Sarah: Dumfries, Scotland - Tracking tombstones et
Trip Start
Dec 27, 2007
1
69
80
Trip End
Dec 28, 2008
Dumfries,
Scotland,
United Kingdom
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
We took the train to Carlisle and then hired a car for the day for 25 pounds. We were going to be seeing a lot of the back roads and public transport wasn't an option. First stop was Glaisters, the farm where Robert McCaw, my great great great great great great grandfather was born in 1656. We met the people who live there now - they run a successful Christmas tree business - and saw the old farm house and buildings. It's quite isolated, but things were only going to get more so. We then went on some more little narrow, windy back roads to Balmaclellan, where John, his wife Margaret Grierson and his son Robert are supposed to be buried. We found the village and the churchyard but no sign of any McCaws. There were some Grierson graves, one followed by Esq. So I figured that must be descendants of Margaret as she was daughter or granddaughter of an Earl.
Still, left somewhat disappointed and hoping for more luck at the next place - Tynron. Many more back roads later, we arrived at a little town called Moniaive and stopped at a dairy to grab some lunch. I thought I should ask for directions to Tynron just to be on the safe side, since we WERE in the middle of nowhere. "Oh aye. Ye just go doon the rood and o'er the bridge, up the bree - it's a really steep bree - and just a wee way further along is Tynron. Ye'll no miss it."
We did find Tynron, a wee way o'er the bree - it's another blink-and-ye'll-miss it village. I had more luck in the Tynron churchyard and discovered the gravestone of my great great great great grandfather Robert McCaw, born 1790, died 1820. Also his two grand-daughters, one called Sarah, who died at the age of 4. As Robert died at Cormilligan, and William McCaw was born there and lived there until leaving for NZ, that was to be our final destination!
Well, it was also to be our most difficult. Funnily enough, Cormilligan (once a farm/homestead) was on Google, so I had a vague idea of what rivers and roads it was between, but we still spent the next hour yo-yo-ing along the back roads. The roads went from tar-seal to gravel to rock to mud and then it stopped. We were literally at the end of the road. And from there we had to foot it. Looking around at the hills and dales, lochs and woods, we weren't sure which way to go. Luckily, however, there were a bunch of old guys rumbling down the hill in an old jeep so I flagged them down and asked for directions to Cormilligan. The guy with the map said to me straight out - "one of William McCaw's descendants are you?" Wow. "There's even a visitor's book up there for you to sign." ?!!
We were cutting it fine timewise, but we decided to go for it. Probably only get one chance to do this. So we started marching up the 4WD track, which in places was basically just flattened grass. We walked through the fern forests, disturbing a herd of highland sheep, who were not impressed. Half an hour later, we emerged from a wee wood to behold what I would call the classic Scottish wind-swept valley surrounded by barren, rocky hills, and, at it's centre, the abandoned but determined homestead of Cormilligan. A complex of grey rock foundations and ruins but the main house still standing and in decent condition - apart from the sheep poo and lack of window panes.
I looked around, took in the stench, heard the squish beneath my shoes, and thought - the old man was taking the piss. There's no visitors' book! And then I saw it. Inside a tupperware container, hanging high above the shit on a piece of string. And beside it, on the wall, were 15 sheets of laminated paper, containing the set of sonnets by the Scottish poet Rab Wilson, entitled Cormilligan. How cool. The visitors' book contained the comments of the hundreds of people who have been through the old place: many descendants of William McCaw, several from Dunedin, Mosgiel, and other parts of Otago and NZ; a film-maker and a producer for the BBC.
There wasn't a lot of time to hang around if we wanted to have any chance of catching our train back to Carlisle, and we had a train from there to Edinburgh to make as well. So I said goodbye to a little piece of my history and we hoofed it back to our lonely car by the little loch. Not knowing what the speed limit actually was (they just have the "open road" sign), and having to work our way back through the mud-rock-gravel stages to the main(er) roads made the drive a bit stressful, but we made our train with a whole 30 seconds to spare - basically threw the cars at the rental guy while ray held the doors for me.
It was really rewarding to search for and find these places that are, as I said, a part of my history. I'll admit I was lazy: I didn't do any of the research myself, and there are dozens of other great-great-great grandparents all over the UK (well, their bones at least) whom I have no idea about, but still, it's something. And it felt good.
