Stones Of Survival

An imposing monument in Easter Ross reveals a story of hunger, power and Highland endurance

- Ally Heather

YOU'LL struggle for a nicer walk with better views than the hike up to the Fyrish Monument. You'll also struggle to find an estate so crammed with the darker side of Highland history than that of Fyrish, or a more unsavoury, murderous character than the man who had the monument built.

The landscape here was the site of a serious showdown between the native Gaelic people and a landlord who wanted to clear away the poor folk and turn the region into his playground.

The Fyrish Monument is a prominent landmark in Easter Ross, on the hills overlooking the Cromarty Firth between Alness and Evanton. The busy A9, with its industrial traffic and caravans of North Coast 500 tourists, carries thousands within sight of it every day.

The monument, the trees on the hill and the big estate mansion of Novar House at the foot of the hill were all paid for through bribes and war plunder from Bengal and elsewhere in India.

Sir Hector Munro of Novar built it, and he created the woodlands flanking the path that carries hikers uphill.

Sir Hector Munro was a nobody by birth: a member of a cadet branch of the Munros, the son of a merchant.

He was born in 1725 in a hamlet that no longer exists - Clayside, near Dunrobin Castle, in Sutherland.

After Culloden, positions for Highland fighters in the British Army really opened up, and Hector soon found himself in command of a regiment fighting the French for control over forts in India. This was the scene of his first recorded outrage.

By 1764, the British East India Company, a private company with the right to raise an army, was tearing through India, trading, warring against regional rulers, forcing treaties and installing puppet leaders.