Time Team
Kappinch Kenny
Winter has returned to Kappinch, the freezing waters below send a chill into our home, which the fire blazing in the hearth can scarcely disguise. My clothes are of thick wool, yet here on Loch Lomond the December air can cut through the thatch and wood around us and make itself known in your very bones.
Looking up from her loom, my mother seems to have sensed my shivering and rises to stoke the fire, adding log after log from a sprawling pile that my brother and I cut just last month. We work hard to prepare for the long dark winters, gathering stocks of fuel, meat, fish and vegetables to see us through.
All that food, now hanging in the rafters above my head, has been hard won on our island Clairinsh, and on the mainland. In the lighter summer days we play, hunt and farm in the fertile lands of our flat island and around the shores of the loch, but when the long, cold nights of winter arrive we scarcely venture further than the waters that separate us from Clairinsh.
I have been well warned to stay within the warmth of our Crannog. Along with my brothers, sisters and cousins I know all too well the dangers that lie beyond our circle of walls. My mother tells of babies being carried off by wolves, of the young and the frail falling victim to attack by beasts of all sorts. Sadly, I too will have tales to tell my children in the years to come, but my stories will tell of a danger more terrifying than any of the wildlife that stalks our land.
Throughout and around this deep, dark loch, people have settled in family groups for hundreds, surely thousands of years. The loch has served us all well with fish and soil rich enough to farm our own plots. But, for some this will never be enough.
Just over a year ago when we had brought in the animals and secured our stores of food for the winter, we had begun an evening of tales and singing. In the light of our fire and with the familiar and soothing sound of my grandmother's harp, I was as happy as I could ever remember. Until that night, tales of thieving and violence were nothing but stories to me, handed down from my father and his father.
In one moment that happy childhood was blighted. A sudden light from behind us and a smell of burning, then shouts followed by screams, and our secure home was safe no more. They had come by boat from a settlement onshore, looking for trouble and all they could raid from us.
Our men fought for all they were worth as the women frantically gathered us children together. As the raiding clan stormed through our home, they pulled food from the rafters and animals from their pens. As they made off with all they had stolen, their torches set light to the bracken on the floor, and it was all we could do to beat it out with the skins from our beds.
We had escaped being burned with our home, but only when the flames were out and the screams died did we realise just what we had lost. In the battle to protect all that he had and all that he cared for, my father and three of his brothers had been killed by the marauding clan.
Their spirits remain, however, and their names will be remembered forever in the haunting songs my mother and her grieving sisters-in-law can be heard to sing through the dark winter on this deep and threatening loch.