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| Dingwall, Ross and Cromarty, Scotland |
Doing research on Clan Bain in
Dingwall, Ross and Cromarty, Scotland, I came across the marriage record of John Bain and Anne Kemp, in the old registers of
Dingwall parish. The two were married on November 30, 1805, and the handwritten
record identifies Anne as “daughter to John Kemp in Gallowhill.”[1] But where was Gallowhill, or, as I later
learned to write it, Gallow Hill?
In order to understand Gallow
Hill, one needs to know a bit about the town of Dingwall. It was the poet Robert
Southey who, while in Dingwall in 1819, indicated to the engineer Thomas
Telford that Dingwall reminded him “in its name of the Icelandic capital
Thingvalla.”[2] Archaeological research has proven Southey’s
instinct to be true: Dingwall has Norse origins.
To be specific, the name Dingwall derives
from the Norse Þingvöllr, which means field, or
meeting place, of the thing. The thing
(sometimes
spelled Þing) was the Norse representative assembly where political
decisions were made and legal disputes settled.
Other places in Scandinavian-controlled areas with similar names are
Tynwald on the Isle of Man, Tingwall on Orkney, Tingwall on Shetland, Thingwall
on the Wirral Peninsula, Þingvellir in Iceland, Tingwalla in Sweden, and Tingvoll in
Norway.
To determine the exact site of
the thing in Dingwall, the Highland
Council commissioned the chairman of the Dingwall historical society, David D.
MacDonald, in 2012. By using Scottish historical
records, knowledge of Norse practice regarding the thing, and even ground-penetrating radar, MacDonald and his team
were able to conclude that the site of the Dingwall thing was a mound in city center already marked with an obelisk, erected
in 1710 by Sir George
Mackenzie, the 1st Earl of Cromartie. (Following his death, the earl was actually buried
next to the obelisk, meaning that today he is completely surrounded by a
parking lot.)
That the obelisk mound might have been the site of the assembly
is confirmed by the fact that in the vicinity of the thing there was normally a church, which may, in the Christian era,
have replaced a pagan shrine of old. (In
the case of Dingwall, the absence of pagan burials in the vicinity suggests
that the establishment of the thing
in that area occurred after the coming of Christianity.[3]) In Dingwall, St.
Clements Church stands just opposite the site of the the earl of Cromartie’s
obelisk, and though the
current church dates only from the first decade of the nineteenth century, it
was raised on the site where a church called St. Clements had stood since
medieval times.
Now, in addition to a church,
there was one other site associated with the Scandanavian thing: a gallows. When a court case at the thing resulted in a sentence of death, the condemned man would be
taken to a place called in the Norse language a galgeberg, or, in English, Gallow(s) Hill. A continental example of such a site is in
Oslo, Norway, in the neighborhood called
Galgeberg (Gallows Hill), which in medieval times lay outside the town.[4] The
execution site, though typically within view of the thing, was normally separated far enough from it that the smell of
death would not taint the vicinity of the dignified assembly.[5] Dingwall’s Gallow Hill was no exception,
being “600 m. west from the medieval town,”[6]
according to MacDonald.
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| Tulloch Castle |
When antiquarian Robert Bain
wrote his History of the Ancient Province
of Ross in 1899, he mentioned Gallow Hill in this way (he mistakenly believed the thing was located near it): “The historic hill itself is situated at the
west end of Dingwall, and, we are sorry to say, has lately, to its great
disfigurement, been in the hands of the Vandals; the profits arising from its
use as a gravel pit outweighing every other consideration whatsoever.” According to MacDonald, this is a reference
to the gravel pit opened on the Tulloch Estate in 1892, which he identifies as “immediately
west of Mill Street.”[7] (The Tulloch Estate is associated with
Tulloch Castle, which lies to the north of Dingwall. The castle was acquired by the Bains in 1513
and the surrounding lands in 1542, when Duncan Bane was made 1st
Laird of Tulloch by James V.)
Now, there remains only one
point to nail down: the Kemp connection to Gallow Hill. Sometimes after intuition and hard work, one
finds a golden nugget that answers questions about the family tree. Other times, it’s just dumb luck. So it was that as I was researching Gallow
Hill, I stumbled across a charter whereby in 1506, William Kemp, burgess of
Dingwall, was granted lands by Sir John Dingwall, vicar of the churches of
Petty and Bracholy (or “Brachowy,” as the scribe had written it). Among these lands was “an half acre lying
near the Gallowhill between the lands of the [Munro] laird of Foulis on the
west and the lands of William Dingwall on the east.”[8] One of those little light bulbs must have
appeared over my head. The Kemps, it
turned out, had had an association with Gallow Hill long before there was ever
an Anne Kemp (b. 1780) or her father John (b. 1750).
In 1821, a fellow named John
Wood of Edinburgh surveyed the town of Dingwall and prepared a plan that
researchers still use to study the history of Dingwall. On the far west side of town, just at the
point where Dingwall ends and Gallow Hill takes up, Wood’s plan shows twelve
dwellings, eleven of which were occupied in 1821. They are on Mill Street. And about in the middle of the group there
are two adjacent houses whose owner/occupants are identified as A. Baine and J.
Baine. I’m more than 50 % confident that
the J. Baine of 1821 Dingwall in what has to be the Gallow Hill neighborhood is
the John Baine who married Anne Kemp in 1805.
By this time, all of their children would have been born, except for the
youngest, Katharine, born in 1822.
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| John Wood's Plan of Dingwall, 1821 Gallow Hill area to the west on road running to the north. |
The first valuation rolls in
Scotland were not taken until 1865. At
that time, my direct ancestor, John and Anne’s son Donald, a shoemaker, had
moved on to Wick in Caithness. But the
rolls still show another Donald Bain, a mason, in Dingwall . . . on Mill Street
. . . in Gallow Hill.
(c) Eileen Cunningham 2015
[1]
OPR Marriages 062/00 0010 0242 Dingwall.
Scotland’s People.
[2]
D[avid]. D. MacDonald. Investigating
Dingwall as Þingvöllr. THING Project. Highland Council. 5. June 2013. Web. 21 Mar. 2015.
[3] MacDonald,
40.
[4] MacDonald,
7. See footnote.
[5] MacDonald,
10.
[6] “Dingwall,
Scotland.” Thing Sites. 2011-2015. Web.
21 Mar. 2015.
[7] MacDonald,
8. (See footnote p. 8 for Bain.)
[8] Calendar of Writs of Munro of Foulis,
1299-1823. Cited in “William Kemp.” Kemp(e) Family History. 12 Aug. 2010.
Web. 21 Mar. 2015.
