Crappit Heids for Tea: Recollections of Highland Childhood

By Iby Fraser, Ann Gray, Anne-Marie Tindley and Chris Fletcher

In this memoir, the daughter of one of the first keeper’s of Scotland’s Shinness Estate details life in the early 20th century Scottish Highlands.

Sutherland is one of the most ruggedly beautiful and sparsely populated parts of Scotland. In the nineteenth century, the Duke of Sutherland set about improving his landholdings to make them more productive by building lodges for sporting tenants who came to enjoy the summer fishing and shooting grouse and deer. In the 1870s some 3,000 acres of land were reclaimed at Shinness. A lodge was built there in 1882 and allocated some 2,500 acres of moorland for grouse and grazing, together with the fishings on Loch Shin and its rivers. One of the first keepers at the estate was John Fraser. His daughter, Iby, became a teacher at Lairg School. In the 1970s, long after the Fletcher family had taken on Shinness Estate, Iby wrote down some recollections of her early life for Mrs. Fletcher's interest.

This charming book offers insightful descriptions of everyday life—from cooking, framing, and game keeping to medicine, schooling, and childhood games—as well as of the events that had a profound effect on communities everywhere, including the emergence of the motor car and World War I. Several other local contemporaries also contribute their memories, including Ann Gray, the daughter of the farmer who took on the reclaimed land in the 1880s, and Jimmy Bain, a crofter born after the Great War.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Aug 15, 2012
• ISBN: 9780857905369

Book preview

List of Plates

Iby Fraser's manuscript, 'A Wisp of History'.

Reclamation works at Colaboll in the 1870s.

Reclamation works etching from Dunrobin Castle.

Monument to Kenneth Murray of Geanies as it is today.

The Duke's luncheon house on the bank of Loch Shin as it is today.

Daisy and Iby Fraser and Feannach the dog.

John and Margaret Fraser, Daisy and Iby at the Keeper's House, Shinness Lodge, c. 1908.

John Fraser, Iby's father.

Margaret Fraser, Iby's mother.

Iby Fraser

Uncle Donald, Normanna, Daisy, Iby and Bob Munro.

The coming of the car – at the Sutherland Arms Hotel Lairg, c. 1911.

J. R. Campbell's car.

Taking home the peats, with Ben More Assynt in the background.

Tinkers' encampment near loch Shin.

Tinkers on the road in the 1930s.

Shooting party at Shinness on the Aird in the 1920s.

Looking west towards Shinness Farm (now West Shinness Lodge) from the Aird in the 1920s, on ground now flooded.

Shooting party on Cnoc an Ulbhaidh, Shinness.

A page from M.E. Sanderson's game book, noting MES and Fraser as guns.

House party at Shinness Lodge in the 1920s.

Colaboll Farm before the First World War, with Alec Gray as a boy, on the left

Some of the Gray family, probably in the mid 1930s.

Graduation portrait of Ann Gray.

Ann Gray.

Acknowledgements

Many people have enthusiastically helped me to compile this book. First, thanks to the SWRI in Lairg who, many years ago, had the idea of encouraging Iby Fraser and Ann Gray to present their recollections. Both of them wrote these down so we can read them ourselves. Iby's recollections were addressed to my mother Margaret Fletcher, who lived at Shinness Lodge from 1958 until 2007. Iby suggested that they be burned once read, and I must therefore thank my mother (a magpie collector in the book world) for not doing so.

There are then many other people to mention.

Dr Anne-Marie Tindley of Glasgow Caledonian University has written the historical introduction and also found in Reading the photographs of the steam ploughs doing their work in the 1870s at Shinness. She diligently spent many hours to research Shinness. Her knowledge of the history of Sutherland has been a wonderful source for the book.

Robin Johnston (Iby's great nephew and former pupil) and Paul Gray (Ann Gray's cousin) have given much help in providing additional material, biographies and photographs which have found their way into the book.

In addition, Annette Parrott (whose grandfather Reginald Maudsley purchased West Shinness), Pete Campbell (whose great grandfather was J.R. Campbell) and Angela Suther-land (Charlie Armstrong's grand-daughter) have provided photographs, and Lord Strathnaver has supported the project and enabled us to use the image of the reclamations which hangs at Dunrobin Castle.

The Lairg Historical Society chaired by Rev. John Leslie Goskirk were early supporters of the project, and John held a reading of the book when it was first typed up.

The publishing team needs special mention – Andrew Simmons at Birlinn, and the editors who helped to refine the text, Karen Howlett and Deborah Warner, put a lot of effort into making the book readable.

Thanks to all of them and the many others who have read the text and had a hand in the final production. I hope the result is as much fun to read as it has been to compile.

Chris Fletcher

Shinness Lodge

May 2012

www.shinnesslodge.co.uk

Foreword

Scotland is often described as Europe's last wilderness, but as the history of this part of the Highlands shows, many people lived there and attempts have been made to improve the living from the wild moorlands for a long time.

By the time Iby Fraser and Ann Gray were born at Shinness, sheep and cattle grazing was only part of the land use; fishing, shooting and stalking were an important addition. Iby describes far more than the life of the gamekeeper working for tenants who took long leases of the lodge. Her lively story is of a happy childhood in a family deeply embedded in the rural Highland life where each member had a part to play. Ann's story of the first 100 years of her family on the farm at Colaboll describes the people she met and the life of the farm. When roads and communications were poor, rural neighbours depended on each other, and the Fraser and Gray families were an important part of the local community.

These accounts are a chance to discover what day to day life was like then, far from the cities. They open a small window onto the benefits and the hardships of Highland gamekeeping and farming in the early 1900s, a time when attempts were being made by the Sutherland family to create better economic use of the land, bringing more people and prosperity to the Highlands.

Over the sixty years since the Second World War, there have been huge changes in the Highlands. Tree planting, power supply, renewable energy, vastly improved communications and tourism have developed land use beyond farming and sport. No longer does a small number of wealthy visitors stay in some style for months at a time as was the case when these memoirs were written. Today many more people can enjoy landscape, nature and the hills during shorter holidays at the places like Shinness and other Highland houses. Visitors find a landscape where much of the land with its sheep, birds and deer, lodges and castles looks little different in their moor and mountain settings described here. But the way of life described by Iby and Ann and their families has vanished. Crappit Heids for Tea brings back a harder and simpler way of life but also captures its warmth and comfortable certainties.

I hope that reading Iby's and Ann's memoirs will spark your interest.

Alistair, Lord Strathnaver

Dunrobin Castle

May 2012

Shinness Estate: the Reclamations and Sutherland Shooting Lodges, 1850–1920

Introduction

This book is set in and around Shinness, near Lairg, in central Sutherland, an area that has witnessed human settlement from the earliest times, although Iby Fraser's and Ann Gray's stories deal mainly with the early twentieth century onwards. By that time, the land around Shinness and Lairg had for centuries been in the hands of the earls of Sutherland. The first earl was William de Moravia, with the title dating from around 1230. He was descended from a Flemish nobleman, Freskin, who settled at Duffus in Moray-shire in the mid-twelfth century. At around the same time, other Flemish immigrant artisans were encouraged by King David I to start the weaving trade and settle in villages. A long line of earls, based at Dunrobin Castle near Golspie, descended from that time, occasionally through daughters who inherited the title. One of these, in the late eighteenth century, was Elizabeth Gordon, the 19th countess, who married Lord (later Marquis of) Stafford, who also became the first Duke of Sutherland. By that time, life spent accumulating cattle and skirmishing with neighbouring clans such as the Mackays had given way to a money-based economy in which landowners sought to increase their cash returns. This change was strongly promoted following the 1745 Jacobite Rising, as the government required clan chiefs to be in London (where money was needed) in order to reduce the chances of further unrest.

From the 1790s, the population in Lairg parish, and of Sutherland (and indeed of Britain as a whole) had been steadily increasing and did not reduce until the early twentieth century. With more efficient agriculture, better public health and improved food supplies, Sutherland's population continued to grow until it reached a peak of around 26,000 as recorded in the 1861 census.¹ Real population decline occurred in Sutherland in the interwar years after 1918, when, at its lowest, the population for the county hovered at around 11,000.² The population varied seasonally: many moved to follow the fishing industry in the summer, while being at home to cultivate crofts in spring, and many more would have worked as casual labour on the new sheep farms created in the nineteenth century.

The Sutherland Estate was, by the mid-nineteenth century, the largest landed estate in western Europe. Owning over one million acres, the earls (dukes from 1833) of Sutherland were the largest of Britain's private landowners, while most of their wealth came from the Stafford connection. As earls, following the purchase of Mackay lands in 1829, they owned almost the whole county of Sutherland, granting them control over land occupied by a large population, the bulk of which were small tenants or crofters. This control over wide acres led to a uniform approach to estate policy, including building works and design, a fact that is strikingly apparent in the appearance of the Sutherland shooting lodges. It also led to the ability to undertake large-scale economic and social restructuring on the estate from the early to late nineteenth century.

Sheep farming

In the very early nineteenth century, the estate owners, Lord Stafford and his wife, the Countess of Sutherland, and their estate managers, principally William Young and