A LADY AT LEISURE
‘This is where my husband’s family used to rampage around with heads in bags. By Victorian times they’d calmed down and were no longer outlawed’
A lady at leisure I
WORDS FIONA ARMSTRONG ILLUSTRATION BOB DEWAR
learned a new word this month: ‘covin’ means ‘a coming together’, while a ‘covin tree’ sits solemnly outside a Scottish
mansion house and is where the laird or chief would have met his visitors or retainers. There’s a rather fine one at Bemersyde in the Borders. This is the place bought with 1,500 acres after the First World War by a grateful nation for Field Marshal Douglas Haig – and I was there making plans to film it ahead of the centenary commemorations in August. If trees could talk, what
stories would
they tell? I once arrived at Naworth Castle in Cumbria and was taken to what was called ‘the Armstrong hanging tree’. My very English host proudly told me that his family, the Dacres, once strung up 26 Scottish Armstrongs in one after- noon. He even offered to grow a sapling for me from one of the acorns. Most thoughtful. All that inter-clan violence was a very long time ago, but it does make you think about mortality. And so it was that I found myself at the
MacGregor family mausoleum in Perthshire. Yes, some wives get taken to Paris for a weekend. In this case, the chief announces that the
month’s outing is to check on the place where his ancestors are buried. Still, it’s a beautiful run across the hills to Loch Earn and we pop the Naughties in the car and set off. The vaults sit in a red sandstone edifice in the
Balquhidder glen. This is where my husband’s family used to rampage around with heads in bags. By Victorian times they’d calmed down and were no longer outlawed. They’d also made some money in India, so between 1840 and 1980 they managed to own a small estate at Lochearnhead. When they finally left, the dead rellies remained, cocooned in their chapel-like building looking down the valley. We unlock the great iron gates and walk
down the gravel drive. The Naughties run around and sniff about and aren’t the least bit scared, so it can’t be haunted. We open up the great door to the upstairs vault, where it is cold and damp. And here, cemented into the walls, lie the remains of four MacGregor clan chiefs. There should have been two more, but they met their ends far from home, in the West Indies. The first to be interred was Sir John – and
that was when a funeral really was a funeral. He was a popular man, and the world and his wife turned out for him. He was brought 20 miles up the valley in a horse-drawn carriage. A thousand semi-inebriated people either rode or walked the winding route with him, having first drunk porter outside his home, Lanrick Castle. Unusually, the day was baking hot and the wheels and horses kicked up mountains of dust, so the black-clad mourners turned white. Sir John was mournfully piped into the glen and laid to rest in the land of his forebears. To cool themselves down, the funeral-goers, including a duke, went fishing in the local loch. We pay our respects to the chiefs (and their
wives) and note the empty burial spaces. There are not many left but my chief points out two that are conveniently side by side. I do not wish to think of such things, but if I had to imagine my own epitaph I would like it to read: ‘I should have caught more fish…’
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Visiting other people’s graves can’t help but make you dwell on your own mortality, especially when you notice there’s a space beside the ancestors that’s been left for you
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