SCOTTISH ROOTS

A trip to Kirkudbrightshire, May 2004

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In May, 2004, Roy and I flew from our local airport at Bournemouth Hurn to Prestwick, the old Glasgow international terminal, now mainly used by Ryanair, BMI and a number of small airlines. My purpose in taking Roy to act as my organiser, treasurer and companion, was to help me search for the homelands of my maternal great-grandmother, Ellenora (later Eleanora) Crocket Lello (1846-1939). The flight took less than an hour.

Our hire-car was waiting and we set off in light cloud to head south-west towards the area where my great-grandmother came from. The A713 south looks good, but the surface is uneven and there are countless sharp bends with no warning. But there's plenty to see and no traffic to speak of, so driving at 30-40 mph was no punishment. We've holidayed in the area before, as do many English, only I had no idea what I was looking for on our last trip there. My mother had mentioned Kirkudbrightshire, but I didn't know I was looking for the ancestors of the Lellos (said to be exclusively from Shropshire), rather (I thought) the Johnstones, immigrants under a bounty scheme to Tasmania as 'superior' immigrants.

I'm not sure I was expecting anything so beautiful on that southward run. Around us fields, lushest green. Woods, dense with new foliage, loud with bird-song. Mountains framed against the late afternoon light on our right-hand side, majestic, open, climbable, dark blue against the sky. The occasional glare of acres of rapeseed in flower. Hedges round the fields, the way England used to be. Dairy cows and heifers, almost always Friesian, but sometimes small groups of Highland beef, shaggy and oddly out of place in this manicured setting. We didn't photograph it as I was keen to keep my camera space for what was to come. Just as well. I ran out and had to resort to my point-and-click Olympus.

The area we were heading for lies at the northern end of the bay between Galloway and Cumbria, and stands between Gretna Green and Kirkudbright, in a belt of villages around Dumfries close to the Solway Firth. The land is sheltered from the westerlies and northerlies by a crescent of mountains and hills to the west and north. It's washed by the Gulf Stream so mild all year round.

Apart from the Devonian lushness of the landscape, the most striking impression was of the houses in the outlying hamlets and farmsteads, and in the older streets of all the villages. They are long and low and very small, and probably former crofts, mostly with no upper floors, even a 'half' upper storey. They reminded us of cottages in the old towns in the Canaries or of outback shacks in Australia. Built in solid stone with small windows and no appreciable loft-space, most must be two or three hundred years old. Yet they are lived in, loved and cared for, with immaculate gardens, well-polished cars outside, double-glazing and satellite dishes. We were taken aback by the gardens, crammed with brilliant azaleas and spring displays that would put Surrey to shame. We saw very few derelict or boarded up houses.

We made for Dalbeattie with a small task to complete before locating our hotel outside Dumfries. Our target was Little Richorn, tucked alongside Richorn Forest, now famous for its paths and cycle tracks. The house is a former farm on the west side of the A710 and has stood on this spot for hundreds of years. It looks out west across the Urrwater valley to the mountains, and at its feet nestle the ruins, cloaked in grass, of the old motte, a defensive structure that would have doubled as mini-castle and home.

Little Richorn was home to my great-grandmother's sister, Mary Johnstone Crocket after she married William Kerr in 1888. Having cared for her ageing parents while the rest of the family made for the towns, she was free on her mother's death to marry. By then, her nephew Harry was 20 and well established in Tasmania. The couple had no children, but Aunt Margaret opened her house to her nephews, and Harry's brother George (1871-1918 – he died in the war) went there to learn animal husbandry. The house is now tidy, white-washed and in very good order. The outhouses are used by the family who live there, but we didn't meet them: there was no car outside, and despite wandering around for ten or so minutes, we found that no-one appeared.

We spent the evening planning the following day, then took a run out before the worst dinner we've ever had (at a Brewster) to identify the area where Harry's grandmother, Jessie Martine McKill, was born, long the home area of her family. Driving out of Dumfries from Crichton hospital towards Bankend, with Craigs Moss on the left, we used our new 1:50,000 scale map to hunt for landmarks thrown up by earlier research.

On the way into Bankend, we spotted a war memorial and stopped to look. No McKills, no Crockets. Not far off, on what later became the B725 still heading south, we spied on our left Caelaverock church, down a track beside Byers Farm.

This compact Palladian brick building stands on the edge of the bank leading down east to the boggy area, mostly to timber, either side of Lochar water. As we drove up to its gates and parked in the yard of Byers Farm (to be greeted by a dog and a teenage girl) we couldn't believe our eyes. Rearing up, higher than the walls and often taller than a man, was a serried army of red sandstone headstones.

Here, my notes told me, I would find a McKill gravestone. But I had forgotten my camera. We found the gravestone, admired it, noted it did not belong to an immediate member of our own Jessie's family, then hurried on.

We passed slowly through Bankend, joining the B725. As we discovered the next morning, this north-south track was quite the worst approach to the village, but we were much taken by the landscape on our right and didn't notice how much we were missing. The bank which gives its name to the village is a sharp incline to the east of the road, steep enough to challenge a sheep but not the bluebells. Our map said there was a Roman fort on top, an excellent look-out across the Nith estuary and the narrowing easterly end of the Firth.

We were soon through Shearington, with signs of yuppy development, and alongside Castlewood. We turned left into the grounds of Caerlaverock castle and crept along looking at the line of classic one-storey cottages to our left. An archway signalled the start of the fortified area. Ahead of us, a two-storey building, now an information centre, was plainly the original farmhouse.

Later, we discovered that this was Greenhead, an old McKill and Crocket farm. Harry's great-uncle Robert Crocket farmed at Greenhead in the castle grounds, and his aunts and uncles were sent to stay with Robert in that beautiful location. It is hard to believe that Harry didn't have holidays there as a child. It must also be fairly unique to have your own real castle in your back garden.

There before us down the slope lay the squat triangular castle, in the now familiar local red sandstone. This old Maxwell fortress once stood in its own moat.

Two boys on bicycles were unable to tell us the names of the houses. I wanted to find Castlewood Cottage. Shaking heads. We drove further into the compound and I knocked on a door in second line of cottages, at the bottom, to the left of the castle. A young woman told me that Castlewood was outside the grounds, down the road, on the bend. A big house, she said.

Harry's grandfather James Johnstone Crocket died there in 1875. Harry's great-aunts lived there long before this, and the widowed Jessie Martine McKill Crocket went there to live. It is secret, green, and now proudly gardened by its current owner. Taller than the local crofts, the house has half a storey of loft space, once plainly bedrooms as there were old window frames in the side walls. This space has been extended to the rear with a flat roof projection giving a view of Castle Wood. I snooped around, saw that there had been a window in the upper floor, now blocked off, and another chimney that would have gone up where the east wall now is. This had plainly been a bigger house made from a smaller house, then returned to its previous size. The owner and her two dogs, a guinea fowl, a cage of birds and a plastic grey heron bade me farewell and licensed me to return the next day with my camera. She had only been there 27 years, she said, and had once lived on a farm.

We turned north along the east bank of the Nith, very wide and sandy at this point. The tide was coming in. Fishermen were up to their armpits in vast all-in-one wading suits 'half-netting' salmon trout. We stopped to admire one, then drove past, without thinking, the little run of cottages at Kelton where Jessie Martine McKill, Harry's Scottish grandmother, was almost certainly born around 1809.

The next morning, a fine shining day, we were up early to retrace our steps to Caerlaverock. We moved around the area we had been through before, this time approaching Bankend from the east and crossing the river. Standing high on the bank above the north-south road is the Victorian red sandstone village school, several houses, and a couple of runs of cottages. At their feet winds the lane to the river, with the mill, and several other houses.

It's deceiving to use the road south from Dumfries. From the other side of the old stone bridge things become visible that are easy to miss from too close up. We took photos, then turned south on the B725 then stopped at Hutton Hall on the right, the name ringing bells. One of the Crocket boys, my laptop told me, had been at school there. Hutton Hall, a gracious Georgian family-size house, is tucked in alongside the cliff that rears up and becomes the east escarpment of Bankend. We edged up the drive. Roy parked beneath the rhododendrons while I went across the big turning area in front of the house. It's bandbox neat, with a newish porch, potted shrubs, and shining door furniture. I knocked. The owner came out in his dressing-gown and slippers and told me everything we needed to know.

The academy, built of stone, with fine metal pillars supporting the upper floor, is now used as a storage area by the family who live at the farm. I declined to scale the steps. The building, looming above Hutton Hall, the old rectory, has quite a history. So has Bankend generally, a former McKill stronghold, Croftend being one of their homes, a house I could not find.

Small C19 village. Humpbacked bridge (1812-3) with small obelisks. Caerlaverock Parish Church (1781): Graveyard contains late a C18 burial enclosure and a hearse-house. Hutton Hall Academy: Now in other use, the school was founded in 1712. Rebuilt 1892, it is a prominent Jacobean building. Isle Tower: Remains of T-plan tower. Probably rebuilt 1622 from an earlier structure. SE. Mid Locharwoods: Formerly a Scottish Labour Colony, a charity that provided farm work for able unemployed.

We drove north to Caerlaverock churchyard, full of dew and spiders' webs, and shining early sun, and photographed the sole McKill gravestone. Our welcoming committee was absent, although we passed the girl at the bus stop and offered her lift. She was going the other way.

We went on to the castle and photographed the cottages, and the old Crocket house within the castle grounds. Greenhead is now the information centre but was once plainly a farm, Robert Crocket's home. My great-grandmother would have known this rather remarkable spot. How many people have a castle in their front gardens?

With the morning still young, we set off north for Dumfries along the east bank of the Nith. It's wide here, but this morning the tide was out, exposing clean sandy mud. Yet we still forgot Kelton down by the water where the men half-netted the night before. Kelton is an unremarkable straggle of low cottages of the kind we saw everywhere, but when we first passed it, we had no idea Jessie McKill was probably born there.

Dumfries and Galloway Family History Centre is in Glasgow Street, Dumfries, close to the bridge beyond the weir that spans the river. We parked in a short-term slot outside. The centre was, as these places always are, manned by a volunteer. Inside, two or three dedicated searchers were glued to the microfiche viewers. A Canadian visitor, with obvious Ango-African ancestry, plied the volunteer with questions, smiling as though she'd won the lottery.

We plundered the Victorian OS maps, and I had a fresh look for the Crockets whom I had been told had sunk without trace by the time of the 1881 census. The CDrom for the 1881 census of Lowland Scotland instantly threw up two Crocket sisters living at 8 English Street in Dumfries. I was fired with curiosity. Ellenora's mother, Jessie Martine McKill, died in English Street at the Union Bank House and her daughter Mary Johnstone Crocket married Robert Kerr from that same address in 1888.

We set off for the centre of town and located English Street. Counting from the corner on the even side, I reckoned that a large late Victorian red sandstone building had the look of a bank. It is now a shop selling all kinds of delights for decking out houses. No-one was downstairs at the till, so I went into the next shop. “When you get letters sent to you, what number is put on the envelope?” A flock came to listen. “Number 10.” The assistant asked me why I wanted to know. I told her I was looking for number 8. “That way,” she said.

I ambled next door to the old bank building, now full of customers and was allowed to photograph as I pleased. The only place I could not go was to the top floor which was someone's flat and the resident was out. The back garden, now a gravel-covered naked patch, had probably once been a model of Victorian horticulture. Buccleuch Street, however, where Harry's aunt Jane (also known as Jean or Jeannie ) Crocket died in 1916 as a 79-year-old spinster, eluded me because I quite simply forgot.

With time to spare before our appointment in Terregles (pronounced Treggles), we made first for Holywood churchyard It is described on the website for Dumfries and Galloway:

Fine monuments, Youngs of Lincluden mausoleum, and an adjoining hearse house. Holywood Parish Church (1779): Dominated by a tall tower (c.1821), the church is built roughly on the site of Holywood Abbey. Holywood Village: N and S are archaeological sites of a cursus (long avenue of two parallel earthen banks with ditches outside). Twelve Apostles: 11 remaining boulders make up this Neolithic stone circle, 5 are standing. Largest on Scottish mainland.

Holywood churchyard was the most surprising place. There we found a cluster of Crocket gravestones, including that of my mother's own grandparents. Tucked alongside was a small marble headstone dedicated to Robina, Ellenora's sister, the devoted aunt who raised her sister Annabella Hallott's children after her untimely death at the early age of 34 in England. It felt good to put a date on Robina's own death.

We spent some time prowling, looking for other familiar names. Nothing. But the location itself is striking, sandwiched between the railway line that runs along the side of the river and the main road north. Like Caerlaverock, the small church is a gracious late Palladian building of the kind so often pulled down further south by zealous reforming Victorian architects.

It was time to move on. We headed south-west past the standing stones, the 'Twelve Apostles', talked to some cows over a fence, nearly ran over a rather elderly lady strolling back to the village, and turned into Terregles past a line of 1950s council houses, staring west across the fields. At the end of this prosaic avenue lies the village, sheltered from the westerly winds by hills, rolling and green, to the west and north. The gardens were in full flower, the sun shone, and it seemed incredible that Ellenora Crocket and her sisters could ever have wanted to leave this place. The village school, now a shop, sat on the left of the bend in the heart of the village.

Terregles is described on the web as 'A small dormitory village in Nithsdale, Dumfries and Galloway, Terregles lies 2 miles (3 km) north west of Dumfries. The parish church incorporates the burial aisle (1588) of Agnes, Lady Herries and nearby once stood Terregles House, built for William Constable-Maxwell in 1789 and demolished in 1964.' Indeed, but this fails to mention is that the church is another Palladian building, nestling behind the village, with many fine gravestones, and is one of only two Protestant churches with a Roman Catholic chapel attached. This one, though, standing symbolically at the east end of the structure, doubles as the vault for the Maxwell family where Mass is celebrated once a year. The chapel, once the choir of a larger Gothic building, is all that remains of the 1583 church built by Lord Herries.

Our guide, a church Elder, was already there. She gave us a tour of the church, a shining and bright place, well-loved but not frequently used. She opened up the Herries chapel, a gloomy and musty space with pews, small windows, and no lighting, dominated by wide central steps that go down to the vault. There are only three places still left for Maxwells. A tour of the gravestones in the churchyard showed nothing further of interest.

I spent a little time contemplating the Crocket children's weekday walk to school from Seeside Farm on the other side. Did they go over the precipitous slopes of the hill that looms in its green and benign fashion above the west flank of the village? Perhaps in summer, but in winter they would surely have walked round on the road. Or been driven in a trap. As we moved on, I tried to think of my great-grandmother as a new baby being carried around this place. I could imagine the shawl. Her grandmother Janet McKill would have repaired the old one used by her seven or eight previous siblings.

The route to Seeside Farm is a sharp left fork as the road turns north. Within a very short distance the view opens out to a scene that couldn't be more different from that on the other side of the hill. On the right, eastward, stretching into the distance is relatively flat pasture land, windswept and featureless with low hills behind. The contours to the left, where they are steep and lush above Terregles village, are here rather more like moorland, rising to the location of an ancient fort. There were sheep and lambs in the field to our left, and cattle here and there further off.

I thought about my original image of the farm and got out to look. Seeside Farm stands alongside the road on the west side, much as it must have done, with working yards, walls, machinery, mud, animals in pens, and the general look of a farm that is an industrial site, and pretty much treated that way. The house, plainly once loved and in good order, has seen better days. An elderly dog mooched around a patch a yard square and stared out at me. There was no car outside the house. I strolled back and forth, and photographed from the road, but no-one came out. The roof, like that of Castlewood Cottage, was steep enough to accommodate bedrooms, although a modern flat-roofed dormer addition gives headroom most of the length of the roof.

Many times I have thought of the young Ellenora and her sisters. The sole remaining brother, William, stayed on to work the farm although where he went after his parents died we do not know. The girls were all put to work in the house or the fields from 13 years up, once out of school. It is not hard to imagine the life. There is no other house in sight although the Ordinance Survey map shows there are. The village is a good walk away, Dumfries yet further. Sometimes the girls were farmed out to relatives in equally remote places. There would be few young men to be courted by.

Small wonder that of the 9 Crocket girls, only 4 married, and 3 escaped to England to do so. The remaining sister, Mary Johnstone Crocket, had to wait until both her parents were dead before she could make her way into marriage in 1888, too late to have children. I imagined, long before studying Seeside Farm, Ellenora dreaming about getting away, standing with her bowl of turnip seeds, or a hoe, looking south and wondering what other future might be found. With Margaret married to her master mariner in Liverpool by 1869, Ellenora's perfect route out was in place.

She was 23. The magnificent new railway station in Dumfries must have beckoned, the line going straight down through Cumbria and Lancashire to Liverpool or to Manchester. A seaside holiday with her sister? A romance with a dapper Shifnal man of 25? There would be no turning back after the wedding.

Ellenora, however, went back to Seeside to have her first baby, a boy named after his father, then probably afterwards only on holiday with her children. Otherwise, she lived in Liverpool in smart little terrace houses, then after Thomas's retirement in Ludlow, in big well-equipped residences – Springfield House, The Gables, The Laurels in Gravel Hill. Then finally in Cheltenham, the ultimate smart destination for townies of her day, where she died. Not that the Crockets at Seeside Farm were poor: Seeside Farm was a larger-than-average house, as was Castlewood Cottage.

We moved on, crossing the Nith to chase out old Crocket strongholds, tracking down the farms where they lived, quite forgetting that the hamlets of Killylung were among them. We had to turn back to see the houses still rooted to the western slopes of the valley near the railway, and the big red-brick Victorian buildings, probably once warehouses and their offices, yet still in use. How the railway must have transformed life in this region.

Two spots fascinated us on the flat-lands, the flood plain, the water meadows of the Nith. We drove right up to old Crocket houses on opposite sides of the river, Lower Killylung and Belholm (the latter occupied by my great-great-great-great-grandfather William Crocket.) With the tide out, it must have been a short job to either wade over or paddle in a small boat. It was illuminating to think of the Crockets ferrying back and forth across this water, and half-netting salmon trout for supper.

My notes said the Crockets only appeared in the area in the 1600s. That was early enough for me. Yet we came home without seeing the earliest known of the McKill settlements in this same area, the house at Bankhead on the east flank of the Nith. Thomas McKill, in 1749-50, owed Nithsdale Estate his rental.

Perhaps the most charming spot other than Terregles itself, which the Old Parish Records shows housed Crockets for years before my own relatives appeared at Seeside Farm, were the houses occupied by Crockets along the escarpment that stands above the eastern water meadows of the Nith. This is no distance from Dumfries and can be reached easily from the A76 as it forges north-west. The bridge at Auldgirth (which made me think of Harry Lello marrying his Presbyterian bride Bessie Johnston in Auld Kirk, Sidmouth, Tasmania in 1897) allows the walker or driver to cross to this old Crocket area. If I had to choose somewhere to live in the Lowlands, it would be here. Quiet woods. Solitary tracks, breathtaking views westwards, dense forest behind, ancient forts, walking tracks and bridle paths. The river snaking below, the road too far off to hear and never busy, the railway too seldom used to be a nuisance.

The houses are being bought up. We found Low Townhead up a track that is just about all right for an ordinary car. It's empty. There are skips outside. The house, a reasonable size for the area with brick outbuildings on its south side, perches looking west through in a gap in the trees. High Townhead's track, on the other hand, ramps away north before this point. It is unmetalled and fit only for 4X vehicles. We decided against it, given that we were driving a hire car.

Quarrelwood, nestling against the escarpment, and once a large farm occupied by linked Crocket families, including my own, is now attached to a smart art workshop, the house in order fit for any southern yuppy. The crofts at its feet, where the spinster Crocket aunts lived, sometimes with their nieces, are hived off and occupied by retirees. It is not hard to imagine the sisters milking the cows and feeding chickens and sewing clothes for payment, as they finally did in Dumfries as unmarried women.

Looking west right and left of Low Townhead I could see the land along the Nith where my ancestors farmed and fished, made love, quarrelled, got into debt, married and died, buried each other, played the fiddle at dances, walked their children and ran after their livestock. Yet there was always the feeling that they came from somewhere else. Crocket is not a local name. It might be French. It might relate to the strange crook, the pottery decoration that can be seen all over Britain on the front edge of ridges of Victorian and Edwardian houses.

But the McKills were true Dumfries and Galloway folk, even though my McKill ancestors remain the greatest mystery. Whereas the Crockets have no clan, the McKills do, and they bear many variants of the name which means son of a Lowlander, a stranger: MacGill, McGill, MacGillip, MacGillop, MacGilp, MacKillib, MacKillip, MacKillop, MacPhilib, MacPhilip, MacPhilipps, MacPilips, Makellop, Makillip or Makillop will know. Looking out from Low Townhead I felt I had truly come home, a MacKill, child of a stranger.

Gwyneth Daniel, Christchurch, Dorset, May 2004

contact for e-mail on scavenge@ntlworld.com

The following information was provided by James Pringle Weavers:

MACGILL: This name is derived from the Gaelic "Mac an Ghoill" (son of the Lowlander or Stranger). MacGills were found in the district of Galloway and the Isle of Man at an early date, and during the 18th century others of the same name were recorded in Jura. Perhaps the best known historical character was James Makgill of *Rankeillor -- Clerk Register and Provost of Edinburgh in the mid 1500's. James, a friend of John Knox, was implicated in the murder of Rizzio, Queen Mary's secretary, in 1566, and subsequently forced to seek refuge in the Highlands. However, in 1568, James took part in a secret mission which brought the famous "Casket Letters" from Scotland to Queen Elizabeth I of England. He also signed the Act of Parliament containing Queen Mary's resignation of the Crown in her son's favour. In 1627 a Baronetcy was given to Sir James Makgill of Cranston-Makgill, and in 1651 he also received the peerage and Viscountcy which were restored recently to his direct descendant, The Viscount of Oxfuird in 1978 was recognised by Lyon Court as Chief of the MacGill Family. Upon the failure of the 1745 Rebellion, some MacGills escaped to Ireland but later returned to settle in Ayrshire, while others made their way to Holland. The family tartan, which originated with the MacGills of Jura, was in use before 1745 but when tartan was proscribed the sett seemed to have been lost until a piece was discovered in Kintyre. It is now in the Museum of Antiquities, Edinburgh. The current version, which first appeared in 1930, is known as the MacGill Society tartan.