Coast to coast: one woman's journey from Kent to Argyll in search of her forebears

“That’s so far!” and “That’s so cold!” became familiar refrains but one person who was delighted was my grandfather, Peter Johnston. I had grown up with his tales of Ardfern, another tiny coastal village, this one on the west coast of Scotland overlooking the Inner Hebrides. This was the village in which his father, John "Jack" Johnston, was born and where several generations of Johnston ancestors had lived out their lives. I had never known this great-grandfather and I had never been to Scotland. I was enthralled with stories of my unknown relative’s life in an unknown country.

This summer, approaching the end of my four years studying in Edinburgh, I decided it was high time to visit Ardfern and follow in the footsteps of my ancestors. My grandfather had researched this family history in the early 2000s, visiting Argyll and compiling a folder of information. My mother and her sister had been to Ardfern as children, but they had not visited since and were keen to return.

On an uncharacteristically hot May morning, my mother, my aunt and I left the bustle of the Edinburgh streets for the solitude of the west Highlands, armed with a rented car, an AA road map, several cameras and years of family stories.

As we drove west, navigating the blur of junctions, concrete and roundabouts that ring Glasgow, the roads narrowed and the views widened. Driving through the Trossachs it had occurred to me how isolated the Argyll coast was even today; how much more remote it must have been when my great-grandfather lived there. The invention of the car, which played a significant role in Jack Johnston’s life, must have been a revolutionary advancement.

Jack grew up in Ardfern in the early 1900s. The advent of the First World War brought opportunities for mobility and Jack worked as a driver for an officer in the army, honing a skill that later became his career. He survived the war, but tragically his brother Alexander was killed in the Battle of the Somme. In fact, of his five siblings, only he and his sister Jean lived past the age of 27.

Every family has their First World War dead, the ancestor whose untimely fate symbolises the lost generation for all the generations who follow. The first time my grandfather told me of Alexander was when he talked of his own childhood in Manchester in the 1930s. Every November 11, he and his classmates enacted the one-minute silence in remembrance of those who had died in the Great War. The next-of-kin of the dead had been given a bronze memorial plaque and Jack had such a plaque in his house commemorating Alexander. “I tried to picture my uncle,” recalled my grandfather, “but all I could picture was the plaque.”

Seventy years later, on a school trip to the battlefields of northern France, aged 14, I attempted to find Alexander Johnston’s name on the imposing, giant cenotaphs of Thiepval. Struggling to identify him among the hundreds of other Scottish Johnstons, I realised how easily the war dead become a symbolic mass, distinguishable only in family folklore. More successful was a recent visit to the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders Museum at Stirling Castle. I thumbed through a roll-call of the regiment’s First World War casualties and Alexander Johnston from Ardfern, near Lochgilphead, was immediately identifiable. He was born in 1894, exactly 100 years before me, and died in 1916 aged 22, the age I am now.

Driving through Scotland is an inimitable experience, from the rolling hills and the glittering lochs to the mountains. We passed Inveraray, with its turreted castle, infamous jail and an atmospheric galleon moored on the misty banks of Loch Fyne. More singletrack roads followed, until through a clearing we glimpsed a marina and boats. Driving down the hill, the view broadened and we had our first glimpse of Ardfern in the afternoon glare. It was a stunning moment: the sun’s rays illuminated the gorse on the hills and the reflections of the boats rippled in the crystal-clear waters of Loch Craignish.

Ardfern has a church, a tiny primary school and a traditional 17th-century drovers’ inn, the earliest part of which was built in 1603 and which was recently refurbished with a panoramic loch-view restaurant. Its history is entangled with Ardfern’s industry: in the 1600s it was a stopping place for drovers manoeuvring the cattle from the neighbouring islands – which include Luing, Shuna and Jura – to the mainland. It remains the heart of Ardfern today.

Three generations before Jack and Alexander Johnston were fighting in the trenches of northern France, an earlier Alexander Johnston and his wife Elizabeth moved across the water from Shuna to the mainland to become the owners of the inn at Ardfern. From the 1850s to the late 1920s, several generations of Johnstons held the license for the inn. It became the site of marriages, celebrations, deaths and births; and it was here that my great-grandfather Jack was born in 1896.

Pulling up at the inn, now known as the Galley of Lorne, I was struck by this familial significance. Staying there rendered our trip particularly special. It was wonderful to see the inn thriving and revitalised, yet loyal to its roots.

In his stories, my grandfather always emphasises the remarkable women in the family. If legend is to be believed, they were forever bailing the men out of trouble, simultaneously running the inn and raising the children. Following Alexander’s heart attack in 1900, Elizabeth acquired the license, bore 11 children and grew and gathered food from the land. Her son John, my great-great-uncle, inherited the inn, but lost the license within a year due to his tendency to spend more time on the other side of the bar. His sisters stepped in and took over the license.

As we sat in the inn, watching the locals and the occasional tourist, we told Ardfern’s latest proprietor, Andrew Stanton, about the family link. We told him our stories and showed him the family photographs, including one from 1917, the year in which John was landlord. In this photograph of the inn’s exterior, the name John Johnston is emblazoned on the sign.

“I know that photograph,” Stanton, from Coventry, said. Disappearing behind the bar, he returned with a cobwebbed, but instantly recognisable larger, framed version of our small picture. It was a sight to behold, and suitably impressed an American couple on the table next to us. It struck me how amazing it was that I was sitting in the inn my ancestors had called home, 100 years later.

Stanton was able to tell us something of the inn’s recent history, explaining that in the 1960s the current laird of Lunga, Colin Lindsay-MacDougall, saw that for the community to survive, things must change. The laird created a new yacht centre at Ardfern and reopened and redeveloped the inn as the Galley of Lorne. Stanton explained that while the community was revitalised, Ardfern remains a lesser-known Argyll gem. Someone who did appreciate it was George Orwell, who concluded his seminal novel 1984 while living on Jura. It is intriguing that Orwell retreated to island solitude to write a novel so intertwined with modern urban society.

If our first day had been warm, our second day was even hotter, the sun beating down as we admired the active harbour and the cloudless skies. Our family link was not confined to the inn: Jack and Alexander Johnston’s mother, Mary, ran the village post office in the early 1900s. “Did Mary herself receive the official notification of Alexander’s death at the post office?” my grandfather wondered when he first told me the story. The post office was, aside from the inn, the focal point of the town and all telegrams were filtered through it.

We knew from my grandfather’s visit to Ardfern in 2002 that the former post office building was now a house. Walking around the village with a photograph of Mary in front of this building, we held the image up to any cottage we spotted that vaguely resembled our black and white image. My grandfather had explained that the post office was built by Mary’s husband Archie, Elizabeth and Alexander’s fourth child, a self-employed joiner who had panelled rooms for the laird on the isle of Lunga. Archie panelled the ceiling of his Ardfern cottage with the leftover material. He was the official postmaster, but Mary ran the show.

After some debate on the identity of the post office (concluding with a phone call to my grandfather outside the village telephone box, which in a Local Hero style twist, was the one place with a decent mobile phone signal) to confirm the exact location as he remembered it, we found the house: Bein an Duin, a traditional cottage opposite the marina. “It’s easily the prettiest cottage in Ardfern,” we decided and proceeded to take several photographs posing outside, hoping the occupants were not too disturbed.

Once home in Edinburgh, after a little googling it became apparent that Bein an Duin is now a holiday cottage. There are several pictures of the interior online, although it's unclear whether Archie’s panelling remains. It was quickly apparent that is where we should stay next time we visit the west Highlands.

While the Johnston family appeared to dominate Ardfern in the early 1900s, by the 1930s, Jack and his sister Jean were the only ones left, although there were cousins and distant relatives. Jean married a widower with a child from his first marriage and Jack began to work as a driver for wealthy local families.

Eventually, this work took him to Manchester where he worked as a chauffeur. When his employer visited neighbouring houses, Jack would drive him and drink tea in the kitchen with the help. In a Downton Abbey-esque tale, this was where he met his wife, Elsie, my great-grandmother, who worked as a kitchen maid. They began their life together in Manchester and he rarely returned to the small Scottish fishing village of his birth. “He didn’t particularly remember it fondly,” my grandfather says. “It was a tough life and I think he was very pleased to arrive in Manchester." The house Elsie and Jack shared, however, they named Ardfern; a sign that the village had an emotional resonance for him.

Our last stop in Ardfern was Craignish Point, situated at the very tip of the Craignish peninsula, offering views across the Sound of Jura towards the islands of Jura and Scarba. Here lies the graveyard and the former village church, the ruined Kirkton or Kilmory Chapel, one of the oldest religious sites in Scotland. Climbing out of the car at the tip of the point, we were greeted with a tranquil, spectral site: here were the remains of the 12th-century kirk, surrounded by sea, loch and hills, intermittently glimpsed through what had been the stone kirk’s windows. In this inordinately atmospheric place, the three of us searched for the Johnston graves. They were surprisingly easy to find. Seeing these memorials to my ancestors, I was struck by how far the graveyard was from the village and the distance the people of Ardfern would have travelled to bury their dead. We walked into the vestibule of the chapel’s breathtaking interior, in which mysterious sculpted gravestones dating from the 15th century lean against the wall. The chapel was abandoned in 1692, for reasons unknown, although it is believed it is because the Presbyterians wanted to disassociate themselves from their Catholic forebears. A new church was built in Ardfern, where a cenotaph also bears Alexander Johnston’s name, but the graveyard remains at Craignish.

The mystical Craignish Point seemed a fitting place to conclude our adventure. Somehow this place embodied all the feelings associated with digging up our family tree: it is reflective and inspirational, sombre and uplifting, surreal yet grounding. Rendering family stories reality is an extraordinary experience and standing at Craignish, I considered that Jack Johnson and his family would be pleased that I, their English descendent from the southern tip of Kent, had come so far north to Scotland and made Edinburgh my home.

*Well, his father Archie, to be accurate.