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Inchnadamph
Our final appointment was with Mrs Helen Morrison at Inchnadamph, who had agreed to show us the old church, next to the graveyard where the MacLeod Vault stands.
It turned out that the Historic Assynt trust has been working for the last few years to preserve the vault and castle, and also to turn the old church into a Heritage Centre. Its grand opening had actually been the week before, so to our surprise we were shown a grand pedigree of the MacLeod chiefs at Assynt, and copies of the local school records and censuses. The former showed us that old Ally Alistair and his siblings had a good education at Lochinver School.
That was as much as we learned on our trip to the Highlands, although we did enjoy looking at earlier archaeological remains. Although Leod was a Viking, the MacLeods married into many local families, who were a mixture of Scots (originally invaders from northern Ireland) and Picts.
Writing in 140AD, the geographer Ptolemy of Alexandria describes the Picts, the aboriginal inhabitants of Scotland, and names their tribes. Those of the Assynt area were the Caeroni or Caronacae, the ‘sheep people’. We saw the chambered cairn on the dry land next to Ardvreck Castle, where ancestors of the later population were buried about 4,000 years ago. Beating that for antiquity, we can go back yet further with the Bone Caves, a couple of miles down the road from Inchnadamph, towards Elphin.
We climbed up to these four magnificent caves, where some of Scott’s ancestors must have lived over thousands of years, up to as recently as 2,700 BC – four of them were found buried here, along with the bones of the animals they hunted, especially red deer. Earlier bones of reindeer and bears have been found there, some dating back 45,000 years. It was an ancient site, in a much more ancient landscape, for the Lewisian Gneiss of Assynt is amongst the oldest to be seen on the surface in any part of the globe, being part of the original earth’s crust, formed of frenzied lava spouts, some 2,500 million years ago.
For our last night, we stayed at the Inchnadaph Hotel, and after dinner we walked down to the graveyard to see the MacLeod Vault by starlight. There are plenty of ghost stories associated with the family, including a grey woman who haunts the shore at Ardvreck, having married a wealthy stranger who came to dinner in the days of the MacLeod’s disgrace after their ‘betrayal’ of Montrose, and transpired to be the Devil himself.
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