The Making of Mickey Bell by Kellan MacInnes

Author:Kellan MacInnes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sandstone Press Ltd
Published: 2016-09-13T04:00:00+00:00

After the ice retreated and the glacier that spread its long tongues out from the frozen Atlantic along Loch Arkaig and over Glen Ruaidh had melted, tribes of people settled along the coast and slowly moved inland.

They farmed the fertile ground along the banks of the River Cour. And in autumn the birch leaves turned to orange.

The scratch of quill pen on parchment in twelfth-century Scotland; a hand clutches the wooden arm of the throne. The warlords stand with bowed head before the king. The land along the banks of the Cour is made the subject of a feudal charter; the land along the Cour was stolen.

And still in autumn the birch leaves turned to orange.

The Prescription Act of 1617 conferred the title for land to those who had possessed it for a period of forty years. The establishment of the Register of Sasines in the same year allowed Donald MacDonnell of Keppoch to register a legally defendable deed for the stolen land along the Cour he had inherited from his father.

And still in autumn the birch leaves turned to orange.

In the warm, balmy September of 1663 young MacDonnell of Keppoch and his brother Ranald were murdered by their cousins. They forced Ranald to watch while they took his brother by the hair, pulled his head back and cut his throat with a dirk. Then they pulled Ranald’s white linen shirt up over his head and slit him open from rib cage to groin and watched his guts spill out onto the stone-flagged floor of the mansion house at Insch.

Revenge was swift. The seven murderers lived but a few days more before their necks were on cold stone and a notched axe sharpened. The seven heads were wrapped in a tartan plaid and presented at the feet of MacDonald of Sleat, high chief of the clan. But first they held each head by the hair and washed the blood away in a spring on the shores of Loch Oich known for evermore as Tobar-nan-Ceann, the well of the seven heads.

And still in autumn the birch leaves turned to orange.

After Alexander MacDonnel of Keppoch was killed by a musket ball through his left eye at the Battle of Culloden in 1746 his lands, which by now stretched as far east as the Corrieyairack Pass, were seized by the British government and managed on behalf of the crown by the Commissioners of the Forfeited Estates.

Thirteen years later, in 1759, his son Ranald Og successfully petioned the British crown for the return of his estate on the grounds he had loyally served in King George’s army at the siege of Quebec.

And still in autumn the birch leaves turned to orange.

With the family estate safely back in his hands, Ranald began the process of establishing himself as a Highland laird and member of the British aristocracy. Unfortunately for the MacDonnells, his son Alexander ran up such vast gambling debts at the gaming tables of London that in 1831 the estate had to be leased to a sheep farmer from Peebles.

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