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Strathnaver Novels
And the Cock Crew
Introduced by John Herdman, And the Cock Crew offers one of the most powerful and searching examinations of the Highland Clearances to be found in modern Scottish literature. Written during the 1930s and published in 1945, Fionn MacColla’s finest book maintains that the roots of all social change are to be found not in so-called "economic causes," but deep in the human heart.
This searching and passionate novel, with its philosophical understanding of the dangers of the will to power and its passionate advocacy of old Gaelic ways, takes the familiar themes of freedom, obedience, and dispossession beyond the Clearances themselves and into the realms of the spirit. In prose style burning with the felt immediacy of the hills and glens in which the book is set, And the Cock Crew revolves around the central encounter between Fearchar the Gaelic poet, who speaks for tradition and continuity, and Maighstir Sachairi, the minister who heralds a more modern world of control, submission, and absolute necessity. At last available in print again, Fionn MacColla’s best-known novel has lost none of its power to challenge and disturb.
This searching and passionate novel, with its philosophical understanding of the dangers of the will to power and its passionate advocacy of old Gaelic ways, takes the familiar themes of freedom, obedience, and dispossession beyond the Clearances themselves and into the realms of the spirit. In prose style burning with the felt immediacy of the hills and glens in which the book is set, And the Cock Crew revolves around the central encounter between Fearchar the Gaelic poet, who speaks for tradition and continuity, and Maighstir Sachairi, the minister who heralds a more modern world of control, submission, and absolute necessity. At last available in print again, Fionn MacColla’s best-known novel has lost none of its power to challenge and disturb.
- GenresScotland
192 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1945
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About the author
Fionn MacColla
10 books4 followersThomas Douglas MacDonald who wrote under the pen name Fionn MacColla, was a Scottish novelist closely associated with the Scottish Renaissance.
MacDonald was brought up as a member of the Plymouth Brethern. He trained as a teacher in Aberdeen and took up his first post at the age of 19, as a headmaster in Wester Ross. In 1926 he went to Palestine, where he taught in the United Free Church's College at Safed. Returning to Scotland in 1929, he turned towards the Catholic faith and studied Gaelic at Glasgow University for a year. After nearly 20 years living in the Western Isles, he moved to Edinburgh, where he died.
MacColla's best known novels are The Albannach (1932) and And the Cock Crew (1945). His strong views on Scottish Presbyterianism were given philosophical expression in his study At the Sign of the Clenced Fist (1962) and in his autobiography, Too Long in this Condition (1975). His novels The Ministers and Move Up John were published posthumously in 1979 and 1994 respectively.
MacDonald was brought up as a member of the Plymouth Brethern. He trained as a teacher in Aberdeen and took up his first post at the age of 19, as a headmaster in Wester Ross. In 1926 he went to Palestine, where he taught in the United Free Church's College at Safed. Returning to Scotland in 1929, he turned towards the Catholic faith and studied Gaelic at Glasgow University for a year. After nearly 20 years living in the Western Isles, he moved to Edinburgh, where he died.
MacColla's best known novels are The Albannach (1932) and And the Cock Crew (1945). His strong views on Scottish Presbyterianism were given philosophical expression in his study At the Sign of the Clenced Fist (1962) and in his autobiography, Too Long in this Condition (1975). His novels The Ministers and Move Up John were published posthumously in 1979 and 1994 respectively.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
February 26, 2018
I don't know why I have never read this before. I am glad I have now. Stark and filled with realism, I was engrossed in the lives of these characters. Beautifully written and atmospheric. It harshly portrays the brutality of the Clearances and the role of religion in maintaining the passivity of the people.
February 19, 2021
The author, Thomas Douglas Macdonald, adopted the pen name Fionn MacColla (the Introduction always spells this as Mac Colla) on taking up writing. In his work he seems to have made it his mission to document the loss of the Highland Gaelic culture and way of life. And the Cock Crew is in line with this undertaking as it is set during the onset of the Highland Clearances. It also examines the crisis of conscience of a profoundly Calvinist minister, known as Zachary Wiseman to non-Highlanders but Maighstir Sachairi to his flock.
Over twenty years before the events of the novel Maighstir Sachairi had arrived in Gleann Luachrach (or Glen Loochry, as rendered in a later sentence uttered by a non-Gael) to find it to his mind far too frivolous and ungodly. Under his influence the people had slowly come round to his way of thinking and behaviour except, perhaps, for Fearchar the poet. The times are, however, about to change. “Something else has come among us, something from altogether outside our way of life, and a man has to take account of it although he doesn’t even understand it or know what it wants for him…..Nowadays a man has to honour God and the Factor.”
That Factor, Master Byars, known to the glen’s inhabitants as “The Black Foreigner,” though he is in fact a Lowland Scot, has an abiding and visceral hatred of anything Gaelic and cannot bear even the sound of that language. His antipathy towards Gaels led him to believe his life had been threatened by local men who had thought him lost and offered to help him. He called a contingent of redcoats to accompany him to where he had summoned the local villagers to assemble in order to arraign them for this. Two other local ministers are on the factor’s side but Maighstir Sachairi temporarily resolves the confrontation by interviewing the men concerned and telling Byars, “They are a people upright, peaceable, temperate in their ways and righteous with their neighbours to a most seengular degree in our times and generation.” The resultant reprieve for the villagers leads them to believe that they are in Sachairi’s protection.
It is, though, the Black Foreigner’s intention to remove the people from the glens and to replace them with sheep. The clan leader, Mac ’Ic Eachainn, to whose forefathers the clans could have looked for succour in the past “is now no better than an Englishman,” lives down south, does not speak Gaelic and is in fact in favour of the new economic project.
There is an impediment to marrying in the glen in that any man who does so will lose his holdings and be banished. In the absence of a wedding, Mairi-daughter-of-Eaghann-Gasda, an otherwise devout and modest woman whom Maighstir Sachairi would not have believed capable of misdeeds, has become pregnant. She cites the marriage bar as an excuse and refuses to name the father. This throws Sachairi into a crisis of conscience, wondering if he can still truly discern the will of God. It is into this vacuum of decision that The Black Foreigner steps, taking advantage of Sachairi’s hesitancy to confront him about the burning of the heather at the neighbouring village in preparation for the sheep.
Sachairi’s discomfiture is compounded by a meeting with Fearchar in which the poet questions him concerning doctrine, “Poetry and music are sinful, we say – yet with poetry and music a man improves himself in his nature it seems…. How is it that a sin can be experienced as a good?” and in which he concedes that the light of the spirit could be withdrawn from one of the Elect without his knowing it, that one of the Elect could be mistaken as to whether a thing is according to the will of God or not. This compounds Saichari’s indecision and he withdraws from interaction with the community giving Byars the opportunity to carry out his evictions unhindered.
In that long conversation Fearchar posits the relation between two neighbouring nations, long in conflict as the larger tried in vain to conquer and subject the smaller. “The big nation understands at last that it is no use to try to conquer them by force of arms. Suppose they try another way … and by some trick get power over the smaller nation and unite them to themselves. And so they will get from pretended friendship and a trick what they could never win by war and arms.”
He names it. “England. There is a nation that would never rest – never until she had taken away our freedom ….. Now she is more subtle, for Cunning is her name. Now she comes with feigned friendship and with lying promises and gold for our traitors she is able to obtain it, and our liberty is at an end.” For Fearchar the adoption of the English language by those who did so meant they became English, indistinguishable from true Englishmen.
It is within these passages that are laid out Mac Colla’s concerns, the nature of Man’s relationship to God, the repressions inherent in Calvinism, and the replacement of Gaelic culture by this alien one. Concerns not entirely absent from the Scottish novel.
It is as a novel, though, that there is something lacking in And the Cock Crew. The characters seem too designed to illustrate the sides to the conflict to have substance as people in their own right. The incidents of cottage burning and removal of people from their homes and livelihoods, harrowing as they may have been, are not shown to us from their victims’ perspective, only from afar, or by others in their aftermath and so their impact is lessened somewhat.
Still, someone had to undertake the task of representing in fiction the brutal upheaval of the way of life of an ancient and hard done by people. Not that that will ever stop such things from happening.
Over twenty years before the events of the novel Maighstir Sachairi had arrived in Gleann Luachrach (or Glen Loochry, as rendered in a later sentence uttered by a non-Gael) to find it to his mind far too frivolous and ungodly. Under his influence the people had slowly come round to his way of thinking and behaviour except, perhaps, for Fearchar the poet. The times are, however, about to change. “Something else has come among us, something from altogether outside our way of life, and a man has to take account of it although he doesn’t even understand it or know what it wants for him…..Nowadays a man has to honour God and the Factor.”
That Factor, Master Byars, known to the glen’s inhabitants as “The Black Foreigner,” though he is in fact a Lowland Scot, has an abiding and visceral hatred of anything Gaelic and cannot bear even the sound of that language. His antipathy towards Gaels led him to believe his life had been threatened by local men who had thought him lost and offered to help him. He called a contingent of redcoats to accompany him to where he had summoned the local villagers to assemble in order to arraign them for this. Two other local ministers are on the factor’s side but Maighstir Sachairi temporarily resolves the confrontation by interviewing the men concerned and telling Byars, “They are a people upright, peaceable, temperate in their ways and righteous with their neighbours to a most seengular degree in our times and generation.” The resultant reprieve for the villagers leads them to believe that they are in Sachairi’s protection.
It is, though, the Black Foreigner’s intention to remove the people from the glens and to replace them with sheep. The clan leader, Mac ’Ic Eachainn, to whose forefathers the clans could have looked for succour in the past “is now no better than an Englishman,” lives down south, does not speak Gaelic and is in fact in favour of the new economic project.
There is an impediment to marrying in the glen in that any man who does so will lose his holdings and be banished. In the absence of a wedding, Mairi-daughter-of-Eaghann-Gasda, an otherwise devout and modest woman whom Maighstir Sachairi would not have believed capable of misdeeds, has become pregnant. She cites the marriage bar as an excuse and refuses to name the father. This throws Sachairi into a crisis of conscience, wondering if he can still truly discern the will of God. It is into this vacuum of decision that The Black Foreigner steps, taking advantage of Sachairi’s hesitancy to confront him about the burning of the heather at the neighbouring village in preparation for the sheep.
Sachairi’s discomfiture is compounded by a meeting with Fearchar in which the poet questions him concerning doctrine, “Poetry and music are sinful, we say – yet with poetry and music a man improves himself in his nature it seems…. How is it that a sin can be experienced as a good?” and in which he concedes that the light of the spirit could be withdrawn from one of the Elect without his knowing it, that one of the Elect could be mistaken as to whether a thing is according to the will of God or not. This compounds Saichari’s indecision and he withdraws from interaction with the community giving Byars the opportunity to carry out his evictions unhindered.
In that long conversation Fearchar posits the relation between two neighbouring nations, long in conflict as the larger tried in vain to conquer and subject the smaller. “The big nation understands at last that it is no use to try to conquer them by force of arms. Suppose they try another way … and by some trick get power over the smaller nation and unite them to themselves. And so they will get from pretended friendship and a trick what they could never win by war and arms.”
He names it. “England. There is a nation that would never rest – never until she had taken away our freedom ….. Now she is more subtle, for Cunning is her name. Now she comes with feigned friendship and with lying promises and gold for our traitors she is able to obtain it, and our liberty is at an end.” For Fearchar the adoption of the English language by those who did so meant they became English, indistinguishable from true Englishmen.
It is within these passages that are laid out Mac Colla’s concerns, the nature of Man’s relationship to God, the repressions inherent in Calvinism, and the replacement of Gaelic culture by this alien one. Concerns not entirely absent from the Scottish novel.
It is as a novel, though, that there is something lacking in And the Cock Crew. The characters seem too designed to illustrate the sides to the conflict to have substance as people in their own right. The incidents of cottage burning and removal of people from their homes and livelihoods, harrowing as they may have been, are not shown to us from their victims’ perspective, only from afar, or by others in their aftermath and so their impact is lessened somewhat.
Still, someone had to undertake the task of representing in fiction the brutal upheaval of the way of life of an ancient and hard done by people. Not that that will ever stop such things from happening.
May 26, 2025
Set against the backdrop of the Highland Clearances this book, like all great novels, transcends its environment. The minister Maighstir Sachairi seeing the cruelty and humiliation of the Clearances begins to question his own moral and spiritual take on the great injustice meted out to his congregation. There are wonderful passages where we see the inner conflict of the minister's conscientiousness working on his religious beliefs and his perceived duties to God on the one hand and the reality of the Clearances on the other.
This conflict and the tortuous effect it has on the minister is used to highlight the battle between tradition (the Highland way of life, in particular the customs, music and, in particular, the Gaelic language) and the forces pitted against it (nascent capitalism).
Sachairi, like Hamlet, is unable to act, always finding reasons to put off addressing the great injustices he witnesses. Most of his reasons he finds in his religious devotion to God. Slowly, however, his faith is being chipped away at until "There was no hesitation now .. oblivion had washed away .. the last hesitation the disorder and strained perplexity of his mind .. the world had righted itself in his perception".
This conflict and the tortuous effect it has on the minister is used to highlight the battle between tradition (the Highland way of life, in particular the customs, music and, in particular, the Gaelic language) and the forces pitted against it (nascent capitalism).
Sachairi, like Hamlet, is unable to act, always finding reasons to put off addressing the great injustices he witnesses. Most of his reasons he finds in his religious devotion to God. Slowly, however, his faith is being chipped away at until "There was no hesitation now .. oblivion had washed away .. the last hesitation the disorder and strained perplexity of his mind .. the world had righted itself in his perception".
October 28, 2024
Important book for the Scottish Literary Renaissance, I loved seeing so much Gaelic and it is important to look into the literary representation of the Highland Clearances as well. Story-wise, I was not entirely convinced but I also wasn't in the mood for serious things like this all the time.
August 9, 2012
An interesting portrayal of the role of religion in the Scottish Highlands, and one that still strikes a chord today.
September 19, 2012
It was a deep literary-type book, but it made me mad.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews