J D Davies - Historian and Author

The website and blog of naval historian and bestselling author J D Davies

Scottish history

The Offpeak Day Return of the King

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A bit of an oddity for this week’s second blog.

(And anybody thinking ‘the blogger’s a bit of an oddity anyway’ is toast.)

Last week’s trip to Galloway – see the previous post – provided me with lots of inspiration of all sorts, and, thanks primarily to Wigtown, also provided me with lots more books which now need to be found space on my groaning shelves. But the area where I was staying also provided me with ideas and material to supplement a post from almost exactly four years ago. So the first half or so of what follows is an edited version of that post, with entirely new material in the second part. I’ll do a similar thing with next Monday’s blog, which will also update another very old post, coincidentally again from pretty much exactly this same time of year, albeit five years ago. This might well be connected to the previous point about bookshops and bookshelves!

Bear with me – and if you know the legends of King Arthur at all, you’ll probably know just how terrible a pun ‘bear with me’ is…

***

A confession: I very nearly became an Arthurian.

Before you all run off into the hills, screaming hysterically, bear with me for a few minutes. Remember that I originally come from Carmarthenshire – Caer Myrddin or Caerfyrddin, the fort of Merlin, right? So the Arthurian myths and legends were all around me from pretty much as far back as I can remember. The Sword in the Stone was the first film I ever saw in the cinema, aged about six, and by the time I was eighteen, I’d read Geoffrey of Monmouth and The Once and Future King, been vaguely irritated by the TV series Arthur of the Britons, and wondered why on earth some of my sixth form friends insisted we should go drinking in the King Arthur Hotel on the Gower Peninsula, rather than in the (literally) hundreds of pubs that were nearer.

Kidwelly Castle, my ‘local’ castle when I was growing up, where a big chunk of my love of history was born. Arthurian connection? None- unless you count the fact that it appeared in ‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail’

Then I went off to Oxford, where my first term studying ‘modern’ history included the Venerable Bede (note: Oxford University has always had difficulty with the concept of ‘modern’) and his ‘back story’ in the writings of Gildas and Nennius. So when it came time for me to choose my options within ‘English One’, the vast English history paper (note: Oxford University has always had difficulty with the concept of ‘British’) that stretched from the fall of Rome to about 1500, it was a no-brainer – like a shot, I was off to what it was then still politically correct to call ‘the Dark Ages’. I decided I’d really impress my tutor by spending the vacation beforehand reading the new, exciting book about the period, namely John Morris’s Age of Arthur.

I was instantly enthralled. Here was a whole new world, a thrilling combination of dramatic narrative and detective story, full of unfamiliar evidence and thought-provoking analysis. I was vaguely aware of the fact that Morris – coincidentally, an alumnus of my own college – had stirred up some controversy, but no matter. It was the newest, biggest book in the field, and I was still of an age when my assessment of history books began and ended with the questions ‘is it new, and is it big?’. Fortunately, my tutor on this course was the ideal man to put me right: James Campbell of Worcester College (who sadly died last year) was a formidably erudite don of the old school, and he alerted me to the devastating critique of Morris penned by David Dumville of the University of Cambridge (note: Oxford University has always had difficulty with the concept of ‘Cambridge’). So off I went to other tomes, such as Leslie Alcock’s Arthur’s Britain, which gave me a very different, archaeological, perspective on the period, and I emerged from the experience a wiser and distinctly more sceptical person, at least when it came to all things Arthurian.

It was also an object lesson in ‘how to do history’ more generally. For example, endless pages of references impress the credulous and are often intended quite deliberately to intimidate the sceptical into submission, but they don’t mean a thing if the references are to sources from long after the period they’re meant to be describing – a particular fault of The Age of Arthur – or are simply cross-referring from one dubious secondary source to another in a vicious circle of obfuscation. These traits are all too common, for example, in the work of many of the more controversial World War II ‘revisionists’, conspiracy theorists, and many of those writing books about such esoterica as the Holy Grail. (For my sins, I read quite a lot of the latter when researching my own venture into the reasonably esoteric, Blood of Kings, and quite a lot of the former when I was trying to steer impressionable GCSE students away from such things in the relatively early days of the Internet.) All too often, those who think they are historians, or even genuine, qualified historians who should know better, ‘prove’ their cases by citing highly dubious ‘sources’ that actually prove nothing whatsoever.

Arthuret church. Nice place, but no sign of kings slumbering for eternity

Four years ago, when the original version of this part of the blog was posted, I was staying at the Landmark Trust’s gloriously eccentric Coop House. This is in the parish of Arthuret, a pretty suggestive name to begin with, and the location of not one but two important battles – one in 573, not long after the time traditionally regarded as ‘the age of Arthur’, and the battle of Solway Moss in 1542. I always like to research an area before going there, so inevitably, I delved into the history of Arthuret. Pretty soon, I was lost in the darker undergrowth of the Arthurian forest (which, of course, is situated next to the Holy Grail sausage factory and the Templar vomitorium), ploughing through books and blogs which made the most astonishing claims. Some even believe that the legendary king himself lies buried beneath Arthuret parish church, and that perhaps the Holy Grail can be found there too… So I made the church my first port of call when I got there, and found it to be a very pleasant spot. But as a candidate for the last resting place of King Arthur, it is no more or less plausible than, say, Glastonbury, where the bones of the ‘king’ (and of Guinevere to boot) were ‘discovered’ in 1191. In the one case, an entire historical theory has been established on the distinctly shaky foundation that the name ‘Arthuret’ might possibly be derived from ‘Arthur’; in the other, the abbey greatly boosted its visitor numbers, and thus its income stream, as a result of the distinctly convenient find.

Glastonbury Abbey: site of the alleged tomb of Arthur and Guinevere. If English Heritage had a sense of humour, they’d erect a shrubbery around it

And that, in a nutshell, is the problem with a lot of the ‘Arthur industry’. Much of it can be attributed to attempts by one over-enthusiastic local historian after another to twist the miniscule amount of actual hard historical evidence about Arthur and his times to follow in the footsteps of the 12th century monks of Glastonbury by placing the fabled king within their own particular patch. Thus we have Cornish Arthurs, Somerset Arthurs, Welsh Arthurs, Cumbrian Arthurs, a French Arthur (seriously) and a Scottish Arthur – or rather Scottish Arthurs, with a veritable battle royal taking place a few years ago between clans desperate to claim him as one of their own. The odd thing is that these optimists keep pushing their distinctly ingenious claims, despite the fact that a few years ago, Guy Halsall’s book Worlds of Arthur carried out what seemed to me to be a pretty effective demolition job on the whole business of Arthur myth-making. But then, and before legions of Arthur-loving trolls start laying into me, I should deploy the historian’s great catch-all cop-out, namely ‘it’s not my period’; or at least, it hasn’t been since about 1977. And let’s face it, books which claim that Arthur didn’t exist and didn’t inhabit a part of the country with a reasonably large book-buying population are never going to sell as well as books that say he really was a great warlord and that Camelot was that hill just up the road.

Hang on, though. When I was looking for potential walks, I noticed on the map that only a few miles from Arthuret and the Coop House is the site of a Roman fort named Camboglanna. Hmm. Doesn’t that sound to you a bit like Camlann, the name of King Arthur’s last battle? And lo, Google the two names together and you’ll see plenty of websites which make precisely that connection. Then again, though, I’ve driven up and down the M4 many more times than I care to remember, and have always thought that the hill fort just by Junction 15 at Swindon would have been an obvious candidate for the site of the Battle of Mount Badon…and what’s the name of the place nearest to it? Badbury. At the end of the day, the Arthur myths are remarkably seductive, powerful and abiding, and who am I to argue with that?

***

So that’s what I wrote four years ago. All of those thoughts and themes came back to me in spades last week, when I was staying in another truly unique Landmark, Glenmalloch Lodge. For one thing, Glenmalloch stands on the Cumloden estate, home to the troubled Earls of Galloway, and was originally built as Cumloden School. (Apparently 25 girls and their teacher used to fit in there – and given that it was cosy for just me, I reckon the teacher must have double stacked the wee lassies.) Mmm, though, ‘Cumloden’…doesn’t that sound a bit like ‘Camlann’ to you? OK, yes, I won’t go there.

Remote and peaceful (indeed, probably the quietest and darkest place I’ve ever stayed in), Glenmalloch is, of course, in North Wales, or as some insist on calling it, ‘Scotland’.

Before all my Scottish friends jump down my throat for the second time this week, I should emphasise that we’re not making a territorial claim on your wonderful country. (Unlike with England, of course, where we still want the flat and dry bits back; fifteen hundred years of hurt, etc…) Nevertheless, it’s indisputably true that what’s now southern Scotland was once ‘Welsh’ territory, the Hen Ogledd (‘Old North’) of the annals. The original name for Edinburgh, Dunedin, is Welsh, as are many place names around it – Tranent, for example, is simply an inverted rendering of ‘Trenant’, about as Welsh as a name as you’ll find. During my drive west along the highway to the sun, otherwise known as the A75, I passed the signs to Caerlaverock Castle, semantic twin to Caernarfon, Caerphilly, and, yes, Caerfyrddin, Carmarthen. The great stone of Clach nam Breatann, ‘the rock of the Britons’, at the northern end of Loch Lomond, is said to mark the northern border of the Welsh kingdom of Strathclyde, which had its capital on the rock of Dumbarton. Thus in the humble opinion of this blogger, adding Scots Gaelic versions of placenames to the usual ones on, say, railway station signs, in this part of Scotland, is historically illiterate: provide an alternative to the Anglo-Scots version by all means, but that alternative should surely be in Welsh, the original language of the area.

All of which brings me to Rheged. In the old Welsh annals, this was a mighty but short-lived kingdom in the north, which had a brief period of greatness under King Urien. But historians and archaeologists can’t agree on whether Rheged existed at all, and if it did, on where it was. It’s usually been assumed to have been on one or both sides of the Solway Firth, perhaps extending as far south as Rochdale, the original name of which was Recedham (Note: on behalf of the Welsh people, I can confirm that we aren’t lodging a territorial claim for Rochdale.) But there were plenty of suggestive pointers not a million miles from Glenmalloch Lodge. Not far west, for example, is Dunragit – surely, some have argued, ‘the fort of Rheged’? Not far east is Trusty’s Hill, brooding over Anwoth kirk, which I mentioned in my last post, and overlooking the town of Gatehouse of Fleet. Recent excavations there have revealed what’s been described as a palace complex from the correct period, i.e. around the sixth century; so was this the principal seat, or capital if you prefer, of Rheged? If so, might Arthur have known it, especially if he was a warlord of the Hen Ogledd, not of ‘south’ Wales, Cornwall or Somerset?

Pendragon Castle. Minus any dragons, but plus red squirrels, allegedly

At which point, off we go once again, charging back into the Arthurian forest. I took a detour on my way to Glenmalloch, and stopped off to see Pendragon Castle, on the border of the north Pennines and the Lake District. Despite being a small and nondescript ruin, this has two things going for it. First, it has surely the most awesome castle name of them all; eat your heart out, George R R Martin. Second, it was reputedly the home of Uther Pendragon, father of King Arthur. In fact, the castle wasn’t built until the twelfth century, half a millennium and more after Uther’s time, but its name demonstrates that, just like the ‘grave’ discovered by the monks of Glastonbury, ‘the Arthur industry’ has pretty well always been with us. A key part of that industry is the myth proclaiming that one day, when the nation is in its direst peril, the Once and Future King will rise from his slumber in a forgotten cave, and ride forth to save –

Hang on, there’s someone at the door.

Ah, OK.

Some guy in a suit of armour, wanting to know Boris Johnson’s address.

 

Dead Admirals Society Dons a Kilt

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Apologies for the ‘radio silence’ last week. Regular followers of this blog will know that I sometimes take myself off to Landmark Trust cottages to brainstorm new novels or just to chill, and I spent last week at the tiny but perfectly formed Glenmalloch Lodge in Galloway. The upside of this was that even by Landmark standards, it was remarkably quiet and peaceful; the downside, that it was some distance beyond the reach of modern technology, while the incredibly muddy two mile unmade track connecting it to the nearest civilisation – a track, moreover, that was frequently blocked by a large herd of cows who saw absolutely no reason to move one inch off their usual route (a bit like Northern Line commuters, in fact) – hardly encouraged frequent trips in search of wifi hotspots. Hence no blog last week. However, my trip has given me an abundance of material, so there’ll be at least two posts this week, possibly even three. Without further ado, then…

***

My travels around Galloway coincided with the autumn rugby internationals, and the conjunction of the two occurrences led me into some odd lateral thinking.

For example, it seems to me that if you were organising the funeral of a Six Nations rugby fanatic, you’d want the French to provide the food and the Italians the wine (or vice-versa), the Welsh to lead the singing, the Irish to lay on the wake, and the English to ensure the whole thing was tax deductible.

And the Scots?

No contest. You’d want the Scots to provide the tomb.

Let me explain in great haste, before my enraged Scottish friends start to charge southwards in pursuit of me, that I’m actually paying a very great compliment here. Yes, I know that Catholic countries have some pretty OTT cemeteries, and London’s Victorian necropolises take some beating, but venture outside the big towns and cities, and you’re likely to find that things get a whole lot more modest. Not in Scotland, though, where even the tiniest, most remote village kirkyard can resemble a miniature Highgate, and the tombs and gravestones give you an astonishing wealth of genealogical detail. For example, take a look at this stunning Gothic monstrosity, straight out of the Hammer House of Horror. Glasgow? Edinburgh? No – Monigaff kirkyard, aka ‘the nearest civilisation’ I referred to above. Not naval, but not exactly what you’d find in a standard village churchyard in, say, Bedfordshire.

So let’s get back to ‘dead admirals’, or, more accurately, obscure naval themed memorials. Another ruined kirk I visited was that at Anwoth, near Gatehouse of Fleet, best known for this incredible early seventeenth century tomb to members of the famous Gordon clan.

Just behind it, though, was this wall memorial, which I assumed at first glance to have been of a not much later vintage – eighteenth century, say, or first half of the nineteenth, given how badly weathered it is. Then I went up close, and spotted the words ‘Royal Navy’. Excellent, I thought! What obscure, forgotten actions of the Napoleonic Wars might be recorded here? But then I noticed the word ‘submarine’, and did a double take. Even closer reading revealed this to be a memorial to Lieutenant Andrew McCulloch, killed when HMS Laforey was sunk off the coast of Italy on 30 March 1944. Yes, 1944 – and yet the memorial is already in this state!

Further south, just below the otter memorial to Ring of Bright Water author Gavin Maxwell which overlooks Monreith Bay, stands the ruin of Kirkmaiden, which takes a little finding (principally because it’s been literally sidelined by a golf course). It’s worth the hunt, though, if only for this intriguing memorial. Definitely one worth further research – although the gentleman in question already has a remarkably fulsome Wikipedia page. (Be warned, though- the link to Kirkmaiden is to another church of the same name, confusingly not too far away as the crow flies.)

Finally, back to Monigaff. Not a naval officer this time, but naval connections don’t get more impressive than a direct link to Nelson, and that’s certainly the case with General Sir William Stewart, a friend of the great admiral, who also served with Wellington and was the first commander of the Rifle Corps (of ‘Sharpe’ fame). Here’s a link which shows the inscription in much more detail.

Next time – not dead admirals, but undead kings. Sort of. Watch this space!

The Ghosts of Swarbacks Minn

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My fourth and final post about the naval heritage I visited during our recent holiday in Shetland…

By complete coincidence (honest!), our rented cottage looked out directly over Busta Voe, at the head of the Swarbacks Minn anchorage. During World War I, this was the base of the Tenth Cruiser Squadron, responsible for enforcing the maritime blockade on Germany by patrolling the great North Atlantic gaps. The squadron initially operated the elderly Edgar-class cruisers, but these proved unable to cope with the sea conditions and were swiftly replaced by larger and faster armed merchant cruisers, which then formed the squadron until it was withdrawn in 1917. These were ships like HMS, formerly RMS, Oceanic, once the largest ship in the world, although her service proved to be brief: she was wrecked on Foula on 8 September 1914, and one of her propellor blades now stands sentinel outside the Shetland museum in Lerwick.

The propellor blade from the Oceanic

Quite a lot of information about 10CS’s operations can be accessed easily online, for instance here and here; there’s even a freely accessible doctoral thesis on the subject.

There’s now relatively little extant evidence of the one-time naval presence in Swarbacks Minn, but it doesn’t take much imagination to visualise the great grey hulls lying in this extensive stretch of water, which is over 100 metres deep in places, and several local history books and pamphlets contain some excellent photographs of the anchorage in its heyday. (One example illustrates this news story, about the local bakery that was established to supply the squadron.) Busta House, commandeered as an officers’ mess and shore headquarters for the admiral commanding 10CS – initially Sir Dudley de Chair – is now a very pleasant hotel, where we enjoyed a good meal.

(Today’s ‘not a lot of people know that’ fact: de Chair’s granddaughter is the wife of Tory MP and arch-Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg.)

Busta Voe and the Busta House Hotel

Most evocative of all, though, are the gun emplacements on the island of Vementry, which stands on one side of the entrance to the anchorage. These still have their original six-inch guns in place; they were originally part of the armament of HMS Gibraltar of the Edgar-class, which became the depot ship for the base after her withdrawal from front-line service. We only viewed the guns from the opposite shore, on the island of Muckle Roe. It’s apparently possible to land on Vementry and inspect them close-up – see the photos here and here – but, sadly, it’s out of bounds in May, which is lambing season in Shetland!

The guns of Vementry

I’ll be exploring the history of the Swarbacks Minn base, and many other aspects of Shetland’s naval heritage, in much more detail in an article in the autumn issue of Dockyards, the newsletter of the Naval Dockyards Society. And we’ll definitely be returning to Shetland!

The Submarine and the Bus Stop

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Number two in my short series of posts based on last week’s holiday in Shetland…

Unst is an absolute must for visitors. As Britain’s most northerly inhabited island, it racks up the superlatives literally every few hundred yards, the further north you go – the most northerly roads, the most northerly shop (splendidly named ‘The Final Checkout’), the most northerly museums, the most northerly castle (Muness – a real gem), the most northerly brewery, the most northerly public loo…formerly the most northerly defence site, too, but RAF Saxa Vord closed a decade ago, and its buildings have now become the unlikely home of, yes, the most northerly holiday resort. But in World War I, Unst had another claim to fame, as the most northerly naval ‘base’ (of sorts) in the British Isles. During the early months of 1917, the submarines E49 and G13 used Baltasound, in the north-east of Unst, as their base for patrolling the seas off the island. On 12 March, though, the E49 struck a mine as she passed between the islands of Balta and Huney, just after leaving harbour. The mine had been planted by UC76, which had left Heligoland on 3 March. The three officers and twenty eight men of E49 were lost, including her commanding officer, Edinburgh-born Lieutenant Reay Parkinson RN, who, despite being only twenty-four, was a knight of the Order of the Crown of Italy for his part in rescuing the crew of the Italian battleship Benedetto Brin after its destruction by an explosion in Brindisi harbour on 27 September 1915. A new memorial to the crew of E49 was unveiled only in March of this year, and looks out over Baltasound to the site where the wreck lies.

The E49 memorial. The wreck lies off the lighthouse at the southern (right) end of the lighthouse in the distance

In something of a bizarre juxtaposition – or, more likely, an astute piece of placement by those responsible – the E49 memorial sits right next to one of the most famous tourist attractions on Unst, Bobby’s bus shelter, probably the only bus stop in the world to have its own website.

It’s a bus stop, Jim, but not as we know it

The Hollanders’ Graves

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Last week, we had a terrific holiday in the sun-drenched beach resorts of…

Shetland.

OK, it’s a fair cop, the temperatures never reached double figures in the week we were there, and were driven down further by the constant northerly wind (reaching gale force at times, e.g. on our return ferry voyage to Aberdeen). But if you’re the sort of person who doesn’t want to spend all day baking on a lounger, then an archipelago which offers stunning scenery, fascinating heritage sites, varied wildlife (orcas were off the coast while we were there, although we didn’t see them), and some of the best roads in Britain – straight, wide, largely empty, and sans potholes – should be high on your bucket list. Shetland is a different world, and that’s emphasised by the blue and white flag that you’ll see flying everywhere. No, not the diagonal saltire (and you certainly won’t see a Union Jack for love nor money) – this is the horizontal/vertical Nordic cross of the Shetland flag. This is a resolutely independent place, where some, like one of the candidates in the forthcoming general election, still believe that the transfer of both these islands and Orkney to the Scottish Crown in 1468-9 was illegal, and that the northern isles should actually be independent; so woe betide you if you suggest to a Shetlander that s/he’s merely a Scot who lives in Scotland, and, come to that, if you suggest that their home is called ‘the Shetlands’.

As far as I was concerned, of course, it was an opportunity to check out the islands’ naval heritage after making several previous visits to Orkney, as described in earlier posts on this site. So this is the first of a series of short posts I intend to publish in quick succession, and it’s the one that deals with my main period of study.

Shetland was an important anchorage during the Anglo-Dutch wars; important, that is, for the Dutch, who used its many sheltered inlets, or voes – fjords by any other name – as harbours of refuge for their merchantmen. Bressay Sound, which lies between Lerwick and the island of Bressay, was a particularly favoured anchorage for the Dutch herring busses, so to deny its use to them, John Mylne, Charles II’s master builder, erected a fort at Lerwick during the second war. This wasn’t completed before the end of the conflict, although the very sight of it, and exaggerated rumours of its strength, were enough to deter a potential attacking squadron in 1667. (A detailed account of this episode can be found at p.178 of this old source.) However, it wasn’t garrisoned during the next war, leading to it being burned by the Dutch in 1673, and was only completed and brought into service in 1781, when it was named Fort Charlotte.

The ramparts of Fort Charlotte, still defending Lerwick’s parked cars after 350 years

Ronas Voe, on the west side of Northmavine, the north-western peninsula of Shetland’s mainland, was another favourite harbour of refuge, and this was where the outgoing Dutch East Indiaman Wapen van Rotterdam overwintered in 1673-4, having sailed from Texel on 6 December 1673. But word of her presence was sent to Whitehall, and on 11 February three frigates, the Cambridge, Crown and Newcastle were sent north to attack her, which they did a few days later. Unfortunately, no logbooks which would provide a precise date, or description of the action, survive from any of the frigates, but the Wapen van Rotterdam was taken, briefly becoming a hulk named Arms of Rotterdam for her new masters. There are no firm figures for casualties in the engagement, but an indeterminate number of dead were buried in a mass grave on the south shore of the voe by the local people, who were rather more sympathetic to the Dutch, whose vessels they had hosted and traded with for many decades, than King Charles II and his ministers might have wished them to be. The grave site was marked by a simple memorial, and this has been renewed over the years; you can see more pictures of the area here.

Ronas Voe, looking north west, with the ‘Hollanders’ Graves’ memorials on the left

Visiting the ‘Hollanders’ Grave’ is something of an adventure, as getting to so many places in Shetland can be. Although marked on Ordnance Survey maps, there are no signposts and no obvious or easy access, other than by skirting the premises of a fish factory to get down to the foreshore. But visiting this quiet, poignant place is definitely worth the effort, and it was good to be able to pay my respects to those who perished in an action that was, with hindsight, utterly pointless – for the Treaty of Westminster, by which Charles II’s kingdoms withdrew from the war, was signed on 19 February 1674, just days, perhaps even hours, after the battle in Ronas Voe.

Dead Admirals Society in the Highlands

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Sometimes, one comes across dead admirals in unexpected ways and unexpected places. This was definitely the case during our recent road trip back from Orkney, where we’d been during the Jutland commemorations. On our journey north, my ‘significant other’ – the ‘LadyQJ’ of my Twitter feed – spotted a sign for a pottery whose products she particularly likes, but the pressure of catching the ferry on time meant we had to postpone a detour until the return journey. On the way to the pottery in question, though, I spotted a Historic Scotland sign for Fearn Abbey, and as I’ve never been able to resist such temptations, I made sure we went to have a look. This turned out to be an interesting place in its own right, a former Premonstratensian monastery that was once much frequented by the Kings of Scots; the abbey church was retained by the local parish, only to suffer a spectacular disaster on a Sunday in 1742, when the roof collapsed during a service and killed 36 members of the congregation. But the real find was up at the east end, possibly relocated there from a different position within the church – a spectacular memorial to Admiral Sir John Lockhart Ross (1721-90). Not only was it a dead admiral, it was one whom I’d actually written about, albeit in an essay that never saw the light of day. Born as John Lockhart, he became one of the star frigate captains of the Seven Years’ War, but the death of the last of his brother in 1760 made him Laird of the Ross-shire estate of Balnagown Castle – today owned by Mohamed Al-Fayed – although an entail compelled him to add the surname of Ross. (He later inherited his family’s baronetcy too, despite having been the fifth son.)

Lockhart Ross returned to service during the American War, being promoted rear-admiral in 1779 and flying his flag in the ill-fated Royal George during the ‘Moonlight Battle’ of 1780. He died as vice-admiral of the Blue. However, he is best known, not for his naval service, but for having been the landlord who introduced sheep farming to the Scottish Highlands. Although Lockhart Ross personally treated his tenants with scrupulous fairness and, indeed, much kindness, others did not, thereby triggering the ‘Highland Clearances’. Anyway, here’s his memorial!