It is a beautiful morning, the moon almost full,  and Coinneach MacLeòid has set out before dawn on the 8 mile walk from his lot at Corran Scoraig to Dundonnel.  By the time the edge of sunrise leaks above Beinn Ghobain, he has followed the winding coastal path beyond Ruigh Ruiabhaich.  It is August.  The oats are ripe and the new potatoes ready to lift but Coinneach’s tenancy demand’s that George MacCoinnich’s corn is shorn before his own.

The air is still and the waters of An Loch Beag[i] calm.  Surefooted in his brogues, Coinneach chooses the precarious cliff-edge path on towards Badralloch, a scramble in places but passable when the weather is so dry and clement.

Coinneach carries his heugh and his sharpening stone, a few oatcakes made of borrowed meal and two smoked herring.  The brambles by the path are still hard bitter red.  His early start has put him ahead of the other men, from Scoraig, Carnach and Ruigh Ruaibhach by, if he maintains this pace he will catch meet the men from the Badralloch lots setting out to fulfil their obligations to the proprietor.

Across An Lochan Beag, on the Southern shore, the sparse lots at Badraulach seem a thin quilt of oats, flax and tatties, narrow rigs, short run, still broken up by boulders.  Poor huts, their turf walls hardly dried.  Already a few folk move among the separated huts, peat smoke drifting up into the summer air.

As the path winds up across the cliff-face, Coinneach must take care of each foot he places.  The path is narrow and the drop to the sea, on his right, immediate and sheer.

His wife, Màiri and Iain, his five year old son, will do what they can, lifting spuds from the ridges nearer the howff but the boy cannot bear much weight yet and it’ll be Màiri’s burden to both turn the earth and carry the potatoes back to their howff.

Coinneach and Màiri migrated to their present lot at Corran Scoraig before Iain was born, married early by traditional standards but it was the coming way, for the old ways were unravelling now.

As the poet[ii] said,

The warrior chiefs are gone

Who had a yearning for the truth,

Who had regard for their faithful followers

And had a yoke on their foe.

They are of the opinion that you do not belong to the soil

And, though they have left you destitute

They do not see it as a loss;

They have lost sight of every law and promise…

With no promise of a stable future…why wait?

They say this new generation of proprietors would ‘geld a louse if it would increase its value by one thousand’. And Coinneach’s landlord was of that craven generation, no matter appearances.

  The whole of the Scoraig peninsula was finally bought up or inherited by the MacCoinnich[iii] Lairds of Dundonnell by 1775[iv].  Even before then, Coinneach MacCoinnich III evicted MacLeòid kinsmen from good land on the strath near Dundonnell House.  MacLeòids and MacCoinnichs too. 

This was the first wave of eviction in Wester Ross.  The wave that lured seventeen MacLeòid cousins[v] and a parcel of Dundonnel MacCoinnichs onto the Hector in 1773 to make the perilous crossing to Nova Scotia[vi].

Perhaps Coinneach’s family should have taken one of the other migrant ships in the years before the war with France but they were still on the Strath then, farming good land on a communal basis in one of the fermtouns near Dundonnel. 

Then, nine years before, as George MacCoinnich inherited the McCoinnich estate for his father,  Britain went to war against the ancient ally, France.[vii]    The price of beef and wool soared.[viii] And the migrant ships ceased to sail to Canada.

Since he took over the running of the Dundonnell estate, George MacCoinnich has evicted almost 70 families from the Strath near Dundonnell, moving them to previously uncultivated land.   Coinneach and his kin were among those families, displaced from their homes and long cultivated rigs onto bare rock and heather on both shores of An Lochan Beag.. 

On the Strath. their lives had been neighbourly, communal.  For all the negotiation demanded of communal cultivation of the shared rigs about the baille, they were a community.  Now they are fragmented, each tenant with his own lot, free to make his own choices on how to go about turning a patch of rocky, barren hillside into a farm.

Meanwhile, McCoinnich has leased their former land to ranchers from the South, a few shepherds, servicing land that once fed hundreds, custodians of flocks of the big sheep imported from the Lowlands.

But the proprietor is canny.  He will not let his former tenants stray far.[ix] Bound to him by the paucity of their virgin lots and their man-rents of labour in his own parks – cutting peats and sowing what arable he chooses to cultivate, harvesting and manuring his fields.

Coinneach’s path descends from cliff-edge to the lower ground towards Badralloch.  From here, the Strath at the head of the loch is visible.

“Ciamar a tha thu?”

“Madan mhath. Tha mi gu mhath, tapleat.” 

Just beyond Badralloch, he falls in with Domhnall MacLeòid and his boy, Iain, setting out for Dundonnell.  Iain is 12 and Domhnall, despite being of an age with Coinneach, has no place of his own, sub-letting from his father, Iain.  The saying goes that a tenancy is bad but the worse is a sub-tenancy.  Though a sub-tenancy within the family is better than with a stranger.

Ahead of them, the Strath, spreading north and south on either side of the Dundonnel River is lush, green and level.

[i] Little Loch Broom

[ii] Ref: Hunter p47.  Provide gaelic version.

[iii] McKenzie

[iv] The area around An Lochan Beag/Little Loch Broom had been in the hands of one or other sept of the Clann Choinnich for two hundred and fifty years.

[v] Mostly from Assynt

[vi] Of 189 migrants onboard when the Hector left Ullapool, 18 were buried at sea.  When the survivors reached Pictou in Nova Scotia they discovered the land agent who had recruited them had lied about provision of supplies to get through their first winter.

[vii] French Revolutionary Wars

[viii] My first recorded MacLeòid ancestors^[viii] were listed as tenants: Iain MacLeòid at No. 1 Badralloch and Coinniach MacLeòid  at No. 5 Scoraig respectively, in 1798. A third MacLeòid – Alexander – is a tenant at Rireabhach at this time. Between them, the proprietor, George MacCoinnich and his father cleared around 70 families from the Strath near Dundonnell  to townships, sited on poorer and previously uncultivated land along the coast such as Badralloch and Scoraig during the last decades of the 18^thcentury.  These clearances ‘enabled’ land, previously managed on a runrig basis, to be ‘improved’ and for large scale sheep ranching to be introduced to exploit the opportunities of the Napoleonic wartime economy.

[ix] According to James Hogg, George MacCoinnich was a ‘popular’ landlord who was ‘reluctant to clear the people completely off of his land to make way for sheep’.  McGregor ibid. Hogg visited Dundonnel in 1803