The Countess of Dunmore Catherine Murray, Countess of Dunmore was born in London in 1814 as Lady Catherine Herbert, a daughter of George Herbert, 11th Earl of Pembroke. She married Alexander Murray, 6th Earl of Dunmore in 1836 and after her marriage was styled Countess of Dunmore. Following her husband’s death in 1845 Lady Dunmore inherited the Dunmore estate and made several improvements to the estate village. The Countess died in February 1886 at Inveresk, East Lothian, and is buried at Dunmore, Falkirk. Deirdre MacCuish Bark is the deviser of The Countess of Dumore’s Reel published in Book 49. She writes about her family’s connection with the legacy of the Countess. Harris is in the Outer Hebrides about 50 miles west of the Scottish mainland. The land is bleak but beautiful. In 1834 it was bought by the 5th Earl of Dunmore as a hunting estate, and remained in the Dunmore family until the early 1900s. The family had several shooting lodges for the pursuit of stag hunting and salmon fishing. The ladies of the family would visit, including the Countess Dowager, Catherine, who was involved in helping the people of the community, especially through promotion of the Harris Tweed industry. After the passing of the Education Act, Scotland in 1872, the Countess gave land in Harris to build schools. One such was Finsbay School in South Harris, which was the local school attended by my grandfather, my father and his siblings. The Feu Charter, signed by Catherine Dunmore, is dated 1879, and the school opened that August. It is interesting to look at the school logbooks for that time. The main information recorded was the attendance record of the scholars and the weather! If you wish to research the weather patterns of the Western Isles for the last century, look at the school logs! It also recorded visits by inspectors, managers (my grandfather Angus MacCuish being one of these), and various ladies who would have been guests of the Dunmores. There were prizes given to the scholars for attendance rather than for academic achievement and other items were donated by wealthy visitors. The logbook notes the school was closed for one day in 1900 to celebrate the Relief of Mafeking and again in 1917 because two young boys had died by drowning whilst ice-skating. My son Alasdair did a genealogy project at his Canadian school in the 1980s, which involved asking his grandparents to write about their school days. My father replied that his was a twoteacher school of about 40 children. Each brought a lump of
peat to school each day to fuel the fire. The children arrived at school speaking Gaelic, but the Government of the day had a policy of placing monolingual English-speaking teachers in the schools in order to force all Gaelic speakers to learn English. They learned Latin and Navigation as well as the more usual school subjects. Their sports were fishing and shinty (akin to hockey). Finsbay School was important to my family. They received an education that enabled them to progress to secondary school and eventually to university. My aunt was head teacher for 38 years. The school, which my sister and I attended for a short while in the 1950s, closed in 1966 when it had only 6 scholars.
Deirdre MacCuish Bark.
Finsbay Old School, now a private house (taken 2002)
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