The Scottish village featured in Outlander forever stained with blood

For this series on ancient and important villages in Scotland, I originally selected 15 and have already written about West Linton, Fettercairn, Luss, Falkland, Muir of Ord, and Tarbert. I have still to write about Glencoe, Culross, Lamlash, Wanlockhead, Kilmartin, Dunbeath, Castlebay, John o’Groats, and Crail.

I asked people to contact me at nationalhamish@gmail.com if they thought their village met my criteria. That offer still stands because I am extending this series to five parts due to the suggestions I have received from readers. Also now to be included are Ceres in Fife, Dalmally, Eaglesham and Cullen in Moray.

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As I wrote last week, there is no absolute definition of what comprises a village but over the years I have used criteria taught to me by a geography teacher, that it should have a rural location; have a population of under 3000 – ie, larger than a hamlet and smaller than a town – and be the site or past site of a centre of worship or some other form of meeting place.

All of the 19 villages I have chosen meet my definition. They need not be ancient – ie pre-Reformation – but must have existed for a couple of centuries at least. They should have some claim to fame in the context of Scotland’s history and there must have been some historical research about them which I, as a history writer rather than a historian, can use. They also have to be places I have visited, which rules out villages on Orkney and Shetland.

I will start today with a lovely village which I have visited on numerous occasions, a place of which the very name sparks mixed emotions: Glencoe.

Situated at the north-west of Glen Coe, near where the River Coe enters Loch Leven, in an area of the glen known in Gaelic as Carnach, Glencoe village was a small settlement whose foundation and ancient history is not recorded though it is known that much of the glen was given by King Robert the Bruce to Angus Og of Islay, chief of Clan Donald, who fought on the winning side at Bannockburn.

It is a matter of fact that Glencoe village is one of the most gorgeous places in all of Scotland, but it will also forever be remembered as one of the scenes of what I consider to be the darkest episode in Scottish history since the catastrophe at Flodden in 1513.

The Massacre of Glencoe is an event I have written about frequently yet I still cannot get my head around the fact that because clan chief Alasdair MacIain was a few days late in signing an oath of loyalty to King William III of England (King William II of Scotland) and Queen Mary II, the clan was ordered to be “extirpated”.

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In the early hours of February 13, 1692, at various locations in the glen, two companies of soldiers led by Colonel Robert Campbell of Glenlyon savagely killed 38 members of Clan MacDonald of Glencoe including MacIain. More MacDonalds died from exposure as they fled, including MacIain’s wife.

Their sons survived, however, and the clan returned to Glen Coe, including the location that became Glencoe village. Largely because the soldiers who did the killing had enjoyed the hospitality of the MacDonalds for a fortnight beforehand, the massacre quickly became infamous and led to a surge in support for the Jacobite cause.

William and Mary knew their troops had committed “murder under trust”, the worst possible breach of the rules of Highland hospitality.

Their commander in Scotland, Thomas Livingstone, wrote in a letter: “It’s not that anyone thinks the thieving tribe did not deserve to be destroyed, but that it should have been done by those quartered among them makes a great noise.”

It still reverberates even now – ask any MacDonald. It is a pity that Glencoe village is really only remembered for the massacre but such was its enormity little else is recalled. You can check out its history at the Folk Museum.

Meanwhile, Culross, on the Fife side of the Firth of Forth, is familiar to millions as one of the filming locations for Outlander. Although it is home to fewer than 500 people, around 5000 live in its environs.

Culross enjoys fame far exceeding its physical stature largely because it is just so beautiful. It is also a very ancient village and, as often happens with places of antiquity, myths and legends have grown up about its foundation.

In the early 6th century CE, a princess Teneu (or Enoch) of the tribe who then ruled the Lothians fell pregnant outwith marriage. She was thrown off a cliff into the Firth of Forth but was miraculously saved and transported in an empty boat across the Firth, landing at Culross where St Serf had established a settlement. The saint, who was much venerated in the east of the country, became foster father to her child, who just happened to become St Kentigern or Mungo, later the founder of Glasgow.

Stone carvings from the 7th and 8th centuries show that Culross remained a Christian settlement in the Dark Ages.

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As also often happens with our ancient towns and villages, Culross developed from the 13th century because a religious institution was established there. Culross Abbey was founded by Malcolm, Earl of Fife, in 1217-18 when he imported Cistercian monks from Kinloss to establish their community.

Though it was built enough for Malcolm to be buried there, in 1230, the monks took about a century to complete the abbey, parts of which can still be seen. It became a noted centre for the production of biblical texts, and an illuminated psalter from around 1450 that belonged to Abbott Richard Marshall is in the National Library of Scotland.

As happened to Roman Catholic institutions across Scotland, the abbey ceased to function after the Reformation in 1560, and became a Protestant church. The abbey church has been much restored over the centuries and it is worth visiting Culross just to see this lovely building.

Culross is probably most famous for its palace and the astonishing preservation of its townscape that largely dates from the 16th and 17th centuries and was mostly planned by the engineer and entrepreneur Sir George Bruce. While Culross Palace – Bruce’s self-designed mansion house – is his lasting legacy, his main claim to fame is that the world’s first undersea mine was created by him at Moat Pit just outside Culross. It became so famous that King James VI & I visited Culross to view the pit in 1617 on his only visit to Scotland after the Union of the Crowns.

Moat Pit was engulfed in a massive “once in a century” storm on March 30, 1625, and had to be abandoned. Sir George Bruce died broken-hearted just five weeks later on May 6, 1625, and was buried in Culross Abbey where his effigy and that of his wife Margaret plus their eight children can be seen.

Culross was named a royal burgh in 1588 and the advantages such status confirmed on Culross included the right to export coal, usually to Veere in the Netherlands, which is now twinned with Culross. The architectural influences from the Continent gave Culross its distinctive looks and it is probably the best example of a preserved village in Scotland.

As I have written, this is not entirely a scientific selection of villages, and while Lamlash on the Isle of Arran does meet my criteria, I have included it mainly because I have visited it many times and have grown to love the place with its views across to Holy Isle (the name of that small island originally having been Lamlash until it was officially changed in the 19th century).

In one respect, Lamlash is one of our most ancient villages, as it has standing stones nearby that indicate the area was settled in prehistoric times. Then around 580-590 CE a man arrived on the scene who changed everything.

The lamlasharran.co.uk website explains: “The name ‘Lamlash’ originated in the 6th century when an Irish monk named Saint Molaise spent some time in a cave on Holy Isle. ‘Lamlash’ evolved from ‘Eilean Molaise’ (Molaise Island) to ‘Elmolaise’, to ‘Lemolash before finally becoming ‘Lamlash’.”

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St Molaise was an Irish-born monk who lived a hermit’s life in a cave on the Holy Isle and converted many locals to Christianity.

Along with all the rest of Arran, Lamlash was occupied by Vikings in the later centuries of the first millennium, and Lamlash Bay was the anchorage of the Norwegian fleet of King Haakon IV before he fought and lost the Battle of Largs in October 1263.

Three years later, Arran became officially Scottish when the Treaty of Perth was signed by Haakon’s successor King Magnus IV and King Alexander II.

A church dedicated to St Bride was built in the 13th century and the village grew around it. But Lamlash and its area ceased to develop when the Isle of Arran was “cleared”

to make way for sheep in the early 19th century.

The first big “clearance”

took place on April 25, 1829, when 86 crafters from Glen Sannox gathered at Lamlash for emigration to Canada on the ship Caledonia. A memorial plaque now stands in the village, erected nearly 150 years later by descendants of those emigrants, and reminds us that the Clearances were not just a Highland phenomenon.

The village of Wanlockhead in the local authority area of Dumfries and Galloway has both geographical and historical significance, the former as it is the highest village in Scotland and the latter because local prospectors produced the gold that was used in the Crown of Scotland.

Although they were not formally laid out until the 18th and 19th centuries, Wanlockhead and the neighbouring village of Leadhills developed because of the lead and gold deposits in the area, first mentioned in the era of the Roman occupation of southern Scotland.

It wasn’t until the 16th century that lead mining was established. Historic Environment Scotland states on its Canmore website: “Tradition ascribes the discovery of the lead mines at Wanlockhead to Cornelius Hardskins, a Dutch gold prospector more properly called Cornelius de Vois, who was active in Scotland at the end of the 1560s, but there are documentary references to mines at Wanlock for half a century prior to that, and medieval records for the rather ill-defined area of Crawford Muir which go back to the 13th century.”

The aristocratic owners of the area had hoped for gold but instead they got lead and exploited that resource for many decades. A pumping engine from the start of the Industrial Revolution stands in the village and is a protected national monument.

There was obviously some rivalry between Wanlockhead and Leadhills, as the former has the second-oldest public subscription library, while Leadhills has the oldest. They were the world’s first public libraries, created by working people for working people.

Wanlockhead also hosts the only lead mining museum in Scotland and for that and many other reasons it is worth a visit.