We’re bringing no fewer than five communities into the winning group for this award. They will all Continue reading
Tag Archives: Luss
Six communities from across Argyll and Bute lead the scramble for the For Argyll Community Award 2010
With 24 hours left to go to the close of nominations of communities Continue reading
Threatened rural primary stays open while big urban receiving school shuts
‘Bigger schools are better’? Not when they’re shut. Continue reading
School closures: matters arising of general importance
Several matters came up at the meeting in Luss on 12th November 2010 that are important to all communities campaigning to save their schools. We list them below and will add other lists from other meetings as this process goes on. This item will therefore be worth specific regular checking and you may wish to bookmark it.
Points from the Luss meeting on 12th November
- Local knowledge – and at a practical level – is crucial in identifying operational flaws in the proposals.
- Given the different geographical locales of Luss and Helensburgh, few Luss parents in rural Loch Lomondside have any local contacts in Helensburgh, Argyll’s largest town, over the hill and relatively far away on the Clyde. So if their child is sick or if the school needs to be closed in the case, say, of a power failure, who can they ring to pick up and look after the child until they get back from work? The Luss community will not be alone in this predicament.
- While some schools could attempt to subvert council intentions by organising mass placing requests from parents, to send their children to an alternative receiving school, Jackie Baillie largely advised against such a tactic. A council can refuse such a request. It would be a waste of time and effort.
- Council Area Committees have been instructed not to intervene in closure proposals, designated as Council business.
- Figures given in the proposals for overall area spare capacity in school places are misleading. Council staff have been working to ‘planning capacity’ standards which are akin to working out how many kids you can fit in a phone box. The standards that apply are the ‘working capacity’ standards which seriously reduce the amount of claimed over-capacity.
- The figure given in the proposals of £15,700, as the annual additional cost of travel associated with the proposals, has been widely challenged as unrealistically low. The basis for the figure is also unknown.
- At the Luss meeting, Jackie Baille MSP advised parent groups to have safety assessments done on the travel routes that will apply if their schools close. Pick up points are of particular concern.
- She also advised campaign teams to get accurate demographic statistics along with current local knowledge and paint the picture of their community. How many families live there, how many children, how many people altogether, the age range and the percentage of the total local population of each age group. We suggest keeping this simple in using three age groups: children to age 16; working age; beyond working age.
- Where one or more schools are closed and their pupils transferred to another school, this is called amalgamation and the Head Teachers of each school involved apply to become the Head Teacher of the combined school. (RECRUITMENT PROCESS COST HERE.) One will win and the other one or two will, according to Councillor Morton, go onto what is called a ‘conserved salary’ for a period of three years, during which time they are free to apply for other jobs.
- The council’s internal retrenchment process – known as ‘streamlining’ – is now moving into middle management, the area where the 5 or 6 unproductive but highly paid Quality Improvement Officers are located. At Luss, the universal feeling was that this is a parasitic role and they and their manager should go.
- Jackie Baille MSP advised campaign teams that each person in the community should email their concerns, their objections and their case to each individual councillor, not just one collective statement and not just to their local councillors. As she said, one collective email is one collective email. A few hundred make an entirely different impact on the perceived strength of feeling and support involved.
School closures: Voting – Councillors between a rock and a hard place
At the meeting in Luss on 12th November 2010, Councillor James Robb laid down for the audience exactly what position he and his fellow councillors are in with the school closures proposals. It is almost mythically awful. He likened it to the situation of the film, Sophie’s Choice. You could also see it as having to make the judgment of Solomon.
The normal procedure at council meetings is that a motion, put and agreed, is then subject to amendments. Each Councillor may vote for only one amendment.
If the normal procedure applies, the meeting on 25th November will see a motion put to proceed to the statutory consultation process on the proposal papers as they then stand – and Argyll and Bute has gone for the minimum consultation period of six weeks.
What will then happen is that, with their community representatives present in the public observation area, Councillors will put forward amendments to exclude each school remaining on the list for closure, except for those already all but closed.
But, under normal procedure, with only one vote to make, each Councillor is going to be put to the sticking point, compelled publicly to align her or himself with one school only.
Last night Provost Wiliam Petrie assured the meeting that the Councillors will support the retention of Luss School – but, in the normal system, they have one vote each and if they use thoe votes for Luss, where will this leave them with Kilchreggan, Rosneath and Parklands? This must not drive schools to fight each other for support. It makes acting together imperative. Alone, schools will be picked off one by one. Acting as an organised single force, they can be formidable.
The alternative to the normal procedure is that Council Leader, Dick Walsh, might opt for a vote on each specific school proposed to close – but this would be a lengthy process and probably a numerically futile one. It is inconceivable that, with 36 councillors, a single rural school in one part of Argyll and the Isles can be won on a majority vote.
Argyll and Bute is a massive and complex area, with a physically divided mainland, inshore and offshore islands, single track roads off the main roads almost everywhere and long journey times to get anywhere. Councillors simply do not know areas other than their own, or the schools in those other areas.
While Councillor Ellen Morton, conscious of this problem, has now cleared it with the Council Leader that Councillors may visit schools outside their own areas to familiarise themselves with the wider picture, not many will do this. Those who are key to the process are the sixteen Councillors chosen to serve on the Executive Committee. They will now be required to visit schools in the communities outside their own. (For information we list the names of Executive Committee members at the foot of this article.)
If they are invited to do so and do not, it will add to the current controversy about the anti-democratic nature, in a local authority like Argyll and Bute, of the Executive Committee itself. Its existence certainly sees some areas more powerfully represented than others, with over half of the body of councillors condemned to be little more than marker buoys.
It is entirely possible that the Council Leader will come up with an entirely different procedure. He is known for revealing unexpected rabbits from hats. But this too is an inappropriate procedure for governance. Decision taking processes should be stable, known to all in advance and not a matter for the theatrics of smoke and mirrors.
Luss to ring St Kessog’s bell (?) on Inchtavannach at midnight tonight
Villagers from Luss will ring two bells at Tom na Clog (Hill of the Bell) Continue reading
National Park to reintroduce passenger ferry on Loch Lomond
The love affair with the car that put paid to the century-old passenger ferry Continue reading
Fatal road accident on A82 at Luss
There was a fatal road accident on the A82 at Luss in Argyll on Sunday 8th February. An Audi A4 driven by Alexander Henderson from Milngavie collided with a Scania lorry half
a mile south of the Southern Luss access road at around 10.00pm that night.
Mr Henderson was pronounced dead at the scene. The 40-year old driver of the lorry was uninjured.
The A82 was closed in both directions while police examined the scene of the accident.
A full report will be submitted to the Procurator Fiscal and officers from Dumbarton Road Policing have appealed for any witnesses to the crash to contact them. Their phone number is: 0141 532 3500.
| 0141-532 3500 |
Siol Alpin – the seven clans that are ‘the seed of Alpin’
The Siol Alpin seemed a good place to start an occasional feature on the Clans of Argyll – because its origin underlines the centrality of Argyll to Scotland and because not everybody has heard of it.
Cinead mac Ailpin (Keneth MacAlpin), King of the Picts, is tradionally held to have become the first King of Scotland in AD 843, uniting the Scots and the Picts. This was a time when writen records were not kept, so much will remain matter for dispute. MacAlpin was said to have been crowned King at Dunadd Fort in Kilmartin Glen in Mid Argyll. There were certainly crownings there. The hill top, along with some ogham script, has a footprint carved into the stone – a key element in the ritual of the crowning of a King.
Whether or not MacAlpin himself was crowned there, it was his seat and remained the family seat when MacAlpin as King transferred his capital to Scone in Perth.
From Perth, coming successors to the crown were sent to Argyll to prepare for their inheritance and to defend it. This all sounds very ordered. In fact the history of the MacAlpins is a blood-spattered one, with murder after murder as family members dispatched each other to secure the throne for themselves.
This created a situation where there was a MacAlpin King in Scone and a MacAlpin Clan Chief in Argyll. Tensions and conflicts between the two led to the decimation of the clan, the loss of its lands and the absence of a recognised Chief. This 500 year-old situaton has led to the MacAlpins not being recognised as a Clan in their own right – something the Clan MacAlpin Society are disputing in an application for recognition to the Court of the Lord Lyon.
There are two reaosn why the Argyll or MacAlpin Clan may have broken. One was that the authorities at Scone used the Clan lands in Argyll to reward other local clans for loyalty and services – a move with the added advantage of weakening the position of challengers to the King from home territory.
It may also be that the Clan itself, never effective as such anyway, broke as strong family branches of it split away to establish strongholds in the new Kindom of Scotland. Each of these would have taken its own network of clansmen with it. Together, these became the Siol Alpin, a close connection of strong clans allied by a proud blood.
Surnames were not the currency of the Scotland of those days so these branch clans would have taken their names from the patronymic of their progenitor. So the seven clans of Siol Alpin are:
- Clan Grant
- Clan Gregor
- Clan MacAulay
- Clan MacFie
- Clan MacKinnon
- Clan MacNab
- Clan MacQuarrie
The seven clans share a common bonnet badge – the Scots Pine. Several underline their royal blood in their mottos: Clan Gregor (generally recognised as the senior clan) has S Rioghal Mo Dhream, whose translation from the Gaelic is Royal is My Race. Clan Macfie has Pro Rege, pointing up their Jacobite allegiance meaning, in translation from the Latin, For the King. Clan MacKinnon’s is Cuimhnich bas Alpein which, in translation from the Gaelic, is Remember the death of Alpin.
Behavioural evidence is often cited as proof of the known blood bond between the seven clans of Siol Alpin.
Early on in 1603, the Campbells (of Argyll) persuaded the MacGregors to raid the Lennox clan. This resulted in the MacGregors routing the Lennox-supporting Colquhouns of Luss in something if a slaughter at Glenfruin, with much booty gained. This brought down on them the wrath of James VI who instructed the Duke of Argyll to extirpate the MacGregors – an ironic tasking, given that it was Argyll who had induced them to attack the Colquhours.
However, the name of MacGregor was proscribed. All MacGregors who had fought at Glenfruin were outlawed. Alasdair MacGregor was hanged. Argyll was granted Kintyre as a reward for his efforts. (There is a curious little contemporary note in that the widow of the last, the 12th, Duke of Argyll, now the Dowager Duchess Iona, is a Colquhoun of Luss, married into the family who incited the slaughter of her ancestors at Glenfruin.)
Anyway, during the 17th century proscription of the name MacGregor, the Chief of Clan Grant gave a massive amount of aid to the MacGregors and was very heavily fined for breaking the law in tbis way. The Chief of Grant would have had no reason for doing this at such cost unless he knew himself to be helping and protecting his own Siol Alpin kin.
Later, in the early eighteenth century, there was a two-week long meeting between the Grants and the MacGregors at Blair Atholl to discuss a merging of the clans. Provided the proscription of the MacGregor name could be lifted, the agreement was that MacGregor would be the name for the combined clan. If it could not be lifted, the name to be adopted was to be MacAlpin of Grant. These promising discussions broke down over the issue of who was to be Chief of the new Clan. Nevertheless, several Grants – including Ballindalloch – went on to demonstrate fidelity to their kinship by adding the MacGregor patronymic to their name.
Other pieces of evidence for the known kinship between the seven clans of Siol Alpin and their individual blood link to Cinead mac Ailpin include:
- In 1591 Alasdair MacGregor of Glenstrae and Aulay MacAulay or Ardencaple entered into a bond to aid each other against anyone but the King. The document recording the bond includes the sentence: ‘Alexander M’Gregor of Glenstray on the ane part and Awly M’Cawley of Ardingapill on the other part understanding ourselfs and our name to be M’Calppins of auld and to be our just and trew surname’…
- In 1606 Lauchlan MacKinnon of Strathairdle and Finlay MacNab of Bowaine entered into a bond to aid each other, saying that they: ‘come from ane house and one lineage’.
- In 1671, Lauchlan MacKinnon of Strathairdle and James MacGregor of MacGregor entered into a bond describing themselves as: ‘twa breethren of auld descent’.
- in the aftermath of the first failed Jacobite rising in 1715, the lands on the Isle of Skye of Iain Dubh, Chief of Clan MacKinnon, were forfeited under the Act of Attainder. The Chief of Clan Grant then bought these lands from the Government and handed them back to the heirs of Iain Dubh. In the habits of the time, it is unthinkable that Grant would have done such a thing for anyone other than a known blood relative, sharing the special kinship of Siol Alpin.
NOTE: Links to the Clan Societies of the 7 Clans of Siol Alpin are to be found under Clan Associations in For Argyll’s Links Directory.
Some useful ‘lucky dip’ background articles include:
2009 Luss Highland Games
The 2009 Luss Highland Games are at the Games Field at Luss on Loch Lomond on 26th July.