Historic Settler Sites

Have any of you ever, in your travels, been somewhere and felt a deep sense of either belonging or connection to that spot?

Sutherlanders, I am told, are noted for two gifts that run strong in them as a group. One is deep faith, the other is their sixth sense.  For me, that sixth sense takes the form of being able to stand in a place and feel its history, or sense that human activity took place there. This has proven a useful gift in my archaeological career. It has also given me a deeper sensitivity to my own history and that of my ancestors.

As a result, I have found several locations where I have felt a connection with my ancestors. The most powerful experience in this vein I had in Scotland, in the Strath of Kildonan, Sutherland, in the township of Aultbreakachy (there are a number of different spellings for this place).

Although I have found documentation that shows that my family lived at Aultbreakachy at the time of the Kildonan evictions (during the Highland Clearances), there is nothing to indicate which of the eight or nine croft houses was theirs. I was able to find the ruins of seven of those cots when I visited the township site in 2006.

I walked all over the site, looking at all the buildings, trying to imagine life inside of them, the children playing around them, the effort of eking a living from the soil in the surrounding area, and cutting the peat out of the hills above to fuel their winter fires.

I found myself drawn to one of those ruined buildings – only the foundations and up to two feet of the walls have survived the last two hundred years – and I walked to the wall between the byre and the living quarters to sit. Suddenly, I began to weep. I sat there for half an hour, unable to stop the flow of tears, unable to block the sense of grief and loss, unable to dismiss the sense of anxiety that overwhelmed me in that spot.

There is no way that I can prove that that was the Matheson croft, the home of my 4g-grandmother Jean (Polson) Matheson and her unmarried children. But because of what I experienced there, that ruined croft, at the very least, represents their last home in Scotland to me.

Tags: 1815 Group, Aultbreakachy, Highland Clearances, historic sites, Kildonan Parish, Member Memories, Scotland, Sutherland

This entry was posted on Monday, September 14th, 2009 at 12:01 am and is filed under Member Memories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.