Latest / The Story of Scotland: Clans, Crowns, and the Fight for Identity — Fexingo History / The Scalan: Scotland's Secret Seminary in the Heather
Transcript
- Lucas: So last time we talked about the Highland Clearances, the forced removals that emptied so many glens. But there's another kind of clearing, a quieter one, that happened decades earlier — the persecution of Catholic education in the wake of the Jacobite risings. Luna: I remember you mentioned that after Culloden, the government really clamped down on anything that looked like Jacobite sympathy. Lucas: Exactly. And for Catholics — many of whom had backed the Stuarts — the Penal Laws were vicious. It became illegal to run a Catholic school, to say Mass openly, even to possess Catholic books. Priests were hunted down, imprisoned, or executed. But the Church didn't just disappear. It went underground. Lucas: And one of the most extraordinary examples of that underground resilience is a place called the Scalan. A tiny, hidden seminary in the Braes of Glenlivet, right in the heart of the Highlands. Luna: The Scalan — I've heard the name but I don't really know what it was. Lucas: It was a secret college. Founded in 1717 by a man named Bishop James Gordon, who was the Vicar Apostolic of the Highland District. After the 1715 rising, the situation for Catholics became even more desperate. Gordon realised that if the Church was going to survive in Scotland, it needed to train its own priests — locally, in secret. So he found a remote spot in Glenlivet, far from any major road or town, and built a small, low building that looked like a farm steading. Lucas: The Scalan was basically a long, single-storey stone house with a thatched roof. The students — boys as young as twelve or thirteen — lived in a loft above the byre, where the cattle were kept. Imagine the smell, the cold, the damp. They studied philosophy, theology, Latin, Greek — and they did it all in constant fear of a Redcoat raid. Luna: How many students were there at a time? Lucas: Usually about a dozen, sometimes fewer. The whole operation was tiny. They had one or two priests as teachers, and they lived on a subsistence diet — oatmeal, milk, maybe a bit of fish. But despite the hardship, the Scalan produced some of the most remarkable priests in Scottish Catholic history. Men who would go on to serve the hidden Church in the glens and islands for decades. Luna: So the government knew about it? Or was it truly secret? Lucas: It was an open secret, really. The local people knew. The Redcoats knew, roughly. But it was so remote, and the locals were so loyal, that it was hard to catch them in the act. There were close calls. In 1746, right after Culloden, soldiers from the Duke of Cumberland's army came through Glenlivet, burning and looting. The Scalan was ransacked, the library destroyed. But the students and teachers escaped into the hills, and they came back and rebuilt. Luna: They rebuilt. That's incredible. Lucas: They did. And the Scalan continued operating for another fifty years. It wasn't until 1799 that the seminary moved to a larger, safer location — Blairs College, near Aberdeen. By then, the Penal Laws were starting to relax, and the Church could breathe a little. Lucas: But the Scalan's legacy is huge. It trained over a hundred priests in its eighty-two years of operation. Without it, the Catholic Church in the Highlands might have simply died out. Luna: It's one of those stories that makes you realise how much history is hiding in plain sight. Lucas: Absolutely. And you know, speaking of hidden things that are worth uncovering — this show itself is a bit like that. We don't run ads, we don't have a big sponsor. It's just us, putting these stories together because we think they matter. And a couple of dollars a month is genuinely what keeps these going — buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo, if you've gotten something out of them. Luna: It's true. Every little bit helps us keep digging into stories like the Scalan. Lucas: Right. So back to the Scalan — one of the most touching details is that the students wrote poetry. There's a famous Gaelic poem called 'The Scalan' by one of its alumni, a priest named Dòmhnall MacMhathain, or Donald MacMahon. He describes the cold, the hunger, but also the sense of purpose. He calls it 'the school of the heather'. Luna: 'School of the heather' — that's beautiful. Lucas: It is. And it captures something essential. The Scalan wasn't just a hiding place. It was a hearth. A place where a tradition was kept alive against all odds. The students didn't just learn Latin and theology — they learned how to be discreet, how to read the landscape, how to move at night. They were trained to be pastors to a people under pressure. Lucas: One of the most famous graduates was a man named Alexander Cameron, who later became a priest in Lochaber. He was known for his courage and his kindness. When the Redcoats came looking for him, the local people would hide him in caves or under their floors. He died young, worn out by the work, but he was remembered for generations. Luna: So the Scalan really was a lifeline for the Catholic community. Lucas: Exactly. And it's not just about Catholics. The Scalan story is about what happens when a government tries to erase a culture. The Penal Laws targeted not just religion, but language, education, even music. The bagpipes were banned after Culloden. Gaelic was suppressed. The Scalan is a symbol of resistance to all of that. Lucas: It's also a reminder that history isn't just about battles and kings. Sometimes the most important stories happen in a tiny stone house in a remote glen, where a handful of boys and their teachers are quietly saving a world. Luna: And now the Scalan is a museum, right? You can visit it? Lucas: You can. It's still there, in Glenlivet, restored and open to the public. It's a small place — you could walk past it without noticing. But if you step inside, you can feel the weight of what happened there. The desks, the peat fire, the little altar where they said Mass in secret. It's one of the most moving historical sites in Scotland, I think. Luna: I'd love to see it one day. Lucas: It's worth the journey. And it's a good place to think about what resilience really means. Not the Hollywood version, but the quiet, daily kind. The kind that keeps a candle burning in the dark.