health that ruled out heavy work, but he had a gift for painting and illustrating, that, in those computer-less times, was much sought after. Ian produced all the posters that advertised the dances, whist drives, election meetings, WRI meetings, hall meetings, British Legion meetings and Church functions. He used poster paints and his style of illustrating was that of the ‘art nouveau’. As you walk through the old graveyard at the Fit o’Gairn you notice how the rows of gravestones all face east and to the Holy Land. The last long-ruined chapel in their midst is similarly orientated. The old folk had an empathy with nature and the metaphysical that their pre-Reformation Faith had nurtured with imagery and a grace that endures to keep this a special place still. Glengairn, along with the Braes of Mar and Glenlivet, supported enclaves of Roman Catholicism that the Reformers passed by, to the extent that the McGregors of Dalfad further up the Gairn, felt sufficiently emboldened to erect a tall crucifix on the slopes of the Mammie Hill to broadcast their persuasion to the world. Although widely regarded as renegades and cattle thieves, the McGregors were Lairds of Dalfad in their own right living in Glengairn for more than 100 years from 1634 until after the 1745 rebellion. A staunchly Catholic family, they sent their sons to be priests, built a chapel in the Dalfad birch woods, and farmed extensively at Dalfad, Ardoch and Inverenzie on Gairnside, and also at Auchallater beyond Braemar and Wester Micras in Crathie. Old records talk of the ‘McGregors of the lime’, and bearing in mind the agricultural ‘improvements’ movement of that time, it is interesting to note that the lime-rich Mammie Hill would have been part of their Dalfad ground and the evidence of lime quarrying above Ardoch, still to be seen today, would have been a later and more legitimate McGregor enterprise. Although the McGregors had built their own chapel at Dalfad, where you can still see gravestones, we find here in Fit o’Gairn kirkyard the
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grave of Father Lachlan McIntosh, long serving priest to the upper Glengairn Catholics. Born in Braemar in 1753, Lachlan McIntosh spent a term at Scanlon in 1770, the Catholic seminary on the Braes of Glen Livet. From there he was sent to the Scots College, Valladolid, in Spain to train for the priesthood. His training there was interrupted when he won a Spanish lottery. There are reports of his leaving Spain and spending time in Madeira where he became seriously ill. After recovering his health, he made his way back to Valladolid and was ordained as a priest in 1782. Father Lachlan McIntosh returned to Scotland to serve as priest on Glen Gairn for 63 years. In recent times the Archbishop Conti was instrumental in refurbishing Fr.Lachlan’s gravestone. It is unique in that his gravestone faces west, while all others face east. I have been told that on Resurrection Day, Fr. Lachlan will rise to face his congregation and guide them thereon.
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