Echoes of Culloden

Another back road supplied another opportunity for reflecting on the past. Forsaking the Trans-Canada at Sutherlands River, we took NS 245 to the ‘Highland Heart’ of Nova Scotia. Just across the border between Pictou and Antigonish counties we came to Knoydart and spotted an imposing gate and interpretive panel drawing attention to a monument in honour of three men—a MacPherson and two MacDonalds—who fought on the losing side in the Battle of Culloden, April 16, 1746.

The battle transpired 273 years ago on a faraway Scottish moor and produced a disastrous result for Scots Highlanders, but Culloden retains great resonance—even reverence—for people of Highland heritage who care about their history. There is a place called Culloden in Ontario, another in Prince Edward Island. In Nova Scotia’s Digby County the village of Culloden is situated on the margin of Culloden Cove.

The Knoydart monument, a stone column about ten feet high commands a fine view from Knoydart Point over Northumberland Strait, the low profile of Prince Edward Island visible on the far horizon. The 1746 battle was the culmination of an intensive effort by supporters of Charles Stuart—“Bonnie Prince Charlie”—to restore the Stuarts as kings of Scotland.

The monument, built by Ronald St. John MacDonald, a great-great-grandson of one of the men it honours and one-time dean of the Dalhousie University law school, contains rocks taken from the Culloden battlefield. The battle veterans are buried nearby in unmarked graves.

On the east face of the Knoydart monument—aimed more or less in the direction of the mythic Scottish moor—Dean MacDonald installed a tablet honouring his ancestor and the other men of Culloden. It ends with lines that make up in fervour what they may lack in subtlety.

Let them tear our bleeding bosoms

Let them drain our dearest veins

In our hearts is Charlie, Charlie

While a drop of blood remains

Culloden was a catastrophe for the Highlanders. The English victors were ungenerous in victory, clan customs, language and dress widely suppressed. Combined with the infamous clearances in which Scottish lairds evicted their poor crofters in favour of sheep, the suppression led to the great emigration of the later 1700s and early 1800s.

I have something in common with the Dalhousie dean: I too have relatives who fought on the losing side at Culloden, men in my 5Xgreat-grandfather’s generation, all of them Livingstones—men affiliated with the Argyll Stewarts of Appin. Jan and I have visited Culloden, seen the spot where the ancestors fought and died, studied the list of kinsmen who perished. One of my long-ago uncles was the last in a string of men who carried and protected the Stewart battle banner. One by one the flag-bearers fell until, the battle ended, the Livingstone took the banner out of harm’s way. You can see it today in the national museum in Edinburgh, ancient blood stains and all.

The significance of Culloden was impressed upon me by my great-uncle, Harrison Livingstone, who cared quite a bit about family history. My first book, Remembered in Bronze and Stone, is dedicated in his memory. When that book was published I made it clear to my publisher that I wished to be identified as author by my full name, Alan Livingstone MacLeod. Google “Alan MacLeod” and you will see any number of people by that name, but try the full name and you will find only one.

Along Highways 245 and 337 in Pictou and Antigonish counties there are communities named for the places in Scotland the Scots pioneers departed in order to make a life in New Scotland: Lismore, Knoydart, Moydart, Morar.

A few miles down the road from Knoydart the traveler finds Livingstone Cove. It is there about the turn of the nineteenth century that my Livingstone ancestors landed in the new world. A commemorative tablet advises the visitor that Malcolm Livingstone and sons made a living from farming, fishing and lobstering.

I took a photo of Livingstone Cove from the side of the road leading down to the community wharf where the small fleet of Cape Island lobster boats is moored. In the foreground of the picture is a group of red flowers. The English forces at Culloden were led by an English prince, William of Cumberland. English gardeners are fond of another red flower they call Sweet William in his honour. In parts of Highland Scotland and in other places where Highland Scots settled after the famous battle the same flower is less reverently known as Stinking Billy.

Communing with Robert Service and Sam McGee

Given my enthusiasm for the adventures Jan and I had savoured along Cumberland County back roads, Garth offered a proposal too good to reject: let’s head out on a back road that will make yesterday’s potholed blacktop look smooth and serene.

My pal retains great affection for the backwoods “camp” he has known since about age 5, the little cabin, now about a century old, that supplies never-to-be-forgotten memories of the hunting and fishing expeditions Garth shared with his dad and brothers all the way back to the late 1940s. I proposed we make the four-wheel-drive Ram pickup our vehicle of choice. Just as well.

We took an unmarked road off Nova Scotia highway 366 that just happened on this day to be a hive of activity: heavy-duty trucks and bulldozers engaged in offloading yards of gravel topfill. A kilometre along the road I lost a staredown with the driver of a big truck heading the opposite way. Being smaller than the other guy I was obliged to retreat about half a kilometre. That minor trouble remedied, we managed to resume our journey, sometimes having to drop the truck transmission into bull low to get through two-foot moguls of dumped gravel.

It was only when we reached the far shore of Long Lake that Garth confessed we had overshot the turnoff to our destination. Another retreat safely negotiated, we made our way over five kilometres of mud and mire that made it clear the Ram had been the right vehicle choice. Along the way we paused long enough to allow a mother ruffed grouse to get her young brood out of harm’s way. Warblers and white-throated sparrows sang from scrubby woods beyond the road edge. Given the road condition our slow progress posed no threat to the numerous swallowtail butterflies going about their business. A rusting, long-abandoned old road grader gave my friend comfort we were where we needed to be.

We passed the front gate of a Boy Scout camp, two privies on the opposite side of the road, one equipped with classic crescent moon window in its door. Himself a long-ago scout of some distinction, Garth explained that, yes, a navigation badge was among the great array he had accumulated as a lad.

Perched on a foundation of large logs, the front deck of the one-room cabin commands a fine view of Long Lake. My first sight of the little cabin evoked thoughts of Robert Service. The notion is not original: at the cabin’s west end a finely made metal sign catches the observer’s eye. A buck deer at one end of it and leaping trout at the other straddle the words Strange Things Done, a snippet from the Yukon bard’s beloved ‘Cremation of Sam McGee’: There are strange things done in the midnight sun by the men who moil for gold.

Through the cabin window we could see all the comforts a fellow could possibly need for a week in the woods: bed, table, woodstove, ample pantry shelf. We burdened a couple of chairs on the little deck, Garth reminiscing about the satisfaction he and his Dad savored apropos his boyhood duck-hunting prowess. A chopping block with two axes stands in one direction, the one-hole outdoor privy in another, a boat and canoe in front of us at the water’s edge. A red-eyed vireo proclaimed his territorial imperative to one side of the deck; to the other a robin paused en route to its nest, with the fat green caterpillar it would soon supply to a clamorous nestling.

We both could have happily lingered far longer but we had places to go and our women to meet so we tore ourselves away, departing by way of a trail through the woods to a neighbouring cabin, its woodshed festooned with deer antlers, moose rack, kerosene lantern and rusting metal Coca Cola signs.

I understand perfectly well why the old cabin is near and dear to my friend’s heart. I know plenty of people who find a city’s amenities the ones they need to make life sweet. On a sunny July day, a shack in the woods by the side of a trout-filled lake, with nothing but bird song to disrupt the quiet, seems perfectly fine to me.

Anna of Central New Annan

One of the opportunities I like to exploit on a road trip is the ability to exchange the busy expressway for the benefits of the road less traveled. Jan and I went to the Nova Scotia mainland, principally to see Doris, my dear old Mum, and to hang out with good pals Garth and Carole at Amherst Shore.

My claim in this context is simple: back roads offer infinite prospects for discovery and edification. Nova Scotia collector roads 256 and 246 in Cumberland County feature four communities named for Annan, the town Scots emigrants forsook in the early 1800s for a life in New Scotland. The motorist driving west on 256 first encounters Central New Annan. One might imagine that East New Annan is situated east of Central New Annan but, no, it lies to the south. West New Annan is indeed west, but not as far west as the final namesake community, Annandale.

At Central New Annan my eye was caught by a commemorative cairn I initially thought might be a war memorial, something I seldom pass by without taking a look. But no, the monument, right by the 1866 Wilson School, commemorates not local boys obliterated in the battlefields of Flanders and Picardy, but a young woman who grew to worldwide fame on the basis of her astonishing height.

Born in 1846 at Middlebrook, Colchester County, Anna Swan moved with her family to Central New Annan at age three. Anna’s beleaguered mother managed to survive her daughter’s birth despite the fact that the newborn entered the world at sixteen pounds. On her fifteenth birthday young Anna was already seven feet tall, not nearly the full height she would ultimately reach.

In a time before it became socially unacceptable to gawk at people of unusual configuration, Anna Swan became a celebrity: the world’s tallest woman, a circus star of the first magnitude. At seven feet, eleven inches, Anna soared a full four inches over the tallest man ever to play NBA basketball. She weighed 330 pounds and walked about on feet more than fourteen inches long. One of the striking surviving images of Anna in her circus career is one in which she holds a diminutive young man in the palm of her right hand.

In her early 20s she had journeyed to Halifax to see a traveling circus where two things of consequence occurred: she was hired on the spot by the circus promoter and, what’s more, met her future husband. The spouse-to-be was Martin Van Buren Bates who at 7’ 7 1/2” was three inches and change shorter than the future Mrs. Bates. Named for the eighth U.S president, Martin was dubbed the Kentucky Giant. He was a soldier hero of the Confederacy who despite being two feet taller than every other Confederate soldier in action beside him managed to survive the war without being picked off by a Union sharpshooter.

In a celebrity wedding for the ages, Martin married the woman of his dreams at St. Martin-in-the-Fields, London, in June 1871. The bride was 26, the groom 34. Many thousands of Londoners sought to attend the colossal event but there simply wasn’t room to accommodate them all. Among those most impressed by the remarkable nuptials was Queen Victoria herself: she gave each of the newlyweds a diamond-studded gold watch of extra-large dimension.

Their circus freak-show days behind them, the happy couple opted for a quiet farm life at Seville, Ohio. There the husband built a monumental house for himself and his bride. The ceilings were fourteen feet high; the eight-foot doors barely high enough to allow Anna to pass through without stooping. Anna gave birth twice, each event ending in grief. An eighteen-pound daughter died at birth in 1872. In January 1879 Anna gave birth to a son. At 23 pounds, nine ounces, the boy remains the biggest newborn in history. Sadly, the infant giant lived only eleven hours.

Anna died suddenly and without warning in her sleep August 5, 1888, just one day before her 42^nd birthday. To honour his remarkable wife Martin Bates commissioned a grave marker featuring a statue in Anna’s likeness. The grave, shared with her short-lived children, is in Mound Hill Cemetery, Seville.

Nine years after Anna’s passing, in 1897, Martin married again. This time he chose a bride of normal stature. Despite the hazards accruing to someone of extraordinary height, Martin lived into his 82^nd year. Meanwhile, Anna occupies a final resting place far removed from the Nova Scotia hamlet that nurtured her tender years. I feel gratitude to the good folks along Nova Scotia Highway 256 who have seen to it that young Anna Swan of Central New Annan is not entirely forgotten.