Page 10 - Hall of Clestrain - Conservation Plan

managed to hide a large sum of money from Pirate Gow when he raided the previous
Hall of Clestrain: possibly the ‘Storehouse’ that stands on the shore below the farm at
Clestrain. According to Daniel Defoe’s account of Pirate Gow, when the Hall of
Clestrain was approached by pirates intent on burning important documents held at
the house, Mr Honeyman’s daughter threw the documents out of a window, “jumpt
after them herself, and Escaped without Damage; tho’ the Window was one Story high at least”.

Robert’s son was William Honeyman (1706-1758) who married Mary Graham. William
drowned in the Pentland Firth with his son Mungo whilst travelling to Edinburgh. In
folklore, William buried treasure on the estate before the journey. His untimely death
was to propel younger son Patrick, (1730-1798) into unexpectedly taking over the
estate.
Patrick had married Margaret Mackay in 1755 and they had seven children. Patrick
later remarried to Margaret Sinclair in 1764 and had a further fifteen children. This
was the height of the kelp boom when the harvesting and burning of seaweed for its
chemicals raised huge sums for Orkney landlords. In 1769 Patrick decided to invest
his income in a new house at Clestrain.
Patrick’s son by his first marriage, William Honeyman (1756-1825), went on to become
a Session Court judge: Lord Armadale. In 1777 he married Mary McQueen, a daughter
of Scotland's Lord Justice Clerk, the much-feared Lord Braxfield, and was created a
Baronet in 1804. In 1787 he built a home at 14 Queen Street in Edinburgh. By the time
he died on 5 June 1825, he held lands in Orkney, Sutherland, Lanarkshire and Lothian,
where the town of Armadale was named by him.
Lord Armadale appointed John Rae snr. as his factor on his Orkney estates and Rae
lived at Clestrain with his family. His son John Rae (1813-1893) grew up at the house
and learned to sail, shoot and fish in the area around it. He went on to become a doctor
with the Hudson’s Bay Company and mapped large parts of the North Coast of
Canada, largely on foot. Relying on advice from the indigenous peoples he travelled
light and managed to live off the land. As a result, he brought back the first news of
the whereabouts of Sir John Franklin’s ill-fated expedition to discover the North West
Passage. Franklin’s ships Erebus and Terror have very recently been located in the
location that Rae was told by local people. He also discovered the last navigable link
in what became the route for Roald Amundsen to sail through the North West Passage
in 1903-1906. Amundsen named this narrow waterway between King William Island
and the Boothia Peninsula, Rae Strait. John Rae was one of the greatest, but least
celebrated, of the Victorian explorers and in recent years his story has featured in
books by Ken McGoogan and Michael Palin, in TV series presented by Billy Connolly
(2009) and Ray Mears (2009) and in the feature length documentary Passage (2008)
directed by John Walker.
Sir Walter Scott visited the Hall of Clestrain on Tuesday 16 August 1814 whilst on his
tour of the North of Scotland in the Lighthouse Yacht, the Pharos. After a visit to the
Standing Stones of Stenness nearby with Mr. Rae he records that “the hospitality of
Mrs. Rae detained us to an early dinner at Clestrain”. Scott’s novel The Pirate was built
around his experiences on this trip and the stories of Pirate Gow that were no doubt

8 Hall of Clestrain, Orkney – Conservation Plan