This is a building, I would argue, of exceptional quality in an exceptional setting; one of the very best buildings of its scale and period anywhere in Scotland.‘
John R Hume, former Chief Inspector of Historic Buildings, Historic Scotland.
The Building
Category A Listed Hall of Clestrain is an exceptionally rare and fragile survival of a mid-Georgian villa. Largely single-phase, it is on three floors with an attic and almost square in plan, with three bays to each elevation. The principal elevation faces South and has an advanced section over which was a pediment, now lost. The Hall has a formal Georgian design with good quality stone detailing, door and window surrounds. Its Orkney stone walls were harled and, until the 1950s, it had an Orkney slate roof. It lies within a well preserved contemporary designed landscape comprising axial approaches to the south, north and east, and a substantial walled garden with a number of associated structures. The Hall itself is formally planned, with service court and flanking pavilions, once taller with an attic storey.
Dating to the 1760s, the Hall and designed landscape saw only minor secondary development and has essentially remained untouched and wholly unoccupied since the 1950s. Now derelict and on the Buildings at Risk Register, the Hall preserves a great wealth of mid-18th century interior features many of which are both exceptional survivals and highly vulnerable – particularly its timber structures, interior joinery and paint finishes that survive from the Georgian period.
Simpson & Brown’s Conservation Plan (2020) assessed Hall of Clestrain as having historic values of outstanding or international cultural heritage significance.
History
The ‘new house at Clestrain’ completed in 1769, was built for Patrick Honyman. A great-great grandson of bishop Andrew Honyman1, he had inherited the Graemsay estate, which included Clestrain, on the death of his father, William, and elder brother, Mungo, both drowned in the Pentland Firth, in 1758. The Graemsay estate was considerable, being the largest in Orkney after the bishopric and earldom estates. The Honymans had acquired it in 1699 when Patrick’s grandfather, Robert, took it over from the Graham family of nearby Breckness, on his marriage to Cecilia Graham, and became Robert of Graemsay. It was raided by pirate John Gow in 1725.
Patrick’s grandfather had been a wealthy man, increasing his capital through successful land deals and loans. His father had been engaged with trading to the Hebrides and, so rumour had it, with smuggling. Patrick was able to augment his inheritance through the kelp industry, which in the eighteenth century provided landowners with a quick and easy route to riches. Tenancy agreements which exacted free labour rather than rent, and pre-existing involvement in shipping and trade with little capital outlay required, meant that for landowners the export of the kelp needed for the manufacture of soap and glass was highly profitable. The trade began in Orkney in the 1720s and during the kelp ‘boom’ (1770─1830) landowners there made £1 million pounds. This money was not reinvested in the land but seen as a bonus: the new Hall of Clestrain exemplifies this.
Patrick married first Margaret Mackay, daughter of the laird of Strathy in Sutherland and then secondly Margaret Sinclair, daughter of James of Durran in Caithness, another family with good connections. Thwarted of his desire to become an MP2, Patrick’s political astuteness led him to support Sir Lawrence Dundas. The latter, with money made from provisioning armies during the wars of the eighteenth century, bought the earldom estate (1766) from the Earl of Morton and also obtained a grant on the bishopric estate (1775). His patronage furthered the career of two of Patrick’s sons, one (William) in studying law at Edinburgh and the other (Robert) in the Navy.
Patrick’s interest in his Orkney estate saw him enclose his farm with ‘good stone dykes’ and introduce a new kind of plough, but less than 10 years after the new Hall was built, he seems to have been spending his time South. The last five of the fourteen children Margaret Sinclair bore him were born in Peebles and his son, William, had installed a factor at Clestrain before his father’s death.
William, the only surviving son from Patrick’s first marriage, became a lawyer. His legal career was remarkably swift. Called to the bar in 1777, he became a judge ten years later, a high court judge in 1799 and lord of session in 1804, taking the title of Lord Armadale, from land in Strathy which his maternal grandfather had assigned to him in 1783. His advancement was assisted by the patronage of Sir Lawrence Dundas and by his marriage in 1777 to Mary McQueen, daughter of Lord Braxfield, one of the most senior judges in Scotland.
In common with other Orcadian lairds at this time, William had little interest in Orkney beyond controlling the election of members of parliament. He helped John Balfour to be elected as MP for Orkney and Shetland in 1790; William’s half-brother, Robert, was elected in 1796, and his son, Robert in 1806. During this time his focus was in Lanarkshire where he became Sheriff depute (1796) and where he built himself a mansion, Smyllum Park, to which he retired in 1811 and where he died in 1825. He took little interest in the estate at Clestrain although he did plant ‘several thousand trees of different kinds’ and appointed a factor whom he hoped would introduce agricultural reform.
The Rae Connection
The factor was John Rae3, a Lanarkshire man of good family and still in his mid-twenties when appointed. He is reputed to have had some knowledge of business and of the new methods of agriculture adopted in the south of Scotland. He married in 1804 and he and his wife raised seven children, born between 1805 and 1817, at the Hall. Their social standing was high: the children had a governess and tutors, and the farm was notably much better equipped than most, including with Galloway horses which Rae had brought from the south. Their eldest son, James, qualified as a surgeon and took a post as ship’s doctor on a voyage to Africa (where he died of fever). Their two daughters, Janet (aka Jessie) and Marion were models for the characters of Minna and Brenda in Scott’s novel, The Pirate. Two sons, William and Richard, followed careers in Canada after joining the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), as did their fourth son, John Rae, the explorer. The youngest, Thomas, also went to Canada to join his brother, Richard, in a shipping business. Sir Walter Scott, entertained by the Rae family on a visit to Orkney in 18144, remarked that John Rae senior managed the estate well, although he had not been able to carry out the improvements in agricultural techniques which he had hoped to make.
In 1819 Rae senior became the recruiting agent in Stromness for the HBC, continuing as factor at Clestrain. Founded in 1670, to meet the increasing demands of the fur trade, the HBC began recruiting in Stromness probably as early as 1702. ‘Orkneymen’ were found to be adaptable, hardy, literate and hard-working. By 1779 nearly 80% of the HBC workforce was Orcadian. The opportunity to earn money and improve one’s prospects was undeniably attractive to agricultural workers, although the minister in Orphir in 1797 deplored the disappearance of young men overseas, leaving a shortage of workers and a disproportionate amount of womenfolk. It is thought that the combination of travel and adventure with a bit of farming and fishing suited a population with Viking ancestry. Many signed up, both in Stromness and at the Hall itself.
John Rae and the Hudson’s Bay Company
The Hall commands a good view of the channel along which the ships sailed to and from Stromness, and the Canada-bound vessels would have been a familiar sight to the Rae boys, taught by their father to handle a small boat, in which they used to race the pilot boats. It was an obvious choice for the young John Rae, newly qualified from Edinburgh College of Surgeons, to sign on as a ship’s doctor with the HBC. Originally this was for a return journey, but forced to winter in Hudson Bay, Rae then signed on for ten years as surgeon and clerk at Moose Factory, where he observed and practised survival skills in addition to his regular duties.
During this time these skills in arctic travel and his physical stamina were noticed by Sir George Simpson, governor of the HBC, who recruited Rae to complete the task of mapping the Canadian Arctic coastline, left unfinished on the death of Simpson’s cousin, Thomas. After a year spent learning surveying techniques, Rae spent the next nine years in Arctic exploration (1845-1854), becoming one of the first Europeans to overwinter in the high Arctic. In the course of these he travelled 6555 miles on foot with or without snowshoes, 6700 miles by boat and surveyed 1765 miles of land previously unexplored5. His first and fourth expeditions were for the purpose of surveying; the second and third were undertaken in the search for the missing Franklin expedition; on the fourth, while surveying the Boothia peninsula, he learned from the Inuit of the fate of Franklin’s crew and also discovered the Northwest Passage. The resultant outcry in London, when Rae disclosed that the last survivors had resorted to cannibalism, and the aspersions cast on his character by Charles Dickens and Lady Jane Franklin is now well known. Up till then he had been recognised for his achievements, being awarded the Royal Geographical Society’s Gold Medal in 1852 and an honorary doctorate in medicine by McGill University in 1854.
New Tenants
None of the Rae children chose to remain in Orkney. John’s siblings opted for Canada, his sister remaining in Stromness6 only until their mother died in 18557. John returned to Canada after he resigned from the HBC, marrying there in 1860, but eventually making his home in London, where he died in 1893.
Following the death of William Honyman in 1825, the estate in Orkney had been sold to John Balfour, another careerist, who had made his money in the East India Company, and was then in his second term as MP for Orkney and Shetland. It included land on the island of Shapinsay, where Balfour preferred to make his home. On the death of John Rae Senior, nine years later, the Hall of Clestrain was thus left in the hands of Magnus MacKay, the Raes’ principal worker, who had come from Halkirk in Caithness with his family about twenty years earlier. Magnus had a reputation for being good with horses and as a gardener and may well have been appointed for this reason. The MacKay family held the tenancy of Clestrain for the next fifty years or so, with Magnus’ son, William, succeeding him, followed by William’s son, John. Their interest lay in improving the farm rather than the house, and changes made in the 1850s, during William’s tenancy, were to the drainage system for this purpose.
When the Mackays left in the 1880s, another local family took on the tenancy. James Baillie, then in his seventies, shared the tenancy with his son, John, and his son-in-law, Thomas Lennie, while another son, William, lived in the manager’s house. But when James died in 1900 the entire family moved out and another Orphir farmer, Peter Maxwell, moved in for a relatively short period of five or six years. From 1906 until 1925 the farm was managed by the Wishart family, who had long-standing connections with both the Raes and the MacKays.
In 1925 James Craigie bought the farm, which then passed to his son, also James, and finally to his grandson, Ivan, in 2001. The roof of the Hall was so badly damaged in the infamous gale of 1952 that Ivan’s father decided to build a new house a short distance away, to which the family moved a couple of years later. When they lived at the Hall, they had not used the ground floor, installing a kitchen on the first floor instead, and once the building was unoccupied this ground floor was given over to pigs, and hens were housed in the attic. The remaining Orkney slates on the roof were removed and replaced with corrugated sheeting and the partitions inside the house removed. The house has been empty for 70 years and although no longer used for keeping livestock it is a battle to keep the weather and the pigeons out.
Notes
- Andrew Honyman (1619-1696) from St. Andrews in 1664 became Bishop of Orkney which with Shetland was then part of the bishopric of St Andrews.
- Patrick was one of 5 people who applied to be added as freeholders to the roll for electing a M.P. Their opponents dealt with this by absenting themselves from the meeting where the voting was to take place. The one person who did attend accepted the application but this was later declared invalid, so Patrick and the others were unable to vote in the next M.P. election. They made a formal complaint that this was in violation of a statute introduced by George II and the claim was upheld but meantime Sir James Douglas was elected (1761)
- John Rae Senior’s father was a merchant of some wealth, who as well as leaving property to his eldest son made provision for his widow and for payments of £200 to four of his children and £50 to another son.
- Sir Walter Scott visited the Rae family at Clestrain and was taken to see the Standing Stones at Stenness by John Rae Senior.
- The figures are taken from Rae’s own account in a letter to Sir Henry Dryden who had it printed.
- Margaret Rae moved from Clestrain to The Haven in Stromness which had been the recruiting office for the HBC but for which she held a life tenancy.