A story by Prof Michael Given
The great thing about having a fire in the middle of the room is that you can sit round it. Everyone gets a share of the warmth, and no one is closer than anyone else. The wattled panels cover the turf walls on all sides, the couples stand proud above your head supporting the roof, and the peat smoke floats up into the roof space. Sit low, so your head’s out of the smoke, and listen up, because the storyteller is just beginning a story.
Gilleasbuig Mòr MacPhàil, Big Archibald MacPhail, was called mòr for a reason. He was large in every direction, and a great man with his fists or his dirk, just the sort you wanted with you in a fight or on a cattle raid. But it should be said that he wasn’t the sharpest sgian dubh in the glen. If it was a bit of negotation you wanted over the small matter of some missing cattle, or some tact and diplomacy, then the last thing you wanted was Big Archie rushing in with his knife and his hot temper.
For a while Big Archie lived in the little village of Breaclaid behind what is now Ballachulish. One day he was walking along the shore to Invercoe when he met an oddly-dressed man on the road. ‘Beannachadh Dhè!’, proclaimed Big Archie in his grandest voice, the Blessings of God. The stranger looked at him oddly, and answered rather uncertainly in English, ‘Um, yes, it’s a nice day, isn’t it?’.
And Big Archie was so furious at the disrespect the stranger showed to the blessings of God that he pulled out his knife and he –
Now, knives, that makes me think. You see, this particularly storyteller is also an archaeologist, and it so happens that the archaeology team at Glencoe have found several knives which Big Archie might
well have recognised. He clearly lived in the seventeenth century, more or less, and that’s when many of our excavated artefacts were made and used.
So, anyway, Big Archie pulled out his iron knife with its neatly carved wooden handle, and before he knew what was happening, the English-speaking stranger was lying dead at his feet.
Now, Big Archie wasn’t the sort of man to feel guilty about this sort of thing. But he did look rather regretfully at the man’s feet, which wore a rather handsome pair of shoes, with nice shiny buckles.
Buckles! We found some of them in the excavations, particularly from the summerhouse of the Chief of the Glencoe Macdonalds, who clearly had a taste for fancy copper-alloy buckles in his shoes. Over the centuries they’ve lost a bit of their shine, though.
He won’t be needing these any more, thought Big Archie to himself, and he pulled the shoes off the man’s feet and put them on his own. And then he noticed that the stranger was carrying a rather impressive musket. Now Archie had never used anything new-fangled like that, but he rather fancied himself at least carrying one and striking fear into anyone who saw him.
I’m sad to say that we didn’t find any muskets in the excavation. But we did find lots of musket balls, and little pistol balls, and a tiny lead cup for measuring out the powder, and a pin for unblocking the touchhole. It’s clearly quite a performance firing a musket.
So Big Archie relieved the man of his musket, and then thought he might just check in his pockets in case there was anything else he wouldn’t be needing any more. And imagine his joy when he found – a golden guinea!
Imagine our joy if we’d found a golden guinea… Sadly, no such luck. But we did find lots of silver coins and bronze coins, and like the buckles and the musket balls they date to more or less the time when Big Archie was alive, and are just the sort of thing he might have carried in his pocket. In fact, seeing they’re quite low value, it’s much more likely he had one of these than a golden guinea…
So off went Big Archie home feeling very pleased with himself, and he started boasting to everyone in Breaclaid how he’d fended off a vicious attack from an evil foreigner but had beaten him off thanks to his superior strength and skill. The tacksman, the headman of the village, rolled his eyes and sent off a couple of his trusty men to see what had happened and bury the body.
When the men returned, they showed everyone what they’d found hanging from the man’s belt: a leather pouch with not one but sixty golden guineas! Big Archie of course was mortified, and everyone had a good laugh. Everyone always seemed to laugh at Big Archie…
Now, it wasn’t that Big Archie felt bad about killing the stranger. As I’ve said, he didn’t really do guilt. But he couldn’t help wondering that such a being who spoke that strange language that normal people couldn’t understand might in fact have been a spirit. And maybe that spirit would one day take his revenge…
Many years later, when Big Archie was living with his daughter, he decided he would climb up over the pass to go and visit his son over in Glen Creran. And right up at the top of the pass, to his horror –
But you know what – this storyteller’s throat is getting a bit dry, and he’s going to stop for a wee dram and a rest. But come and sit round the fire some other time, and he’ll tell you the rest of the story.
A huge thank-you to the unnamed but wonderful storyteller who told this story to the collector John Dewar in the middle of the 19th century, and to the long line of storytellers that told it across the generations, perhaps right from the time of Big Archie himself.
Dewar, John. 1963. The Dewar Manuscripts. Volume 1: Scottish West Highland Folk Tales. Glasgow: William MacLellan. (pages 246–247)
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