Glenmoriston

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Free Church

This is the Free Church of Glenmoriston. It served the whole of the glen, down the glen and up the glen. It closed 10 years ago or so. At the turn of the century there would be an overflow. There would be a service outside as well as in, there would be so many people. There would be more than 150 people there. I went to church here. The minister used to come and preach here once a fortnight, every second week. We would bring two carloads up from Invermoriston and there would be another twenty people from up the glen here. Then latterly in the 1950s there might be 20 people altogether until it dwindled away till they decided to hold their services in Fort Augustus only.

Once I was before the session when I asked for baptism for my eldest child, Connie. And they weren't very willing to baptise my child because I sold from the petrol station on Sunday.

In the Free Church we didn't have an organ so the precentor led the praise. He just started off the singing, that's all. One time we had a lay preacher from Invergarry. He was known as the Bishop MacDonald. He was actually a road worker. But he saw the light, or took the curam as they say in the Western Isles and became a very holy man and gave up strong drink and women and all that sort of thing. Well I was sitting in the garner, that's where the precentor sat facing the congregation but on a lower level than the minister. So I was looking around at the bonnie lassies in the congregation, there were a few of them too. There was.... ach I won't mention any names. Well the preacher he went on preaching about Foooornication and the like. And he went on finally to say that it was just as bad to be looking upon a woman with lust in your heart as... as doing it. Well hell I says to myself, I'm damned anyway, I might as well be doing it. But I kissed the girls goodnight several times after that.

There's a road goes down there, an old road, a track. At the bottom, near the river there was a bobbin mill. The pool in the river there, which is flooded now by the dam, was known as the bobbin pool. It was a good salmon fishing point. During the war there was still the boiler of the sawmill engine lying there and the homeguard used it as target practice for Mills' bombs and Molotov cocktails and the like.

The Sacraments

Recorded June 2001

Once a year on the second Sunday of July, we held a communion, the communion weekend. On the Thursday we had two services, morning and evening, each lasting about an hour and a half. Friday we had a service in the evening. and Saturday we had a service in the afternoon. They called that the preparation or something. on Sunday they had the communion. Well the church used to be full. And in my father's day there would be an overflow meeting outside, there was no room in the church for everybody.

Anyway the service started at 11 in the morning, Sunday morning. and for an hour we were preached at in Gaelic. And then they started the English service. That went on for another hour at least. We're now at one o' clock. Then we have the tables, and for half an hour or so he preached about fencing the tables, telling us about who should go forward to the table for communion and who shouldn't. and anybody who ate and drank the communion unworthily drank damnation unto themselves. And there were an awful lot of them who thought they were not worthy.

So then the communion service takes place, and during the singing of a couple of verses of psalm.... I forget which one, the communicants come forward to the table. Two verses are sung and nobody moves. So there's another sermon, wee sermon, and then they try again, another two verses. So then at the very last line they start. The old wifies start parading down to the front. Mostly old women, very few men. So then the sacrament is passed round the line and the bread which had been brought forward from somewhere by the elders, and then the elders sit down, and they get theirs from the minister. And then the minister sits down and he gets his from the elders. And then they have another sermon, and other that after another psalm they all parade back to their seats, after of course an undue delay.

So, that takes us another hour, and this one's in Gaelic. And then they start again and do it all over again in English. We used to finish about 3 o' clock. And they're leaving the church there; some people have been there from 11 o' clock till 3 o'clock.

So, we all go to one or two particular houses for lunch, for a Sunday dinner. I don't know whose it was. I don't know what we'd do then for a bit. Anyway, we'd sit round the tables, and they'd put the soup out. And nobody touches that till the grace is said. So when all the soup is out, somebody stands up and says grace. Grace takes... it seems like an hour, but it only takes ten minutes or so. And then we get stuck into the COLD soup. And then another course is passed round, we had a good meal; apart from the soup. And then of course we had to have grace after the meal. There were certain houses that did the catering, I think. The manse of course would have as many as they could hold and various other houses. Things were brought for the communion. For instance there'd be salmon and venison from the estate. They weren't Free Church at all but they'd supply the food, free.

It was common practise for the people of Glen Shiel to come down to the Glen Moriston sacraments. And they were well entertained here. And maybe a month later they had the sacraments in Glen Shiel. And maybe twenty people went up from Glenmoriston to there. And we all went up there and spent the whole day there. Now, having had our meal and the grace after we proceed to sing psalms till it was time to go to church again. And off we went to church for an evening service about 6 o' clock. And that was not a short one either. And then after the service, it was home.

To get there and back, there was various transport, all our vehicles were pressed into service. There was a.... it would be a minibus today.... a shooting brake; two shooting brakes. A car... and a wagonette sort of thing, we called it the Bog Roy. It held about a dozen. The seats were long ways up the back. My father would be driving, and my uncle.... whoever was driving for us. And in my own day, I was driving as well.

But, then we had another service on the Monday. A thanks giving service for the communion on the Monday, and that was the end of it. And in Drum school, we had Thursday, Friday and Monday off School for the sacraments, twice a year.

In Glenmoriston, it was July. And Glen Urquhart, they had it in February and November, I think; twice a year. Here, we only had it once a year because we were only a part congregation. We also had it in Fort Augustus for the second one. So we went to Glen Shiel, and Fort Augustus, and Glen Urquhart too. Some people went on all three, three or four.

The funny thing was, the pub was closed on the Thursday, that was the fast day, the Thursday of the communion weekend, and the pub was closed. And that was a statutory holiday. The pub was supposed to close twice a year. One day was New Year's Day, and the other was the sacraments. Now, the trouble was, people would come to Invermoriston pub, and they'd never heard of the sacraments or anything else. They were wondering what on earth, why was the pub closed? They would find some drink in Fort Augustus instead, that kept them happy. But latterly when the pub became open on Sundays, it was closed on the Thursday and open on the Sunday. and I remember coming down, particularly in the evening, after church, 7 o' clock at night, the pub was bursting at the seams, and singing and great gaiety going on there, and this hellish holy lot from the Free Church were going home after the service, after all the services, after hours and hours in the church, and they were feeling very much pharasaical about the people who were drinking instead.

The elders of the church were the leaders and head of the local church. You know the presbyterian system, we don't have bishops and so forth, but we have kirk sessions. And at the kirk session, there are the elders, deacons, (whatever they did, I'm not very sure), and members of the church, who are entitled to arrange the affairs of the church, like collecting money and... collecting more money. As far as I could see that was all they did. Johnny Smart was an elder. My aunty Mary was a member of the church. The women were not elders or office bearers. The communicants were.... I don't remember really. They were mostly old. They were mostly.... at least sixty. My mother and father weren't members.

We would go up to Glen Shiel in the morning, and the Gaelic service started at eleven and the English is at twelve. So, some of the drivers, and some of the men, instead of going to the Gaelic service, they went to the pub, which is open on a Sunday all day to travellers. And they had a couple of drinks there, nothing much. And then they went to church, to the English service, which was long enough for them anyway. But they went.

Each congregation has it's own time. Say the second week in July was Glen Moriston. The fourth week in July might have been Glen Shiel. The second week in February was Glen Urquhart and so forth. So you could go to one every Sunday of the year if you liked.

Other congregations would visit Glen Moriston at the time of the sacraments. The main body were from Glen Shiel, but they also came from Fort Augustus and from Glen Urquhart. That was about it. But they had an extra minister for the communion, sometimes even two.

The last minister to do Gaelic services, I suppose was MacLeod, but he didn't do many. He came in the late 30s. Before that there was Ferguson. He was a real Gaelic man. He was a St Kildan. He was born and brought up on St Kilda. And, he was a boat builder. And he became a minister later on in life as the Free Church ministers often did. He must have left St Kilda before the evacuation, because he was here in the early 30s. I met his son-in-law on the boat to St Kilda. Myself and Chris went on a MacBrayne's boat which made a special trip to St Kilda. It took twelve hours to get there I think, or so, from Oban via Barra, that was overnight.

So Ferguson did a Gaelic service every Sunday and an English service. I would sit through both in Cùl na Carn. In Invermoriston the service was in English in the school. When MacLeod was called, as they say, to the Free Church; that's when they ask a minister to leave the church he happens to be in, and come and be our minister a spell. He was called, and at the time, unless he could preach in Gaelic, he wouldn't do. He was a Leòdhasach. He just did the Gaelic services now and again. He's buried in Fort Augustus When he went in the 1950s, that was the last of the Gaelic services. There was a bit of a gap until we got John Fraser. He was the last minister. He lived at Cùl na Carn.

Between MacLeod and Ferguson we only had one minister who did Fort Augustus, Invergarry and Glen Moriston for manys a year. The manse was available for rent then, and Bill Fraser's family were there for more than ten years.