Cattle on a Thousand Hills

By Katharine Stewart

While their role has been all too often overlooked by historians, cattle played an integral part in the economy, ecology and culture of Highland life. Although many of these animals and their keepers have been abandoned in favour of sheep walks and deer forests, their legacy has remained through stories, paintings and songs.
Infused by the author's own experiences of small holding at the end of the crofting era, this book offers an excellent insight into the social history and colourful customs assosiated with tending cattle on crofts, on shielings and on the drove roads of old, in an account that is populated by legendary figures, mighty beasts and characters larger than life.
Perhaps most importantly of all, however, this is a history that looks to the future - a recent revival in cattle and traditional practices could pave the way for the truly sustainable agriculture practices so crucial to the fate of the planet at large.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Luath Press
• Release date: May 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781913025779

Katharine Stewart

Katharine Stewart was born in 1914 in Reading. Following the Second World War and after a spell running a hotel in Edinburgh she moved with her husband, Sam Stewart, and daughter Hilda, to the croft at Abriachan near Loch Ness, where she began her writing career with A Croft in the Hills. Later she trained as a teacher before, on the death of her husband, becoming the local postmistress at Abriachan. She died in 2013 and is survived by her daughter, Hilda.

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Preface

Cattle on the Croft

SOME FIFTY YEARS AGO my husband and I came from Edinburgh to work a croft in Caiplich, Abriachan, a small settlement 800 feet up in the hills to the north of Loch Ness.

My husband’s forebears were crofters in Perthshire and I had farming ancestors in Galloway, so agriculture must have been in the blood. Before we moved north we had grown food in a small way, had kept poultry and bees and had escaped to the hills whenever we could.

In Caiplich we found ourselves in a community of crofters, native to the area, who all spoke Gaelic as well as English, and worked their crofts in the traditional way. They made us, and our small daughter, unreservedly welcome.

We soon acquired a small herd of black Aberdeen Angus cattle, then three score blackface sheep, numerous poultry and Charlie – a garron or working pony, who soon became one of the family! We also had a tractor, one of the few in the immediate vicinity.

After a while we became competent enough to take part in the usual community activities of clipping and dipping the sheep, of harvesting, of herding cattle and so on.

Our daughter, Hilda, like all croft children, also joined in happily – feeding motherless lambs from a bottle and dumping sheaves of corn into stooks. Later she would gaze in amazement as the travelling threshing-mill arrived and began to turn the sheaves into grain and straw.

We followed the usual five-year rotation of crops – oats, grass for hay, potatoes, turnips, then fallow. The oats were harvested with the binder and made into stacks, which was a communal job. Making hay was another community activity, although we sometimes had to hang it on the fences to dry before stacking! The potatoes and turnips were stored in clamps – long shallow pits covered with straw or rushes to keep out the frost.

On winter evenings we enjoyed many a ceilidh, a gathering in someone’s house, for the exchange of news and gossip and perhaps a tune on the ‘box’, as the accordion was known, and a song or two. Our neighbours would tell us about people and happenings of older times, their powers of recall amazing us.

They told us of one neighbour known as ‘The Drover’, droving being in his blood. The days of the long droves to the south were over, of course, but he still liked to take cattle on the hoof, even the ten miles to the market in Inverness. He would collect twenty or thirty beasts from the area, two or three boys would have a couple of days off school to deal with the herding, and off they would go. A stop overnight in a friendly farmer’s field and they would be fit and fresh for the market early next morning.

One day, it seems, they were too fresh. In spite of frantic herding by the boys, when passing down the High Street of Inverness a frisky bullock crashed into, of all places, a dairy! Not too much damage was done, compensation was arranged for later, and the drove moved on. That story made the headlines in the local press.

Part of our small herd grazing the rough ground

When we asked why a small island in the burn which ran through our croft was called the ‘island of cheeses’ we were told that cheese made up in a shieling on the hill to the west had by mischance landed in the water and been carried downstream before being washed up on the island. It was still edible, despite its perilous journey!

These tales and others, told with all the verve and accuracy of the born story-teller, brought the past vividly before us.

Along with four other crofters we had the right, on a nearby hill, to ‘graze sheep, cut peats and bleach linen.’ This last must have dated from the time when flax was grown to make linen thread. As a result we had room for the sheep. They mostly looked after themselves – lambing on their own, and being fed a little hay only in the worst of the winter weather. Hilda loved the lambs, of course, but the sheep as a whole did not inspire the affection we felt for the cattle, or for our hard-working garron.

My husband went away from time to time, as was the custom among crofters, to work at something that would bring in a little cash. During these periods my daughter and I managed the croft on our own.

We always hoped that no disaster would occur during these times. As we were quite far off any beaten track we sometimes had to act as amateur vets in an emergency. ‘Bloat’ for instance, a swelling of the stomach caused by over-indulgence in sweet, spring grass, had to be dealt with promptly by piercing the organ to allow the gas to escape. Calving could be tricky but, luckily, we had no problems with it, only strength and common sense being needed in a difficult birth.

There were two bulls within walking distance to which our cows could go at the appropriate time. Artificial insemination was not commonly resorted to in our day. We were lucky not to have foot-and-mouth around and to be farming before the time of BSE and blue tongue. The cattle were, however, regularly tested for brucellosis and TB.

We kept one cow to provide milk for the house, the others allowed their calves to suckle. We had many names for the cows, of course, many of which were slightly daft – May, who always calved in May, Caroline, who resembled an old friend of mine, and so on. The female calves, as they grew on as heifers, acquired names too. We didn’t name the boys – even though we had seen them grow from lively, dancing creatures, cavorting about on their little spindly legs, into the castrated, burly beasts known as bullocks – because we knew they would eventually be destined for market. But we loved them, too, and hoped that when they went to market they would reach a dealer who had a flowery meadow for them to enjoy before they met their final fate.

With a small herd such as ours we could get to know each beast individually. We knew Queenie, for example, would always be the first at the byre door on a cold winter evening, May would be the one bellowing to get out on a fine morning. Just as we knew them and enjoyed their company I’m sure they enjoyed ours.

My closest contact with any of the herd was with the cow I milked for the house. We called her Hope and she gave us many well-doing calves over the years. She was a cross-bred shorthorn, sturdy, with a reddish-brown silky coat. As I leaned towards her flank while milking I could feel the life-beat pulsing in her.

I sang to her, of course, although – sadly – not in Gaelic. Her favourite song was ‘Lily Marlene’. If I sang anything different she would turn her head and give me a look from her big dark eyes.

One cold spring