Patchwork tales at Moulin Hall

Claire Hewitt and I were at Moulin Hall on Friday with the patchwork quilt for Tell a Story Day and for an event that was part of the Luminate Creative Ageing festival.  Children from four of Highland Perthshire schools came early to hear and rehearse ‘The Spider that Spun the Golden Web’, a wonder tale created on Claire’s Travelling Tales cycling project in May.  The children worked hard to learn the story.  There was no reading and no props. They just had their memories and voices to tell the story.  And they did, wonderfully well, to an audience in the afternoon of older people who had come to listen and to tell their stories about the patchwork quilt.

Some of those quilt stories were remarkable.  Angus Macmaster and his brother Archie came along and told us about their three aunts, Gracie, Katie and Bella Macmaster.  The three girls lived at Saunich, four miles over the hill from Kinloch Rannoch and they walked to and from school every day.  They were known as the ‘wild deer of Rannoch’. Even for the time that was a tough walk.  They all emigrated to Canada about a hundred years ago.  Perhapsthat wasn’t such a daunting journey for young women who’d walked the hills since they were five years old. Mabel Macaulay came from Kyle to talk about her grandmother, who was the assistant teacher in Lochmaddy when she signed her name on the quilt. Mabel had a school tale too. She lived on Kirkibost, a tidal island off North Uist, and went by boat or horse and cart, depending on the tide.

We are hoping to have more gatherings to hear stories from those patchwork names and, eventually, I will write them.  The patchwork names represent girls from three Highland and Island communities and their lives in those landscapes one hundred and odd years ago.  It’ll take some time to piece their stories and how they fit in their communities and landscapes, so it will be a while.  And hopefully we can get some funding.  In the meantime the stories on Friday were wonderful to hear, and thank you to all who came to listen and tell. It was a very special day.

Patchwork lives

A few years ago I visited a local primary school in Kinloch Rannoch and the head teacher at the time showed us an old quilt that had recently donated to the school. It wasn’t very beautiful, crude red and white squares patched into a checkerboard. But each square had a girl’s name embroidered on it and there was a central medallion with the initials IFC. The teacher, Simon Calvin, had done some research and found that IFC was Isabella Christie who had taught at Kinloch Rannoch in the 1890s after starting her career in the Western Isles. She left her home near Elgin at the age of nineteen to teach on Heisker (aka the Monach Isles), a windy bit of Hebridean machair marooned off the west coast of North Uist. Heisker is deserted now but then there were over a hundred people living there and they needed a teacher. Isabella Christie had got the girls there and in her next two schools to sign their own square. The quilt was a record of her teaching.

Three of the girls’ names were Macmasters, Katie, Gracie and Bella. I knew Angus Macmaster, who lives in Aberfeldy, and he told me that they were his aunts. Gracie, the youngest of seventeen, emigrated with her mother and two of her sisters in 1908, abandoning the family home at Saunich over the hill from Rannoch in lonely Glen Errochty and moving to Saskatchewan, Canada. So the quilt held stories of people who were the last to live in some of the remotest parts of the Highlands and Islands. These were stories of lives shaped by the landscapes in which they lived and recorded in a quilt. As someone who looks at landscape as a storybook that can be read if you look closely enough, and as an occasional quilter, I couldn’t help being fascinated by it.

Sadly the quilt has disappeared and I didn’t manage to take a picture of it before it vanished. The picture here is taken from an article that appeared in the Perth Courier in 2007. But I’ve been able to do more research and I’m planning to produce a wee book, sometime soon I hope. Watch this space.