Survival Guide to Glen Prosen and the Great Scott Memorial

The end of June 1949 heralded many events worldwide but, as far as I was concerned, it was my 7th birthday and the beginning of the High School of Dundee’s summer holidays. Where would we go? A guest house in Stonehaven again for a fortnight? Boring; however, be careful what you wish for!

Our parents had mentioned a cottage in Glen Prosen where we would live for the full nine weeks. We found this to be a matter of some concern. No cinema? No contact with friends? No No.9 bus to Dundee? What on earth would we do? Worse was to come. Eventually, we came to understand that the nearest habitation was a mile distant, there was no road access, no electricity, no phone, no shops, no water and no loo. How on earth would we survive?

Within a week, our doubts began to diminish. Within a month we couldn’t imagine a better place to be! Every day, rain or shine, we would discover something. Either a task to be done, such as providing firewood for the huge fireplace in the main room, or building a dam of rocks across the Prosen River to form the pool in which I would learn to swim – yes, it was freezing! This was always the first task in every year of the 15 summers we were to spend at Craigiemeg cottage. In all cases, it was hard, very rural fun. We wore singlets, gym shorts and gym shoes all day and every day. If it rained, one got wet. When the rain stopped, one quickly became dry. Only on long walks or when fishing did we wear or take along something more substantial.

We came to know nature in all its summertime forms. From the curlew to the capercaillie, we learned to recognise bird calls and the ways and means of survival for the flora and fauna of the glen. We learned the best way to catch and kill rabbits for the pot and dig for ‘bramlin’ worms in the silage heap; these were best for catching brown trout in the two nearby burns, the Cramie and the Logie. We learned to recognise the weather; that it was always windy, that the poem ‘red sky at night,’ had real meaning.

The population of the glen ran in single figures, but each figure was an immense personality. Alec MacKenzie at Cramie Farm introduced me to whisky served in a fish paste jar and the farmer at Cormuir, Geordie MacIntosh, very proud of his Black Watch history, would invite me every year to a very large ‘High Tea’ for which I performed on the pipes as taught to me at school by that marvellous and well known teacher, Donald MacLeod. Each ‘first’ event took place during my fourteenth year.

And to round off the summer we would have two weeks of grouse-beating, for which we were paid £1 a day for walking up to 25 miles before returning to school, brown and fit, ready for the first game of rugby. Our PE teacher, the late, great Dallas Allardice encouraged us in this pre-season form of training. And Jack Stark, Janitor and cricket coach par excellence, who gave up his Friday evenings supervising the school rifle club, recognised an ability to shoot which I’d acquired on the hunt for the pot and would bring a bit of silver to the school.

A grocery van came every Monday evening to the end of the drive at Cramie Farm about a mile distant; fresh milk was provided by the farm on the other side of the glen at Cormuir. The first task of the day was to take a flagon for filling, which involved an exacting round-trip of almost two miles over dry-stane dykes and the Prosen River.

Father would drive up from Dundee on the Friday evening with a box of groceries. Every item was carried the mile up from the Cramie Farm where he would park the car before returning to his work early the following Monday morning.

The cottage itself was spartan but sufficient. A large dining-room with a huge open fire was, at first, the main family hub before we developed the ‘sitting-room’ which was small with a wind-up gramophone, books, some old comfortable chairs and a fireplace. If the weather became boringly wet, we would spend time reading.

I found solitude for reading, seated on the rafters in the hayshed. Father invested in a wireless on which we heard the Coronation in 1953 and I recall thinking that the weather was appalling for the occasion but splendid for fishing. Three very basic bedrooms completed the accommodation with a large empty space upstairs called the ‘Lambers’ Room’ – available for the additional help during the lambing season. The building habitat had that faint smell, redolent of age – perhaps a hundred years of it. And with no ceilings upstairs, the sounds of the weather – especially in a wind-lashed rainstorm – were a waking reminder of where we were.

The larder was huge with large shelves and a ‘meatsafe’-type coldbox. A gas cooker completed the white furniture with gas bottles the only option for fuel while water was hand-pumped from a well located down the field in front of the cottage. Here we would wash in the evening, dancing about in the cold water before sprinting up to the cottage and the warm embrace of big towels.

A chemical toilet was erected in an outhouse. This was emptied once a week into a large hole dug in the garden where the gooseberry, blackcurrant and redcurrant bushes seemed to take on a new lease of life.

In short, it was nine weeks of blissful discovery, fun and freedom in every sense, which I shared in later years with school friends who all savoured the harsh but hair-raising experience of wild Scotland – much as I would remember from that first whisky from Alec MacKenzie.

The demands of ‘growing up’ overtook our summer and Easter idylls. I went to Africa and far beyond for half a century, while my younger brother Martin built a business in Argyll. Scott, the eldest, the toughest and probably the best-known of the three, succumbed to an incurable infection of his kidneys and, at the age of 28, died in the Cairngorm mountains at Aviemore.

And so, on what would have been his 81st birthday, 2nd March 2020, Martin and I made a memorial trip back to where we grew up together; and planted a Rowan Tree with a tune on the pipes of the same name in memory of our brother. As one young lady co-worker said of him ‘if you were lucky enough to meet Scott Stewart early in your day, he’d always have a smile and an encouraging word or two for you; and the rest of the day was just that bit brighter.’

A splendid epitaph for a splendid young man.

Iain Sinclair Stewart, Class of 1961