On this bleak, stony hillside on the Coigach coast of the north-west Highlands the land stoops gently to meet the sea and Scotland invites you to gaze upon her majesty. There can be no better setting for the consecration that's about to happen. I’d visited this place some years ago on another assignment and so built an extra hour into my journey to Achiltibuie, so that I could properly appraise the grandeur that greets you as you head west from Ullapool. It would have been a sacrilege not to have stopped along the way and drank in these vistas with their jaggy peaks that don’t invite climbers to scale them, but dare them to.
There’s no priest or minister here today; no hymns or sacraments, yet something sacred will take place that sanctifies the deeds of local women who, more than a century and a half ago, were prepared to give everything to protect their people and their land. They were the Women of Coigach, who on five separate occasions in 1852 and 1853 repelled attempts by sheriffs and police sent by a desperate landowner to evict them from their ancient sirelands. Their legend has been woven into this place ever since, bequeathed to their forebears in music and art and the spoken stories that form an oral history much more reliable and authentic than anything selectively written by officials.
Today, their stout defence of this stately realm is being commemorated by a monument, Lorg na Coigich, hewn from the rock which girds this coastline beneath the scattered homesteads and farms of Achiltibuie. For the group of local leaders and fundraisers and the artists who created it - Will MacLean and Marion Leven - it marked the end of a decade-long project involving an entire community, which began steadily to gain support from across the world and especially in those places to which many Highland families were forced to flee. The stone monument possesses a bleak beauty which conveys the hardship and resilience of a people living on the edge of the world.
Yet, it also radiates love that’s rooted in bonds of family which protect and nourish in good times and bad. It carries the strength and pride which had resisted the predations of a scavenging class of landowners who came to view them as disposable chattels standing in the way of profit at any cost. Lorg na Coigich comprises four standing stones within two outer rings formed by stones taken from several of the crofts that cling to these hills and all willingly gifted.
As such, the monument, literally and metaphorically, is the natural embodiment of the people who live here and dozens of generations of their kinsmen and kinswomen. Iain Muir, chair of Coigach Heritage, reveals the meaning and the messages conveyed by these stones. “The central stone represents the community while the three stones round about it represent three of the women ringleaders. They are protecting the community which is represented by the main stone.
“On the outer stone ring there are five boat stones which jut out from the wall, all pointing towards the beaches that the boats had attempted to land to serve the papers. It was important that the boats were met and the papers were destroyed before they could be served above the shoreline and the dates are inscribed on these stones.
“One points towards Achnahaird; one to Achiltibuie and three to Culnacraig. The boats came from Ullapool with the sheriff's men and police, but were thwarted by all these fierce Coigach women.”
The names of the women who led the Coigach rebellion are all missing from the official records, but the oral tradition in this part of the western Highlands has preserved them and their deeds. They are: Mary Macleod, Anna Bhan Mackenzie, Katie Macleod Campbell, Margaret Macleod and Catherine Stewart.
Though the sheriff officers were eventually forced to turn tail and give up on their action, the authorities sought reprisals where they could. Katie Macleod Campbell was thus barred from ever living on the estate and when she later married, both she and her husband were forced to build their house below the shoreline so that it became frequently flooded. Their neighbours all gathered round to help them make their house as strong as it could be and some of its stones form part of the outer rings. Later, at an evening of music, poetry and stories, the poet, Lisa MacDonald, who lives in Coigach, reads from her poem “Anna” in both Gaelic and English. It comes from her anthology, The Women of Coigach.
We had stones, and anger, A lifetime of hunger and fear.
We know about papers.
We have sharp eyes, And nimble fingers, flitting through pockets, Under collars, in shirt seams – The younger ones tore at the officer’s clothing And roared when they found it.
A child, sent for a torch from the fire, Burned the writ on the shore.
Not now. Not today, we will not.
We will not be leaving this place.
Not today, nor tomorrow.”
Successive government policies aimed at strengthening the fragile economy and infrastructure of Scotland’s Highlands and Islands rarely meet with long-term success. The cinematic beauty and grandeur of these hard and anointed lands always features prominently in the brochures of VisitScotland and in the barren pledges of governments, but their sparse populations mean that they’ll never mean the difference between electoral success and defeat. They are still considered disposable. Highlanders have been enduring this for many generations. Even so, conditions on the Coigach Peninsula in the early part of the 19th century, when it was much more heavily populated than now were especially harsh.
In 2024, to mark International Women’s Day, the writer and blogger Lynn Fraser published a vivid account of the Coigach Women’s resistance, which also described the background to their actions. “The then laird, John Hay-Mackenzie, was benevolent but debt-ridden. In 1849, financial ruin loomed; ruin that was averted by the marriage of his daughter, Anne, to the Marquis of Stafford, followed two weeks later by her father’s death. In the years following the Coigach land struggles of the 1850s, the Marquis, heir to the Duke of Sutherland, would become one of the wealthiest men in the country, but, until then, the Cromartie Estate could not count on the Sutherland fortune to subsidise it.
“In 1852, with the estate under financial pressure, Andrew Scott, the estate factor, decided that it was time to ‘rationalise’ the land use at Coigach. Specifically, there was a large farm at Achiltibuie and Badenscallie that was densely packed with sub-tenants. The tacksmen, or main tenants, of this farm were complaining so vociferously about their sub-tenants that Lady Stafford agreed to terminate their lease. Prospective new tenants would only take on the lease without the sub-tenants.
“Scott was able to persuade the majority of the sub-tenants to sign an agreement to relinquish their hill-grazings and resettle at Badentarbat. However, 18 families refused to sign; not only would they lose their hill-grazing but also their landholding.”
Thus, the seeds of the rebellion were sown. At that time, there was no road to speak of connecting Ullapool and the villages and crofts in this part of Wester Ross. Access was by boat along Loch Broom, the sea loch that opens out onto the Minch. A resourceful bush telegraph came into operation whenever the sheriffs set sail along the loch to serve the eviction writs.
At their first attempt, the alarm was raised by a young lad in Ullapool who travelled by foot “through the rock’ to warn the resisters about the approaching menace. Among the stories and songs about the rebellion handed across the generations is a pipe tune called The March of the Cold Testicles, inspired (you would imagine) by the stripping of the sheriff’s officer. The original tune has been lost, but some local musicians have recently composed a new one.
The events are also recorded in official documents housed in the National Records of Scotland. Writing to James Melville the estate’s lawyer in Edinburgh, the estate factor painted a detailed and dramatic picture: “The sheriff’s party had travelled by boat to Culnacraig where they were assaulted by a large number; mainly of women.
“Once more the summonses were wrenched from the officer and burned; the officer was then entirely stripped of his clothes and was put back on board the boat in which he went to Coigach in a state of absolute nudity.”
A collective male instinct demands you hope that the temperatures had not plunged to brass-monkey levels.
Mairi Thornton, is a Coigach Heritage trustee and led the campaign to raise funds for the memorial. “The idea had been floating around Coigach for many years,” she said, “but people started talking about it a bit more about five or six years ago and we’d had a play produced by the community around 20 years ago, which was the only celebration of any kind that had ever taken place, as far as we knew.
“Alasdair Mcleod, who's chair of the Community Council, has always felt very passionate about this story because his great, great grandmother was one of the women, and he came to talk to me about it. ‘We really need to do something’, he said. And I thought: ‘Okay, we could take this on, and we can have a small cairn somewhere, and put a plaque on it’.
“And then it just grew and grew. More and more people got interested, and it became a real community project. We had to become a charity to take it forward because we needed to raise funds. There was never any question that it would be Will and Marion who would design it because they both have deep roots here and they're such wonderful artists.”
We discuss the role of the women in this rebellion, including the fact that there were many more than the five whose names had been preserved in the oral traditions of this place. “The more you delve into its history, the more you realise that the women are invisible,” says Ms Thornton. “We discovered that in many communities it was the women who led the rebellions, and this hasn't been sufficiently recognised in many places: not just in Highland communities.
“We’d initially thought that the women of Coigach were unique in that respect, and then we discovered that there are invisible women in all of these stories, and so in a way, this commemorates all of them. We hope that it gives a bit of inspiration to young women to say ‘we can make a difference’.
The oral tradition is vital in a place like this. Native Highlanders are often written out of the accounts and records of everyday life, with official narratives cleansed of anything that reflect the authentic ground view of the people who were reared here and thus directly affected by the decisions taken in London and Edinburgh.
“There weren't many records, as people handed on their stories down through the generations, or they were entrusted to known local story-tellers,” says Ms Thornton. “And so there were lots of fragments of the story. If you talked to different people, it would be different aspects of it. Some people had previously thought that the Coigach women’s resistance was one event.
“It was only when we started to research the records of the estate, that we realised just how much detail confirmed the stories and provided more information.
“We have the names of the men named in the summons of removing, and that was pretty powerful to find that for the first time, because we'd only a vague idea where their crofts were. And now, to see this document in beautiful copper plate and to see these names has brought it all to life.”
At the end of the ceremony, a lone piper stands above us, impervious to the wind and rain and, for once, I’m glad of these elements. They lend this occasion something dramatic and forceful that speaks of the human cyclones that swirled on the beaches below in 1852 and 1853. Then Will MacLean raises a glass of whisky as he officially unveils the art that he and Marion Leven created. He quotes the beginning of Hugh MacDiarmid’s On a Raised Beach: “All is lithogenesis – or Lochia.”
“These stones we see today are Coigach’s from Coigach Beach, and in Coigach they will remain. An na Coigich, a symbol of our shared history and culture, and a place of contemplation and reflection. In the words of Sorley MacLean, “symbols become the landscape of our physical environment”. The Watcher Stones will guard against the return of a time when landowners used their wealth and status to impose indiscriminate and heartless policies on their tenants.
“At a similar event in Lewis in 1996, Alastair Macleod stated: “This is not a pile of stones, but a symbolic gesture to the dignity of man. No tyrant, through silver-spooned accident of birth, or through economic cunning, should be allowed to dominate and humiliate his fellow creatures”.”
In the Community Hall, later that night, a feast has been prepared on large wooden tables. They’re laid end to end along the full width of an adjoining marquee, creaking from the food that every household has brought. On my way here I’ve met three people who all asked how I came to know about the story of the Women of Coigach. I tell them that my friend, Catherine Mcleod who was once Westminster Editor of The Herald, and whose family sprang from here, had told me about it. “Do you know her,” I ask each of them in turn. “Know her? I’m related to her.”
These close, interconnected family bonds have become a Highland cliché, too often mocked by haughty Lowlanders. This is community in its purest sense, though. In a place like this it proceeds as a life-giving and life-preserving force. Your neighbour’s triumphs are your triumphs and their troubles are your troubles. It’s the way it has to be in these elemental terrains, which enchanted Walter Scott.
Oh Caledonia! stern and wild, Meet nurse for a poetic child!
Land of the heath and shaggy wood, Land of the mountain and the flood, Land of my sires!
What mortal hand Can e'er untie the filial band That knits me to thy rugged strand!
I meet Millie, a young crofter and sheep-shearer who has just returned from a year in Australia spent working on a sheep-shearing station. “If not for those women of Coigach, I might not be doing this,” she says. “In fact, none of us might be here at all if those women had not fought for this land. They are my inspiration.”
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