The Grey Dog of Meoble

No part of the Highlands and Islands seems to have a shortage of supernatural legends, some of which have a connection with animals. The following story was recorded from John MacLeod, Glenfinnan, and transcribed shortly afterwards by Calum Maclean on the 15th of May 1951.

Cù Glas Mheòbail

Ann an làithean m’ òige gu sònraichte agus gus an latha a-diugh is minig a dh’airich mi feadhainn a’ bruidhinn air Cù Glas Mheòbail. A-nise b’ aithne dhomh-sa gràinne dhaoine, daoine tùrail ’s daoine sgilear is daoine foghainteach a bha glan-chinnteach gum faca iad fhèin an cù glas. Seo agaibh mar a dh’airich mis’ a thòisich an eachdraidh seo. Bha chionn iomadh bliadhna bha duine ann am Meòbal, taobh Loch Mòrair. Agus bha gràinne mhial-choin aige. Thuit dà gun d’fhalbh e fairis agus dh’fhàg e as a dheaghaidh gala dhe na mial-choin nach b’ urrainn da greim fhaighinn oirre mun d’fhalbh e, leis chuir e as do chàch air fad. As deaghaidh dhi falbh, dh’fhalbh a’ ghala a bha seo agus shnàmh i a-nunn do dh’ eilean a th’ ann an loch fos cionn Taigh Cheann Loch Beòraid their iad ris an lochan sin Lochan a’ Choin Ghlais. A-nise bha cuain chuileinean aice anns an eilean. Cha robh iad a’ cur mòran dragh air duine na beothach airson bhliadhnaichean. Ach thuit dhan duine a bha seo gun do thill e nall, agus nuair a thàinig e a Mheòbal, dh’innis iad dà gu robh a’ ghala is a’ chuain aice anns an eilean. Cha dèanadh nitheann an gnothach ach gu rachadh esan a choimhead. Ràinig e an lochan agus rinn e an fhead a b’ àbhaist dà a dhèanadh ris a’ ghala. Shnàmh ise air tìr is rinn i sog is mearag ris an duine a bha mòr. Ach coma lìbh-se, an ceann tacain thàinig a dhà na trì dhen chuain air tìr. Agus is duilich leam a ghràdhainn gur a h-ann a stiall iad an duine as a chèile. Agus mharbh iad ann an sin e taobh an eilein. Tha an seann-sluagh a’ gràdhainn.

Feumas e a bhith gur h-e sin is coireach Cù Glas Mheòbail a bhith a’ leanailt Cloinn ’ic Dhùghaill gus an latha an-diugh, leis ’s e Mac ’ic Dhùghaill a bh’ anns an duine a thug iad as a chèile taobh an loch.

And the translation goes something like the following:

The Grey Dog of Meoble

In the days of my youth especially even up to this day I’ve often heard folk speak about the Grey Dog of Meoble. Now I knew a great deal of intelligent, skilful and brave folk who believed implicitly that they had seen the grey dog. Well, this is how I first heard of the beginning to this historical narrative. Many years ago there was a man in Meoble, besides Loch Morar. He owned a great many greyhounds. It so happened that he went overseas and he left behind him a greyhound bitch that he couldn’t get hold off before he went off, which then killed all the others. After he went off, the bitch swam over to an island in a loch above the house at the head of Loch Beoraid which they call the Little Loch of the Grey Dog. Now she gave birth to a litter of puppies on the island. They didn’t harm any man or beast for many years. But it so happened that this man returned and when he arrived at Meoble they told him about the bitch and her litter on the island. There was nothing for it but for him to go over and take a look. He got the loch and whistled as usual to the bitch. She swam over to him and greatly delighted and happy to see him. But never mind that, in a while two or three of the litter came to the shore. And I’m sorry to say that they tore this man to pieces. And they killed him there near the island. That’s what the old folks say. It must be that this is why the Grey Dog of Meoble follows Clan Dugald (MacDonalds) to this very day, as this man was a MacDugald that was torn to pieces by the lochside.

During the mid-1950s, Calum Maclean visited Morar and the surrounding area and took the opportunity to record many traditions then still current including the story about the Grey Dog of Meoble. Included is a summary of the above narrative:

The district of Morar is extremely pretty with its white sands and hill clad with birch. Loch Morar is reputed to be the deepest fresh-water loch in the British Isles. The loch is now a North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board reservoir, and although there is a dam and power-station at its western end, the beauty of it remains unaffected. Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat of the ’Forty-five was captured on one of the wooded islands on the loch and from there made his way to his execution in London. There is a roadway up for a couple of miles on the northern shore of the loch, while there are only one or two scattered houses on the southern shore. I met a young shepherd who lived alone at Meoble miles away from anyone. He never felt lonely and seemed to enjoy life very much. He was accustomed to walking long distances to Morar and Arisaig. He laughed heartily on being asked if he were afraid that he might encounter the legendary Grey Dog of Meoble. The Grey Dog of Meoble makes its appearance when any one of the MacDonalds of Morar, the seed of Dugald, is about to die. There are several people still living who maintain that they have really seen the mysterious dog. It appears only before the death of members of that particular branch of the MacDonalds. Over two hundred years ago a MacDonald of Meoble had a greyhound. He had to leave home to take part in some campaign and at the time of his leaving, the hound was in pup. When he left, the bitch swam out to an island on Loch Morar and there gave birth to a litter. Months went by and MacDonald returned home again, but his greyhound was missing. He happened to go to the very island where the bitch had her litter. The pups had now grown up into huge dogs, and not recognising their master, attacked and killed him before the mother appeared on the scene. Ever since that time the Grey Dog has appeared as an omen of death.

Writing in an article about the Grey Dog of Meoble, Iain Thornber took the opportunity to collect as much material from knowledgeable locals as Charlie MacFarlane of the Glenfinnan House Hotel:

It was he that told me the following tale concerning an old Highland lady who lived in Glasgow in the early 1900’s and whose family were closely related to the MacDonalds of Meoble.

She lived alone and had been confined to her room for many years but a friend who lived across the street was in the habit of calling each day to attend her needs. On once occasion as the friend was leaving the flat, a large dog, of a type she had never seen before, passed her on the stairs. She thought no more about it until the following day when much to her surprise she saw it again, this time lying on the old lady’s doorstep. With difficulty she pushed it aside and went in. In the course of conversation she happened to mention the dog. Her friend sat bolt upright, her eyes alight. “Describe it to me,” she said in a low voice. “Well,” replied the other, “It was very big―about the size of a Shetland pony, grey in colour with a long curly tail.” “Ah!” exclaimed the old lady with a contented smile on her lips, “The faithful friend ― she came at last,” and with that sank and passed peacefully away.

Other instances of the Grey Dog have been noted some as far afield as Cape Breton where many of the MacDonalds of Meoble settled after first arriving in Prince Edward Island. It would seem also that a sighting of the Grey Dog portended a major family event such as a birth or a death although the latter connection seems well entrenched in this particular legend. A slightly similar legend that contains a death portent is also associated with the Clan Donald of Keppoch in which a grey bird appears. It may be added that the late Alistair MacLeod, a hugely talented writer from Cape Breton, was influenced by the legend which he reworked into a short story entitled “As Birds Bring Forth the Son.”

References:

Calum I. Maclean, The Highlands (London: Batsfords, 1959), p. 67

SSS, NB 8, pp. 766–67

Iain Thornber, ‘The Legend of the Grey Dog’, The Scots Magazine, vol. 117, no. 2 (1982), pp 133–40

¾¾¾. ‘An Cù Glas Mheobail – The Grey Dog of Meobale’, in Sàr Ghàidheal: Essays in Memory of Rory Mackay (Inverness: An Comunn Gàidhealach and The Gaelic Society of Inverness, 1986), pp. 106–12

Images:

A Scottish wolfhound

Lochan Mhic Dhùghaill from Meith Bheinn, Morar

Calum I. Maclean: An Appreciation

Fifty-three years ago to this very day, Calum Maclean lost his long struggle with cancer and passed away on his adopted isle of South Uist. Here is an obituary notice reproduced in full from The Oban Times submitted by John Lorne Campbell of Canna, a close friend and colleague. The slightly older Campbell had known Maclean since the latter’s return from Ireland at the end of the Second World War and they assisted one another in the collecting of oral traditions particularly in the Southern Hebrides:

 

The passing of Calum Maclean at the early age of 45 has deprived the Highlands and Islands of a much loved personality. Calum Maclean had dedicated himself to the work of the preservation of the oral tradition of his country. In this field, he had achieved a unique position. It was a field of research that was, until recently, grossly neglected by official Scottish academic authorities, though its interest was better recognised abroad. Lovers of traditional Gaelic song and story and folklore saw with relief, when the Irish Folklore commission sent Calum Maclean to the Hebrides with an Ediphone in 1946, that at least one serious attempt would be made at the scientific preservation of this material before the last Gaelic storytellers and folksingers who had escaped the net of the 1872 Education Act has passed away.

 

Calum Maclean was the first person who undertook the systematic collection of old Gaelic songs and stories and tradition in the Highlands and Islands with modern recording apparatus. Therein lay the importance of his work. A good deal had been done previously in the way of collecting old stories in the Highlands by J. F. Campbell of Islay and his collectors, but lacking any means of making mechanical recordings, their task of writing down such tales from dictation was a very laborious one, and J. F. Campbell himself admitted that his collection in no way exhausted the stories current in the Highlands “whole districts as yet untried, and whole classes of stories, such as popular history and robber stories, have yet been untouched.

 

In the field of folksong things were worse. If it is difficult enough to take down a long Gaelic story in writing from dictation, it is ten times more difficult to write down traditional tunes in unfamiliar modes and varies with each repetition. J. F. Campbell’s “Popular Tales of the West Highlands” are authentic, but subject to the drawback that a storyteller who is dictating to someone writing down is always apt to shorten his sentences and reduce dialogue to indirect speech. “Songs of the Hebrides” are not authentic, and the establishment of the songs, both tunes and words, as actually sung, is a matter of great importance to students of folksong the world over.

 

More and more scholars are recognising that the Gaelic language, and geographically the Outer Hebrides, constitute the most interesting repository of oral tradition in Western Europe. It is not only what has been preserved of local origin that is of interest, but what has come from outside and then been forgotten elsewhere, in the way, for instance, that traditional songs that originated on the mainland are now only remembered in the Isles. Thanks to Calum Maclean, the amount of material now available for the study of folktale and of popular tradition in the Highlands and Islands has been enormously increased, the words of hundreds of old songs have been preserved in their authentic form, and their tunes have been made available for transcription from the recordings by first rate musicians skilled in the idiom of folk music.

 

In 1951, Calum Maclean transferred from the Irish Folklore Commission to the School of Scottish Studies, where he became a Senior Research Fellow. The scope and extent of his work in the field will not be properly appreciated until his notebooks have been catalogued and indexed, including the material he collected for the Irish Folklore Commission, of which a microfilm has been presented by the Commission to Edinburgh University. Many person acquainted with the Hebrides will be well aware of the singers and storytellers who were discovered by Calum Maclean, in many cases only just in time. All with regret most deeply that he did not live to catalogue his collections and print a substantial part of them.

 

Like Fr Allan Macdonald and Dr George Henderson, who collected Gaelic tales and folklore in South Uist between sixty and seventy years ago, Calum Maclean has passed away in his prime. In the years that are to come, the value and extent of his work are likely to be more and more realised. Calum Maclean was to have received, in September of this year, form the University of St. Francis Xavier at Antigonish, Nova Scotia – an institution with very strong Highland associations – the honorary degree of LL.D. for his work for the preservation of the Gaelic oral tradition. No much honour was ever more merited.

                                                                                      John Lorne Campbell

 

Some months passed and in December an elegy was also published in The Oban Times composed by Iain Ruadh MacLeòid (John MacLeod):

 

Fhuair sinn naidheachd an dè

chuir saigheadean geur nar crìdh,

’s gun robh ’n dùthaich gu lèir

fo phràmh ann an dèidh na tìm,

o na chualas mu d’ bhàs,

a Chaluim, air clàr gun chlì,

’s cha bhi ’n dùthaich gu bràth

mar bhà i is tu ga dìth.

 

Siud a’ cholann bha stuam’,

bha aoibhneas is uails’ nad ghnùis,

bha do ghiùlan gun uaill,

bha thu iriosal, suairc, is ciùin,

’s aig cruinneachadh sluaigh

thug thu iomadach buaidh is cliù,

’s bochd dhuinne san uair

nach cluinne sinne fuaim do chiùil.

 

Gun robh foghlam nach gann

nad cheann agus t’ aois glè òg,

’s thug thu dearbhadh gach àm

le d’ chainnt an ionadan mòr,

fhuair thu tàlant bho Dhia

’s thug thu riarachadh seachad is còrr,

’s cha do dh’àicheidh thu riamh

do dhleasnas do d’ Dhia ’s co d’ chòir.

 

O ’s buidhe don àl

Fhuair blasad de d’ mhànran maoth,

’s a bhlais air na bàird

tron spàirn a thug thu le d’ ghaol;

gun chuir thu air clàr

iomadh eachdraidh is àilleachd chiùil,

’s bidh sinne nad dhèidh

gad mholadh ’s tu fhèin san ùir.

 

We got news yesterday

which pierced our hearts with sharp arrows,

and the whole land

was overcast from that time;

for we heard you lay dead,

Calum, strengthless on boards,

and never again will the land

be the same as before it lost you.

 

That was a body always well-controlled,

cheerful and noble was your face,

your bearing was without arrogance,

you were modest, courteous, and gentle;

and in gatherings of people

you made an impact won much fame—

how much poorer are we now

that we cannot hear the sound of your music!

 

A wealth of learning

filled your mind from your earliest years,

you proved it time upon time

in the great place in which your spoke:

you got a talent from God

and you gave good measure and more

and you never denied

your duties to your God and to your own standards.

 

How happy the young

who savoured the sweetness of your talk

and tasted the bards

through your devoted hard work!

You put down on record

many a story and beautiful tune,

and we, now you have left us,

will go on praising you in your grave.

 

References:

John Lorne Campbell, ‘Calum I. Maclean: An Appreciation’, The Oban Times (6 September 1960)

John MacLeod, ‘Do Calum Ia[I]n MacGhilleathain’, The Oban Times (3 December 1960)

 

Image:

Calum I. Maclean from the late 1950s

Slàinte a’ Choigrich – The Stranger’s Toast

The following story was collected from John MacLeod from Glenfinnan by Calum Maclean around the 15 of January 1951. The moral–if indeed it can be described as such–of the story is that niggardliness was  always best avoided and that generosity to a stranger was customary in the Highlands.

Seo agaibh naidheachd a dh’ airich mise aig na seann-daoine. ’S ann ma dhéidhinn fear agas té a bha a’ fuireach ann am bothan àirigh. Agas bho’n is e am na Nollaig’ a bh’ ann, bha corra-dhram a’ dol. Agas bha bean an taighe a’ fàs car sgìth dhe na dramaichean. Thachair a’ latha a bha seo gun dàinig coigreach an rathad.

“O dram mosach!” thuir^st a’ bhean. “Is mise a tha sgìth dheth agas gun sònrui’ aig an am seo dhe’n bhliadhna.”

“Och, och,” thuir^st an coigreach, “an ann mar seo a tha?”

Agas seo agaibh mar a labhair e:

’S iomadh gloine a dh’ òl mi,

Agas stòp a lìon mi,
Agas tasdan a chur air bòr^st,
Bu chòir an diugh a bhith a’ cur riadh dheth.
A nall a’ chuach is lìon gu bàrr.
Is tràighidh sinn i gu h-iochdar,
Air tìr nam beann 's nan gleann 's an fireach,
Far an do chleachd na fir is na mrathan a bhith bàidheil.

And the translation of the above anecdote goes something like this: 

Here’s an anecdote that I heard from the old folk. It’s about a man and a woman who stayed in a sheiling bothy. And because it was Christmas time there were a few drams going around. And the goodwife of the house was getting pretty fed-up with the drams. It so happened that on this particular day a stranger came by the way.

“O vile dram!” said the wife. “I’m getting fed-up with this and especially at this time of year.

“Och, och,” said the stranger, “is that how it is?”

And here’s is what he spoke:

Many a glass I’ve drunk

And many a stoup I’ve filled

With a coin on the table,

This day it shall be paid with interest

Over with the quaich and fill it to the brim

And we’ll drain it to the bottom,

In the land of the hills, the glens and moors,

Where men and women used to be kindly.

In his book The Highlands, Calum Maclean affectionately recalls the narrator of the above anecdote: 

I shall always associate Kinlocheil with someone whom I have never seen, someone I shall never see. During my months in Lochaber I paid many visits to the late John MacLeod, a Fort William newsagent. John was a fine storyteller as well as being one of the very finest of Highland gentlemen. He was passionately devoted to the Gaelic language and Gaelic traditions. We spent many pleasant hours together. John always told me that his brother, Joseph, who was station-master at Kinlocheil, had scores and scores of old songs and other lore as well. The MacLeod brothers were natives of Glenfinnan and knew the whole history of that lovely, fateful glen. Joseph had songs that no living person knows now, songs that had been sung in Glenfinnan long before it ever saw Charles Edward Stuart, the last rightful prince of the Gael. Joseph was a comparatively young man. I left Lochaber in June 1951 and did not succeed in visiting him. I was away for over a year. When I returned Joseph MacLeod was dead. The recording of folk-songs has become quite fashionable in Scotland during the last few years. Certain singers have had their songs recorded by as many as a dozen collectors. All Joseph MacLeod’s songs went with him to the grave. His brother, John, died shortly afterwards. Two authentic Highland voices are now silenced for ever.

Such a scenario was not that uncommon as many of the folk from whom Maclean recorded so much material during the late 1940s and 1950s had passed away by the time his book was published. Perhaps this becomes even more relevant when one remembers that Maclean knew that he was dying of cancer when he was writing his book and it is at moments like these that makes his writing all the more poignant.

References:

SSS NB 8, pp. 763–64

Calum I. Maclean, The Highlands (Inbhirnis: Club Leabhar, 1975), 30–31

Image:

Glass of whisky /  Gloinne uisge-bheatha