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Langwell Sheep Farm
We continued south to stay in Ullapool, but as we drove along Scott noticed a sign to a now quite familiar place ‘Langwell Farm’, Coigach. This, we remembered, was the destination of Alexander MacLeod, father of Angus who settled in Badnaban, when he was cleared from his home at Cnocaneach. We drove down a long road through a broad glacial valley, with many sheep on the fertile hillsides around us, but were disconcerted by a notice at the bottom reading:
STALKING WITH HIGH VELOCITY RIFLES IN PROGRESS. YOU ARE STRONGLY ADVISED NOT TO PROCEED FURTHER.
We did not, but when we reached the B&B (‘the Sheiling’) in Ullapool we asked the owner, Mr MacKenzie, if he knew who owned the farm. Yes, we were rather trepidatious of asking help of a MacKenzie, but he was very kind and told us that he was one of the stalkers there, and gave us the number of the owners, Mr and Mrs Fenwick.
The Fenwicks kindly invited us to call in the next morning, and assured us we would not be shot. ‘This was all MacLeod county’, they told us, but in fact the marriage of Margaret Macleod of Lewis and Rory MacKenzie, second son of the MacKenzies of Kintail in 1605, seems to have brought Coigach into MacKenzie hands. Bangor-Jones’s history of Assynt actually says that in 1725 Angus, son of John Maceanreoch alias MacLeod, a cousin of Neil MacLeod of Assynt, reduced to poverty, became a servant to the MacKenzies there.
It seems, then, that by going there to find work himself, old Alexander was to some extent following the footsteps trod by Angus MacLeod in 1725.
The farm was a fine place. It had been established there in about 1809, in buildings rebuilt after the older ones had been burned down by English sailors who came up from Ullapool in the wake of the ’45. Although Alexander's life had taken a downward turn, it can’t have been a bad place for him to have worked. The MacKenzies were the Earls of Cromarty, with the subsidiary title of Lord MacLeod, and certainly didn’t live at Langwell, so it is possible, as the house was the grieve’s house, that a MacLeod was the grieve there, as a tenant of the MacKenzies.
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