Only the Ancestors: The life of Hugh Graham in Mid Argyll

By Hugh Fife

Hugh Graham lived from the start of the 20th century to the start of the 21st, in the sea-girt Highland Parish of North Knapdale in Argyll, Scotland. Great changes occurred in his lifetime, and the centuries before – changes in land use and culture that saddened him, even angered him, but he had ever the serenity and pragmatism of the West Highlander – the Gael. In this place the Irish Gaels arrived over 1,500 years ago, establishing the proto-Scottish nation, in a green place amidst the ancient grey crags, with the blessing of the monks in the holy island of Iona on Argyll’s North-Western edge. Amidst the craggy hills and raised lochs of Knapdale, and prehistoric standing stones and burial mounds of wide Kilmartin Glen, and old chapels on the long peninsulas reaching into the Hebridean Sea, and the ruins of villages in the now-sheep-cropped glens, lived Hugh Graham and his ancestors.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Jan 5, 2024
• ISBN: 9781035808854

Hugh Fife

The author has lived in Mid-Argyll since the early 1970s, raising two daughters with his Argyll-born wife. He has been a gardener, farm worker, mental health worker, woodland contractor, and disabled countryside access advisor—for which he earned two major Scottish Awards. The author has had two books on Scottish native trees published. Currently, in semi-retirement, he runs a music club in Mid Argyll which involves people with disabilities and health issues.

Book preview

About the Author

The author has lived in Mid-Argyll since the early 1970s, raising two daughters with his Argyll-born wife. He has been a gardener, farm worker, mental health worker, woodland contractor, and disabled countryside access advisor—for which he earned two major Scottish Awards. The author has had two books on Scottish native trees published. Currently, in semi-retirement, he runs a music club in Mid Argyll which involves people with disabilities and health issues.

Dedication

This book is dedicated to five women—Cathie Fife, Shuna Fife, Karra Fife, Sylvia White (nee Graham), and May Graham.

Copyright Information ©

Hugh Fife 2024

The right of Hugh Fife to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

The story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.

All pictures by Hugh Fife except old family pictures leant by Sylvia White (Graham).

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781035808847 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781035808854 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.co.uk

First Published 2024

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd®

1 Canada Square

Canary Wharf

London

E14 5AA

Acknowledgement

Thanks to Hugh Graham’s daughter, Sylvia; Roddy Regan, Archaeologist and Historical Researcher; Murdo McDonald, former Archivist with Argyll and Bute Council.

Chapter 1

Hugh Graham was born in a low whitewashed thatched cottage in the tiny village of Bellanoch in June 1906. Bellanoch—sister-village to slightly larger and dispersed village of Crinan, is in the parish of North Knapdale in Mid-Argyll, in the county of Argyll and Bute, Scotland.

Hugh lived his whole life in North Knapdale into his mid-eighties, when he and his wife, May, moved to sheltered housing, a small ground-level flat, in a complex with 24 hour warden in the nearby town Lochgilphead.

May passed away not very long after the move, and Hugh lived on until the end of 2001, dying at the great age of ninety-five; latterly cared for at the Duncuan Geriatric Unit next to the old sprawling mass of Argyll and Bute Psychiatric Hospital on the edge of Lochgilphead.

Sea-girt Mid-Argyll stretches from Tarbert on Loch Fyne in the South to Ardfern and the Craignish peninsula in the North and Inverary on Loch Fyne in the Northeast; Inverary being the traditional capital of the County, though not its biggest town; bigger Lochgilphead is right in the middle, in low-lying country between the hilly peninsulas.

Although he had spent some senior school years at Lochgilphead High School, and lived all his life no more than a few miles from the small local town, Hugh found moving into the ‘Gilp’ an unsettling experience. Tarmac and concrete and brick all around, instead of fields and crags and woods and a scatter of homes blended in with the landscape; some gleaming white, like the seams of white quartz running through this land, yet just dots on a big landscape of green and grey, and some grey, tinged with green, like the ancient crags adorned with moss, heather and trees, down to the edge of water.

Water is everywhere, salt and fresh, in shades of blue and yellow and grey, changing with the very changeable weather; sun or rain or gale upon the water and hard stony land of the West Highland coast.

The rock is 600 million years old, older than most of Europe, apart from some further up and further out parts of the West Highlands and Islands, which are even older than the stone of Mid Argyll: the little holy island of Iona on the North-Western edge of Argyll, and mountains in Wester Ross and North-West Sutherland, and the big Isle of Lewis on the furthest edge of Europe.

Hugh experienced health problems in his last years, but his doctor said that he continued to pull through due to a very strong heart. This strong heart must have resulted from walking and working on the land for decades and decades, along with a particular genetic inheritance, and good basic food.

Food that in his earlier years was largely local, fresh and natural. In later years, Hugh regretted the great decline in local produce, and he found it strange and annoying to have to order and buy a pint of milk, having grown up being sent out by his mum with a pail to get milk from whatever cow happened to be grazing nearby.

That’s the way he told it to me anyway, as if the cow was just part of the land and place; its bounty just there for anyone in the community.

Even into the 1980s, there were several dairy herds in Mid Argyll. The coming of pasteurisation brought them all to an end, the cost of chilling systems too great for small farmers.

In the 1970s, there was a wee shop in Lochgilphead where you could still get fresh Poltalloch butter, from the dairy by the Big House in Kilmartin Glen; rough blocks of glossy yellow butter, veined and marbled, and utterly delicious. Then the dairy closed. Then the nearby dairy farms ceased production.

These and other more dramatic changes saddened Hugh, even angered him at times, but he had ever the pragmatism and serenity of the Gael, the West Highlander. In fact, he had serenity and quietness in abundance.

He spoke in a quiet considered way, not given to great wordiness, but sure and certain in his low drawn-out voice, with space for thought and reflection, and for hearing others. He was never particularly jocular, and his sense of and response to humour were dry and subtle.

He was a small, slight and wiry man, reserved but friendly, shy but with a kind of self-assuredness; a bit private but nevertheless willing to let his knowledge flow out like a wide meandering river if there were ears to listen.

And there were often ears to listen, near neighbours, or people from further away who had heard that this man could help them with family history or Gaelic place-names. But a lot of what he knew was actually conveyed by May, his wife.

She was really the monarch of the house, and she was proud of what they had both inherited, proud that the area’s ancient and glorious history had come down to them through continuous word-of-mouth through many generations.

May was born Mary Eliza MacDougall, at Inveryne Cottage on the edge of Lochgilphead. Her grandfather was gardener at the adjacent Inveryne House, and the family had a shop in Lochgilphead, but the home and income were too small for a big family.

When she was in her mid-teens, she was ‘sent away’ to the Kirkintilloch area south of the Clyde to train as a cook, and she became cook to the Hay family in their Big House. The Hays built and owned Clyde Puffers—the steam-powered boats that plied the Clyde coasts and the Argyll Islands, carrying a great variety of goods back and forth.

She was there several years, but returned to Mid Argyll at every opportunity to stay with her granny at tiny Bellanoch, where she met Hugh.

This is how I remember most of the time in their house at Crinan, in their later years (Crinan pronounced ‘Creenan’, though these days commonly pronounced ‘Crinnan’, and presumed to be from the Gaelic ‘Grianan’, meaning sunny place, and probably referring to the great stretch of flat, open land stretching North), May Graham holding court, coordinating the hospitality and the flow of conversation.

Sometimes the house quite busy, myself and my wife, Cathie, and our daughters, Shuna and Karra, dropping by, and other close neighbours, and relatives on the telephone. Hugh in and out of the kitchen getting tea and biscuits, or in and out of the garden, or just off his bicycle from the post office at Bellanoch with his bicycle clips still gripping the ankles of his baggy trousers.

And May sitting on the big armchair by the fire, large and omnipresent; her grip on her walking stick like her grip on everything else. Not to doubt that her friendliness and welcome were absolutely sincere, but Highland hospitality was to her an absolute duty and obligation.

It must be done, and it must be done right, even if in later years she found it difficult to maintain her great baking skills, and biscuits had to be purchased from the local shop. She knew much about the land and the place and the people (oh yes, she knew much about the people!), through her own relatives hereabouts.

But she was very proud of Hugh, of his ancestry and knowledge and his standing in the community. Yet it shouldn’t be imagined that there was a continual stream of visitors and researchers, or that the Graham household was famed throughout the land. They were just ordinary folk with many peers and equals.

Some recognition of Hugh’s standing, by researchers and Knapdale neighbours, and later his professional carers, was sustained over the years, but in a general and popular sense it diminished as time went by, in a time and place of change, with an increasingly cosmopolitan and modern population, and less people recognising the traditions embodied in people like the Grahams.

Hugh was an ordinary working man among working people, no laird or aristocrat or member of the ‘County Set’. However, not so very long ago, the Grahams of North Knapdale had an important place in the social structure of the area.

In Highland Clan culture, up until fairly recently, as in wider Celtic culture going much further back, there were a number of hereditary positions somewhere below that of Chief or Chieftain or Laird, such as Bard, Piper, Physician, Archer, and Herald. Most of the people holding such positions were, in their everyday working lives and lifestyle, just ordinary people, and did not live in great style and comfort.

But in truth, there were only thin social barriers in Clan society, and the ordinary folk holding these extra ordinary positions were symbolic of the cultural and genetic links connecting the township tenant or humble cottar with the Chief.

Yes, this was a hierarchy, with the Pipers and Heralds and others somewhere in the middle ranks, but there were close ties and mutual responsibilities between high and low, and something like equal rights over land and water and natural resources, while the culture remained intact.

The Grahams of past centuries, in their house at Ardnacaig just down the rocky green coast from Crinan, on the wide Sound of Jura, and the Grahams in the sheltered Oib region (pronounced something like ‘Ope’), amidst the long sea-lochs and peninsulas at the heart of North Knapdale, were Heralds to the local Chiefs or Lairds.

Most recently Campbells, and before them McNeills. It is difficult to pinpoint the demise of this hereditary role but it must have been in the late 1700s or early 1800s.

The earlier records of this period name this Herald family McIlvernock (pronounced McIlverock, with no ‘n’, and the accent on the ‘Il’), seemingly the original name of the Mid Argyll Grahams. McIlverock means ‘Son of the Servant or Follower of Saint Marnock’, an early Celtic Christian monk associated with the town of Kilmarnock in Ayrshire, and the small holy island of Inch Marnock by the Isle of Bute, a few Argyll peninsulas South of Knapdale.

Just why this name-change occurred isn’t known for sure, but may have arisen from social or political necessity. Many family groups of McDonalds, McGregors and other clans changed their name following clashes with the Scottish then British State during the 17th and 18th centuries.

According to local tradition, some Glencoe MacDonalds came to Mid Argyll after the Glencoe Massacre in 1692, a clash between Clans Campbell and MacDonald, yet also a clash between the State and ancient Celtic culture. These MacDonalds gave themselves the name McGilp, after Loch Gilp at the head of which stands the town of Lochgilphead—in Gaelic ‘Ceann Loch Gilp’, the Head of Loch Gilp (though it used to be called Polgillip—the Lagoon or Pool of Gilp).

On the Western side of Loch Gilp, and only a couple of miles away, is the similar-sized town of Ardrishaig—Height of the Thorns or Brambles. Being closer to deep water, it has had a much bigger fishing industry than Lochgilphead.

McGilp is a sub-clan or sept of Clan MacDonnell of Keppoch, near Arisaig in Lochaber, a hundred or so miles to North. It is not known for sure where the name ‘Gilp’ originates but it is similar to the Gaelic for ‘chisel’, and the small sea-loch is indeed shaped like a chisel.

It’s an odd wee inlet, very shallow with extensive sandy mud flats, close-by but set apart from the open waters of the great sea-loch of Loch Fyne rippled with shining wave-lets. Loch Fyne is known as ‘The Shining Loch’, presumably because of its bigness and great length and thus exposure to sunshine.

It is also not known for sure where the name ‘Fyne’ comes from; it could come from an old Celtic word for Clan or Kindred, like the Irish warrior band—the Fein or Fiann; or from one of the several Gaelic words for white or fair, perhaps referring to the shimmer on the surface of the Loch, or the beauty of its shores.

But, the Gaelic or Celtic word is not pronounced ‘Fine’, nor the Loch itself, but ‘Feen’. The proper pronunciation ‘Feen’ spoils all the myriad of ‘Fyne’ businesses, community groups and projects in the communities of its extensive punning shores.

I know, I thought Fyne Fettle was a great name for our wee folk group in the 1980s, the Scottish and Irish and Northern English term for being ‘in great form’, in ‘Fine Fettle’. Feen Fettle doesn’t really mean anything.

The name McGilp is particular to this immediate part of Mid Argyll, and there are still quite a few McGilps around. The name where it is found out with the area is commonly spelt and pronounced McKillop, which is actually closer to the true Gaelic pronunciation.

McDonalds also fled here after the failed Jacobite/Stuart Risings of the 18th century and similarly took on new names to avoid persecution, in this predominantly Campbell/pro Hanoverian/pro government part of the Highlands; although there were already long-established McDonalds here, kin to the ancient lines of the Kintyre and Islay McDonalds.

And there were even some Campbell lairds in Mid Argyll with strong Jacobite/Stuart leanings, and possibly this is how McDonald refugees settled safely here.

The Grahams or McIlverocks of North Knapdale were kin to the Campbells, and to confuse matters still further the Clan name ‘Mcilverock’ (and its many spellings) may not precede the name ‘Graham’. This confusing but important topic, in terms of this book at least, will be returned to.

But it is likely that the McIlverock or Graham Heralds of Knapdale in the 17th and 18th centuries were successors to an ancient line of law-keepers, or keepers of the genealogy of the local Clan Chiefs. From the 1500s, they, the head of the family, kept a bugle or post-horn, on which they called the tenants of any township in North Knapdale to assembly when the Chief was visiting to adjudicate on local issues, the Baron Court.

In the early part of this period, the Chiefs of the area were the McNeills of Gallachoille (pronounced Gallachley), just North of the significant village of Tayvallich on Loch Sween—Gallachoille meaning Wood of the Stranger (Gall meaning Stranger, and Coille, pronounced Killie, or Kerlya, meaning Wood).

The place-name may refer to the partly Norse origins of the McNeills, or further back to the arrival of the Irish Scots