
John Reid’s book The Eagle and the Bear: A New History of Roman Scotland is published by Birlinn on 6 April 2023. If you’d like to know more about the Antonine Wall, specifically Rough Castle Fort which I visited, it’s one of three stretches of the wall owned by the National Trust for Scotland which are in the guardianship of Historic Environment Scotland. You can find more details on our website – just head for nts.org.uk
And that’s all from this episode of Love Scotland. Until next time, goodbye.

[MV]
Love Scotland is brought to you by Think and Demus Productions, on behalf of the National Trust for Scotland. Presented by Jackie Bird. For show notes and more information, go to nts.org.uk and don’t forget to like, subscribe, review and share.

Transcript

Four voices: male voiceover [MV]; Jackie Bird [JB]; Hannah Lawrence [HL]; Colin McFarlane [CM]

[MV]
Love Scotland – from the National Trust for Scotland. Presented by Jackie Bird.

[JB]
Hello and welcome to the latest episode of Love Scotland. Although much of today’s story takes place at Ayrshire’s Culzean Castle, perched on cliffs on Scotland’s west coast, it begins in West Africa. It’s the year 1700 and the transatlantic slave trade is nearing its peak. A boy born in Guinea, whose birth name has been lost to history, is sold into slavery. He’s one of millions of slaves from Africa, and most of those captured in Guinea were bound for the Caribbean, where conditions were harsh. The death rate on the ships that carried them and on the plantations was high. Of more than 3 million Africans transported to the Caribbean and the Americas by the British between 1640 and 1807, some 400,000 didn’t even survive the journey.

The boy is eventually brought to Scotland, to Culzean. At the time, young African boys were used in some stately homes as a sign of wealth and power. He’s given the first name Scipio and the surname of the castle’s owners, Kennedy.

His is a revealing story of what life was like for an African slave in Scotland at the dawn of the 18th century. Scipio’s life has been pieced together by Hannah Lawrence, who’s been connecting fragments of historical records for a blog on the National Trust for Scotland website. And, we have Hannah in person to tell us all about it. Hannah, welcome to the podcast.

[HL]
Thank you so much! I’m so happy to be here.

[JB]
Now, before we tell Scipio’s story, my first observation is that I didn’t know that enslaved people, never mind children, were brought to Scotland. Was Scipio a rarity?

[HL]
No, he wouldn’t have been a rarity. I think this, as you said, was fashionable. This is what gave aristocratic ladies the edge in society, to say that they were part of this new, colonial world. Servants were often young, and they were also considered a good investment for the future, and sometimes not a great investment. Once they got older, they were forgotten.

[JB]
How did you become interested in Scipio’s story?

[HL]
I did research on British country houses for many years, starting in about 2014. I came across his story and I thought it was very interesting because it’s such an important story and there’s so little known about it. I was really shocked when I started asking around curators and historians, and nobody had heard about him. So, I decided to delve a little bit deeper, and I realised just how fascinating his story was, even though we do know so little about it. I think he’s probably living through maybe a little more than a dozen sheets of paper. So yeah, I think I was shocked by the disparity in terms of how much we actually knew about him and how much there was to know.

[JB]
And your job is as an academic researcher. How challenging was it to piece that story together once you got your teeth into it?

[HL]
It’s extremely challenging. I talk to people about it all the time, and I bore them to death! Most people in history live on through administrative documents, and sometimes documents that have nothing to do with them, especially in Scipio Kennedy’s case – a lot of times he’s a footnote in the Kennedy family archive. So yes, it’s extremely difficult to match up dates, match up names. And of course, there’s a million John Kennedys, a million Thomas Kennedys – a million Kennedys in general(!) – so putting it all together has been a challenge.

[JB]
Well, let’s talk about Scipio’s story. What’s the earliest date that we find him?

[HL]
The earliest date we find him is around 1695–97; this is through back-dating, essentially. We don’t have anything from that date itself. What we have is his manumission contract, which I’m sure we’ll come to …

[JB]
That’s his freedom contract, isn’t it?

[HL]
This is his freedom contract. There’s a few caveats there, but yes, it’s his freedom contract. And in that, in 1725, it says that he is 28 or 30. So, if we do the calculations, that means that around 1695 to 1697 he would have been born.

[JB]
How old was he and where was he taken from?

[HL]
He would have been taken from Jamaica by Captain Andrew Douglas. He would originally have been from Guinea, Africa – we know that again from the manumission contract. He would have been around 6, I believe, at the time of being bought by Douglas.

[JB]
And it was Captain Andrew Douglas who brought him to Scotland. Do we know why?

[HL]
He did. He had Scipio for 3 years and he was brought over to Scotland to be a gift for his daughter for her wedding day to John Kennedy, 2nd Baronet of Culzean.

[JB]
Good grief. So, Scipio was a gift for the captain’s daughter Jean. Then what happened?

[HL]
Scipio was a gift for Jean. Then Jean and John got married, and they moved to Culzean. That is where Scipio was brought with them. He would have been perhaps around 10 at this point, if he had been with Douglas for about 3 years. He would have likely been a page boy, a servant just like we spoke about earlier. He would have been maybe not very much help; he was very, very young, so I’m not entirely sure how much he was actually able to contribute to the household. But domestic servants were quite young back then. He would have done basic domestic chores around the house. He would have been a very visible servant, which likely would have been part of what they were wanting.

[JB]
Because presumably he would have been the only person of colour perhaps in the castle, the estate, the surrounding area?

[HL]
Absolutely. He’s the only one that I’ve come across. I have done some digging and I haven’t found any evidence of another black person in the area.

[JB]
Do we know anything of his life there?

[HL]
We know very little. We know that later in life he potentially was taught weaving and textiles, and of course we have a lot of information in the manumission contract where he said that he was given food and clothing and maintenance and education; that he was treated with extraordinary kindness. So, based on that and pretty much that alone, we can glean a little bit about what his life would have been like. Other than that, it’s mostly speculation.

[JB]
You say he was in his late 20s, nearly 30, when he was given his freedom. Do we know why?

[HL]
We don’t know why.

[JB]
Was that normal?

[HL]
It’s hard to tell if it were normal or not, just because there are so few records that we know about. He talks in the manumission contract about him accepting Christianity; we know that this was often a factor for manumitting slaves. We don’t know the particular reasons around his manumission, but we do know that around 1725, it wasn’t in statute in Scotland or England that slavery was actually allowed and legal. It was kind of an ambiguous state to be in anyway. And so, to be manumitted is to also admit that you have a slave in a country where slavery is not written into law. That’s what I mean about the caveats about the manumission. Was it an actual freedom contract? Some people say no; some people say it was just a record of employment, it was an employment contract that says you’re now going to be paid for your labour. That just inherently means that you’re not a slave. But it doesn’t specifically say Scipio was a slave and is now not a slave, in the way that other slave documents do say that from that century. It is later in that century that we get the more explicit wording in contracts like that. And so, there’s nothing to say why, but it does seem that they’re trying to paint a picture of a happy family, of good relationships. One would like to hope that he’s being freed because they have some sort of familial connection that they’re looking to legitimise in another way.

[JB]
I suppose the test of that is to find out what he did after achieving manumission.

[HL]
We have some more evidence from that period of time. He did go on to get married and he had 8 children.

[JB]
Oh my goodness, right.

[HL]
8 children!

[JB]
Who did he marry?

[HL]
He married a woman named Margaret Grey. She was a local woman. First of all, we know that, of course, because of the marriage certificate. We know her before that because they both show up in what’s called the Kirk Sessions, which is the lowest court in the Church at the time. She goes to the Kirk Session and says ‘I am with child’, and this is before marriage, I’ll remind you!

[JB]
Ooh.

[HL]
She says, ‘I am with child, and it is with Scipio Kennedy of Culzean’. There is a riveting couple of pages in these Kirk Sessions where they’re going back and forth about whether he takes responsibility or not, and how they’re both punished for fornication out of wedlock.

[JB]

Do we know if this was a romance, or just an attraction, a fleeting attraction as they say?

[HL]
I think that’s a great question and it’s one that I’ve contemplated myself. I do a lot of reading between the lines of these Kirk Session records to try and see if I can glean anything from them! There is a bit of it that I think points to her feeling a certain way about Scipio Kennedy. It’s a part where she – I don’t have the exact verbiage here – but what she says is that he has not been essentially with anyone but her, and that she doesn’t plan to give the child to another. That’s the exact verbiage: she wouldn’t give that child to another. That to me says that she feels there’s something monogamous potentially about their relationship, and that she is prepared to take on the child regardless of whether he takes responsibility or not. But there’s some sort of affection there, I like to read into it!

[JB]
Yes, that’s good enough for me. Let’s put it down as a love story, shall we?

[HL]
Yes! Let’s do.

[JB]
What was the reaction in the community though to an interracial marriage?

[HL]
This is another question that I think is an interesting one, and I’ve done a bit of research on it. I want to defer to David Olusoga …

[JB]
Yes, the historian.

[HL]
That’s right. He spoke a little bit about that. He said that black Georgians were in interracial marriages and it was seemingly an unremarkable feature of life. This racial mixing seemed to have not convinced some people that relationships with black people should be taboo. We’re talking about black Georgians, that’s early 1700s. Later, another historian has said that once we get later into the 1700s and ideas start to change, and people start to be more familiar with the idea of slavery, and they start to draw opinions and create judgements, then they start to get more critical of this idea of interracial marriage. So, it’s entirely possible that at the beginning of their marriage, it might have been a lot easier to have been married than later in their marriage, when people had started developing very racialised ideas and judgemental ideas about interracial relationships.

[JB]
How interesting. You always think that, as civilisation develops, we’re supposed to become more advanced. It seems in this case that has certainly not been the case. Ok, so 8 children. Apart from the fact that he was pretty busy at home, what of his later life?

[HL]
Yeah, so 8 children. Eventually, I’m assuming, because of the growing family, they needed their own space. We assume that he would have been living in Culzean Castle while he was working there as a servant. But once he got married, was manumitted and started having children, they built him a house to the tune of about £90, which was really, really pricey. I don’t want to get into the business of old money conversion because it’s really, really dicey, but it’s about half the wage of a middle-class income, that they spent on just his house. So, he moved into this house and may have learned weaving, potentially. He ended up living until he was 84 or 86 years old, in 1774. He lived a really long life. The life expectancy of that time was around 40, so …

[JB]
Gosh. He had a house in the grounds of Culzean, built for him by the family. I understand that Jean left him a pretty substantial sum in her will.

[HL]
She did. She left him £10. By comparison, she left each of her three grandchildren a third of £40. She had a little note in her will that says ‘to my old servant Scipio’. We can gauge the way that he was sitting in that family by that little note alone.

[JB]
It is, I suppose, because he was taken from his home; he had no control over his life before, during or after. What’s your assessment about what his story and what you’ve unearthed tells us about Scipio and about his time?

[HL]
I think Scipio’s an important story because he doesn’t have any grand court cases associated with him. There was nothing huge that came out of his life in his lifetime, or even after, in the way that Joseph Knight, who was another enslaved Scottish man. His life resulted in a landmark case which ended slavery in Scotland, or it made slavery in Scotland not legal is what I should say. So, nothing really grand happened around his life, and so it speaks to the ubiquity of these sorts of lives that they can just be there, be ‘normal lives’. They’re part of the Scottish story; they’re part of the Scottish landscape; they’re part of the Scottish built history. I think that’s why he’s so important because I think he demonstrates that exact meaning.

[JB]
Yes, I think it underscores what I said at the beginning, that it was a normal life – but I didn’t know anything about it. I didn’t know that enslaved people were brought to castles to be playthings or accessories for the wealthy.

[HL]
No, often we do see it in paintings. These paintings aren’t often up for people to see, and that’s a shame. Often, they’re not contextualised properly so that people have an idea of where these paintings came from, why they were painted this way, who were these people. A lot of times, these grand, aristocratic figures are the only ones acknowledged in the painting, when we’ve got a young, black, enslaved boy who’s serving the principal character. A lot of these servant characters in the painting go unacknowledged; they go unnamed.

[JB]
Well, you’ve certainly done your bit to bring him to prominence. Can I just ask – he had 8 children. I understand from your blog that at least a few of his children did pretty well for themselves. Has anyone tried to track them down through the generations? Are there any Scipio descendants that you’ve been able to make contact with?

[HL]
There are. I luckily had one of his descendants contact me after reading the blog series, and he also wrote up an article in a newspaper. He had traced his line back to Scipio. There will be many, many more out there. 8 children is no joke, so he’ll have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people out there who can trace their line.

[JB]
That must have been a moment for you, whenever one of Scipio’s descendants actually got in touch.

[HL]
Yeah! I think the most shocking part probably to him is that he’s a white Scottish man. He didn’t expect it; he wouldn’t have expected it. But it’s in our blood. We’re a melting pot, all of us, no matter where we’re from.

[JB]
We certainly are. And you’re now working on a Scipio trail at Culzean – what will that entail?

[HL]
It’s really exciting. I’m really excited to finally get Scipio on the ground there in Culzean. The trail will follow different places where he’s purported to or definitely has tread, on the Culzean estate and also in the Kirkoswald old kirkyard, where it’s got the old Kirkoswald church and it’s got him and his son’s gravestone. We’re really excited to get something that people can explore on their own, and hopefully it’ll be that next step toward getting a permanent display at Culzean.

[JB]
Hannah Lawrence, thank you for sharing your research with us.

[HL]
Thank you so much! I’ve really enjoyed it. Thanks so much.

[JB]
But that is not where we leave Scipio’s story, because it’s attracted the interest of one of the stars of the historical drama Outlander, who’ll be joining me in just a moment to reveal how historical truth has merged with best-selling fiction. We’ll be back after the break.

[MV]
From coastlines to castles, wildlife to wilderness, when you become a member of the National Trust for Scotland you can enjoy the very best of what Scotland has to offer, as often as you like. And you can help to protect it. The National Trust for Scotland is Scotland’s largest conservation charity. By becoming a member, you join thousands of others who are all playing their part to care for the places we love, for generations to come. Join us and become a member today. Just search National Trust for Scotland.

[JB]
Welcome back to the Love Scotland podcast and welcome to Colin McFarlane. Known to many of you as an actor on TV and movies, he’s appeared on hit shows like Dr Who and in the Dark Knight trilogy. But notably for our purposes, he’s also one of the stars of the immensely successful Outlander TV series. Hello, Colin.

[CM]
Hello, Jackie. What a pleasure to be here.

[JB]
Well, it’s lovely to have you. We’ve just been hearing all about the life of Scipio Kennedy, and in Outlander you play Ulysses, a freed slave in post-Jacobite Scotland. Now firstly, to be clear, the real person and the character you play, they aren’t linked, are they?

[CM]
Well, we didn’t think so when I started filming … but bizarrely we now think that having traced my McFarlane Scottish ancestry, bizarrely there may be for those Outlander fans tuning in (and they know all about the Battle of Culloden), there may actually be a connection to the Jacobites in the Battle of Culloden.

[JB]
Now, that is a real tease. We’ll come to that a little bit later. But talk about Ulysses for the moment. As I discovered earlier in the podcast, for reasons of race and class, there are very few detailed historical records. So, when you took on the role of Ulysses, were you able to research the character?

[CM]
Yeah, I looked around, but I didn’t know about Scipio at that time. I just did general slave research, I guess. Diana Gabaldon, who writes the books for those who don’t know the series, she is an historian and that’s how she began. Outlander was a sort of exercise to see if she could write a novel – ha ha ha! And then it turns into this mammoth juggernaut. So, I read the books that Ulysses is in, and there’s a lot of research within the books, which was really useful. It tells you all about the time, who was in power, what lives were like at that time – so I got a lot of my research from her writing. It was very clear. She gave me a lovely back story to Ulysses.

He was originally from South-West England. He had a series of different masters. His first master, who supposedly treated him very well, was a scholar and taught Ulysses to read Greek and Latin, and to play harpsichord, and to be able to talk to gentlemen and ladies. They travelled the world together and supposedly had a great relationship, and then his master dies and sells him to a Scottish lord, who was called Hector Cameron. We see him briefly in one of the episodes of Outlander. He then has a wife called Jocasta, who’s a major character in the series. She’s losing her sight, so Ulysses gets passed to Jocasta to look after her and guide her because she’s basically going blind, which is where we pick it up when we join Ulysses in the story. So, he’s literally passed slightly from pillar to post, and then has a very long stint with Jocasta. In the books – that you have hinted at in the series – he has a fully fledged affair with Jocasta for 20 years.

[JB]
Hmmm. So, that’s Ulysses. When did you learn about Scipio Kennedy, the real-life Scipio?

[CM]
Well, I knew about Scipio when I have a charity called Making History, which is (in simple terms for the audience) a sort of Who Do You Think You Are? for kids, with a bit of a twist. We would go into schools with celebrities like Miriam Margolyes, Jim Broadbent – they would talk about why family history and cultural history is so important, and then we’d ask the kids to find a story in their background that inspires them to follow their dreams and turn it into a film, lasting no more than 5 minutes, that we then showed on the massive cinema screen at BFI. So, Findmypast, MyHeritage and Ancestry were all sponsors of the project, and Findmypast got in touch with me during COVID to say ‘We’re launching 11 million Scottish records. We know you’re in Outlander playing a slave. There’s a very interesting story about a slave called Scipio Kennedy, who married a local Scottish girl in 1702’. And so, they said it would be lovely if you could tell his story because it’s a great way of highlighting the power of these records, because he had 8 Scottish children who can be traced through those records to the present day. And I was like, ‘Wow, I’ve never heard of this guy’. So, of course, I then went down a rabbit hole of research and went ‘Oh my goodness, he’s so similar to Ulysses but he’s a lot earlier’. So, I think 1702 is when he’s first bought and then brought to Scotland in 1706, around then? It’s much earlier than in Outlander when we’re in the 1760s, 1770s when we discover Ulysses.

[JB]
Yes, so you’re post-Jacobite rebellion and you’re post-Culloden. Ok, so you’re playing a character and you’ve done as much research as you can, then you find out about the real-life Scipio and then this ignites something in you personally?

[CM]
Yeah, because I took in two Scottish children. About 10 years ago, their mother died of cancer; I never knew her. The mother was Scottish; the father was English. The father turned his back on the children, and my son, who’s about 2 or 3 years older, told me about the eldest boy Johnny. He was at school with him with some of his friends in Lincoln, and my son said ‘Oh, he’s having a really tough time; his father’s turned his back on him and he’s lost his mother, can he stay the weekend?’ It started off as that and then he stayed the next weekend and so on, until – I met him when he was 16 – when he turned 18, he’d moved in with us. And along the way, he said ‘I have a sister’. And I was like ‘What? Sorry? Where’s she?’ ‘Oh, she’s at the girls’ boarding school and we never really see each other.’ I said, ‘Well, she’d better come over’. So, she – I met her at 14 – and when she turned 16, she said ‘Can I live with you too?’ So, I’ve ended up with two Scottish children, and since that point, everything Scottish, ridiculously, has come towards me! It was no surprise that Outlander followed and no surprise that I found Scipio. There you are.

[JB]
And what about your own links? I take it that in Findmypast, you started finding out about Colin McFarlane’s past.

[CM]
Indeed, because I was going into schools and saying to the children: ‘The reason we’re doing family history – children, do you know what family history is?’ And they’d all go, ‘No’. And I’d say ‘Well, first of all, do you know that the average person starts doing their family history at age 55? What happens then, children? Your mother and father might not be here; your grandparents certainly aren’t going to be here. Then your key resource has gone.’ Now, I can’t get beyond my grandparents. I’d then turn to the teacher and go, ‘Is it alright to talk to them about slavery?’ Because, of course, it’s not taught in schools. And so, I’d then have to explain to the children I have the surname McFarlane, but of course my ancestors wouldn’t have been born with that name; that’s a plantation owner. And the kids would be looking blank and you’d have to explain that we came over from Africa to the Caribbean – my parents are Jamaican – and so when they were freed, they took their master’s surname, which would have been McFarlane. But I can’t get beyond my grandparents.

Then, when I get asked to do this talk on Scipio, my wife (who does a bit of family history) said to me, ‘Why don’t you ask Findmypast if they can help you get a bit further with your own family history, as a kind of reward for doing this event for them?’ And I said, ‘That’s a nice idea’. So, I spoke to one of their researchers, Myko Clelland, told him the story and he said, ‘Do you have anything to go on?’ And I said, ‘Not a lot; I can’t get past my grandparents. But there is a family rumour about a doctor in the family’. There can’t be a real doctor because my parents were not about the money, and neither were my grandparents, so they must be referring to the plantation owner; perhaps there was a Dr McFarlane. And he said, ‘Where was your family from?’ I said, ‘Montego Bay in Jamaica’. He said, ‘Look, leave it with me. I happen to be at the National Archives today.’ I went, ‘Are you joking?’ And he said ‘Nope! They have quite a lot of records on Jamaica. We do have access to slave records: we can see where they were bought, when they were bought, how much they cost. Let me have a look if there is anything on McFarlanes.’ He then rings me back excitedly about two hours later, going ‘I think I’ve found where your ancestors are from!’ I was like, ‘What?’ ‘There’s only one Scottish McFarlane clan that … it was a doctor. He actually died in 1837 on his way back to Scotland, but I’m pretty sure this is your ancestor.’

And then a few days later, he rang me up and sent me a copy of what he believes to be the first freed McFarlane slave’s manumission letter, which was the document proving your freedom. And of course, this happened whilst I was still researching Scipio and he’d only just sent me Scipio’s own manumission letter, which was from 1725. So, of course, the parallel was incredibly spooky. I thought, ‘This is getting crazy’. And he said, ‘Well, if you really want to be absolutely sure, get your DNA done. But do it with Ancestry because they do a lot of Afro-Caribbean history. We do DNA at Findmypast but it’s not as good, not for someone of a black background.’

So, I did it. And two or three months later, I found out that I have Scottish ancestry. I think I’m 91% West African, no surprise, from various different countries. But actually, there’s 9% European and 6% of that – surprise, surprise – is Scottish.

[JB]
Incredible. What a collision of fiction and real-life fact, and how very, very personal.

[CM]
Yep.

[JB]
Are you still playing Ulysses?

[CM]
No, I finished. I did Seasons 4 and 5, and what the producers always say with Outlander is they leave the door open, because they often do flashbacks and bring characters back. You never quite know if you’re finished. I think they’re now doing Season 7 at the moment, and they’ve literally just done an announcement about bringing back about seven characters who’ve been in the show before, who also assumed that they’d finished! And then I got a message, just before they started Season 6, from the writer of the books – Diana Gabaldon – saying Ulysses isn’t quite finished with yet. And I said, ‘Sorry?’. And she said, ‘I’m bringing him back in the books’. She then sent me an extract from her latest book called Go Tell the Bees That I am Gone, which I think is the ninth Outlander book. Ulysses comes back but he’s actually, in the depiction on TV, quite loveable, very sensitive and hugely loyal to Jocasta, who he is secretly in love with and, as I say, in the books has an affair with – on the TV, more just hinted at. We see a very nice, warm, loveable character trying to survive in this very strange time. And in the book, it makes it very clear that had he been white, he would have married Jocasta, because behind the scenes in the books, Ulysses looks after the entire plantation. He does all the accounts; he basically runs the whole place. But of course, he can’t be seen to be doing that publicly because of the time he’s in.

[JB]
So, you and your agent have everything crossed that Ulysses certainly comes back in the TV shows. And there’s going to be another coincidence because there’s going to be another character in Outlander – certainly, he’s in the books – a slave called Scipio.

[CM]
Correct. And Diana Gabaldon, the author of the books, and I often send little Twitter messages to each other, private messages. When I told her about Scipio Kennedy, I asked her ‘Had you heard of him?’ And so, she – I’ll read you the little tweet she sent me – where she says: ‘Anyway, switching momentarily to Scipio Kennedy, no I hadn’t come across him before, largely because he occurred mostly before the period I was dealing with. But oddly enough, Go Tell the Bees [which is her latest book] does have a Scipio who occurs with Ulysses. This one is a free man, a Gullah, who joins His Majesty’s Company of Black Pioneers [have you heard of them?]. Having occasion to poke about in Gullah history culture, at least briefly, one of the things I learned was that Scipio, often reduced to Sipio, was a very common name in those communities. I did wonder where it originated. From my hasty Google of Scipio Kennedy, I don’t see any Gullah connections – but it was a popular name, and still is apparently’. And on she goes. But yes, there is a Scipio in the latest book, who I think is a corporal – Corporal Scipio Jackson is her new character’s name.

[JB]
Well, that is really interesting. And in fact, I think we have an Outlander exclusive, or at least a potential exclusive, there! So, Colin, thank you very much for joining us. I wish you well. Fingers crossed with Outlander and with all your other projects.

[CM]
My pleasure. Thank you, Scipio, for somehow sending us this message from 1702 or something, that he was here in Scotland. To think that he was here all those years ago and we are talking about him in 2022 is really quite incredible, so it’s a pleasure to be able to help get that message and that story out there.

[JB]
Scipio’s great legacy. And thank you once again to Hannah Lawrence. You can read Hannah’s full blog series on the NTS website by searching for Scipio Kennedy. More information on the Scipio trail will be released as that project progresses. You can also find out more about Culzean Castle on the Trust website or by looking at the show notes for this episode. Plus, if you scroll back on your Love Scotland podcast feed, you’ll find our episode on Culzean’s smuggler caves. But that’s all from me for now. Until next time, goodbye.

[MV]

Love Scotland is brought to you by Think and Demus Productions, on behalf of the National Trust for Scotland. Presented by Jackie Bird. For show notes and more information, go to nts.org.uk and don’t forget to like, subscribe, review and share.

Transcript

Four voices: male voiceover [MV]; Jackie Bird [JB]; Doug Allan [DA]; Kathi Kamleitner [KK]

[MV]
Love Scotland – brought to you from the National Trust for Scotland. Presented by Jackie Bird.

[JB]
Hello and welcome to the Love Scotland podcast. If you’ve ever marvelled at extraordinary scenes in wildlife documentaries, be it rare footage of polar bear cubs emerging from their snowy den for the first time or a mother whale battling to save her calf from predators, then the chances are my guest today was behind the lens. Doug Allan is a world-renowned wildlife cameraman. You don’t just look at the many BAFTAs, Emmys and other awards he’s collected in a career of 40-odd years, you have to scroll through them. Sir David Attenborough, Doug’s long-time collaborator in landmark series like The Blue Planet and Frozen Planet describes him as ‘fearless’, but added ‘that comes not from recklessness, but from deep knowledge and experience’. Operating for months in inhospitable surroundings, Doug excels when filming beneath the polar ice packs and says cold places is where he feels most alive.

Doug, we’ve turned down the temperature just a little bit in the studio for you today, so you feel a bit more comfortable! [Thank you!] Welcome to the podcast; it’s really great to have you here.

[DA]
Thank you – it’s great to be here.

[JB]
Now, the problem with chatting to you, Doug Allan, is that you have achieved too much – you’ve filled your life with too many interesting moments – that with your permission, what I’m going to do now is give a potted history of your early years. [Go for it!] You can haul me up if I get anything wrong.

You were born in Dunfermline. Your dad was a photo-journalist who did some sport; he also did some weddings, and you used to help out at the weddings. But prompted by Jacques Cousteau, notably The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau – which I remember, ground-breaking telly – you took up diving. That led to a degree in marine biology at Stirling University. But it’s around then in your biography that you get the feeling that Doug Allan’s life isn’t going to follow a traditional path, because as a young diver you spend some time firstly as a pearl fisherman in Scotland. That sounds awfully romantic! Tell me about that.

[DA]
Well, basically I decided while I was doing my degree, I didn’t want to be a real scientist, but I wanted to combine science with diving. But the first thing out of university was how to make a living, so I answered an advert in a diving magazine which simply said: ‘Diver wanted for interesting work in Scottish rivers. PO Box number’. So, I wrote to it, and a couple of weeks later came back a letter from Bill Abernethy. He was the last of Scotland’s full-time professional pearl fishermen. He had done it; his father had done it. Bill fished with the traditional methods – a glass-bottomed bucket, something that looked like a 2-pint mug that you would drink beer from. Put a glass bottom in it, use that to look down through the water and pick up the shells using a forked stick. Bill knew a lot of good places where there were good mussels, but also there were lots of pearls in the mussels – because there are far more places in rivers where there are lots of shells but not many pearls. Bill knew areas where the water deepened off, making it difficult for him to fish. So, he thought, ‘if I got a diver who could go down there …’ So, he found me and he took me to the appropriate places and we dived for them. Or, I dived for them, and Bill would take them on the side and open them up.

[JB]
It sounds very lucrative. Was it?

[DA]
Well, yeah. I mean, Bill made a living out of it, and Bill and I made a good living out of it for a year or so. I wouldn’t say it was massively lucrative, but again Bill had the contacts with the jewellers. We used to sell a lot of pearls to Cairncross, a jeweller in Perth, because they specialised in freshwater pearls. You needed a jeweller because not all the pearls were perfect. Some of them might be brown on one side, so you wanted a jeweller who could cut them in half, put them in a mounting, etc. But Bill also knew one or two farmers who were collecting and making necklaces for their wives – and when a particularly nice round one would come out, Bill would often put it in his hand and say ‘aye, I know a farmer up the road who would pay a pretty penny for that one’! They would get sold as one-offs for a good price.

[JB]
You’ve dived all over Scotland, haven’t you? I know one of the places you learned to dive was the Hermitage, which is a Trust property.

[DA]
Yeah, the National Trust for Scotland has got such a wide array of not just places in terms of physical houses or what have you, but just vast tracts of land which they are looking after.

[JB]
And you’ve also said that if you can dive in Scotland, you can dive anywhere.

[DA]
That’s right.

[JB]
Why’s that?

[DA]
Learning to dive in Scottish waters … the temperature of a river or inshore … but learning to dive in the sea in Scotland, you come across fairly cold seas, on the cool side anyway. They can be rough, poor visibility. The fact is that those are the things that make diving difficult. If you can dive confidently in poor-ish visibility, cold-ish water and rough seas on the surface, strong currents, going to the Red Sea or the Caribbean is just so easy by comparison. That’s why you learn to dive in Scotland. You’ll get experience in Scotland, and you can take that experience anywhere underwater in the world.

[JB]
You went off to the Red Sea, and I think that you must have decided ‘this is a bit too warm for me’ because you ended up at the British Antarctic Survey. What was your role?

[DA]
I was the diving officer. At that point, the British Antarctic Survey had two bases, which they used for a lot of marine biology. On both of those bases, they employed a diving officer to look after the equipment and to make sure that the scientific divers had a buddy to go with and they could organise their work efficiently. So, that was my job: I was the diving officer. It was the ideal thing for me: working with scientists, helped to contribute to the science and then working in the Antarctic was just great.

That was where I discovered stills photography. I wasn’t really into stills at that point but it was such a big thing in the Antarctic. I really got into stills photography in a big way but not just taking photographs of the animals. I wanted to take photographs underwater and show the divers at work and the kind of animals that were down there. But also, how base life operated. More like a self-training as a photo-journalist rather than as a wildlife camera person. It was great. I did one year and then I did another contract that was supposed to be one year but ended up being two years because the ship couldn’t get in because of the ice to relieve us. So myself and six others who should have been coming home after a year and a half, we all got stuck for an extra year.

[JB]
That’s extraordinary, how you just throw that away. People get stuck in places for a week or a month and think they’re hard done by! It was during that time that you had a chance meeting that was to change the path of your life.

[DA]
It’s funny how luck goes along. I got stuck for this extra winter but at the end of that winter I stayed on for the summer, and it was through that summer that I met David. David Attenborough, a producer, a camera man and a sound man – four of them – came onto our base for two days from a visiting naval ship. It was early February in 1981. It fell to me to help them because I knew my way around the island and there were occasionally some dangerous parts. I went with them and got to know them and watched them in action. Basically, I thought after less than a day, ‘what a great way to make a living, to be that camera person’. Because after the Antarctic, they were going straight to Galapagos and then on to somewhere else. It was so romantic and so glamorous and so exciting.

Also, since I’ve been filming, I have filmed in small groups like that myself, as a director, and there are some groups of four people that I would run a mile if they suggested me filming with them because they can be full of egos, not very good at what they do. Not like that at all with David and his crew. They were really good fun. They knew what they wanted to do. They bounced ideas off each other. Who wouldn’t want to work in a business where you got a chance to do something like that?

[JB]
And you finally did it.

[DA]
It was great.

[JB]
You badgered the right people, you kept on, you offered your services and you landed …

[DA]
The chance to go back to the Antarctic in winter with the emperor penguins and we did some filming for that. Then it led to another contract. And the rest is history, as they say! I was lucky.

[JB]
Let’s talk about a work that we’re clearly all familiar with, if we’ve watched any telly at all. Firstly, I want to know: filming in cold places – do you have a special aptitude for extreme cold weather?

[DA]
I think when I worked in the Antarctic, without thinking about photography, down there we got a lot of work outside. And Signy as a base was almost like Scotland in the summer but in the winter we would get temperatures down to -30, -35. And so you were working outside, you were diving, so you learned your own limits. You learned not only how to stay warm by wearing the right sort of clothing but also how cold you could let your feet become, or your fingers become, before they might begin to get frost-bitten.

[JB]
So that’s the physicality; then there’s the skill and the intuition. You’ve said that what’s fascinating about underwater filming is that you can’t hide from an animal and you have to give off the right vibes. Tell me more about that.

[DA]
It’s not just underwater; it’s topside as well. You employ it with a dog that you meet for the first time, whether it’s your neighbour’s dog or a dog you meet in the street. I’m not quite sure what it is. Underwater, it has to do with how you behave in the water. If you’re flapping around too much because you’re not at home yourself in the water, or you get too excited and you’re swimming over furiously to catch up with something, all those sort of things pass out into the water as vibrations and get picked up by the fish and the animals round about you. If you’re with dolphins and things like that, they can ping you with their sonar and they can tell what’s going on in your body as far as your muscle tone, as far as your brain. And also they can tell who you are. They do say if you want dolphins to approach you, go diving with a pregnant female woman because they buzz those people – they know if a person is pregnant …

[JB]
Really?

[DA]
Yeah, yeah, yeah – I think that’s true. It’s all about being an object of curiosity, by being something that they maybe want to go over and look at you, but not being too keen to get too close too quickly. Sometimes, it’s a case of not looking at them. If there’s a seal over here somewhere out to my left, I know that if I just glance at it and nod away and keep paddling on, that seal will come in a little bit closer and say hi. And then the next thing it’ll be round about you. Take your time; it really is like getting to know a person. Respect the animal’s physical space, and sometimes that physical space round about an animal that’s comfortable will exist with a whale until it sees you. The minute that you’re going in the water with a whale or a seal, just be content to stay with it just hovering on that edge of visibility. And when it’s ready it’ll come over to you. It might not be the first dive; it might be the second dive.

The advantage that we film-makers have got as well is we’re often given a long time to get that relationship going with the whale. Sometimes, of course, with whales, you can recognise individuals from the pattern on their tails maybe, as they throw their tail in the air. It is possible to go looking for a specific, friendly whale, that you found friendly yesterday. If you behaved properly round about it, then you’re off to a head start when you meet that whale again the next day. You can’t hide from them underwater. When an animal can see you, you can see the animal. The fact is, underwater, animals can find out all things about you long before they see you. Like I say, the vibrations pass through; dolphins have got sonar, etc.

And then polar bears are the same, up in the Arctic. You can’t hide from a polar bear. Or if you try and hide from a polar bear, you’d better make sure you’ve got a good 360-degree view all round about you. Because if they see you or smell you, and are interested in you, and decide at some point as they come closer, that you are potentially something they might hunt and eat – they turn all the cunning that they use to get close to seals, they turn all that cunning into that stalk.

[JB]
You’ve described polar bears as ‘big, sexy, charismatic beasts – but also devious and deadly’.

[DA]
They might eat you. That definitely puts the edge on anyone. The fact that sometimes you’re working on foot, or two of you are on snow machines and things. The Arctic is a wonderful empty place where you just wonder how an animal like a polar bear, when you meet it for the first time, you can’t feel anything but awe. After you’ve been driving around for three days at -30, -35, looking for polar bears and you haven’t seen a living thing – no seals, no birds, nothing – and then this polar bear steps out from behind an iceberg and is there: big and fat and looks at you. You just think, ‘what do you know that I don’t’? A whole lot! And how can you feel anything but respect for that animal; you just want to spend as much time as possible.

[JB]
You’ve spoken about how time-consuming it all is; you can spend weeks, sometimes months – because nowadays is it correct that you’re not just looking to spot the animals, you’re looking for behaviours.

[DA]
Yeah, behaviour is what we’re always after.

[JB]
One of your most famous sequences is of a mother polar bear emerging from hibernation with her cubs. How long had you waited to catch her?

[DA]
The one that I think you’re thinking about was at a place called Kong Karls Land and we went there because there was this valley where, 25 years before, two scientists had discovered 22 dens in one valley – a really high denning density. The BBC had been trying for 25 years to get back to that place but it’s a protected area and permission was always refused. Anyway, for some reason, the Governor decided to let myself and Jason go there, so we made a beeline for that valley, but this year it ended up there were hardly any dens in that valley – maybe the sea ice had arrived later. For whatever reason, we weren’t finding bears. We actually went 5 weeks before we found a new den opening up. We got the only den that was possible to film in that season and we waited and had seen nothing for 5 weeks. We almost gave up.

[JB]
5 weeks! Tell me about the moment that you spotted them.

[DA]
Well, it was wonderful. When a polar bear comes out of the den, she only stays around for somewhere between 3 and 8 days with her cubs round about the den. So, if you’re want to maximise your chances, you’ve got to be at the den almost as soon as it opens. You have to walk round the valleys as often as you can, weather permitting, and looking for the new holes. So we went up this valley in the morning, nothing; came back down in the afternoon, there’s a hole up in the hill. We thought right, a bear’s coming out of there. So, we dug ourselves a hole in the snow …

[JB]
Who’s we? Who’s Jason?

[DA]
Myself and Jason. Jason is more than my field assistant and he’s now the most experienced person when it comes to a lot of polar matters. We were only allowed two people on Kong Karls Land and no snow machines – that’s what made it special, because it’s a protected area for polar bears denning. The region says if you go there, there has to be no disturbance, so you have to do everything on foot. We’ll fly everything you need in, and then we’ll come at the end of your 6 weeks and we’ll take you out. If you need any re-supply or if anyone has an injury, we don’t do any more than those two flights, top and tail of the trip. It seemed as though we’d run out of time. Most of the dens were coming out by the end of February or middle of March, and here we were towards the end of March – we still hadn’t found a den.

We finally got this one and it ended up being lovely because she came out, she slipped down the hill. Bear in mind at this point, I have no idea if there are any cubs in there at all. She came out, she slid down the hill, and as she picked herself up at the bottom, two little heads appeared in the den and out she came. And you think, wow – we’ve cracked it!

[JB]
25 years of waiting for a shot like that! Not you personally of course …

[DA]
Well, it was 25 years since anyone had been there before.

[JB]
When that’s in the viewfinder, what is your main feeling? Is it wow? Or is it, Doug, don’t mess this up!

[DA]
It’s actually the latter! We’ve got this chance, don’t screw it up. Hold the focus, think of the shots we need, think of the editor and what he’s going to do with them. I think there’s only two things you need to bear in mind to keep you sane when you’re filming things. You need patience. But patience is very passive. I prefer tenacity, because tenacity is patience with teeth in it; that’s what keeps you going out on the days that aren’t so good.

There’s really only two things to remember. Number one is you can only be in one place at one time. A lot of people, researchers, producers have put all their heads together and want you to go somewhere to have the best chance. So they’ve done all the work and said: ‘we think to get what we want, you should be on Kong Karls Land for 5 weeks’. Hopefully that’s it. So, they’ve put all your faith in that. And then every day when you get up, you have to remember it’s not a great day but we’ll go out and have a look. Because if we’re not where we think it’s going to happen, then we’re not going to get it at all. You’ve got to remember you can only be in one place at one time, but if you’re not there, you’ll never get it.

So those are only the two things you have to remember. Sometimes it’s wonderfully simple. You go somewhere, you look outside and you think we could sit here all day, but it’s more likely to find a polar bear if we go out and do 25 miles on the snow machines or 10 miles walking around the valleys, looking for what we want. And then you get back at night and you find there’s polar bear prints all round the cabin and you think ‘goddammit, I made the wrong call that day!’

[JB]
Well, that was something that ended joyfully.

[DA]
It was joyfully, yes.

[JB]
I mentioned danger in the introduction. What’s been the hairiest moment? There must have been a few.

[DA]
Well, not … there are certainly a few. You know, my drug of choice is adrenaline …

[JB]
Really!

[DA]
It’s nice to get into situations that take you to the extremes of your experience, but you still have the experience to stay this side of real danger. Yes, it’s exciting working with big animals and recognising when a whale’s behaviour is beginning to change from ‘it’s ok, I’ve had you for an hour and I’ve tolerated your presence, but now I’m going to swish my tail at you because I want you to leave me alone for a while. And if you don’t leave me alone, then I’ll come over and swish my tail and give you a real wallop’ – that kind of thing. It’s nice to tune into animals so that you stay on the right sort of relationship with them, but there was the classic walrus attack, which happened to me.

I was snorkelling off the ice edge up in the Canadian Arctic, and I was filming some birds that were just diving down. I would swim in slowly – just snorkelling, no bottle – get the shot as they went down and then wait until they came back up again or if I could find another bunch of birds. I was treading water on the surface and suddenly it was just like someone had wrapped their arms around my thighs and was holding me tight. So, I swung round and looked down and there was a walrus, head tucked underneath my armpits. This walrus …

[JB]
And they’re not small!

[DA]
No, this was a medium one; it wasn’t a really big one, but it was big enough, bigger than me anyway. So, without really thinking, I swung the camera round and, because the head was slightly below me, I pushed against its head and it let go and swam away. It had attacked me, or had come at me, in the same way it would come at sleeping seals. Walrus don’t always feed on mussels on the seabed. Sometimes they change their diet and think ‘I’m going to attack a seal; I’m going to eat a seal’. And when they do that, they look for seals that are sleeping on the surface, because when a seal goes to sleep, it just bobs up and down like a bottle in the water, with its nose sticking out. And those are much easier to attack for the walrus. I think the walrus was probably swimming around on the surface; I didn’t notice it. It saw my bobbing head and thought ‘here’s a seal’; dived down, goes underneath and looks up and sees a silhouette, and up it comes and grabs you. And luckily, it was pure luck, reacting the way that I did probably surprised the walrus sufficiently that it let go and swam away a little bit, looked at me and then carried off. Because if it had held on and taken me down, that would have been it. Absolutely. No way I would have lasted very long at all because I had no air supply. It was such a surprise – it was a classic attack. So many animals – this is to digress slightly – if you see a polar bear from a long way away, make sure that the polar bear knows that you’ve seen it. It loses the element of surprise. It may come over for a curious look around, but it’s much less likely to attack you.

[JB]
Well, I’m so glad that the walrus didn’t have its evil way with you.

[DA]
When I described this to my Inuit friends, they went into detail of how the walrus can sometimes kill the seal. Which they do by, if they grab the seal high on its body and pin its flippers to its side. And then they finish it off by basically putting its walrus lips against the seal’s head and it has the ability to suck its brains out. That’s often the way they dispose of the seal!

[JB]
Ok, I think that’s the perfect moment to take a break because thank goodness it didn’t have its evil way with you and you’re here to tell the tale. Join us in a moment and we’ll hear some more tales from Doug Allan.

[KK]
Hello there! My name is Kathi Kamleitner and I’m here to tell you about my podcast: Wild for Scotland. If you enjoy travelling, spending time outside or simply relaxing to a good story, check out Wild for Scotland and join me for inspiring journeys from the cobbled streets of Edinburgh to the sandy beaches of the Western Isles. This spring, we’ll explore the historic heart of Fife, wild lands in unexpected places, and up and down the West Coast. Think of it like story time for adults, that inspires you to pack your bags and head out to explore. So, join me on the Wild for Scotland podcast. Listen now, wherever you get your podcasts.

[MV]
The National Trust for Scotland cares for thousands of miles of coastline. From the sea cliffs of St Kilda to the magic of Fingal’s Cave, from the tight-knit community of Fair Isle to the seal pups at St Abb’s Head, you can help to protect this incredible heritage and to safeguard it for future generations. Find out more online including how to donate to the Trust’s Wild Scotland appeal at nts.org.uk/donate

[JB]
Welcome back to the Love Scotland podcast, where we’re observing the life in the wild of my guest, Doug Allan. Now, Doug, let’s talk some more about the landmark series that we’re all familiar with that you’ve been involved with – Blue Planet, Frozen Planet, Planet Earth. And a lot of it, as we’ve talked about, focuses on animal behaviour, the good and the bad.

[DA]
Is there bad animal behaviour?

[JB]
Well, the savagery. And I must confess … well, I must have spent a lot of time looking at your brilliant work through my fingers.

[DA]
Really?

[JB]
Nature red in tooth and claw.

[DA]
Blame the editor!

[JB]
When you’re filming something like that, that is savage, that is brutal in the wild, does that ever disturb you?

[DA]
No, not if I’m watching something totally natural, if I’m watching something that would happen if I wasn’t here. Some animals make a living by killing other animals. That, to our anthropocentric eyes, can sometimes appear cruel. And the more we find out about animals – whales for example, how sentient they are and the bonds between family groups – then yes, if you were to put yourself into the position or mindset of a mother grey whale with her two-year-old calf making their way up the Monterey coast, and the three hours of ‘brutal’ attacks by killer whales to drive the two apart and then drown the calf, then yes you could wonder what is going on inside that mother’s mind. It’s a fairly legitimate question. But what you have been observing, if you want to stop that somehow, then what are the killer whales going to eat? You’ll lose killer whales in the natural environment. So, I don’t have a problem with filming natural events. The key thing that’s in my mind is I must not interfere with the outcome of this event. My presence mustn’t make it easier for the predator to catch the prey, or easier for the prey to escape. That’s really important.

On the other hand, when you come to see animals suffering because of something that we are doing – when you see a seal tangled in an old, discarded piece of fishing net – or animals suffering because of extreme weather events, which can be increasingly directly put down to climate change, then you have to think to yourself that that is wrong. We need to do something about that.

[JB]
You’ve pre-empted my next question, which is: four decades of observing our natural world, what’s it taught you about what’s out there and how we treat it?

[DA]
Well, exactly, it’s funny … I’ve been working in the Antarctic since ’76; I first went to the Arctic in 1988. And that was the year that people often choose as the beginning year of real climate awareness. That was when Jim Hansen stood up before the American Senate when they were having a big heatwave and said ‘gentlemen, we think this heatwave has been caused by climate change’. And as for when we should have, we should have been acting before that. Since then, certainly.

The thing with the poles is that the poles are probably the most naked place to see climate change. The poles are warming faster than other places. The average temperature in the Arctic is now 5 degrees warmer; across the world it’s 1.2. In the Arctic, it’s 5. In the Antarctic winter (and we know this from meticulous meteorological records kept at bases since the mid-1950s) the temperatures are 5 or 6 degrees warmer in the winter than they were 50 years ago. You can see it because you can see the effect on tangible things like glaciers, which melt and go back. I could take you to glaciers in the Antarctic on the small island that I spent many winters on – at Signy, there was one glacier to get to one part of the island, you had to walk over the glacier because the snout of the glacier extended into the sea at all times; now you just walk around the beach because the glacier has receded so much.

And Signy had a permanent ice cap. And every year back to the early 70s, the Antarctic Survey (good on them) biologists would go out on a certain date in February when the snow cover was minimum, they would do panoramas showing all the ice cover. Massive decrease in ice cover between now and when I was down there; huge. And every likelihood that in 15 years’ time, there will be no permanent ice on Signy; it will all have melted. These are huge repercussions, massive, not just for the animals living there but the North and South Poles are enormously important for weather in the northern and southern hemispheres. We tinker with them at our peril.

[JB]
Coming closer to home, we also have our own problems. [Yes!] A guest on a previous podcast here said that to care for something, you have to love it; and to love it, you have to get to know it. Now, if we’re talking about our home waters – I don’t know if you know but the National Trust for Scotland has been advocating setting up, for example, marine and coastal national parks …

[DA]
That would be great!

[JB]

… and looking after our sea beds. [Absolutely] The reason being, if you’re young here, you need something to experience. And to experience it, you start to love it, and then you start to care for it.

[DA]

Yeah. I learned to dive in Scotland, and it made me a better diver physically, but also I think that wild experiences – you need to work for them a little bit. There was a plan at one point in America to ban cars from all the national parks. That’s a great plan. The idea was you’d get to the edge and you’d leave your car there. There might be a bus that you could take so far, but if you really want to experience the wild bits, you’ve got to start walking. There’s nothing wrong with that. I think that’s one of the lovely challenges of the UK is the variable weather. You could climb the same hill (it doesn’t have to be a big hill) every day for a month and you’ll see different things from it every month depending on the weather. I think that young people need to have these areas looked after so that they are in the best condition for someone to see them in 20 years’ or 30 years’ time. We can’t do that with all of it because some of it will get used, some of it has been despoiled. Certainly, if you take the sea bed, we should have far more areas that are protected from bottom trawling, for example; that’s hugely disruptive. It’s very true that if we saw people doing on land what people do underwater, it would get banned tomorrow.

[JB]
Yes.

[DA]
Completely! And so, I think that the more areas that we can have that are protected and looked after, but still a reasonable degree of access; but if you’re going to allow that, then they need to be taught to be responsible, with all the things that go with looking after the environment. I think if you teach awareness of the environment from an early age – ecology, simple relationships between animals and plants and people – from primary school onwards, then you won’t have this problem. If you act like that with encouraging youngsters and parents and everyone to get out in the wild and to experience it, then yes, great. It’s about being aware and having these places which are looked after but also accessible. I remember diving at the Hermitage. There’s a deep pool at the Hermitage with a waterfall falling into it and there’s an observation point above it. We would go there specifically for diving. It was amazing! You found money in there; we found a camera one day; there’s probably mobile phones in there now!

[JB]
Back to the pearls again! You’ve dived off St Kilda – there’s so much marine life …

[DA]
Oh, St Kilda is wonderful. It took us three attempts to get there; it’s a tricky place. We tried getting out but we got battered back by the wind once. We tried again, and then we finally did a third shoot and got out there. But the visibility out there … because you’re right out in the Atlantic, the visibility is another order of magnitude. You’ve got these lovely, big, steep, rocky gullies with the kelp weaving round about them and the odd seal that would come out and poke around. It’s really a fearsome place. Well, awesome is a better word for it. It is one of these awe-inspiring places.

[JB]
Awesome is such an over-used word …

[DA]
Totally over-used!

[JB]
… but so appropriate for the things that you have seen.

[DA]
Exactly. You stand there and … we didn’t get ashore because of what we were doing, because it was too rough. You think about the people who lived out there, making a living on it. That’s why we need to look after these places, so that we can go to them and with a bit of rebuilding you learn so much more by being there. There’s nothing broadens the mind like travel. The fact is, travelling around Scotland is all the much better for places being looked after by the likes of the National Trust for Scotland. I think that, in this day and age, we should be looking towards less far-flung destinations, just so we can fly less, it makes a lot of sense to explore Scotland.

[JB]
We’ve not got long so I’m dreading the answer to this question. What are you up to at the moment?

[DA]
I’m fairly quiet at the moment, to be honest. I’m not getting any younger. I had a very successful theatre tour out in Ireland actually.

[JB]
You’re spreading the word?

[DA]
Spreading the word, talking about what I do, weaving in climate change messages, etc. To be honest, having just spoken about flying etc, the big trip I’m looking forward to is I’m going to New Zealand for 5 weeks in April. But that is to see my son, who has been out there for 4 years and because of COVID, I haven’t seen him in that time.

[JB]
You forget that – you’re so prolific in your career – you are human and you do have a family. To that end, when I was researching you, amongst all these incredible achievements, these lists of awards, there was a line that said – and I almost missed it – the small matter of the brain haemorrhage when you were 55. Not out hunting snow leopards but on a trampoline.

[DA]
In Wiltshire, yeah! I got a great letter from David after that. He said that it’s ironic that after all the adventures you’ve had, you should be nearly laid low by a trampoline in Wiltshire. It was Center Parcs in one of these big bouncy boingy things. I just went out like a light. Luckily, there was an ambulance in the park and they diagnosed what it was and I got whisked to hospital and they immediately treated it. I remember nothing from blanking out to waking up 24 hours later. I was very lucky not to die at the time, getting to hospital quickly, but also there was pretty much no physical damage.

[JB]
People often say huge health events like that make them rethink their life. You?

[DA]
I must admit, not really! Getting old makes you rethink … I look on it as a bullet that missed. Actually, I’m safer now. When they fixed the little hole that popped, after we were discussing recuperation and things, and they said ‘you have got another two sites, which although not a problem at the moment, will become a problem when you get older. If you want, we can fix them for you just now.’ So, I said fine, take me back in and fix them. I’m safe enough in that respect. I think as you get older though, my priorities have changed. My New Year’s Resolution was to go and see some people that I’ve been saying for too long ‘I’m going to come and see you’ and haven’t done. I’m going to go and see them this year. My son is obviously top of the list.

[JB]
We wish you well and hope you have a great trip. But as importantly, I do hope you pick up a camera soon, and I hope we get a chance to see some of those sequences that will stay with us.

[DA]
You’re never far from the screen with iPlayer …

[JB]
No, you are not. Those sequences that are on iPlayer and are all over the internet that you captured will stay with us and many generations to come, so Doug, thank you for sharing your secrets and your techniques and your memories with us.

[DA]
My pleasure. Thank you.

[JB]
That’s all from this episode of Love Scotland. You can find more information and links to National Trust for Scotland properties and places we’ve mentioned, like the Hermitage and St Kilda, on our website. And you can help protect Scotland’s irreplaceable wildlife and habitats just by joining the National Trust for Scotland or by donating to our Wild Scotland campaign. You can play a vital part in protecting what we all love. Just head to that website: nts.org.uk

Thank you for listening. We’ll be back soon. Goodbye.

[MV]

Love Scotland is brought to you by Think and Demus Productions, on behalf of the National Trust for Scotland. Presented by Jackie Bird. For show notes and more information, go to nts.org.uk and don’t forget to like, subscribe, review and share.

Transcript

Three voices: male voiceover [MV]; Jackie Bird [JB]; Tom Devine [TD]

[MV]
Love Scotland – brought to you from the National Trust for Scotland. Presented by Jackie Bird.

[JB]
‘Upon Thursday, the day after the battle, a party was ordered to the field of battle, to put to death all the wounded they should find upon it. Which accordingly they performed with the greatest despatch and the utmost exactness, carrying the wounded from several parts of the field, where they arranged them in due order and instantly shot them dead.’

Those chilling words are from an eye-witness account of the aftermath of the battle of Culloden, the last pitched battle to be fought on British soil, in 1746. This civil war pitted clan against clan, and even brother against brother. Today, visitors to the battlefield, which is in the care of the Trust, can see stones commemorating the fallen and their proud clan allegiances. Its outcome was to change a way of life that had existed in Scotland for centuries.
Welcome to the Love Scotland podcast, and to the second part of the history of the Scottish clans. I’m pleased to say that I’m joined once again by Sir Tom Devine, Professor Emeritus of Scottish History at Edinburgh University. Welcome, Tom. Are you ready for our next epic leap into clan history?

[TD]
I’m absolutely frantic to get started.

[JB]
In the last episode, we ended at a bloody point in clan history: the Massacre of Glencoe. However, as we’ve just heard, there was more violence to come. So, in terms of the clans, how do we get from the massacre in 1692 to Culloden?

[TD]

The storyline of course, the historical line, is bound up with the history of support or opposition to Jacobitism – that is the restoration of the Stuarts. Because the Massacre of Glencoe was bound up with an attempt to destroy Jacobitism at Glencoe. And the final battle you just referred to, Culloden, was the final stand of the Jacobite forces against the new regime of Hanoverianism, the new regime of Protestantism, Presbyterianism if you will. So, that is the linkage. Let’s not forget that between 1692 (the first Jacobite rising) and the final one in 1745/6, there were no less than four others between the two. In other words, five all together.

[JB]
So, what part were the clans playing in these uprisings, in terms of the division of their loyalties?

[TD]
They were on both sides. The classic example again is the Campbells, who were root-and-branch committed to the Hanoverian state; their whole fortunes were locked up in that loyalty. On the other extreme, you have clans who were pro-Jacobite in their allegiances. But, the thing to bear in mind is the numbers of people on both sides who actually came out during those Risings varied enormously. Because the Jacobite leaders, the clan chiefs for example who had loyalties to the Jacobite cause because of James VII and II, they had to calculate every time the opportunity occurred – is this now the best opportunity available? Should we throw our weight behind this? Because remember for failure, and if they were caught, they were going to experience the terrible death in English treason law of a traitor.

[JB]
Is it possible to tell how many clans there were? We’re talking early 1700s.

[TD]
We’re talking somewhere in the order of – because you obviously have cadet branches of clans – but I would say between 45 to 50 at that particular period.

[JB]
Was this peak clan, or post-peak clan?

[TD]
In my view at least, between 1707 and the last Jacobite Rising, you’re beginning to see aspects of clanship fading away. The most important one is chiefs are already in the process of limiting their connections with their people and becoming more interested in a materialistic way of life, perhaps even sometimes in Edinburgh or London.

[JB]
Yes. Mentioning Edinburgh, because we’re talking a lot about the Highlands here, but the density of population was even then still the Central Belt. What interaction, if any, did they have with the clans? Did they know that this existed up there?

[TD]
Of course. Right down to the mid-18th century, there was a great fear in Lowland Scotland of Highland clanship and indeed of the Highland population. They were regarded as thieves and demons who wanted, above everything else, to steal cattle in the fringes of the Lowlands. Plus, it was the last part of Scotland where there was still a Catholic minority in certain parts of the Highlands. I mean, Charles Edward Stuart was known in the folklore of the rebellion of 1745/6 as the ‘limb of Satan’ – Satan of course being the pope. And of course, Episcopalianism, ruled by bishops, was also in conflict with Presbyterianism.

[JB]
What effect did the Union of the Parliaments in 1707 have on the clans?

[TD]
It helped for example to increase commercial traffic and trade between the Highlands and the Lowlands, especially the cattle trade. Because, as the Union allowed for more opportunity into the English market and to sell beef for the Royal Navy’s salt beef, that also became very important. The whole of Scotland was affected by this. There was one very interesting aspect to it, however: Jacobite clans opposed the Union because they thought the Union, if it succeeded, would strengthen the anti-Jacobite cause, would strengthen the position of those who had evicted the Jacobite king in the late 17th century.

[JB]
And on the death of Queen Anne in 1714, the last of the Stuarts, what effect did that have on the clans?

[TD]
Well, of course it made it more imperative and pressing for those who continued to hope for a Jacobite counter-revolution to try to ensure that the remaining kinspeople of the Stuarts in exile in Europe, would eventually come back and succeed. And that would be their only hope of a Jacobite counter-revolution. There were still people who could be potential figureheads for a pro-Stuart movement living in exile.

[JB]
So, power was shifting as far as the pro-Jacobite clans were concerned. And they had to make a big move, perhaps their final move – and this takes us of course to 1745.

[TD]
One of the questions about the ’45 is why, more than 40/50 years after the Stuarts lost their crown in Scotland, why was that still something that many clans – and not simply clans, people in Lowland Scotland, especially the North-East Lowlands – wished to achieve, to bring back the Stuarts? And one of the reasons is, as I think you indicate, it had to be a last gamble. This was the very last chance there had to be. Of course, there was also the strong sense that French support in 1745 might be, at the end of the day, once and for all, forthcoming.

[JB]
And it didn’t just pitch clan against clan. As I said in the lead-in, brother against brother, husband against wife. Because I read about a particular lady – Anne Mackintosh – an ardent Jacobite who raised 300 men to fight, but her husband fought for the Government.

[TD]
Yes, and he found out about his wife’s behaviour much to his chagrin. Because not simply did this happen, but she was a superstar in terms of the Jacobite side. They used much propaganda to emphasise this significant thing of a family split, and the wife actually coming over to the cause.

[JB]
Spoiler alert: we know how that ended on the battlefield of Culloden, and I think one of the reasons why that has echoed in history is the barbaric nature. You heard my quotation at the start of the episode. We’ve touched on it but tell us more about the barbarism of the victors. Why?

[TD]
You’ll notice, for example, that you don’t find the French troops who fought at Culloden or the Irish mercenaries who fought at Culloden treated in this way. They were treated as prisoners of war. The problem with the Jacobite army, mainly civilian and therefore not an official force, their position was that they were regarded as rebels and therefore had to be treated as such. You’ve also got to think of the attitude of the English army and perhaps also a lot of Lowland Scots to the Highlands: a primitive society, a society of savagery and therefore had to be dealt with accordingly.
And of course, the other and final point to make is Jacobitism had come too close to success in the march as far south as Derby. Now it was time to end this problem forever. Cumberland actually thought of a plan to emigrate, to transport the majority of the Jacobite clans to North America and the Caribbean before it was decided it was going to be far too costly.

[JB]
What was the death toll at Culloden, in terms of the Jacobites?

[TD]
We can’t be absolutely certain because we’ve got a rough reckoning that something like 1,000–1,500 possibly died in the battle. But as you’ve already indicated, there were also people dying of their wounds or even being slaughtered in the two days after the battle itself. So, I would reckon we’re going to go up to about 2–2,500.

[JB]
Simplistically, it’s widely believed that Culloden did for the clans. But as you’ve hinted at, they were coming under stress after the Union and the rise of commercialism – would that be fair?

[TD]
Correct. Trade and commercialism and also the appetite of the landed classes, namely the clan elites, for a different way of life based on income, based on money and the expenditure that went with a luxury way of life. In other words, they were being much very influenced by the culture of their fellow elites in Lowland Scotland and even indeed in England.

[JB]
But in legal terms it did seal the fate of the clan system because it was effectively banned?

[TD]
It was. There were laws to ensure that clanship was basically outlawed. The Disarming Act prevented them from bearing arms. You can’t actually have a warrior society that’s not allowed to bear arms. That was quite clearly one of the most obvious effects there. It is a law, said one Whig lawyer or official in London, for ‘disarming and undressing those savages’. In other words, that was the law to ban plaid and tartan because that was regarded as the badge of disaffection.

[JB]
And even children’s education – they weren’t allowed to be educated in ‘rebellious principles’.

[TD]
Put it this way, it was a full-frontal, extensive assault on every aspect of clan culture – political, economic, military, familial – that was planned in such a way that it would have effect. It wasn’t simply an uprooting of the warrior ethos, and the control and pacification of the area; it was also to change the mindset. That is why they cracked down heavily on Roman Catholic chapels and also on Episcopalian churches, because they regarded these two religious formations and identities as the ideology of disaffection, the ideology of anti-Government feeling and anti-Hanoverian feeling.
But then historians have got to stand back and say: this is creeping up on the clans because, after Culloden, why did clanship disintegrate so rapidly? Well, my argument would be because it was already under pressure and eroding before that. And the second major reason is, two to three decades after Culloden, Highland society was hit by the impact of the Lowland Industrial Revolution, in terms of demand for Highland cattle, wool, linen and kelp (that’s the manufacture of seaweed). So, that whole impact of Lowland industrial and English industrial demand destroyed any infant growths of industrialism there were in the Highlands and at the same time ensured that the way forward was peaceful, because you can’t have economic development without peace.
So, there’s two aspects therefore in my own thinking; and not everyone will necessarily agree with one historian’s perspective. A) Clanship was already dying, although not dead, by 1746. And secondly, you’ve got to look at the entire history of the impact of these other historical forces on the Highlands and clanship in order to understand why by the time Dr Johnson visited the Highlands in the 1770s he noted that the clans had lost almost entirely their history of savagery and had been, in his view, civilised.

[JB]
From kinship to capitalism. [Correct.] This is a huge question. We’ve not got long because I really need to take a break now, but before I go – migration (voluntary or otherwise) that also plays a part.

[TD]
You’re beginning to see the first evidences of significant migration – obviously the Highlands had always haemorrhaged people – but you’re beginning to see the first evidences of it from about the 1760s. It is indeed caused by the new commercialisation, because we know from the evidence of the 1760s and 1770s that a principal reason why people are deciding to cross the Atlantic and transport their way of life there was because of rent increases and the other aspects of commercialisation. It’s the early stages which then reached a climax in the 19th century on expulsive clearance.

[JB]
But, as we know, the clans didn’t disappear. We’ll find out what happened to them in a moment.

[MV]
From coastlines to castles, wildlife to wilderness, when you become a member of the National Trust for Scotland you can enjoy the very best of what Scotland has to offer as often as you like, and you can help to protect it.
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[JB]
Welcome back to the Love Scotland podcast. Before the break, we had explored the fall of the clan system after the battle of Culloden. And you might have thought that the clans would gradually fade into obscurity but, Professor Sir Tom Devine, they didn’t. How did the tide turn?

[TD]
Well, the tide turned obviously for a number of reasons. Ironically enough, Jackie, one of the reasons was that old Highland clanship (if you want to call it that) had been comprehensively destroyed during and after the battle of Culloden and its subsequent changes. And therefore, because Jacobitism was no longer a political force, all its potency had gone, it could be sentimentalised. Therefore, the pacification of the Highlands was the essential pre-condition for what I term Highlandism – that is a romantic interest in everything to do with the Highlands, from traditional clanship to the old literature of the Highlands, which was apparently rediscovered in this period, and at the other extreme the impact that the formation of the Highland regiments – I call it neo-clanship – caused from the Seven Years War of 1756–63. If you look at that date, it is very shortly after Culloden that we begin to see Highland soldiers, but this time under Government pay, dressed in tartan and steadily becoming world famous in the British empire by the mid-19th century.

[JB]
Fascinating change there. And also, equally fascinating is even the view of the landscape, which previously had been described as a bit dreich and uninteresting. That took on a new life.

[TD]
The Highland landscape in the previous period was to be feared because it was seen to go alongside the kind of society it was – a barbarous society, a society of threat in that particular period. But then you have an aesthetic revolution in landscape. It doesn’t simply affect Scottish society; it affects Western Europe. Mountains become attractive; they become not daunting as they used to be, but they become places of beauty. What you’ve got to recall of course in this period is you’re beginning to see, in these later stages of the Enlightenment, a view taken that primitive peoples retained certain positive characteristics that the new modern era, the new era of industrialisation, was losing. And where to go and see this? One of the very few places in the whole of Europe, certainly in Britain, you could go to see it were the Highlands of Scotland, which had retained so much of the characteristics, including the landscape, of a past era.

[JB]
And clans? The perception of clans?

[TD]
Well, the statement always made by government ministers once they started to recruit Highland soldiers was that a) they were descendants of the clans therefore must be good warriors; and b) that they were now in government employ. And in fact, they were increasingly used by the early 19th century. The late 18th and early 19th century was a period of almost continuous warfare: the Seven Years War, the American War of Independence, the French Revolution wars and then the long period of the Napoleonic wars. And more and more Highland not only regiments but volunteers dressed in tartan were being used in this. One lady novelist and painter of the late 19th century put it: ‘they’re so beautifully pictorial’, meaning men dressed in skirts. The Highland regiments with pipes and drums led the march into Paris after the final defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo. They became superstars. That also helped with one aspect of the development of Highlandism, because for the first time they wore coordinated kilts. Before that, plaids were extremely confused – there was no sett or pattern. But with the glorification of the regiments, the military authorities had to ensure that there was one sett for one particular corps; another sett for another particular echelon. And a very famous firm in Bannockburn became the art producer of these tartans. And it’s a very short step from that to clan tartans, which didn’t exist in the previous period, and family tartans.

[JB]
Ok, because that’s very important that it didn’t actually exist in previous periods as you would have thought.

[TD]
It only existed when it was no longer of any great significance.

[JB]
Because we know that in the 1780s and beyond, we have things like the Repeal of the Dress Act, and I suppose popular history would have us believe it was all down, latterly, to Sir Walter Scott?

[TD]
I think Sir Walter Scott was in a sense – I mean obviously his literature became world famous – the most influential Scot, even including the inventors and all those famous names of the 19th century. He was probably the most famous Scot by name of the whole 19th century period. The extent to which his books, especially the series dealing with the Highlands Waverley, had the most extraordinary sales. We cannot underestimate the Scott influence. But these other influences that I’ve described are also equally important. Scott was able to attract an international audience because they were already becoming interested in the old Highlands, even if some of that interest was actually confection, was actually spun and not necessarily close to reality.

[JB]
Talk to us briefly about this famous visit by King George IV to Edinburgh.

[TD]
Again, orchestrated …

[JB]
By Sir Walter!

[TD]
The arch-impresario. But it’s very interesting and this is why I think we should not over-emphasise Scott. Because George wanted to see Scots as Highlanders.

[JB]
This is 1822?

[TD]
1822

[JB]
It’s said that whenever George was in Edinburgh, the dress code was to wear your own ancient clan tartan. This goes back to what you were saying before. Your ‘own ancient clan tartan’ led to a stampede to the shops of Edinburgh of various landed gentry saying ‘I want a tartan and I want it now’, which gives the lie to this idea of your own family ancient tartan!

[TD]
Yes, and my clan tartan … the vast majority of these were members of the Lowland aristocracy and the Lowland gentry class, with no connections at all to what was going on. But that event, because it was so publicised and because it involved a reigning monarch, made Highlanders legitimate.

[JB]
And the Victorians took this and ran with it!

[TD]
They took it even further. Then, with the extraordinary expansion of the British empire, with the Highland regiments as the shop troops of empire, national heroes, no longer rebels.

[JB]
Those clan warriors had been rehabilitated.

[TD]
They had been rehabilitated to the extent that they were regarded as traitors, villains and (worse) papists in the mid-18th century. By the mid-19th century they were national heroes, much to the discontent of many other British regiments including Scottish regiments. In the early 1880s, even what became the King’s Own Royal Scottish Borderers, a Lowland regiment, were forced into not Highland kilts but into trews. The victory of Highlandism, as I say in one of my books when I mention this, was complete.

[JB]
And while we’re shattering these myths, what about (we’ve touched on it before) this idea of lineage, that someone called MacGregor today is a direct descendant of the MacGregors?

[TD]
It’s obviously nonsense, but it’s harmless nonsense. And it’s not just the Scots who are doing this. My last graduate student at Edinburgh was German, called David Hesse. He has written a book based on his PhD called Warrior Dreams. He’s calculated there were nearly 600 (this is in 2010) organisations in Europe, from Moscow to Stockholm, with pipe bands, military enactments and Highland games. Hardly any of these individuals had even been to Scotland. There is something …

[JB]
Yes, what is the reason for this? Why are people captivated by it?

[TD]
When I was told about the early stages of David’s findings, I said maybe we should get as a second supervisor, a social psychologist or a psychiatrist to explain because one cannot do it. There’s no doubt about it, what it has done in terms of that extraordinary co-mingling of legend, of history, of Scottish landscape, of the attractions of that part of Scotland. What it has done is produce an alchemy that few can resist. And of course, that’s shown by the global appeal of this new development, this new dynamic adding to this. My favourite book reviewer, Diana Gabaldon, who wrote a review of one of my books – the Clearances book – …

[JB]
Diana who wrote the Outlander series, which has been phenomenally successful.

[TD]
Correct, globally. And it’s given a tremendous new impetus to Highlandism. The Scottish Tourist Board thought Highlandism was beginning to perish as a consequence of the behaviour of historians bringing us the reality rather than the romance. They have been soundly vanquished in this, because this is probably, since Scott, the most important literary influence and now television influence on this continuation of the Highlandist obsession. Fascinating.

[JB]
What is the legacy of the clan system?

[TD]
The lineage runs right through people today. Very happy, not least the Scottish Diaspora, as a way of connecting to the homeland. And it’s usually the second, third, fourth generation – it’s the multi-generational group, not the first migrants to the USA a few years ago, or to New Zealand or South Africa. It’s the multi-generational group who use Highlandism, and neo-clanship as I would call it, as a way of associating with the land of their forebears. As many professors in the USA in particular have said, in terms of our academic analysis we can try and demonstrate that a lot of this is bogus, but very very few countries in Europe would not envy the fact that the Scots have this ‘badge’ of history, of landscape, of scenery and lore. It seems to have a tremendous influence, this alchemy of all these things, on human spirit and the human imagination.

[JB]
The irony that this way of life and the people who were described as savages and looked down upon, have now become emblematic globally of Scotland as a whole.

[TD]
Exactly. And also, don’t forget, Jackie, a Scotland which is one of the most urbanised societies on Earth, has selected a part of the country – they haven’t done it consciously because of historical trends and forces – but one part of the country which is the badge, the culture, the landscape which Scotland is happy to show to the world.

[JB]
That’s a great place to end, I think. Professor Sir Tom Devine, thank you.

[TD]
My pleasure, Jackie, and I’ve been very impressed by your incisive interrogation and questioning.

[JB]
Oh! Thank you! Well, it has been a fascinating romp through the history of the Scottish clans. And to put Highland history into Scottish context, look out for two of Sir Tom’s many best-selling books, notably The Scottish Clearances: A history of the dispossessed and The Scottish Nation: A modern history.
And if all of that has stirred your interest in either the Culloden battlefield or maybe your own clan history, there’s a wealth of information at the Culloden Visitor Centre. You may be interested to know that the National Trust for Scotland has set up a Fighting Fund to help protect the battlefield from unwelcome development. For details of that and for many other Trust places which have links to clan history, do head to our show notes or of course to the Trust website: nts.org.uk.
Thank you for listening. Until next time, goodbye.

[MV]
Love Scotland is brought to you by Think and Demus Productions, on behalf of the National Trust for Scotland. Presented by Jackie Bird. For show notes and more information, go to nts.org.uk and don’t forget to like, subscribe, review and share.

Transcript

Three voices: male voiceover [MV]; Jackie Bird [JB]; Tom Devine [TD]

[MV]
Love Scotland – brought to you by the National Trust for Scotland. Presented by Jackie Bird.

[JB]
Scotland’s clans stretch back into ancient history, even though their power and prestige wanes down the centuries. They’re still regarded at home, and among the millions of people of Scots descent around the world, as a key part of our heritage. Yet, the romanticism of the simple kinship of the clans belied a complex system of patronage and payback, which often led to what’s been described as a ‘real-life, blood-soaked Game of Thrones’.
The ghosts of the clans walk National Trust for Scotland places like Glencoe, Killiecrankie, the Culloden battlefield and more. Today though, we have a much more cosy idea of clanship, symbolised by gatherings across the world. They’re an intrinsic part of the Scottish identity, but what do we actually know about their emergence, their fall from power and their relevance in a modern-day Scotland?
Well, in this, the first of a new series of Love Scotland, we thought we’d take an in-depth look at the history of the clans. To do that, we’ve enlisted one of our most eminent academics and writers, Professor Emeritus of Scottish History at the University of Edinburgh, Sir Tom Devine. Tom, welcome to the podcast.

[TD]
Thank you very much, Jackie.

[JB]
Before we get into the detail, can you give us an overview, in your view, of how significant are clans in Scottish history as a whole.

[TD]
Well, of course the first thing to note is the longevity, at least in the earlier period of development. In terms of those clan names that people know about today, we’re talking about the emergence of those particular septs and kindred groups round about the 12th and 13th centuries. They’re actually relatively young in terms of historical time. Of course, there were kinship groups before that as well, but the big names known today – MacKenzie, Campbell and all of the rest of them that people are very familiar with – probably date from about the 12th/13th centuries and becoming more important over time, before their demise which really starts to occur in about the 17th century. Even before, I would argue, the catastrophe of Culloden and the imposition of effective state control on Highland Scotland.
The other thing to note, of course: kinship groups existed in the Lowlands. They weren’t actually called clans and they certainly existed in the Scottish Borders. And in that part of Scotland, we know that the state regarded the recalcitrant clans of the Borders in the same way as they regarded the recalcitrant and violent clans of the Western Highlands and islands. In a statement in 1593, the Scottish government of the time – in fact specifically the Scottish parliament of the time – stated unequivocally that the Western Highlands and islands were clannate and violent, and so also were the Scottish Borders. And of course, there the names are less familiar, but Armstrong, Elliot, Douglas, Scott and the rest. So, the next key question is to ask what were they?
Essentially, I regard them as warrior societies. They emerged in the early medieval period at a time when the Scottish state could not control some very unstable parts of the country. And therefore, people over time – the lower classes, if you like – started to associate themselves with great men of influence, who with their own followers could guarantee a degree of protection, a degree of security in these troubled times. That factor was an identical force both in the Western Highlands and Central Highlands, and also in the Borders, because all these areas reflected a very profound weakness in state power.

[JB]
Was this because of the geography of the land? Was it that simple?

[TD]
It wasn’t so much the geography across the country, because remember the Scottish Borders are not all that far away from Edinburgh – but of course in the Western Highlands and islands, yes it was a big problem of geographical control. Hardly any of that whole region in the north, which we now love for its scenic beauty, had been mapped at the time. So, it was an area that was almost unknown, mysterious and therefore threatening because of that. But as I said, only a few miles from Edinburgh we have the Scottish Borders, and one of the reasons why it was unstable was because the whole relationship on the border between England and Scotland was profoundly unstable between the two nations. So, clan groups thrived in that environment. We’ll note later in our discussion that as the state became more powerful, both in the Border countryside and indeed also in the north and west of Scotland, you begin to see these kinship groups, these associations for protection if you like, beginning to weaken.

[JB]
So, let’s talk about the social framework of the clan itself internally. What did it mean to be part of a clan? You mentioned a sort of protection there. Was that the main driver?

[TD]
Yeah, protection both from enemies but also because in that particular period, living a secure life in the Highlands was rather difficult because of the climatic conditions and the poor agricultural output. So, it was also an economic security as well as a military security. Therefore, the great men, who we now can call clan chiefs and their kindred – the immediate gentlemen of the clan – and that middling group, the tacksmen – tacks is the Scots word for lease – these were individual families who were given a good deal of control below the level of the chiefs and their blood associates. Their role was to provide this necessary element, this vital element, of security, which the remote state could not do.

[JB]
Could you choose a clan to belong to? ‘I quite like the look of that clan …’ Or did you have to be born into it?

[TD]
No, because blood has been profoundly exaggerated as a factor in the make-up of the Highland clan in particular. Certainly, it seems very likely that that inner group – the clan elite – most of them were related directly or indirectly to the chief and his family. You could say there is a very strong blood bond at that level. But elsewhere in the clan, especially in terms of the big confederated clans like Clan Donald (both south and north), the extent of connection to the elite becomes weaker and weaker over time. So, the belief in a blood family was all-persuasive. It was essential to give cohesion to the clan that this belief was cemented, because it also gave authority to the chief and to those who were appointed by him at lower levels of the clanship structure. But, the mythic nature and the striking aspect of this whole thing, there was quite a lot of invention of tradition in the development of what we think were the beliefs of clansmen at the time.
Just to give you a couple of examples. The birth father of Clan Gregor and MacGregor, some people believed he was Pope Gregory the Great. The birth father, or patriarch, of the great Clan Campbell, he was suspected to be the equally legendary King Arthur.

[JB]
Ah.

[[TD]
I mean, these in a sense were made-up stories by the bards, the genealogists, the storywriters. But in a pre-literate society, it was vital that these beliefs were accepted and widely seen to be true. Because, by having that, the authority of the leading family – the gentry of the clan – was obviously massively increased. Influence was very important.

[JB]
So, the heritage and the importance and the blood ties and all of that, they were sort of spun? They were spinning the myths, the importance and the ancient nature of things?

[TD]
There was a lot of fiction about it, and that’s why I say the invention of tradition. But the thing to bear in mind, Jackie, is we shouldn’t necessarily denigrate this. Every society, in terms of human development, has indulged in the invention of tradition. Many of the things that we have taken from our ancestors are equally invented, so we should not feel in any way superior to the way these communities behaved.
What is absolutely clear, however, is the reality of the fact that these organisations existed. They were designed for security. They were designed also for aggression and for making war – that was their essential raison d’être. Once that raison d’être disappeared, clanship (in terms of the historical nature of clanship) simply evaporated relatively quickly.

[JB]
During my research on this, I kept coming across the word ‘dùthchas’. Am I pronouncing it properly firstly, and what is it?

[TD]
Well, dùthchas is the way I’d certainly pronounce it. Some people say that it’s actually untranslatable. But I think it merges two concepts – one is the sense of the heritage of the clan and the fact that one of the great codes of the clan is that the elites have a duty of protection to the followers, in return of course for their military support and for giving rental on a regular basis to these elites. The second thing, which is associated with the word, is the sense that the absolute owner of the territory of the clan was not the elite, despite the fact that we know in Scots law usually the head of the chieftain group (the heads of the clan) had feudal charters from the monarch, testifying to the fact that they were indeed the absolute legal owners. The belief of the ‘kindred’, the belief of the followers, seemed to be that they had at least a right to have land and a right to own land within the territorial imperium of the clan itself. That belief continued during the period of the so-called Clearances, right down into the 19th century. And that was one of the reasons why Clearance in the Highlands, unlike in other parts of Scotland, was so bitter. The elites knowing what is their power; and at the other extreme the vast majority of the followers thinking they have a completely different concept of this.

[JB]
Alright. Now, we’re running out of time for this first half because it’s a tall order. Can I give you some quick-fire questions?

[TD]
Yes. And I’ll try and give you quick-fire answers!

[JB]
Ok! Did the chief have absolute power within a legal framework of the clans?

[TD]
In terms of access to land, yes. In terms of the cohesion of the clan, obviously his role was a governance role. So, he had to be very careful to ensure that enmities within the clan did not produce rivalries and therefore split the clan asunder, especially in terms of its military capacity.

[JB]
And finally, how important was it if you had a clever, a canny clan chief? How much did that determine the power and success of the clan?

[TD]
Very important because it meant that if you had somebody who was cunning and brave and gifted with brain, this is one of the reasons why you see certain clans and clan formations accessing other clans, annexing them – taking them either by using debt as a way of making them semi-bankrupt and therefore giving them loans to encourage them to join the larger grouping, the larger clan; also the appropriate use, when necessary, of violence against smaller units in order to try and absorb them.
The way I would say it, Jackie, there was a kind of Darwinian situation. If the state wasn’t there to be the honest broker above all this, then what you find is almost a ‘sauve qui peut’ – a survival of the fittest.

[JB]
Which we will talk about more in the second half. So, we’ll leave it there. We’ve got a lot of self-contained communities around the country. We’ll take a break and when we come back, we’ll talk about the clans and how they interacted with each other … and it wasn’t always friendly. We’ll be back in a moment.

[MV]
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[JB]
Welcome back to the Love Scotland podcast. Before the break, Sir Tom Devine had filled us in on the social order within clans, but let’s now look at external relations. Tom, we’ve all seen the multi-coloured maps of Scotland, of the clan territories back in the day. Did those clan function as small countries, for want of a better word? Or were they conscious of being part of a wider Scotland?

[TD]
Well, no, they were definitely conscious of being part of Scotland. There was a recognition also of the monarchy, which is one of the reasons why of course many of the clans – when we get into the late 17th/18th century – supported the exiled House of Stuart. A tremendous devotion also to that greater Scotland. So, they didn’t think of themselves in any sense as separate nations. They were separate, individualised, kindred groupings.

[JB]
We have an image of clansmen as warring. Were inter-clan disputes and feuds common?

[TD]
Very common. One of the most common periods was from the late 15th century, the great empire of Clan Donald in the Western Isles – the Lordship of that area – disintegrated. And the result – this explains that violence was not specific to the earlier period of clan formation – it became even more intense in the following century, the 16th century, because of the disintegration and end of that over-arching empire.

[JB]
So, there was a bit of a power vacuum then?

[TD]
A power vacuum which resulted in several decades of unprecedented violence, much much more intense and acute than in earlier times.

[JB]
And you’ve sort of answered my next question because I wanted to know whether there were enduring clan superpowers, if you like, or whether various clans’ influence rose and fell?

[TD]
Well, it’s a cycle. The classic example I’ve already given of the end of the great seaboard empire, from the Butt of Lewis down to Arran, of Clan Donald and particularly Clan Donald south – that had really ceased to exist apart from the individual estates owned by septs of Clan Donald when we move into the 17th and early 18th centuries. So, there’s a classic example of that occurring.
At the other extreme, the two resurgent and ambitious (and therefore for that reason probably hated) larger kindreds are Clan Campbell and the Lovats in the North East, and also Clan MacKenzie further south.

[JB]
How important was size, ability to fight, your force?

[TD]
It was one of the main reasons why a very ambitious, enterprising and imperialistic clan would try and secure alliances, even to the point of absorption of smaller units. And this is what makes the history of clanship so much more complex than perhaps is portrayed in the media.

[JB]
King James I and VI, crowned King of Scotland in 1567 – how does James on the throne change things?

[TD]
It’s a watershed time. It’s not only a watershed in the Highlands; it’s a watershed also in the Scottish Borders because it’s easier to keep control …

[JB]
So, this is the Union of the Crowns that we’re talking about, that comes later?

[TD]
The Union of the Crowns in 1603 means that he can call on English and Scottish force, and no longer is a recalcitrant area between two nations; it’s an area where he can force law and order, and does so. By the late 17th century, the problem of the Border clans has vanished. That leaves the western Highlands and islands. And there he and his advisors are trying again to ensure that the state manages to gain control. It happened through a number of reasons, for example the Plantation of Ulster with the movement of Scots across the Irish Sea. Because of that movement, he builds up a kind of cordon sanitaire, a kind of bastion, especially between the Catholic clans of the Outer Hebrides and the Protestant, so-called answerable subjects who are moved from Lowland Scotland to take up land ownership there.
Also, a series of punitive expeditions to recalcitrant areas in the North West and islands. Also linked to that, the demand that clan chiefs come to Edinburgh on a regular basis, make sure they’ve provided a financial security, and assurity indeed, for the behaviour of their clansmen. If not, they will be fined. And of course, sometimes that duration of time that these people have got to spend in Edinburgh, in the capital, can go on for sometimes half a year before their cases are actually settled. This is the very slow beginning of the erosion of clanship and the beginnings of landlord-ism, based on the customs, the material goods, furnishings, the dress of the elites of the south. It’s the beginning of the process of merging what used to be a distinctive, elite society in the Highlands. Steadily, that elite society is becoming adapted more to Lowland mores.

[JB]
Tell me about this role of the clans, this Act of 1587 – what was that aiming to do?

[TD]
It was really the first official statement of the determination of the Scottish state, to sort the problems of these lawless regions out, and to implement state control throughout Scotland. But it was still only an aspiration. It required the enormous new powers of the Jacobean monarchy of James VI and I because of the united capacities of England and Scotland to deal with this. For example, James was able to call upon a navy to sort out the Western Isles …

[JB]
Which he didn’t have before.

[TD]
Of course, not anything like to the same extent. And of course, having very rapidly managed to deal with the Border problem, because there’s the two pressures from north and south on the border instability, he was then able to concentrate – and his successors were able to concentrate – on the continued vexed problem of the Western Highlands and islands.

[JB]
What about his successors? Charles I, he also found the clans problematic. [Yes] Is it true that he took things a little further? He pursued a more aggressive strategy?

[TD]
Well, he pursued a very aggressive religious strategy in terms of … because of course this then leads up to the so-called War of the Three Kingdoms and eventually of course the English Civil War as well. Because of the relative anarchy that the civil wars produce in the 1630s/40s, until the English occupation force of General Monk that brings law and order of an almost Stalinist variety again, because of that, clanship flourishes in the way that it usually flourishes in periods of disorder.

[JB]
So, the monarchy is looking the other way; they’ve got other fish to fry. So the clans think, yeah, this is great.

[TD]
You could argue that James VI produces very significant results, especially in terms of elite behaviour, but then there’s another hiatus as the civil wars begin and that lasts through to 1652. Scotland’s then conquered by the Cromwellian army and therefore they await the return of the old Stuart monarchy in the person of Charles II.

[JB]
So, Charles comes back … can we jump then [Yes] to the seismic event: the end of the Stuart dynasty and the accession of William and Mary. Now, what impact did the Jacobite rebellion that that sparked have on the clans and on their allegiances? Did it split them?

[TD]
Yeah, there was a huge range of different reactions to what’s been termed the Glorious Revolution, which resulted in the expulsion of the Stuarts.

[JB]
So, let’s get an anchor date here. We’re talking 16 …

[TD]
1688/89 is the Glorious Revolution, where the Stuarts are evicted and the new monarchy of William and Mary is established. It’s essentially a Protestant revolution, so it’s not in any way liked by those clans of Catholic allegiance. And it’s not liked by the majority of clans, because remember the clans depend on a belief in a blood-based dynasty. In the same way that they would react to their own clan elites or clan chieftain being suborned by another, so they also have the same view about the monarch of the Kingdom of Scotland being treated in the same way. They have a strong belief in genealogical right and birthright. And that’s one of the bases on why many of them react so bitterly against the Revolution and the eviction of the Stuarts. It’s in no way because they necessarily support the religious policies, particularly the pro-Catholic policies of the Stuarts before 1688, it is to a large extent because of this.
And one other factor which is important: the dangerously ambitious Clan Campbell – its might, its influence behind the revolutions of 1688/1689. And since those clans that were already beginning to feel pressure from the Argylls, from the Campbell family, the Campbell dynasty, they also tend to look to the Stuarts as a form of protection.

[JB]
So, it was a huge period of political unrest. And to calm things down, the government decided to do what lots of governments do down the ages, they threw money at the problem. They wanted the clans to swear an oath of loyalty and they would pay them for it, but of course this led to one of the most infamous episodes in Scottish history in 1692. Can you talk us through that?

[TD]
This is the Massacre of Glencoe, of course [It is indeed]. Murder under trust. At least 20 (maybe 25) members including children of the clan that occupied the Glencoe area, a branch of Clan Donald – a MacDonald sept, if you will – were murdered by an Argyll militia, supported by the state. And it caused a tremendous response in Scotland and indeed elsewhere. One of the things I’ve pondered is why is that? Clearly, it was because the codes of hospitality had been neglected. But it’s also, I think, a reflection of the fact that by the 1690s, Highland Scotland was becoming peaceful, much more peaceful than it had been before. And so, this horror, this mass act of murder, was exceptional. And that’s one of the explanations I would have as to why it’s remembered.
The other explanation is of course it was a golden gift to the Jacobites, because they were able to demonstrate the fact that the new dynasty coming in was in fact deeply guilty, deep in blood as a consort of treacherous murders which were against all Highland codes of hospitality in the preceding era. But for over a century, the Massacre of Glencoe was virtually forgotten.

[JB]
Really? But we remember it today [Yes] and in terms of our subject matter, the history of the clans, for the heinous nature of clan against clan.

[TD]
There were much more dreadful massacres than the massacre at Glencoe. In the perspective of clanship violence, it was a relatively simple and limited episode. But, for the reasons I’ve given, it achieved fame in the period, and then of course until writers in the 19th century started to become interested in it, and not least of course the 20th century with the Scottish folk revival.

[JB]
Well, we’ll leave, Tom, with your permission, the history of the clans for this episode in the eerie wilderness of Glencoe, which of course is looked after by the National Trust for Scotland. And if you want to get a real insight and experience what it was like for the inhabitants of Glencoe in those dark days, there is a marvellous reconstruction of a turf house, right next to the visitor centre.
So, I hope you’ll join us for part 2 of this story. We’ll be following the clans to Culloden and beyond. And even today, the Trust’s Foundation in America helps stage an annual gathering of a hundred clans in North Carolina, which gives you an indication of the power of the legacy of the clans that remains around the globe.
You can find out more in the show notes to this episode. Until next time, with Tom and me, goodbye.

[MV]
Love Scotland is brought to you by Think and Demus Productions, on behalf of the National Trust for Scotland. Presented by Jackie Bird. For show notes and more information, go to nts.org.uk and don’t forget to like, subscribe, review and share.