When the west coast did not want its Minister

Lochcarron, Applecross and Gairloch occupy the final days of many of our longer North Coast Explorer tours, and it is usually the landscape that dominates the conversation. Around every corner stands another mountain, while beneath almost every bridge runs another surging river. I ask guests to remove those roads and bridges from the landscape, forget maps and GPS and imagine crossing it on foot, horseback or by boat. The result is intimidating enough before we consider how an eighteenth-century minister was supposed to administer the scattered communities living within it.

Aeneas Sage entered this enormous district as a Presbyterian missionary during the 1720s, travelling between Lochcarron, Applecross and Gairloch, preaching at different stations and moving from house to house to instruct families. Christianity was hardly new to the West Coast, as the ancient monastery at Applecross demonstrates, but the Presbyterian Church represented a different religious and political order. Some communities retained strong Episcopalian and Jacobite sympathies, and they did not necessarily welcome a minister whom they regarded as an unwanted representative of the post-Revolution establishment.

On the night before Sage was installed at Lochcarron, he was given a barn in which to sleep. During the night, somebody set it alight, hoping to rid the parish of its new ‘Whig minister’. Sage escaped, saw the incendiary running away and pursued him while only partly dressed. The enormous minister caught the man near his home and dragged him back to the barn, where the culprit expected a severe beating. Instead, Sage placed food and drink before him, offered a blessing and sent him away to tell his neighbours how their new minister avenged an attempt upon his life.

The attack was not an isolated example of resistance. Ministers gathering at Lochalsh were mobbed so violently that their next meeting was held far outside the district, while churches elsewhere were barricaded against Presbyterian clergy. To minister on the West Coast required more than theological knowledge: it demanded physical endurance, diplomacy and considerable courage. The modern roads soften the landscape, but the surviving churches and competing kirks remind us that religious divisions did not simply disappear. The people here were not waiting passively to be administered, and sometimes the most effective sermon began with a burning barn and ended with an unexpected meal.

To learn more, book one of our North Coast Explorer private tours.