Descendants drawn to family home

Dozens of family members made the return to Cormilligan in Dumfries and Galloway, the remote home their ancestors left behind nearly 130 years ago

By Willie Johnston
BBC Scotland reporter

At just six months old Itzel Stewart will have no memory of the day she visited the home of her great, great, great grandfather.

But her dad Ben was a similar age when he first came and, like so many other members of his family, he keeps being drawn back, even from a home in far off Mexico.

Maybe Itzel will, too.

Cormilligan is an unlikely ancestral home, far removed from the great castles and keeps of Scotland's clans and grand families.

No more than a tumbledown cottage, doors and windows open to the elements. A tree grows from what remains of the roof.

Inside, on the rotting floor, sheep droppings and a birds nest are evidence of its 21st Century occupants.

It makes you very proud to be a McCaw - to come home to see where your ancestors lived and how hard life must have been for them Bill McCaw

It wasn't always thus.

Cormilligan was home to shepherd William Armstrong McCaw and his father and grandfather before him.

It is where William and his wife Isabella raised their 10 surviving children. And it is from where, in 1880, the family upped sticks to emigrate to New Zealand after facing the loss of the farm tenancy.

That June, they sailed on board the Sterlingshire from Glasgow's Broomielaw on a three-month journey to a new country and a new life.

It was a remarkable decision for a man in his 60s, but William was a remarkable man.

Looking at Cormilligan now it would be easy to assume that McCaw was no more than a humble 'herd, but that would be a disservice.

He was a God-fearing Presbyterian, largely self-educated but well-read and extremely literate.

'Self-taught man'

For about 20 years after their move Down Under, McCaw sent regular bulletins back for publication in the Dumfries and Galloway Standard.

His great grandson, another William Armstrong McCaw (but known as Bill), says: "He was a great reader and really a self-taught man.

"He had a wonderful command of the language as the letters that he wrote back to the newspaper demonstrated."

Bill has just been back at Cormilligan with three dozen other descendants for a family reunion.

They came from New Zealand, America, Mexico and Greece and from all round the UK.

Great great granddaughter Mary Stewart studied McCaw and his story for her Masters degree thesis.

William and Isabella McCaw left Cormilligan with their children in 1880

"He was a very religious man; a very devout man," she says.

"God and his faith really inspired him through all of his life."

And with the church in Penpont, a good eight-mile walk away, that can't have been easy!

McCaw and Cormilligan have inspired more than just his direct descendants.

The Scots language poet Rab Wilson chanced upon the farmstead some years ago and was "blown away" by what he found.

"The biggest surprise awaited me on entering the house," he wrote later.

"There to my utter astonishment were name after name after name, written or scrawled all over the inside gable end wall of the house.

"As I read, it quickly became apparent that these names had been written there by the actual living descendants of William McCaw, many, it seemed, living now in New Zealand.

"These descendants had returned, like the migrating salmon, to the land of their forefathers."

Poetic inspiration

Wilson did further research and made contact with family members.

The result is an epic "Sonnet Redouble" - a collection of 15 poems, the last line of one forming the first line of the next, and the 15th verse made up of all those repeated lines.

It took him two years and is the only work of its kind in the Scots canon.

The sonnets were recited at this latest McCaw gathering.

In the language of his work Wilson told me: "Ah read oot the hale sonnet sequence (by request!) an there wis haurdly a dry eye in the hoose (masel includit!!)."

These days, Cormilligan is not easy for humans to find, or reach.

Poet Rab Wilson was stunned by what he discovered in the house

The metalled road from Tynron runs out after three miles at Kirkconnel Farm, from there it's another two miles hard trek over rough ground, or a bone-shaking ride by 4x4 across rock-strewn tracks and over free-flowing burns.

From Cormilligan, I watched the approach of the Homecomers and it was an amazing sight.

From half a mile away, a booted and backpacked procession strung out behind a kilted piper.

As they came closer the strains of the music droned atmospherically over the moor. And as they crested the hill, the sight of the old farmstead had them breaking rank for the first snaps of the ancestral home.

Not much to look at but no less significant for that.

Mary Stewart wasn't the only one who shed a tear, and wasn't ashamed to admit it.

I don't think Bill McCaw cried. At 82, the former All Black was the elder statesman of the day and - most likely - on his last visit to Cormilligan.

"It makes you very proud to be a McCaw," he said.

"To come home to see where your ancestors lived and how hard life must have been for them. Amazing."