How many McNaughtons lived in Glen Shira?

The MacNachtan families were packed together in tight little clachans. They knew poverty and how to deal with it. There were no fat McNachtans is my guess. I have read about highlanders making a meal out of a handful of raw oats with a bit of water and being content. Plus, many of them were fishermen. The clan had “barges”, berlins, quite a few of them. Fish were more abundant than they are today. In fact other game was abundant too on a grander scale than we can imagine. Wild geese for instance. There were deer in the forest.

          There is a paragraph in ROB ROY MACGREGOR which might pertain. Though it speaks of Macgregor lands they were just the next glen over from the McNaughtons. One would expect conditions to be quite similar.

          Page 7: “Apart from its foot-tracks, this whole Trossachs country was roadless, its intricate ways complicated for any visitor by wood and water, by bridgeless rivers and craggy hills. Yet the valleys were inhabited by several thousands of people.” (His footnote gives the authority for this statement as the Statistical Account for Scotland of 1796.) “The hills gave them shelter as a natural fortress enclosing good hill-pastures for large herds of cattle, and lower arable for oats and barley.”

          A clan in those days could be a rather crowded together sort of thing, and they probably rather liked it that way. We think of the broad open spaces of America where our families have lived for the past almost two centuries, and we forget how miraculous such an idea seemed to our ancestors. They were used to those crowded glens. Momma Yokum and Daisey Mae and all the grampas and grammas and all the cousins and nephews and people bumping into each other whenever they needed to go anywhere on narrow paths and no one really having much privacy. As packed together as many a city, worse in fact in many ways. They didn’t all have farms of their own. Not always. They were lucky to have small gardens. Houses were deliberately built within hollering distance of one another. Often a lot closer than that.

          When the landlords contemplated the clearances they rather considered it a thing of beauty to imagine those valleys freed from the hubbub and chaos and even from the fomentation and dangerous philosophies that were forever springing up. Diseases spread like wildfire. Wild fires were a danger in themselves. With so many people all packed together they had to steal sometimes or starve. The Macgregors got an especial bad name for that, and the McNaughtons didn’t seem to. Then again, there was John’s raid on the Campbell lands. He knew how to steal cattle and where to dispose of them.

The highlanders were basically a bunch of skinny cantankerous hill people feuding and fighting and shaking fists. Many of them emigrated to the Adarondaks, Kentucky and Oklahoma, where they went on pretty much the same without changing hardly at all.