A commentary on Stephen Goodall’s article of July 2022
An article of this title (see original text below) appeared in the Summer 2022 edition of Standfast, the magazine of the Clan Grant Society (UK) under the name of Stephen Goodall. It was drawn to my attention. It is actually composed of two separate stories surrounding “Holy Mary”:
the story surrounding the “miracle” itself
the story about the stone created to mark the “miracle”.
It is not clear how much is Goodall’s work and how much is merely lifted from the source he cites as his reference - which should be understood properly as “The Past in the Present” written by Arthur Mitchell and published by David Douglas in 1890. The fact that the tale comes from Arthur Mitchell shows that it is a source out of Grant hands and so we should expect even more confusion and erroneous elaboration than if it had remained ‘in-house’.
The mixture of copying and his own work is well illustrated by this extract from Goodall’s text:
Luckily, in the very year of its erection (1865), I saw the stone, and then made the sketch of it which is given. Mitchell saw the stone and made the drawing shown.
Errr… no. Goodall did not witness this. Sadly this is the sort of incompetence we have come to expect.
There are several supercilious comments running through the article; initially I was tempted to assign them to Mitchell - but Goodall claims authorship and with that he takes on responsibility.
The Raw Tale
Goodall takes just two paragraphs to set out the original story:
In the beginning of the thirteenth century, a lady of the family of Mackintosh of Kylachy was married to one of the eighteen sons of Patrick Grant of Tullochgorum, and grandson of the first Laird of Grant. The laird gave Patrick the farm of Luirg, in Abernethy, as a marriage gift. After many years of domestic happiness Grant died, and was interred in the churchyard of Duthil, and soon after his lady followed him to the grave. The latter, on her deathbed, expressed a wish to be buried in the same tomb with her husband. Her friends represented the impossibility of complying with her desire, as the River Spey could not be forded. 'Go you,' said she, 'to the water-side, and if you proceed to a certain spot, which she indicated, a spot opposite the Tom Pitlac, a passage will be speedily effected.' On arriving at the river side, at the place pointed out, the waters were instantly divided, and the procession walked over on dry ground!
The followers then saw an immense shoal of salmon stranded on the dry bed of the stream and were tempted to try and capture some. The Spey was offended at this lack of respect and began to flood back. That the men thus engaged should have escaped with their lives was considered almost as great a miracle as the crossing! The procession was liberally supplied with bread and wine, and a 'Te Deum' sung. The funeral attendants continued their journey until they reached the summit of the rock immediately above the present farm of Gartenbeg. Here they rested and erected a signpost pointing to the spot where the passage was accomplished. No sign of this post has survived.
Analysis
1. In the beginning of the thirteenth century, a lady of the family of Mackintosh of Kylachy was married to one of the eighteen sons of Patrick Grant of Tullochgorum, and grandson of the first Laird of Grant.
Goodall uses this sentence to offer his own snide supercilious disdain for the story - but actually thereby he parades only his own arrogance and ignorance. Further on he says:
However, there are difficulties with it. The first is that to get to Duthil from Tullochgorum one does not have to cross the river at all! Bigla Cumin would have had to have lived two centuries before she did; and there was no Grant of Tullochgorum with eighteen sons in the thirteenth century.....
Sir John Roy Grant, 11th Chief, married Bigla Comyn in 1410. It was this marriage which triggered the murder of his father Sir Patrick by the Comyns. John Roy’s first legitimate son was Sir Duncan Grant, but he also had an illegitimate son with the daughter (or wife) of Baron Lamb of Tullochcarn in Stratha’an. He called this son Patrick - so we may reasonably assume that this Patrick was rather older than Sir Duncan and was probably born shortly before John Roy’s marriage - so we may hazard a time window 1408x10 for Patrick’s birth. Patrick became the progenitor of the Grants of Tullochgorm.
Patrick and Sir Duncan married sisters: they were the daughters of Malcolm Beg Mackintosh, 10th Chief of Mackintosh. Sir Duncan married Muriel and Patrick married Janet. Clearly this was a pair of very important dynastic marriages. The sisters had a brother Alan who was the progenitor of the Mackintoshes of Kyallachie (which is on the Findhorn just south of Tomatin - about 10 miles from Tullochgorm as the crow flies).
We might reasonably expect an eldest grandson of this Patrick (and hence also called Patrick) to have been born around 1455x60 and there is no good reason why he would not have married his own second cousin - a daughter of Mackintosh of Kyllachie - probably around 1480.
So yes, this is not the C13th, and the “first laird of Grant” is actually the “first laird of Grant of Tullochgorm”. Not only that but Janet married the lad who would become the 3rd Grant of Tullochgorm, rather than one of his eighteen sons. It was one of these 18 who was given Lurg in Abernethy.
2. The laird gave Patrick the farm of Luirg, in Abernethy, as a marriage gift.
However we do now have a problem because Lurg was not a farm in the gift of the Chief of Grant or even the Chieftain of Tullochgorm, never mind Mackintosh of Mackintosh or Mackintosh of Kyllachie. Abernethy was Gordon land until the 1609 ex cambion when it was swapped for the bulk of Stratha’an. However we do have reason to know that from about 145o (if not before) the Chieftains of the Clan Allan Grants were running Abernethy on a day-to-day basis, but answerable to the Gordons for this, while maintaining also their Grant base at Dunan right next to Castle Grant. So this is a time when the Clan Allan chieftain was very keen to shore up his position by getting his own men (ie Grants) into key locations in Abernethy.
Lurg looks as if it is in the middle of nowhere 3 miles up the Nethy and then the Dorback Burn from Nethy Bridge, but actually it was enormous - within living memory its land stretched all the way to the peak of Cairngorm, many square miles. So this is a very significant location.
Right across the Spey from Tullochgorm is a farm called Cullachie. The name is pronounced in exactly the same way as Kyllachie, with the emphasis on the first syllable (they are actually the same name - referring to the black grouse) - what a basis for confusion!!
In his disdainful dismissal of the tale Goodall says:
Other versions say the lady in question belonged to the Mackintoshes only by marriage, her first husband being An Fear-Cyllachie, and her second An Fear-na-Luirgan......
As soon as we take the sneer off our lips, we can resolve this paradox:
The chieftain of Clan Allan had a son who was the tenant of Cullachie; he had a daughter Mary who married her neighbour across the Spey - Patrick the 3rd son of Patrick the 3rd Laird of Tullochgorm and his wife who was a Mackintosh of Kyllachie. This marriage probably took place around 1510.
Patrick Grant and his wife Mary were given the tenancy of the huge tract of land called Lurg to help cement the control of Abernethy exercised for the Gordons by the Grant Clan Allan chieftain - and this was successful. So ....
“The Laird” here was the Grant Clan Allan Chieftain;
Mary was the daughter of “An Fear-Cyllachie”;
Mary was the wife of “An Fear-na-Luirgan”;
Mary was only related to Mackintosh by marriage - her mother-in-law was one.
[Digression: In a feeble attempt to advance their “Norman origin” narrative for the clan, some revisionist “historians” (who do not merit being named) but to whom Stephen Goodall appears to adhere, like to pretend that the Clan Allan Grants were not Grants at all, but were local denizens who took the name Grant because it was politically self-serving to do so. It is inconvenient to them that their DNA signature is that of the original line of Viking chiefs.
Now...
Q: What possible benefit would taking the surname Grant be to a steward acting for the Gordons?
A: None whatsoever - any intelligent steward would take the name Gordon.
Thus this tale refutes the stupid revisionism. On the contrary, it reinforces the traditional history which was not even questioned until 1773.]
3. After many years of domestic happiness Grant died, and was interred in the churchyard of Duthil, and soon after his lady followed him to the grave.
As we have seen “Grant” was born c1490. So we might expect a death epoch for him c1560; it is unlikely that both husband and wife would survive into their 80s. But we should note the word “many”.
However, let us speculate: we noted above that the stone about which there was (and indeed remains) such a controversy was erected in 1865 - so I wonder whether the date of Holy Mary’s death may have been 1565. If Patrick had died in say 1562 that would have given the pair 50 years of marriage and made him into his 70s at death. Mary would likely have been born c1495, making her 70 in 1565.
Several Grants of Tullochgorm are buried at Duthil - so it should come as no surprise that this Patrick would have wanted to be buried there rather than at Abernethy Old Kirk (beside Castle Roy). We should note also that the Reformation had recently taken place in Scotland at this time.
4. The latter, on her deathbed, expressed a wish to be buried in the same tomb with her husband. Her friends represented the impossibility of complying with her desire, as the River Spey could not be forded. 'Go you,' said she, 'to the water-side, and if you proceed to a certain spot, which she indicated, a spot opposite the Tom Pitlac, a passage will be speedily effected.'
Before discussing this, we should add to this two more sneers from Goodall
... to get to Duthil from Tullochgorum one does not have to cross the river at all!
... In one, the woman is said to have been married but contracted smallpox and was so disfigured her new husband would have nothing to do with her. In the second, the new husband was something of a philanderer and rarely consorted with his new wife.
In both cases the tale ends with the remark by the dying lady that ‘He’ll dammed well lie with me now, whatever he wishes!’
What an idiot.... Goodall has forgotten they are not going from Tullochgorm but notionally from Lurg.
Carrying a coffin is no joke. If you died at Lurg, we have noted already that it is a 3-mile walk for the coffin-bearers to get to Nethybridge. It is a further 3 miles in the wrong direction to get to Tom Pitlac (thence another 3 miles to Duthil).
The idea that crossing the Spey is problematic is clearly nonsense in principle because there had not been a problem for her husband.
But the interesting matter is the reference to “her friends”.
What we may infer is that the marriage was childless. This, even more then than now, will have been much grist for the rumour mill and idle speculation including ribaldry.
My interpretation is that there was indeed domestic happiness - but no children. But Lurg is a vast and key power centre. So when Patrick died and there was no son to take over, a new tenant was needed. My conclusion is that in her widowhood Mary went back to stay with her family at Cullachie. As she had no children, it was her “friends” who would have had to convey her coffin.
It is only just over one mile from Cullachie to Tom Pitlac - and on old maps a road can be seen from Duthil due south to Drumuillie.
The advantage of using a road would have more than outweighed any relatively short extra distance. As she was born at Cullachie, Mary will have been familiar with that stretch of the Spey - and doubtless there will have been many crossings when she and Patrick were courting! The railway line has some underpasses which might hint as to where relevant possible crossing points for the coffin may have been.
5. The funeral attendants continued their journey until they reached the summit of the rock immediately above the present farm of Gartenbeg. Here they rested and erected a signpost pointing to the spot where the passage was accomplished. No sign of this post has survived.
[This sentence is misunderstood all too easily. Only a team of idiots would carry a coffin to the top of a hill. The road from Duthil to Drumuillie runs between Craig Garten and Creag an Fhithich, but obviously the coffin bearers did have to crest the ridge between the two. So strictly the summit was the summit of the ridge rather than the summit of either adjacent “rock”.]
The Miracle
Crossing the Spey dry shod is not itself a miracle - but this would normally be accomplished on stepping stones (indeed that is the meaning of the root of the name Craigelachie beside Aviemore (the Craig of the Eilach Burn)). I will leave to others to make what they will of this part of the tale - and acknowledge Goodall’s last paragraph:
About 1820 one John Shaw, who emigrated to St. Louis, USA in later life, witnessed an actual parting of the Spey near Inverallan Churchyard. The river was running at low ebb and a strong squall blew the water away from a ridge of sand and pebbles, possibly a farm ford, for several minutes. Shaw claimed it would have been possible to have crossed the river dry-shod at this point! Certainly in prolonged dry weather the Spey can appear to extremely [sic] shallow.
The Miracle Stone
I have nothing to say about the erection of the stone, the dispute between the Minister of Duthil and “The Men of Duthil” and the religiosity/sectarianism of the time - in which my own ancestors were caught up. Goodall himself reports what was reported without taking sides.
Summary & Conclusions
Goodall’s disparagement of the whole story parades his ignorance and, given the lack of any critical faculties of his own, his unwillingness to engage anyone else’s. Of course stories will acquire errors over the retelling, but it is a matter of quite elementary research and logical thinking to reinstate a perfectly plausible version which meets all the criteria required and even explains how the errors were facilitated, inter alia by showing that some of the apparent dichotomies are false.
History and culture are not assisted by Goodall’s approach. Why the editor of Standfast would want to promulgate this stuff to members who have no reason to know any better is beyond me.
It is likely that the corrected version of the “miracle” story is true.
It is likely that the juxtaposition of events surrounding 1865/7 are also correct.
The attribution of causality is a matter of conjecture/belief rather than being demonstrable.
We now know more about the early generations of the Tullochgorm line.
The traditional understanding of the origins of the Clan Allan Grants (ie their descent from the original Viking chiefs) is reinforced.
Included here so that interested readers can see what the refutation above is all about.
The Miracle Stone of Strathspey, by Stephen Goodall
The main source of this tale about some of the independently-minded characters to be found in Strathspey is Arthur Mitchell, The Past in the Present, David Douglas, 1880, pages 143-160.
Arthur Mitchell collected and gave an account of many strange superstitions still existing in remote parts of Scotland. One of the oddest is this wonderful illustration of a living superstition, still spoken of in hushed tones here in Strathspey.
The Miracle Stone of the Spey was erected in 1865 close to the banks of the river, not too far from the Boat of Garten railway station, and about 150 yards downstream of Tom Pitlac - a natural mound on the edge of the River Spey. The legend of the miracle was reported in the Inverness Courier.
In the beginning of the thirteenth century, a lady of the family of Mackintosh of Kylachy was married to one of the eighteen sons of Patrick Grant of Tullochgorum, and grandson of the first Laird of Grant. The laird gave Patrick the farm of Luirg, in Abernethy, as a marriage gift. After many years of domestic happiness Grant died, and was interred in the churchyard of Duthil, and soon after his lady followed him to the grave. The latter, on her deathbed, expressed a wish to be buried in the same tomb with her husband. Her friends represented the impossibility of complying with her desire, as the River Spey could not be forded. 'Go you,' said she, 'to the water-side, and if you proceed to a certain spot, which she indicated, a spot opposite the Tom Pitlac, a passage will be speedily effected.' On arriving at the river side, at the place pointed out, the waters were instantly divided, and the procession walked over on dry ground!
The followers then saw an immense shoal of salmon stranded on the dry bed of the stream and were tempted to try and capture some. The Spey was offended at this lack of respect and began to flood back. That the men thus engaged should have escaped with their lives was considered almost as great a miracle as the crossing! The procession was liberally supplied with bread and wine, and a 'Te Deum' sung. The funeral attendants continued their journey until they reached the summit of the rock immediately above the present farm of Gartenbeg. Here they rested and erected a signpost pointing to the spot where the passage was accomplished. No sign of this post has survived.
This is the most acceptable, to modern sensibilities, of the many versions of the story which are still in circulation. However, there are difficulties with it. The first is that to get to Duthil from Tullochgorum one does not have to cross the river at all!
Bigla Cumin would have had to have lived two centuries before she did; and there was no Grant of Tullochgorum with eighteen sons in the thirteenth century. This number may contain echoes of a very early version of this story in that three, and multiples of three held significant importance, a significance now lost.
Other versions say the lady in question belonged to the Mackintoshes only by marriage, her first husband being An Fear-Cyllachie, and her second An Fear-na-Luirgan. In some she is a spinster, in others once or twice married and across several centuries. Only as Holy Mary of Luirg does the story begin to account for what happened in 1865.
It was a farmer of Slochd, William Grant, who decided to erect a stone commemorating the legend. He was one of ‘The Men of Duthil’, self-appointed authorities on matters of scripture, prophets and for some gifted with ‘The Sight’.
Some days before he died, he showed his supporters where to erect the stone and this they did, with an inscription, in English and Gaelic. On the 9th of March 1865, the stone was erected.
The ceremony of inauguration has been described as very solemn and after prayers the stone was consecrated and dedicated in all time coming as a memorial of the miraculous passage of the Spey.
The cart on which the stone was conveyed from Slock to Garten was old and rickety, and broke down by the way; that the horse which was harnessed to it was frail, and not equal to its work except under constant stimulation; and that the people followed the cart smoking their short black pipes.
Luckily, in the very year of its erection (1865), I saw the stone, and then made the sketch of it which is given. Mitchell saw the stone and made the drawing shown. Just as well for on the night of the 19th February 1867, it was ruthlessly broken up and thrown into the river, where the fragments can still be seen when the water is low.
The perpetrators were unknown. It is most likely that they were supporters of the Free Church Minister at Duthil. He had spoken against the erection of the stone, unsurprising as ‘The Men’, with whom he was in dispute on theological matters, had stated that the minister was not devout enough to have asked for the Miracle Parting of the Spey as Holy Mary had done.
Various fragments of the stone are said to have been taken as relics but with unforeseen results. A young cattle herder of Gartenbeg is said to have pulled down the signpost and become ill. He only recovered when it was replaced.
Another farmer took a large piece of the stone and installed it as a lintel in one of his barns. Poor crops and illness amongst his livestock followed until the lintel was removed and thrown back into the river.
Local folk still do not like to talk of the stone, although children have swum near the site.
As already mentioned, the version above is one of the more acceptable still in circulation. At least two others have a far darker aspect. They are usually told after sufficient drams have been consumed to overcome reticence! In one, the woman is said to have been married but contracted smallpox and was so disfigured her new husband would have nothing to do with her. In the second, the new husband was something of a philanderer and rarely consorted with his new wife. In both cases the tale ends with the remark by the dying lady that ‘He’ll dammed well lie with me now, whatever he wishes!’
The story contains some intriguing echoes of past beliefs. For example, the number 18, ‘The Angel Number’, can be found in several ancient belief systems. In Iron Age times any multiple of 3 was considered to be powerful. The claim to have had 18 children is likely to have been a sign of potency and great good luck. The Hebrew word for ‘life’is חי (chai), which has the numerical value of 18. The custom is to give donations and monetary gifts in multiples of 18 as an expression of blessing for long life. In Ancient Roman the number 18 came to symbolise a blood relative. There are 18 chapters in the Bhagavad Gita, which is contained in the Mahabharata, which has 18 books. In Babism the first 18 disciples of the Báb were known as the Letters of the Living. The Kurukshetra War which the epic depicts, is between 18 armies (11 on the Kuru side, 7 on the Pandava). The war itself lasts for 18 days. In the other Hindu epic, the Ramayana, the war between Rama and the demons also lasted 18 days.
About 1820 one John Shaw, who emigrated to St. Louis, USA in later life, witnessed an actual parting of the Spey near Inverallan Churchyard. The river was running at low ebb and a strong squall blew the water away from a ridge of sand and pebbles, possibly a farm ford, for several minutes. Shaw claimed it would have been possible to have crossed the river dry-shod at this point! Certainly in prolonged dry weather the Spey can appear to extremely shallow. (Grant, John Charles, letters from the Mountains to Canadian relatives. Donated to Grantown Museum by Dr J. R. Allen, Edinburgh)
