Sample

Chapter 1

Branchill

 

“Far am ah gyaan, Faither?”  I heard my thin voice whisper.
“Wheesht, quinie, dinna fash yersel. Yir jist awa tae Maggie Grant’s.”
I drowsily half opened my eyes and caught a fleeting glimpse of his face, reassuring and kind, and let his words wash over me. I liked Maggie. That was all right. I closed my eyes again.
Father however looked anxious as he carried me, his youngest daughter, from the house and across the field, green-happit with June corn. Wrapped in a darned blanket plucked in haste from the bed, I was only six and already in the grip of ‘the fever’ which, yet again, was spreading its malevolence over our community. Before it ran its course it would have claimed two young lives from our small village to add to those who had gone before.
With as much tenderness as his weary arms could impart or custom would allow a man of the soil in 1927, my father carried my slight, febrile body down the rough track from the croft to the stretcher waiting for me at the road end. He handed over his once lively, bright, chatterbox child to the attendants, who placed me in the new motor-ambulance. The last I remembered was the nurse placing a sheet over my face—necessary to prevent infection but terrifying for a child sliding in and out of consciousness and fearfully ominous for my father, powerless to help me more.
Easter Meikle Branchill huddled, as best she could, in the hills above Forres, her back to the Moray Firth and the north wind, soughing and snell, which often in the winter brought snow. Folk had lived there since the days of the Norsemen who named it after the well, pouring out its mineral-rich water high in the hills.
A sister croft, Wester Meikle Branchill, lay across the yard and over the road―Robbie’s road―and both were offspring of the mother croft, ‘big Branchill’, that sat on the crest of the rise above Rafford. They were all on land belonging to Craigmill Estate and were tucked in between Blackhillock to the north and Coldhome, which was set further along the road to Dallas and acted as a buffer for the crofters against the world beyond.
The whole had made a fermtoun in days long gone before improvements, by some folks’ way of it, had broken up most of the farming townships into single farmsteads and scattered them amongst newly enclosed fields. Land that had never been settled was given over to individual crofts and that which was poor for the want of good soil and riddled with stones and bog was reclaimed from the clutches of the moor. The old names endured though and, if there were now three crofts where there used to be one, they were styled ‘mid’ or ‘nether’, ‘easter’ or ‘wester’, ‘lower’ or ‘upper’ to distinguish them from their neighbour.
A new strain of village, too, began to replace kirktouns and milltouns of old. A thousand years ago, folk would tell you, this part of Moray had been a favoured spot. A mannie called William de Ripley had been granted land here by William the Lion and later his descendant, Sir William of Dallas, fought on the side of noble King Robert,  earning lasting glory for himself by being declared a ‘rebel’ by Edward Longshanks.
There had been a settlement at Dallas long before Alexander, the ‘Wolf of Badenoch,’ cut a swathe of terror across the north, sacking and burning Forres and Elgin Cathedral. He had used the ancient dun at Torcastle as his storehouse for the loot plundered on his rampages. The Cummin or Comyn family had received a warrant at the beginning of the fifteenth century to build a castle at Dallas. Their lineage was long and noble, reaching back beyond the bloodied steps of Dumfries Kirk where John Comyn’s life was cut short. Their castle had stood at the foot of the Wangie since the early part of the fifteenth century but, with the passage of time, had gradually fallen into disrepair. It was no wonder then that, when the new village was started around 1814, much of the stone, which had formed the thick walls of the keep, was used to build the houses.
The new village consisted of a single street linking Hatton and the Hill of the Wangie to the road to Knockando and Strathspey. The hills of Mulundy, Millbuies, Delnahe, the Meikle Hill and the Wangie surrounded the vale, enveloping it and protecting it from the worst of the weather. By 1839, it boasted around 35 homes arranged in line on either side of a wide road.
The area was well served with grey slate quarries so each dwelling was easily and substantially roofed. Every tenant was able to rent a piece of land behind the house amounting to two Scots acres to grow potatoes and vegetables for themselves and grass and hay to feed their cows. A few scattered dwellings at either end completed the settlement, home to just over a hundred souls. And so it remained for the next four or five generations, old folks dying to make way for the new and each, in their turn, carrying forward the mingled blood of the Celt and Pict and Norseman to become our people. This was the Dallas of my young days—a village so ordinary that you would scarce notice it today but the whole world to the lassie that was I.
From the front door of Branchill, the gentle Moray hills, bare of trees, rolled away as far as you could see over the young, peat-brown Lossie—not quite yet a river—towards the braes of Knockando. From time to time, it would become too swollen to be contained within its banks. Then, it would pour its contents— mineral, vegetable and, occasionally, animal—over the land and wreak havoc and destruction on the neighbourhood.
Flooding was not unusual in our part of the world. As far back as 1097, in the year that Malcolm king of Scotland died, an ‘exundation of the German Ocean’ was reported to have overwhelmed castles, villages, towns and woods and left the land of Moray desolate. In more recent times, the great spate of 1829 all but destroyed many of the dwellings, crops and much of the livestock in the vale of Dallas. The summer of that year had been excessively hot, worse than folk could remember, and the drought that had come with it had been so extreme that most of the newly planted trees had perished. The  ‘northern lights’ shone brighter and clearer than folk were used to and with them often came a warm wind, stealing over the land and unsettling the beasts in the fields. The first of the rain fell on the coast but very soon the deluge was covering the whole of the land of Strathdearn and Badenoch. A sixth of the usual annual rainfall fell in 24 hours.
‘Rain commenced on 2nd August and continued ‘til the 4th. A fierce north-east wind stripped the leaves off the trees and whirled them into the air and their thick boughs were bending and cracking beneath the tempest. At the Haugh of Bethlem, the river came so furiously down about 4 o’clock that the house was instantly flooded and the man’s wife had no more than time to snatch up her child and run for her life. The fine farm of Craigroy attached to the Mill of Dallas was utterly ruined as to the crop and soil and the river opened a new channel through the finest part of the land. At 4 o’clock in the afternoon, the river burst its left embankment immediately below the narrow pass where it enters the open vale and the whole force of the stream, at a height of over three feet, poured towards the village of 32 houses. Some 120 people had to be evacuated.’
Folk who were there told of the blacksmith, Kenneth MacLean by name, who was very near drowned trying to save his pig. He had stayed behind long after he should have fled to take care of his favourite sow which was about to farrow. As the water rose, his predicament became desperate and he was only saved by his rescuer hauling at his clothes when his head had already been under water for some time. He managed tocarry the sow up to his own bed where, we’re told, she gave birth to a beautiful litter. No father could have been more proud!
The flood, though disastrous in the havoc it wreaked, threw up some surprises, too. A tenant farmer’s wife up at Dalraddy, high in the hills where the Spey is in its infancy, opened her door after the deluge and found, to her amazement, a trout, a pike, a hare, a partridge, a boiling of tatties, a helping of neeps, and one of her own turkeys, ready for the pot! Most of the poor, however, lost all they had—their homes, livestock, land, meal-kist and, for those that had them, their little store of ‘picture-books,’ the banknotes that had gradually come into their lives.
The Lossie, like most rivers, had plainly not always taken her present course. In the days before men, she had flowed into the loch which covered the valley where the village now stood and out again at Rhininver, flowing through Branchill and into the Black Burn from where she wandered to the sea by way of Briach, Craigmill and Pluscarden. All around the loch was a dense forest, home to wildcat and wolf, elk and bear, wild ox and boar.
We were lucky. The land around our croft was fertile and now far enough away from the vagaries of the new Lossie not to need worry about flooding.
The Laich o’ Moray, a thirty mile ribbon five miles at its narrowest, twelve at its broadest, tangled its way round villages and farms, cushioning the land and its folk from the worst advances of the sea and keeping at bay the moors, empty and bleak, to the south.
Sand-blown and lightly textured, the reddish-brown till was stippled and patched with hard Moray pan, coffee in colour and iron, like its folk, in character. For all that, the Laich was well-kent for its farming and husbandry. Trim steadings and clean crops bore testimony to the hard, relentless work and quiet pride of the tenants in their small corner of Scotland’s ‘cold shoulder’, where springs arrive late and autumn frosts come early. Despite a growing season of not much more than two hundred days, Morayshire barley enjoyed a high reputation for quality and was used by the local distilleries that made it their practice to use home-grown over import in making their malt. Water leeching from the Cairngorms was pure and free from minerals and ideally suited for whisky. The mosses on the moors acted as a filter and the peat itself, used for drying the malted barley, enriched the product with its distinctive flavour and aroma.
Over the hill above Branchill lay centuries-old peat-bogs, some deep enough to cover a house, folk would say. Peat-bogs which had their beginnings in the long-gone days when wolves, not men, roamed the place and forests covered the land. Peat-bogs which, every summer, relinquished enough winter fuel to local families who were prepared to make the effort to dig it out.
 The peat also provided much needed income for folk who wrested, stacked and carted it to sell to the distilleries round about.  
My parents, Robbie and Bella Skene, had been crofters in Branchill since 1910. That year had started well for them. Since their marriage three years before, they had been blessed with first a son and then a daughter, a year later. With her sizeable dowry, Bella Masson, my mother, had brought enough money to the marriage to furnish their new home at Craigroy Mill above the village with a few handsome pieces of furniture and a chest of bonny dishes.
Each year at Whitsun, tenants would be sought to take on the mill and thirty acres of arable and pasture land alongside it. And so in the spring of 1907, Father and his brother William renewed their lease and settled down for another twelvemonth to work the land and mill the meal for the people of Dallas. Father also had the job of public carrier. Each Tuesday was market day in Forres, each Friday in Elgin and Robbie would take himself off with his horse and cart, delivering meal, eggs, cheese and the like to the town and collecting tea, turkeys and tractor parts for the local folk on the way back. He never wrote anything down and always delivered the correct item as well as the exact change. He was highly regarded by all the villagers and they looked forward to his cheery smile and courteous manner. He, in turn, enjoyed the blether and news he picked up along the way. As a wedding gift, the villagers collected thirteen and a half sovereigns to present to him on the eve of his marriage as thanks for his honourable and straightforward dealings in his business with them.
Mother and Father settled into married life at Craigroy, prospered well enough and were able to afford a maid to look after the bairns. Work at the mill was hard and relentless, everyone in the area needing corn milled to provide the staple oatmeal. Time off from the darg was rare. So, when their farmer friend, Sandy, decided to wed the local school teacher, my parents eagerly accepted his invitation to celebrate their marriage in Elgin, leaving young Johnny and his sister, Annie, in the care of their nursemaid.
She couldn’t have noticed the toddler wandering off in the late afternoon and she couldn’t have heard his infant cries for help or his last, gasping breaths as the water covered his face. When my parents returned from their day out, the maid was beside herself with grief and Johnny’s lifeless body lay at the side of the mill-lade.

View Synopsis View Information Purchase Options