Haunted Scotland Page 6

  The advice I would therefore offer to anyone finding themselves on the Renton stretch of the Dumbarton Road after sunset is simply to maintain a healthy stride. When driving a car, be certain to keep your eyes firmly fixed on the highway ahead.

  Under absolutely no circumstances should you feel tempted to pull over and offer someone a lift.

  8

  TO TRIUMPH IN GLORY WITH THE LAMB

  When a man’s soul is certainly in hell, his body will scarce lie quiet in a tomb, however costly; some time or other the door must open, and the reprobate come forth in the abhorred garments of the grave.

  Robert Louis Stevenson,

  Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes (1879)

  The religious purges of long ago are of little concern to those facing up to the challenges of the here and now. There are, nonetheless, certain episodes of repression indelibly imprinted on the faiths of our island race, their consequences embedded deep within our spiritual psyche. That is why we shudder when we hear of atrocities in far-off lands. That is why we claim to abhor injustice.

  The Scottish National Covenant of 400 years ago is a case in point. The passions it engendered are largely forgotten, but they certainly make it easier to explain the re-emergence of such movements as Islamic Fundamentalism.

  In 1633, spurred on by William Laud, the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, King Charles I, a didactic monarch by any standards, pronounced himself head of the Church of Scotland by Divine Right and, in so doing, ordered the replacement of the reformer John Knox’s Book of Discipline with his own modified Book of Common Prayer. This was seen by the majority of Lowland Scots as a betrayal of everything that had come before.

  Since neither the Scottish Parliament nor the Kirk Assembly had been consulted, the king’s proposals were justifiably seen as a blatant attempt to undermine the independence of Scotland’s hard-won fight for its Presbyterian faith. Although the majority of Scots had always supported their Stuart monarchs in the past, this was a step too far. Matters came to a head on 23 July 1637 when Jenny Geddes, a market trader in Edinburgh, threw her ‘fald’ stool at the minister of St Giles’ Kirk in protest. When, in 1638, a large number of devout members of the Church of Scotland signed a National Covenant of opposition, it ignited a period of brutal religious repression which lasted for over fifty years.

  During these ‘killing times’, simple, God-fearing folk, whose only crime was to reject the corruption of their political masters, were unwittingly transformed into martyrs. Those who failed to attend government-approved churches were fined. The death penalty was imposed on those who preached out-of-doors at so-called ‘conventicles’.

  It is estimated that over 28,000 souls met their deaths in the violent confrontations that followed. With such an intensity of anger and frustration, it is only to be expected that the blanket of discontent surrounding such emotions should linger on to create the occasional aberration of time.

  Encroaching upon Edinburgh to the south-west are the Pentland Hills, today designated a Regional Park. Here the scenery is criss-crossed by rivulets, burns and glens spilling into the Southern Uplands, a wild and lonely territory despite its close proximity to Edinburgh.

  And it was exactly the plentiful solitude and fresh air to be found here that attracted the Dutton family. Entrapped within their individual working environments during the week, Richard Dutton, a bank employee, and his wife Emma, a nurse, first began excursions prior to their marriage. With the arrival of their two sons, Jamie and Pete, such outings became a monthly ritual in all weathers.

  More often than not, they parked their car in the old railway station at Dolphinton, and set off on foot towards West Linton. They had completed this walk on numerous occasions, but one Sunday, as they were crossing the gate at North Slipperfield, the sky became rapidly overcast and before long it had begun to rain.

  ‘It’ll pass,’ said Richard. Besides, all four were equipped with boots and waterproofs.

  Two miles on, as they were approaching the remains of the old Blackhill farmhouse, they encountered a man dressed in what looked like an ill-fitting coat. He was carrying what appeared to be a younger man over his shoulder. ‘Can we help?’ asked Richard. ‘My wife is a nurse.’

  The older man fixed them with a sad and vacant stare, and made no response. Turning to Emma and the boys, Richard shrugged his shoulders. ‘Must be down-and-outs,’ he observed. ‘Probably drunk.’

  Emma was not so censorious. ‘The one wearing the red cloak looked unconscious,’ she said with concern. When they turned to have another look, the pair had vanished.

  ‘They went over the brow of that hill,’ shouted Jamie, scampering across the heather with his brother to have a look. ‘Not here,’ he called back to his parents. ‘They must have gone some other way.’

  Sure enough, when Richard and Emma reached the summit, the strange couple were nowhere to be seen.

  ‘Did you see how they were dressed?’ asked Emma. ‘They must belong to one of those historical reenactment groups. You know, the Sealed Knot or White Cockade Society.’

  Richard laughed. ‘Well at least I’ll have something to tell them in the office tomorrow.’

  Emma was more circumspect. ‘I’ve a bad feeling about this,’ she said and, as soon as they reached home and the children were fed, she turned on the computer to search the internet. ‘Look what it says here,’ she called out eventually. Richard joined her and, with some incredulity, absorbed the information on the screen.

  On 28 November 1666, a bloody battle was fought at Rullion Green on the southern slopes of the Pentland Hills. Some 900 Covenanters, men and boys, had been challenged by a Government army led by the notorious General ‘Black’ Tam Dalyell. It was a rout. Fifty Covenanters were killed outright. The remainder scattered into the surrounding hillsides.

  Although badly wounded, young John Carphin, an Ayrshire lad, was among those who escaped, but by midnight his strength had failed him. He therefore sought help at the remote farmhouse of Blackhill where Adam Sanderson, a shepherd, invited him in. Knowing that this would place Sanderson in danger, Carphin declined and asked only that he help him make his way up the valley of the West Water.

  Sanderson obliged, leading him in the right direction, but as dawn broke the younger man collapsed and died in his arms, his last words a plea to be buried within sight of his beloved Ayrshire hills. It was a big favour to ask of a complete stranger, especially as it put his companion at considerable personal risk should his actions become known. However, Adam Sanderson was a decent man, unimpressed by religious bigotry.

  So he carried the body of John Carphin to the summit of the Black Law, where the far-off Ayrshire hills could clearly be seen in the far distance. There he buried him and erected a cairn of stones in his memory.

  ‘It doesn’t seem possible, but I wonder?’ speculated Emma.

  A few weeks later, she and Richard, Jamie and Pete made a return visit to Blackhill. This time they climbed to the top of Black Law, where a gravestone erected two centuries after the interment marks the spot of John Carphin’s final resting place. By the time the gravestone was erected the covenanting cause had long been resolved, but its martyrs are not forgotten.

  The day was bright and clear. To the west, through the gap between Black Law and the Pike, the Dutton family could clearly make out the distant, silken hills of Ayrshire. ‘He’d have liked that,’ said Emma with a sigh.

  Another chapter in the turbulent advance of Scotland’s story concerns the relentless thieving of cattle the length of the ‘Debatable Land’, the Border with England. From the thirteenth until seventeenth centuries, the practice was commonplace, becoming a way of life for the lawless ‘riding’ clans who dominated this territory and regularly turned against each other in their struggle to survive. As a result, the Borders region is littered with medieval keeps and peel towers, each and every one of them with blood on its stones. As darkness falls, who knows whose eyes are keeping watch on their cold stone battlements?


  On the summit of Minto Crags, near Denholm, are the remains of Fatlips Castle, so named to commemorate the swollen jowls and mouth of the notorious Turnbull of Barnhill, who never passed up a chance to kiss a pretty girl. Standing three storeys high and towering above the surrounding countryside, this formidable stronghold occupies a spectacular vantage point. From its clifftop platform, known as Barnhill’s Bed, approaching trouble was easily spotted and, in the relentless days of reiving and English invasion, this proved invaluable.

  The crunch for the Turnbulls came in the early sixteenth century, when King James IV, despairing of the lawlessness of his Border subjects, held a mass hanging beside the Rule Water, two miles from Denholm. Fatlips Castle passed to their neighbours and rivals, the Elliotts, who were elevated to the Scottish peerage as earls of Minto.

  From then on, the fortified tower on the hill became little more than a garden folly for the Elliotts until 1897, when it was restored as a sporting lodge. It then became a museum, but after a spate of vandalism which culminated in a fire, it was abandoned.

  That was back in the 1970s, and since then those who live nearby in the area have looked on in dismay as the building has deteriorated. ‘I often go for a wee walk up there on a weekend,’ Sandy Lochie informed me, ‘But never at night.’

  Although he and his friends played as children in and around the tower, he claims to be baffled as to why it was abandoned by its owners. ‘It’s perfectly habitable,’ he insists, and, to some extent, this is what prompted him to stop one night as he was driving past and noticed lights flickering in the windows.

  ‘There was only just a dull glow, but I knew there shouldn’t have been anybody up there,’ he recalled.

  Besides, he knew that access from ground level had been bricked up. ‘I had three options,’ he went on. ‘I could have gone home and forgotten about it, or I could have reported it to the police, or, instead, I could go and have a look for myself – which is what I did.’

  Pulling his car into the side of the road, Sandy extracted a torch from the car’s glove compartment and cautiously made his way up the overgrown track. ‘I must have been daft,’ he said. ‘But it was a warmish night and I didn’t really think much of it at the time.’

  As he came closer to the castle walls, he says he clearly heard the sounds of a harp or clarsach being played. ‘There was a great roar of shouting, joviality and laughter, as if the occupants were throwing a party.’

  By then he was within twenty feet of the castle walls. Increasingly breathless from the ascent, he had momentarily paused when a loud explosion rocked the ground and everything became quiet. Looking up, he saw the lights in the tower windows had been turned off.

  ‘There was a pungent smell of damp smoke, even though it hadn’t rained all week,’ he recalled with a shudder. ‘Everything was eerily still. I said to myself “you’re a daft laddie”, and turned on my heels to go home.’

  Sandy returned the following morning to have another look at the castle by daylight. As he might have expected, he found the entrance was sealed up and there were no apparent signs of a break-in.

  ‘I took the dog along with me this time,’ he said. ‘Poor old chap, he started off by running away ahead of me, but as we got closer he stopped dead in his tracks and started to whimper.

  ‘From there on, he wouldn’t go any further. I reckon he knew something was going on there. If only animals could speak.’

  9

  HELL AND PURGATORY

  Strange things, the neighbours say, have happen’d here;

  Wild shrieks have issued from the hollow tombs;

  Dead men have come again, and walk’d about;

  And the great bell has toll’d, unrung, untouch’d.

  The Reverend Robert Blair, ‘The Grave’ (1743)

  Nowhere is the past more pervasive than on the Orkney Islands, where everyday survival is governed by 100-mile-per-hour winds off the Atlantic Ocean. In one of his more memorable essays published in the Orkney Herald, the Orcadian poet George Mackay Brown recalled a childhood visit to two adjoining crofts named Hell and Purgatory. Around thirty years ago I noticed an advertisement offering these two crofts with their six acres of land for sale for what appeared to be an extremely modest sum. At the time I thought how splendid it would be to have such an address on my headed notepaper.

  But then I asked myself why they were so named? And why so inexpensive?

  So I consulted a map and immediately saw the reason. Perched on the very edge of the far north-east coast and no doubt glorious during the warm summer months, during winter they are exposed to everything the North Atlantic chooses to throw at them. Hell and Purgatory, indeed!

  Such weather conditions are at the core of a thousand Orcadian and Shetland folktales, where the spirits of all of the forces of land, sea and sky become one. Added to which, there is no more evocative a stretch of water, where the rain clouds thicken, and the ocean clamours for attention, than Scapa Flow. Even on a fair day with a light head wind, the mood remains solemn; the great mass of water looms in front of you like a solemn sheet of steel.

  Here, seventy-four ships of the German High Seas fleet were deliberately scuttled by their crews in the last century. Moreover, on a chill October night in 1939, 833 seamen lost their lives when a German U-Boat torpedoed the HMS Royal Oak, a battleship employed as temporary accommodation for sailors.

  In 2006, Rick Moston and Gus Purdy, both experienced scuba divers, arrived in Stromness to join a team of naval history enthusiasts exploring the basin of Scapa Flow. On 21 June 1919, Admiral von Reuter, the German commander, had issued the order for his entire fleet to be sunk. Although many of the boats have since been salvaged, the bottom of the sea is still littered with remnants: three 25,000-ton battleships, four cruisers, five torpedo boats and two submarines, not to mention a handful of other more domestic wrecks.

  Rick and Gus had been on similar excursions before, but never one with such sinister associations. Only too well did Gus remember his grandfather reminiscing about a friend who had gone down on the Royal Oak. Today, it lies in a protected war grave, keeping company with HMS Vanguard, another battleship which was blown up in 1917, condemning her crew to a watery tomb. Diving in this vicinity is strictly forbidden, but elsewhere in Scapa Flow it has been actively encouraged.

  Starting off with the big ships, SMS König and SMS Kronprinz Wilhelm, Rick and Gus moved on to SMS Köln and SMS Dresden, taking time off to swim with some seals off the so-called Barrel of Butter.

  It was on the fourth day of their adventure that Gus dived close to where the SMS Karlsruhe lay, surrounded by debris. Reaching the bottom, he was preoccupied with the scallops, queenies, plume anemones and dead men’s fingers clinging to its sides, when his attention was diverted to a similar vessel lying on its starboard side.

  ‘I’d started to encircle the hull, when I noticed a yellow light coming from inside one of the portholes on the bridge. I thought it was odd and when I paused beside it to have a look, I saw this bloated face of a middle-aged man staring back at me.’

  Gus shuddered. ‘I can’t tell you what a shock it gave me. I’ll never forget those watery eyes. He didn’t have a mask on or a wet suit, which naturally alarmed me. Then I realised he was trying to say something to me.

  ‘His situation looked desperate. All of the time, he was scrabbling frantically at the porthole surrounds with his hands. The water was swirling all over him. He looked absolutely terrified.’

  Unnerved, Gus broke surface to summon help and was quickly joined by Rick. ‘When we dived, I tried to locate the sunken boat, but it was no longer there,’ said Gus incredulously. ‘Rick thought I was winding him up. He didn’t think it at all funny. But I wouldn’t have made something like that up,’ he told me afterwards. ‘I’m not that sick. It was far too dreadful to be a joke, a really bad dream. It still haunts me. I just hope I was having a bad turn and that there isn’t somebody still down there.’

  There are a few places on earth where there
is a real sense of being where time began, and the Orkney Islands rank high in this category. Remote as they might seem to some of us, a lasting impression has been left by the two World Wars. Gus Purdy is unlikely ever to forget his diving exploit in Scapa Flow, but even more recently yet another equally disturbing experience was shared by two young Norwegians on a walking holiday.

  Off the west coast of Mainland at eight o’clock in the evening of 5 June 1916, the HMS Hampshire on its way to Russia was sunk by either a mine or a German torpedo. Now, most of us still recognise the famous moustache and pointing figure of the First World War’s most iconic recruitment poster. Herbert Kitchener, Earl Kitchener of Khartoum, was the British Government’s Secretary of State for War, but how many of us know that he was on board HMS Hampshire on the fateful night it disappeared under the waves?

  Conspiracy theories abound. To this day nobody can be certain if it was a German mine or torpedo, or an internal explosion that was responsible. Watching from Marwick Head, Joe Angus, a gunner with the Orkney Territorial Forces, reported seeing the ship on fire two miles offshore. Within fifteen minutes it had disappeared from sight. There were 200 survivors who clung to rafts and pieces of wreckage in the raging sea, but 656 perished, including the Secretary of State for War.

  Only twelve members of the crew made land, and it was reported that Lord Kitchener had last been seen on the quarter-deck. His mission to Russia was top secret, but it was later revealed that he was carrying a number of critically important official documents. When the sinking was confirmed, the Admiralty hastily ordered precautions to prevent any wreckage falling into enemy hands.