"Now we were going to put the car on the train from London to Edinburgh, take in a bit of the Edinburgh Festival, then putter up the road north to Perth and Dunkeld, where Mother might catch a glimpse of a kilt and some woolen mills and I could see some gardens. I had even recently uncovered on my library shelf 'The National Trust for Scotland Guide, a complete introduction to the buildings, gardens, coast and country, etc.' (London, Johathan Cape, 1978). I must have bought it in a fit of enthusiasm on my last visit to Scotland some five years ago."
"Indeed, Mother was thrilled, and it was the first thing she mentioned. 'I am so excited about our little trip to Scotland, dear. Do you think we could possibly stop by In-VER-ness, if we had the time?"
"In-VER-ness? My mind whirled but nothing registered. Mother is good at these curve balls so I could usually think and act fast. But what could she mean this time? Oh, no! Not Inver-Ness! Not Inverness nearly 200 miles north of Edinburgh on the single-lane-traffic A9 highway with all that August holiday traffic and that huge stretch of no-man's-land just south of Inverness?"
"I hadn't thought we would try to go quite that far north, Mummy,' I ventured, wondering why the dickens if she had wanted to go to Inverness ( a place most people only go through on their way to some good fishing, deer-stalking or grouse-shooting) she hadn't told me two months ago! Booking the car on the train with all the Edinburgh Festival goings-on had taken a little thinking ahead, but getting a last-minute booking change to Inverness now when every successful businessman and his Range Rover would be going up to fish or shoot would be impossible, even if we hadn't got the ballet tickets already!"
"That was Wednesday. By Friday, I could see that whatever the sensible reasons were for not going to Inverness, Mother was not going to be happy until we did. That was because her forebear John Bean had come from Strathdearn near Inverness, and the fact that going there would add another 400 miles of holiday driving was unimportant by comparison."
"Feverishly I searched my maps, having never heard of Strathdearn. It turned out to be a wide valley (not surprisingly, as a strath is a wide valley) about 15 miles south of Inverness, intersecting the A9. It was in fact the valley of the River Findhorn, about 10 miles long or thereabouts, and, from what I could see on the map, with not a placename that would indicate any settlement larger than a small village, if that. It was, as luck would have it, precisely in the middle of what I have previously described as a 'no-man's-land,' and as for finding anyone who might have know John Bean who left there in 1651........"
"Suddenly, I saw the answer staring at me from a page of the Scottish National Trust Guide: 'The Family History Society of Inverness' it said. I rushed to the telephone. It was nearly 5 p.m. Friday, and British tourist offices keep strict hours."
"Yes, indeed,' said the polite voice with a Scottish burr on the telephone from Inverness. 'The person you want to talk to is the secretary of the Highland Family History Society, and her name is.....' Mrs. MacLean wasn't at home, but she would certainly want to talk to me, I was told. 'Bean of Strathdearn? Of course! You mean the MacBeans of Clan Chattan. She'll ring you back.'"
"Mrs. MacLean telephoned that evening, and, after a few succint inquiries about John Bean, she fairly exploded with hospitality. 'The Cat Clan!' she exclaimed to my bewilderment, and then tried to explain how the ancient Clan Chattan had taken the wildcat as its emblem and into its motto. She pronounced 'Chattan' as if it were hatten and explained that the 'ch' was like the 'ch' in 'loch.' Mother was listening on another telephone to all of this, and I was beginning to wonder if she was taking it in. Neither of us was quite clear about what all this had to do with good old John Bean from New Hampshire."
"The thing was,' MacLean said, 'that the MacBeans had allied themselves with the Mackintoshes back sometime at the start of Highland history, and Mackintosh of Mckintosh, the Clan Chief, lived right here in Strathdearn."
"But the person Mother really had to meet, MacLean said, was Mrs. James Scarlett who was Meta MacBean before she married. She was one of the few remaining MacBeans in the area, and she was also living right there in Strathdearn. Her husband Jamie was a hand-weaver of kilt tartans and a few years back had even been sent to Japan to teach the Japanese how to weave tartan."
"There was something gloriously unreal about all this. Were we really going to go to Strathdearn and find members of Mother's family there centuries after last contact? So we did Edinburgh. We looked at the National Trust's lovely Georgian House in Charlotte Square, near our hotel, and just 24 hours later, we headed north on the A9.
"Meta MacBean Scarlett's home at Milton of Moy in Strathdearn was right in the middle of those seemingly deserted heather-covered moorland where the A9 winds over hill after barren hill. Only her directions by telephone would ever have gotten us to the house, which was just up a track off the main road, once you could find the turn. About a quarter of a mile along this track, which wound around the edge of the strath with wild llupins and a dark pine forest behind, they were standing in the garden outside their house, a whitewashed crofter's cottage. The fields stretched out around the little house into the wide strath. The only other dwelling visible was a forester's croft in the hills about a half-mile beyond."
"James Scarlett was wearing the kilt, a light green and black tartan he had woven. His kilt hose were of the same color, and he wore strapped just below his lean waist an old hammered leather sporran. His dress was simple and sensible - how sensible one only knows if one has tried walking across heather-covered moors in wet weather in trousers soaked up to the knee!"
"Meta had a fine, intelligent face and soft, sandy hair. Reserved and polite, she had prepared a sumptuous tea and soon revealed an intense curiosity about Mother's kinship ties. The detail about how John Bean had got to America - he had been transported as a prisoner of war to Boston on a ship called Sara and John - seemed to impress her favorably, and also the fact that his arrival and subsequent marriage were matters of public record."
"It didn't take very long for us to work out that Meta really did know more or less all there was to know about MacBeans. It was a credit to her shrewdness that she quickly realized that Mother wasn't desperately interested in MacBeans in general: She just really wanted to know who her forebear had been before he left Scotland in 1651, and on this point Meta had some clever suggestions about how to find out."
"The other semantic disparity was the use of the adjectives 'Scotch' and 'Scottish.' like most Americans, Mother was used to the former, older form of this word, while the Scots themselves used the newer British word 'Scottish.' Even poor old Robbie Burns used to have to defend his use of the older word 'Scotch' when it was derided as 'incorrect' in his day. With American Engilish everywhere superseding British English, it could be that Robbie will have the last laugh."
"Hand-weaving tartan is a dying craft, and Jamie explained the difficulty of getting wools in the quantities and colors he needed. He carefully researches the setts (patterns) of the tartans he weaves and, when necessary, dyes the natural wools with vegetable dyes. He showed us a very fine and closely-woven 'plaide' - the word literally means 'blanket' or 'shawl'. It had been made for a neighbor's great-great-grandmmother's wedding dress. Jamie explained that every Highland family wore all sorts of tartans of any pattern, more or less depending on the whim of the local weaver, up until the Victorians came along in the 19th century to assign and standardize them family by family. When we left, we exchanged gifts, and theirs was a small piece of authentic MacBean tartan, part of a length he had woven some years ago for a member of Meta's family."
"Meta's suggestion had been to go to the graveyeards of the local parish churches at Moy and Dalrossie, so, the next day, umbrellas up in mist, fog and rain, Mother and I read gravestones. The Findhorn, swollen with rain, flowed noisily past the stone walled graveyard at Dalrossie. I thought the river could have given me a lot of gossip about the MacBeans, had I understood its gurglings. As it was, I was scribbling all I could about MacBeans as Mother marched enthusiastically from one monument to the next: 'Look, here's another one!' I eventually succumbed to blatant sexism and gave up on MacBEa ladies married to Mackintoshes or Macgillivreys. But I had still filled two or three notebook pages before it bacame obvious that our John Bean was long gone to New Hampshire more than a century before the oldest inhabitants here had been born. Still, it was the greatest fun, and one thing was perfectly clear: they seemed to have been able to make up the numbers in those days quite well without him."
"Mother read about the battles of Dunbar and Worcester, while I concentratedon a wonderful volume of manuscripts that had been found in some old chest or other belonging to the Mackintoshes. MacBeans abounded. Almost before we looked at our watches, we had made a day of it."
"It was the assiduous Victorians who, with their passion for collecting, had collected up all the Highland families and carefully documented them in clan histories. And there was our man among his brothers and cousins: a younger half-brother who had gone off to war to make his fortune on the battlefield. He seemed to have missed out on receiving property, which was just at that time being parceled out by the Earl of Moray to his elder half-brother. So off to war and to populate a continent."
"We hadn't really minded the extra 400 miles as we drove back south. Mother said, 'The family used to say there are a lot of Beans in Boston. Funny, now we know how they got there!"