Friday 10th September 1819
Friday Sept 10th We proceeded to Berrydale Inn 12 miles from Port Gower to breakfast in the road we saw the ruins of Helmsdale Castle scarcely distinguishable we then continued 14 miles to Inver passing in our way Dunbeath Castle much resembling that of Dunrobin; having remained here two hours we continued another 14 mile stage to Wick the country becomes very flat on approaching the town which is small with a pretty harbour the Inn is good
OBSERVATIONS & COMMENTS:
Berriedale Inn: Berriedale (or Berrydale) is a small estate village on the northern east coast of Caithness on the A9 road between Helmsdale and Lybster. No coaching inn of that name could be located on line, but Lucy’s Inn may be The Castle Arms Hotel, which was originally built as a single storey building as a staging inn for mail coaches which came via the coast road from Wick. A map published between 1854 and 1857 lists the Berrydale Inn (see http://www.rareoldprints.com/z/19585 or wait till the 14th September blog). In the 1861 census it was listed as the Prince of Wales Inn but by 1871 it had become the Berriedale Inn and you can still see the iron rings for hitching horses besides the front door. http://www.castlearmshotel.co.uk/page/about-us
Image from the Castle Arms Hotel website http://www.castlearmshotel.co.uk/page/about-us
Portgower was built in the nineteenth century as clearance village by the Duke of Sutherland who employed a French factor. It was his idea to have Portgower as compact village on a grid system similar to the villages he was used to in France. That is why the houses are numbered not logically like a street in most places but with each house bearing the number of the croft land. Unfortunately this set up, which might have assisted community spirit, meant that most of the crofters had to walk some distance to their land to work on it unlike most crofts in the Highlands where the house is situated on the land being worked. http://www.helmsdale.org/portgower.html more information about Portgower can be found from yesterday’s wonderful reference, Esther's Portgower Story, at: http://timespanthestreets.blogspot.com/2011/04/esthers-portgower-story.html
To get a feel of the road the Coplands followed two centuries earlier through Portgower and onward along the A9 to Berridale we followed a modern car journey published on YouTube on 4 September 2015 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=HZttRoeRYZg
Helmsdale Castle was constructed in the 15th century on the instructions of Margaret Baillie, Countess of Sutherland and the wife of William, Earl of Sutherland. It was the scene of a triple murder involving poison. The plot is said to have inspired Shakespeare's Hamlet. It was rebuilt and repaired in 1616 by Alexander Gordon of Garty and was later used as a hunting lodge for landowners and their guests. Helmsdale Castle fell into ruin and was demolished to clear the site for a road improvements in the 1970s. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-39869409
2010: Helmsdale, Highland, Scotland, photo by Postdlf, the copyright holder of this work, and published it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Helmsdale_01.jpg
Inver is a small village of 300 houses. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inver,_Highland
Dunbeath Castle is first recorded on the rocky peninsula at Dunbeath in 1428, when the lands belonged to the Earl of Caithness. An earlier structure was replaced with a four-storey tower house in 1620. The castle was extensively remodelled in the 17th century by Sir William Sinclair. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbeath_Castle
200&: Dunbeath Castle, by Bill Henderson. This image was taken from the Geograph project collection. The copyright on this image is owned by Bill Henderson and is licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dunbeath_Castle.jpg
Wick: Saint Fergus, an Irish missionary, brought Christianity to Wick and is its patron saint. In 1613 the Anglican archdeacon, Richard Merchiston of Bower, was brought into Caithness by Bishop Patrick Forbes. Merchiston, a zealous iconoclast, angered the Catholic townspeople when he broke up the stone sculpture of St. Fergus, the town's patron saint. At first yielding to the city authorities who tried to prevent violence, a band of men nevertheless followed the parson as he returned home in the evening, took him by force, and drowned him in the Wick River. When questioned about the murder, they alleged that it had been the work of the saint himself, whom they claimed they had seen astride Merchiston, holding his head below the water. Construction of Wick Harbour began in 1803 and was completed by 1811.
2004: Wick Harbour, Scotland. The ex-RMAS Fleet Tender Ilchester is to the left, with windmill blades behind her. Panoramic photograph by James L Woodward, the copyright holder of this work, and published it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wick_harbor_scotland.jpg
It soon became a bustling harbour and, with the rise in fisheries, the size of the town increased, and Wick replaced Thurso as the centre of both shipping and trade in Caithness. In 1800 a bridge was built at Wick, before which travellers from the south could only cross over into Wick via a footbridge of eleven pillars connected by planks and in 1803 the “Parliamentary” road which ran from Inverness to Thurso was extended from the Ord to Wick and then to Thurso, completed in 1811. In 1818, the mail coach, which was already running between Inverness and Tain, extended its reach by passing Bonar Bridge and the Ord to Wick and Thurso, which offered better communication between Wick and the south of Scotland. Pulteneytown was founded in 1808 to provide space for the many Scots displaced by the Highland Clearances, who poured to the coast in search of work in the fishing industry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wick,_Caithness
2005: The Wick River and Bridge Street, by Flaxton and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wick,_Caithness#/media/File:WickCaithness.jpg
2005: Bridge of Wick (here, Bridge Street crosses the Wick River, viewed from River Street) by OLU. The copyright on this image, taken from the Geograph project collection, is owned by OLU and is licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wick,_Caithness#/media/File:Bridge_of_Wick_-_geograph.org.uk_-_252159.jpg
Lucy describes the town as small in 1819, with a pretty harbour. The town had expanded so much that by 1868 Robert Louis Stephenson expressed a totally different opinion of the town in a letter to his mother:
Certainly Wick in itself possesses no beauty: bare, grey shores, grim grey houses, grim grey sea; not even the gleam of red tiles; not even the greenness of a tree. The southerly heights, when I came here, were black with people, fishers waiting on wind and night. Now all the S.Y.S. (Stornoway boats) have beaten out of the bay, and the Wick men stay indoors or wrangle on the quays with dissatisfied fish-curers, knee-high in brine, mud, and herring refuse. The day when the boats put out to go home to the Hebrides, the girl here told me there was ‘a black wind’; and on going out, I found the epithet as justifiable as it was picturesque. A cold, BLACK southerly wind, with occasional rising showers of rain; it was a fine sight to see the boats beat out a-teeth of it.
In Wick I have never heard any one greet his neighbour with the usual ‘Fine day’ or ‘Good morning.’ Both come shaking their heads, and both say, ‘Breezy, breezy!’ And such is the atrocious quality of the climate, that the remark is almost invariably justified by the fact. The streets are full of the Highland fishers, lubberly, stupid, inconceivably lazy and heavy to move. You bruise against them, tumble over them, elbow them against the wall — all to no purpose; they will not budge; and you are forced to leave the pavement every step.
To the south, however, is as fine a piece of coast scenery as I ever saw. Great black chasms, huge black cliffs, rugged and over- hung gullies, natural arches, and deep green pools below them, almost too deep to let you see the gleam of sand among the darker weed: there are deep caves too. In one of these lives a tribe of gipsies. The men are ALWAYS drunk, simply and truthfully always. From morning to evening the great villainous-looking fellows are either sleeping off the last debauch, or hulking about the cove ‘in the horrors.’ The cave is deep, high, and airy, and might be made comfortable enough. But they just live among heaped boulders, damp with continual droppings from above, with no more furniture than two or three tin pans, a truss of rotten straw, and a few ragged cloaks. In winter the surf bursts into the mouth and often forces them to abandon it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wick,_Caithness
YouTube has a fascinating collection of old photographs collected by Tour Scotland at https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=iHGNJ6MoVZ8 and George McKnight’s "A short aerial spin around Wick, Caithness, Scotland on a cold early February morning in 2016" provides a complete aerial view of Wick today https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jbyqhrqJD8
Inn: No contemporaneous Inn found on line.
Can you help us?
Wick Inns operating in 1819: Lucy recorded that the Inn is good. It would be helpful to know which Inns were open in 1819 and to take an educated guess as to the one that impressed her so much.
Old Regency Prints, Pictures an Coaching maps: Do you have access to any prints or pictures showing what town and country would have looked like when Lucy travelled through? Any illustrations of what she would have seen in 1819 will enliven our research.
New Pictures: Do you have any modern pictures of the streets, buildings, gardens and views that would enable us to see the changes that two centuries have wrought?