Harkness – MacGillivray Stories

The Galmisdale laird, Robert Laurie Thomson based himself in the large house at Galmisdale. He moved the crofters away “where he could not see the poor people”. Thomson made fortunes trading arms. He and his ilk were known as “Merchants of Death”. With his ill-gotten gains he purchased, amongst other things, the Isle of Muck, an estate on Skye and the Isle of Eigg (1896).

The cottages were ordered pulled down and a boundary wall using the stones from the crofts was built; the wall is a substantial one and runs from Galmisdale to Sandavore and still remains standing today. It would be grimly ironic if the crofters had been ordered to pull down their own crofts and build the wall, but I haven’t found any information regarding this. 

According to Wade Martins (2004: 46), this act by the new proprietor represented the last clearance on the island. In all, five families were moved to new crofts at Cuagach. However, a law had been passed in 1886, The Crofter’s Holdings Act, which gave crofters rights so that they could not just be moved on the whim of landowners as was not unusual prior to this. Consequently, the crofters were most likely encouraged to move rather than be ‘evicted’. 

New Cuagach crofts

Thus, it was decided to move them into new crofts at Cuagach. The new crofts were said to be a vast improvement to the cottages the crofters had lived in at Galmisdale:

“Roofed with Ballachulish slates brought by the puffer to Laig Beach, these five identical houses represented the height of modernity and an undeniable improvement in living conditions with their two upstairs bedrooms, parlour, kitchen and boxroom downstairs, wooden panelling and cast-iron range” (Dressler, 2007: 100). 

Fall into shit and come up smelling like roses

I sometimes say to people that I often ‘Fall into shit and come up smelling like roses’. Maybe this is something I have inherited from my great grandfather, Roderick. In other words, as mentioned above, this act by the new proprietor represented the last clearance on the island (Wade Martins, 2004). But, as also mentioned above by Dressler  (2007), this resulted in a great improvement in their living conditions. So the ‘lairds’ were not always the ‘bad guys’.