A Woman of the Highlands

The launch of her latest book, ‘Women Of The Highlands’, to a packed Waterstones in Inverness in December marked another memorable chapter in the 46-year publishing career of writer KATHARINE STEWART. Peter Urpeth caught up with her for Northings

AN ADOPTED Highlander who has over the years not only entertained a large, loyal and loving readership with her vivid, first-hand, factual accounts and short-stories, Katharine Stewart has also contributed greatly to wider national and international understanding of Highland life and culture through such books as ‘A Croft In the Hills’ and ‘A Garden In The Hills’.

In ‘Women Of The Highlands’, through chapters of historical survey and summary, including ‘Early Women – Celtic Times’, ‘Mediaeval Times – Women of the Castles’, ‘Women of the ’45’, ‘Women Wages-Earners’, and ‘A New Form of Fostering’, and in a series of illuminating chapters on the life and work of individual women – some familiar, some not so, including ‘Mairi Macleod (c.1569-c.1674) – Bard’, ‘Flora Macdonald (1722 -1790) – A Reluctant Heroine’ and ‘ Anne Grant of Laggan (1755 -1838) – ‘She Was a lady most complete and bright” – Katharine Stewart brings into sharp focus the varied and rich contribution and role(s) that women have played in Highland life and culture from earliest times to the post-war period.

Written in a style that is neither polemic, apologia or sentimental, Katharine Stewart’s elegant and quietly assertive prose stems from the thoroughness and diversity of her research, a factor emphasised in the Preface where Maragret Elphinstone asserts “The overriding impression of Katharine Stewart’s book is its richness of texture”, and ensures that the book achieves that difficult balance of being of equal relevance and interest to the general reader and the academic.

Being a woman you’re bound to see the world through slightly different eyes, and have different priorities

Of course, for all the range of content in her new book, it does exclude one woman who, had this subject been addressed by any other writer than herself, would for sure have included Katharine Stewart of Abriachan and, more lately, Inverness.

Katharine Stewart’s life began far removed from the her beloved, rolling croftlands of Abriachan. Her early years were spent in Musselburgh, the daughter of a public school master. At first, Katharine attended ‘Dame’ schools (small, private primary schools), before attending Musselburgh Grammar School, and ultimately on to Edinburgh University, where she attained an honors degree in French.

But her life and education had been disrupted following the early death of her mother, and unable to leave his work in France, Katharine’s father moved her and her brother to France and into the daily care of an aunt.

During the war, Katharine worked at the Admiralty in London before deciding in 1950 to move to the Highlands and Abriachan with her husband, where she lived for fifty years, moving to Inverness in 2000.

Reading and writing had always been a major part of Katharine’s early life and her father was a prolific writer and published a number of books including a best-selling comical history of English Literature along the lines of ‘1066 And All That’, as well as being a writer for the magazine ‘Punch’.

Where, I asked Katharine in her home in Inverness, did her decision to move to the Highlands originate?

KS: Well, I didn’t spend much time in the Highlands as a child but we were never very far away, and we used to go on holidays to places like the Isle of Arran, but we were never as far north as this. But as soon as I was a student, we spent every holiday up in the Highlands, walking and climbing and so on.

Living in the Highlands was something I had always wanted to do. My father was one of a farming family from further south but he used to say, you know, farming is a precarious business, you need capital and all that and I didn’t have a science degree but I thought, well, let’s chance it. My husband’s people had been crofters – the Stewarts – two generations back in Perthshire, round about Blair Atholl, so it was kind of in the blood.

PU: And the writing, where, when and how did that begin?

KS: Well I had always done odd things, had an article or two in newspapers in my student days, but it really started when we had been working for several years on the croft in Abriachan, and we had got to a stage where not enough money was coming in. A lot of money had gone out buying livestock and so on, so we were getting a little bit strapped for cash. So I sat down at the kitchen table one afternoon – I remember it was pouring with rain – and I wrote an article about what it was like to be on a croft in the middle of winter thinking it would interest people in the towns, and this went off to the Weekly Scotsman which was on the go then, and it was accepted.

I remember that the editor after that said that he might like to take an article, do a little short series, and in the end I did those articles for 13 years! It was called ‘On The Croft’. So that started me off. Then, a literary agent in London wrote and said he had seen some of the articles I had done and suggested that I do a book. So, I wrote back and said, okay if you think so, and he wanted to see a chapter or two which I did, and then nothing was happening so after several months I wrote and asked him to send the chapters back, which he did, and I finished the book and sent it to Oliver & Boyd, publishers in Edinburgh, and within three weeks the whole thing was settled up.

By the way, Neil Gunn, whose work I loved, very kindly did a foreword for me, for my first book, called ‘A Croft In The Hills’. He liked it and that was a great help, I’m sure.

At that time I hadn’t met him, and I didn’t meet him for years, but he very kindly did the foreword and after a few years I did another book, ‘A Garden In The Hills’, and we did meet then and he knew what we were doing and that we were interested in all the old times in Abriachan and that we had started up a little museum with crofting things. I only met him once but we corresponded quite a lot and I’ve got quite a lot of his letters, lovely letters.

PU: What was life like in Abriachan when you arrived? Was it easy to be accepted as an incomer, then?

KS: We were almost the first incomers to Abriachan, but after us quite a lot of different people did come, but we were accepted so well and the people were so nice and kind and helpful. There were then all native people belonging to the place, all Gaidhlig speakers, but they just accepted us, I don’t know how, I couldn’t tell you why but we didn’t find any problem. You know how they refer to people as ‘white settlers’, well, we never had any of that, and the people were all still working their crofts in those days in the traditional way, and we worked the traditional way. We kept cattle and sheep and grew oats and turnips, hay and potatoes on a five year rotation.

After we reluctantly gave up the croft as we just couldn’t make enough to make it work, we moved to the school house just down the road from the croft and by that time I was doing some teaching in Inverness and my husband ran the post office. The last couple who had lived in the school house had run the post office and my daughter still does it today!

Before we gave up the croft I did write a lot of short stories for the BBC in London. In those days there was a thing called ‘Morning Story’ broadcast every morning, and they were read on air mostly by a man called James McKechnie from London, who was a Highlander, and he read them so well. The stories were very Highland but I had a lot of fan mail, especially from overseas.

The stories were purely incidents from Highland life. The first one was about how the men of the village were up cutting the peats and they were so late back this night that the women were wondering what was keeping them. Eventually they came in rather sheepishly and took this man up to his bed saying that he might have got a touch of the sun. What had happened was that they had unearthed a bottle of whisky up there! Quite small incidents but people seemed to enjoy them.

They were also published in The Scotsman. The Weekly Scotsman had disappeared by then, but the Saturday edition of the The Scotsman sometimes published short stories.

PU: And where did the inspiration for your new book come from?

KS: Well, I wanted to do something about the status of women in the Highlands through the ages, and in researching the book I found out a lot of things that I didn’t know myself before hand, especially about how in Celtic times women had a much higher status than their Greek or Roman counterparts; how they were able to take part in public life and were highly regarded. Whereas in Greek and Roman circles the women were totally dominated by the men.

The book was researched through archives, and I must say that the museum in Kingussie was very helpful, and a great many friends helped, as well.

I think until the 1872 Education Act, which made schooling much more available to girls and encouraged them to stay on – otherwise they would leave as soon as they could and the boys would stay on – that helped women, and then a lot of women began to get university degrees and were taken much more seriously from then on.

Being a woman you’re bound to see the world through slightly different eyes, and have different priorities. What I feel is that, basically, women, unlike men, didn’t look for power but they were very much aware of what was going on and aware of the injustices in the way things were run.

PU: What legacy have women writers in Highland history left for women today?

KS: Women in the Highlands are now really living up to their full stature. They have so much more confidence now and they can take part in politics and can get themselves onto committees where they can make a difference to things. I try to look on the positive side as far as I can. I mean, the women on the crofts in the 1950s I still remember as being very calm, people who were always there and would never make a fuss about anything, they took everything in their stride.

So I would say, don’t be afraid as you write, express yourself as you want to, and don’t feel that you have to retell other people’s opinions about things.

Katharine Stewart’s ‘Women Of The Highlands’ is published by Luath Press.

© Peter Urpeth, 2007