Skye Zuihitsu

Camasunray Bay

I climbed up to the top shelf of my bookshelf and got all my old photo albums down, you know photos before they went digital, not that long ago..

I was looking for some photo's of Skye for a children's story I have in mind to write and I wanted to show them to an illustrator friend I had visiting with a view to getting her collaboration on the project. I ended up going through all my albums, revelling in memories, such joy!..and then seeking to share that joy by taking pictures of my photographs with my phone and posting them on social media, tagging all my friends who appeared in the pictures..all of us younger and perhaps more beautiful than we are now, on the outside anyway..

Kiran, who came with me for a trip to Skye in the early 2000's, took one of the pictures of himself and made it his profile picture -

Having posted it he asked -

Hey. So that mountain. Was Sgurr na Stri? Is it the one where the Clan Chiefs of the McDonalds and the McLeods had a fight over the land boundary that the hill marked? What's the story? Also your family own the farmhouse still. Mr Tul. Owned it?

My response was -

Yep. All correct.

Near enough anyway. Then I came back to it later and went off on one. This is what I know about Skye, picked up over the years, from friends and family (I can't gaurantee it's all acurate, just writing what I know, off the top of my head).

That's actually Sgurr nan Eag and Sgurr Alasdair and the Isle of Soy in the background, Sgurr na Stri ('The Hill of the conflict') is just out of the picture on the right.

You had McLeods to the North and the land you are sitting on would have been McKinnon land, the Strathaird Estate. The land was granted to the McKinnon Clan by Robert the Bruce for their support during the wars of independance and forfeited by them for their support of Bonnie Prince Charlie. They were ever loyal to the Bruce/Stewart line.

Sgur Na Stri (the hill of the conflict) was ever a bone of contention between McLeod and McKinnon until, so the story goes, they met up and one said to the other 'Sure it's just bloody big useless lump of rock' (which it is),'what the hell are we fighting for?' and so the conflict ended.

If you go around the headland and march through the heather for a couple of hours, you'll find a beautiful and haunting abandoned crofting village. You can see the houses, substantial houses, all roofless now and the fields marked out with stone. On a sunny day at least, you can see it would have been a beautiful, happy place. Down on the beach a waterfall tumbles down a short cliff face and you can see the children playing there, the women gossiping and washing their clothes. The story goes that the Clachan of Boreraig was 'cleared', the McKinnons as they would have been, who had been on the land for time imemorial were brutally kicked off by the landlords that came after the forfiture. Progress, rationalisation, making way for sheep and profits.

The villagers were supposed to be shipped to the Americas, in conditions I'm told, worse than the slave ships (because they were, unlike slaves, not valuable cargo). They refused to go, heart broken at leaving their land..and so were dumped on Soy (behind you in the picture) a bare, infertile little island, exposed to all the gales of the North Atlantic. They hung on there as best they could, some would die, some would scatter and some would eventually take the boat to the Americas.

My cousin's cottage is just behind you. You have Sgur Alisdair, Loch Corrusk, Sgur Na Stri and then Camasunary bay.

Camasunary can only be reached by sea or by a rocky path, that my cousins euphamistically insist on calling a 'road' (it's not, it's a rough rocky track only to be negotiated by a competent and brave driver, heedless of damage to his or her 4x4).

In Camasunry bay you'll find three buildings; the Lodge, the Celtic and the Bothie. I believe that all three still belong to my cousin.

These buildings were all part of the Strathaird Estate, which my cousins used to own. When I take visitors to Camasuray, I like to point out Blaven to them. Blaven is a massive, craggy lump of black gabbro. 'See that mountain' I say 'my cousins used to own that.'

This is their story. As you know, my mum's family were industrialists in the North of England, owning coal mines and railways and towns even in the North of England, building a massive fortune and loosing it all again, literally it all, within three generations. My cousin's story is similar, they were great industrials, Middlesborough steel makers, I think above all. They provided the steel for the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

About 100 years ago, one of the sons of the family got married and his wife's dowery was the Strathaird Estate. The other daughters of that particular family were given money in the form of an educational trust as their doweries. One of the descendants of that branch of the family is Kate Middleton, now married to Prince William. The same educational trust paid for her education at Saint Andrews Univeristy, where William and Kate met.

OK back to Strathaird. As I've said my cousins owned and ran the estate for 70 odd years. Summers would be spent at Kilmarie House, a gorgeous, white and black painted Scottish Country House on the other side of the peninsular, where the weather is kinder and rhodedendrons grow. sadly i've never been inside, but my mum passed on memories of happy holidays spent there. In addition to Kilmarie, the family would also decamp to Camasunary, having a holiday within a holiday, if you like,  for fishing, rabbit shooting and mountaineering, but fishing above all. Food would be brought over the hill by pony, friends would visit and feasting would be done on fresh caught sea trout and cherry pie. A pretty idylic set up all told.

After the second World War, three brothers took over the running of the estate, Stephen, Mark and the oldest one, whose name escapes me just now. Stephen had been a Mosquito pilot in the war and had been shot down and interned in a prisoner of war camp. With a pencil and on scraps of paper, he wrote a book, 'Fishing from Afar', which became quietly renowned in fishing circles after the war. I got it out to try and find the eldest brother's name (without success) but here are some nice quotes -

'But the cream of the fishing lay over the hill at Camasunary, in those days reached only by a pony or after a long and often turbulent boat trip by sea. Into the bay flowed the river that took the sea trout up to the lochs of na Creitach (Pronounced Na Cray) and an Athain (Pronounced An An)..'

'The Johnson family - lucky devils! - spent their summers at Strathaird. "We lived the perfect life", Johnson recalled "sleeping when we were tired and eating when we were hungry. We usually got up fairly late and had a large breakfast of porridge and sea trout. We spent the day fishing or stalking rabbits in the park with air rifle, with a snack for lunch. In the evenings we had another meal of sea trout and rasberry tart or anything else that had been sent over the hill from Kilmarie."
'He and his brothers and his father caught sea trout in the sea, in the rivers and on the lochs, by day and by night, all summer long.'

'The family expectation of Stephen was that, after University, he would follow his father into the Middlesborough engineering firm of Dorman Long. The prospect clearly appalled the young man, used to the wide spaces and clean air of Skye.'

Morris. That was the older brother's name. Both Morris and Mark became farmers and Stephen qualified as a vet, all three turning their backs on the industrial heritage that had made their family's fortune. All three lived a leisured life based around the upper class pursuits of hunting shooting and fishing.

By the 1970's, most of the money was gone and Strathaird, being mostly barren rock, had never and never would produce an income and indeed was costing the family £30,000 a year in upkeep. And so it was sold, to the next generation of entrepreur, with money burning holes in their pockets, in the case of Strathaird, the buyer was Ian Anderson, the lead singer of the folk rock band Jethro Tull.

The brothers and their progeny however hung on to small properties on the estate and some fishing and shooting rights. One of the properties they retained was Camasunray, this eventually passing down to my cousin Allen Johnson, who is the current owner.

Allen was one of four brothers, the sons of Mark and Helen Johnson. Helen was my mum's sister and that's my connection to this lot. All four sons were sent to Eton (Uncle Mark would say 'Every time I sent one of the boys off to school, I had to sell a farm.'). Allen trained as a doctor in Edinburgh, specialised in ear, nose and throat and despite living down near Birmingham, dedicated time and energy, money and heart ache to the upkeep of the Lodge at Camasunray, not an easy task given the difficulties of access and the howling gales that roar in off the North Atlantic.

Morris, Stevie and Mark had all turned their backs on the Teeside industries where their family fortune had been made. My mum's family had a similar story to tell. They were coal mine and railway entrepreneurs around Teeside, they too as they became rich, moved away from the industries were their fortunes were founded, buying land and estates, building large country houses and taking up the habits and past times of the upper classes, particularly hunting, shooting and fishing. Both famillies pretty much went from clogs to clogs in three generations. In my family's case through bad management, an unfortunate marriage into a bankrupt Aristocratic family (The 'evil' Portsmouths) and simply bad luck and bad timing, cash flow problems, when cash was needed at the wrong point in the business cycle.

My grandmother married for love, to the (relatively) impoverished Sandy Medlicott, an old Harovian (he was in the same class as Winston Churchill). Sandy Medlicott was acting as Factotum for Great Grandfather, who after the collapse of the family firm, tried his hand at various things including Ostrich farming and lion hunting in Kenya. Famously he took Theodore Roosevelt Lion hunting and became friends with Kermit, Theodore's son.
Having married Sandy, my grandmother had the delightfull Victorian name of Lavender Medlicott. The Medlicotts eventually settled at Goathland in the Yorkshire Moors, living on the small farm of Partridge Hill, just outside the village it's self. 

My mother and her two sisters used to ride their ponies to the local school, hobbling them on the grass outside, while they took their lessons.The North Yorkshire Moors Steam Railway passes through Goathland and the Station has been preserved. In the Second World War, my mum at eighteen years of age, went off to war, a motorcycle escort rider for ambulence convoys. When I visited Goathland, I could see her on the station platform, in uniform, saying goodbye to her mum and dad, off to war, off to fight Facism, at the tender age of eighteen.

Sandy and Lavender had three surviving childrem Dionysia, Helen and Rosie. Helen would grow to be the beauty ('The most beautiful women to ever come into the Scottish Borders' according to my father) and would marry the still well to do Mark Johnson and it would be this marriage that would bring the whole family eventually to live in the Scottish Borders.

..to be continued.