Blair Collection > Celtic monthly > Volume 8, No.5 (February, 1900)

06
THE OELTIO MONTHLY',
fied place of theirs in the interior, viz., Brawl
Castle, on the Thurso river, five miles from the
sea. In the Mackay country I do not know of
a single Norse fortified building, except those
perched on the sea rocks, and to which due ref-
erence will be made. The native Celts appear
to have held the hills and hill forts ; the pirate
Norsemen held the fortified sea rocks, whence
they issued, as opportunities presented them-
selves, to plunder the flocks and corn fields of
the aborigines. In some cases they married
with the natives, but their hold on the counury
was much more slender than their historians
would have us believe : and tins is very evident,
they did little to elevate the moral or religious
life of the natives. On the contrary, they
crushed out the infant Christianity of the north,
burning and plundering, in a most ruthless
manner, the primitive settlements of the devoted
Culdees, who, since the sixth century, laboured
among the people with a growing measure of
success. On the east bank of the Halladale, and
just where it enters the sea, there is a place
called Bighouse, or in the vernacular ISiijas.
This word is a Gaelic corruption of the Norse
compound big hus, meaning "big house." It is
also called An I'ur, which is the Gaelic for "an
heaj)." From this it appears there was of old a
Norse habitation here, which may have been
fortified, but not likely. The Norse name for a
fortified jilace is ttm, the equivalent of the
Gaelic duii. The present modern house of Big-
house stands on the site of the old Tor. Further
up the river there is another place-name Big-
house, but not a stone of the building can be
seen, and from its position it does not appear
likely that a stronghold would be reared there.
It was more probably the private dwelling of
some Norseman who settled down among the
people of the place.
Celtic Toweks and Places op Interest.
There is a magnificent specimen of the old
Celtic round tower on the heights to the east of
the river, and nearly opposite Craggy. Its ex-
ternal circumference is fully three hundred feet.
Its height, in some places, is about nine feet,
and the walls are about ten feet thick. It is
built of dry unhewn stones, some of which weigh
half a-ton, perhaps more. There is the usual
passage running round through the body of the
wall, from which the winding staircase rose to
its summit. The tower is peculiar in that it has
two exits ; the larger facing the east, the smaller
the south. Opposite the southern exit, and in
contact with the tower, traces of an irregularly
shaped building are to be seen, which give a
clue to the object of having a second outlet.
It is very likely the occupants of the tower were
in the habit of storing their corn and folding
their cattle in this building when danger threat-
ened. Close to one of the towers at Keiss,
lately opened and cleared by Sir F. T. Barry, a
similar irregular structure is seen, which is de-
clared, Ijy competent authorities, to have been
an ancient covered cattle fold. The Keisa
building is very much less massive than the
Strath-Halladale tower ; the former is built of
comparatively thin flagstones, which have seri-
ously decomposed through weather action ; the
latter of whin and granite, solid as a rock.
Some distance further down the strath, at Bun-
na-houn, where the Dyke water falls into the
Halladale, there is another round tower on an
eminence close to the river. It is not so im-
posing as the former, and very little of it now
remains I am told its stones were used in
building dwelling houses, and in rearing a wall
round the burial place of Bunna-houn, which
stands in its near neighbourhood. I may re-
mark, in passing, that this burial ])lace is com-
paratively modern, and that it became a place
of sepulture by what may be called an accident.
About the beginning of this century the mater-
nal aunt of Ensign Joseph Mackay died at
Dyke, and she being a native of the Strath of
Kildonan, her friends and neighbours set out in
wild, wintry, weather to bury her at Achaneckan;
but by the time they reached Bun-na-houn the
storm grew so furious that they were compelled
to halt and leave the cottin in the old tower.
There it lay for some days without any abate-
ment of the snowstorm, the friends meanwhile
keeping a "wake" in the old tower, to show
their respect for the dead, as was and is their
custom. But a prolonged " wake" in a roofless
old tower, with the thermometer under zero,
will wear out the devotion of even warm-hearted
Highlanders. The end of it was they had to
bury their dead in the haugh close to the tower,
and to remove the stigma of giving her a
dishonourable interment, resolved to make it
a permanent burial place, which resolution they
have religiously kept ever since by regularly
burying their dead there. Still further down
the strath, and on the same side — the west
side — Cnoc an Fhreacadain (the watch hill)
lifts its bold shoulder to the skies. On its
summit, and within a fortified place prepared
for the purpose, the guards of Strathlialladale
ke|it a sharp eye on the marches, lighting a tire
at the first sign of danger, which would be seen
on the "watch hill" above Tongue, 30 miles
away, and thus warning the chief to gather his
men and prepare for action. With fire signals
and fiery crosses, it did not take long to muster
the clansmen in those wild, unsettled days, when
fighting was a pastime, especially if there was a
prospect of securing plunder.