The peat-fire flame : folk-tales and traditions of the Highlands & Islands

FOLK-TALES OF THE '15 AND THE '45
son remembered the crooked sixpence seven times cursed,
and the warning of his mother that it was better he should
depart with her blessing than with her curse. So he placed
the crooked sixpence in his flint-lock, and fired at Little Alan
of Clan Ranald, who fell dead. And the clansmen gathered
round their fallen hero, weeping and wailing so bitterly that
Glengarry had to cry out to them in the Gaelic : " To-day
for revenge: to-tnorrow for weeping!" Thereupon the
MacDonalds resumed the fight with renewed vigour, and
hewed down the Hanoverian troops under the command of
Argyll.
" He who was a man but yesterday," was the retort of
Clan Ranald's foster-father, when asked for whom he was
lamenting, since the news of Little Alan's death had
travelled swiftly across Scotland to the Isles.
A few days prior to Clan Ranald's leaving South Uist for
Sheriffmuir, Lady Clan Ranald had a strange premonition
that some dire calamity was going to befall her home at
Ormacleit. It had taken Clan Ranald seven years to build
the house at Ormacleit with the aid of a French architect,
French masons, and French freestone. Seven years, and
not a day longer, it was occupied. On the night of the
battle, and the blood of Clan Ranald himself barely cold
on the heath of Sheriffmuir, it was burned to the ground
through the kitchen chimney's having caught fire.
The Silver Shoe of Locheil.
Faith in the protective and curative power ^ of silver
persists in the Highlands and Islands to this very day ;
and
1 The belief that the seventh son, or the seventh son of a seventh
son, has the power of curing certain diseases is still held in many
districts of the Highlands and Islands. My own cousins, for example,
who live within a mile or so of the town of Stornoway, in the Outer
Hebrides, firmly believe that the power of healing " the king's evil "
(scrofula) is vested in a seventh son. Morning and evening, for three
consecutive days, the seventh son must bathe the wound of his patient.
On the evening of the third day, he must pierce a hole in an old
sixpence, and hang it by a thread of green wool round the patient's
neck. The wound begins to heal, it is said, immediately the green
thread breaks unbeknown to the sufferer.
Dr. Norman Morrison, a well-known Lewis scholar and naturalist
now residing at Campbeltown, has in his possession an old sixpence
that was used in Lewis as recently as 1928 to cure " the king's evil."
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