Scotland: Dreams of kilted grandeur

Cawdor Castle. Photo / Supplied

The young boy listens wide-eyed as his uncle holds forth on the family's noble Scottish history. He has a taste for the dramatic, the storyteller, and he's warming to his task as he reaches the part where the contest for an ancient kingship has come down to a swimming race across a river.

"He whose hand first touches the other bank," the uncle booms, in a wild brogue that makes him sound like a pirate or an angry giant, "let him be king".

The punchline, of course, is that all the other poor saps dive in and start swimming like hell, while the one who is meant to be our ancestor whips out his sword, lops off his left hand and flings it across to the other side. Game over. Long live the king.

It does not occur to a 6-year-old to ask the obvious questions. Since when was the Scottish royal succession decided by crude athletic contests in icy rivers? Is a willingness to twist the rules - not to mention a penchant for impulsive self-mutilation - a qualification for leadership, never mind kingship? And who was this one-handed ancestor king? How has he not come to the attention of historians - or even Google?

Half a century later, though, I'm belatedly asking the questions as I wander through the handsome vaulted Georgian rooms of the Scotland People's Centre in Edinburgh. Opened in January this year, the centre has combined the national registers of births, deaths and marriages (since 1855); census returns; and surviving parish registers and wills going back as far as 1513 into a single digitised database. You can have a two-hour taster session here for nothing; spend a day for £10 ($24) or even get an "assisted search" with the help of an expert - prices start from £20 an hour. And if you find what you want you can touch and smell the paper documents, too, in which the waypoints of millions of lives are meticulously recorded in spidery copperplate.

Centre manager Iain Ferguson says there has been an upsurge in interest among antipodeans of Scottish descent (as well as among Scots themselves) in finding their roots. People whose emigrant forebears had left seeking a better life may have been uninterested in looking back. But baby boomers, it seems, are ever keener to find out where they came from, and television programmes like Who Do You Think You Are? have further piqued interest.

"I remember when I was growing up," he says, "Mum and Dad had no interest in their family trees. But now people do and I think availability of facilities like this has added to the demands."

Unfortunately, ScotlandsPeople, as the organisation is known, is not much help to this failed Scottish nobleman. All I can give them is the name of my great-grandfather, William W. Calder (I don't even know what the W stood for) who was born in Chesterfield (in that hated land south of the border) in the 1840s. But as the centre's Family History Officer Keith Paxton explains, that's not much to go on.

"We need an event - a birth, say, or a marriage - in Scotland after 1855," he says. "It's no use going back 200 years and typing in a name. You'll get a lot of people by that name, but you won't have any idea who they are."

That name - Calder, I mean - is not hard to find in Scotland. It turns out it comes from "coille" and "dur" meaning respectively "hill" and "wood" and since there are lots of hills and woods in Scotland it's unsurprisingly in the names of several villages and roads from Edinburgh to the far north. I cross the Calder River at Newtonmore in Banffshire on my way to visit some Speyside distilleries.

I always "knew" as I was growing up that we were descended from the Campbells of Cawdor. I knew that because my father told me so. He wore a signet ring with part of the Cawdor coat of arms - correctly "a swan proper, crowned" - which was also on his stationery.

He never seemed troubled by the need to adduce the slightest shred of evidence for all this, and he's not around now so I can't ask him how the trail led from Chesterfield back to the Highlands. Nor can I ask him why, if we were Cawdors, he always pronounced "Cawdor" wrongly, with the emphasis on the second syllable. It's supposed to rhyme with "border".

Perhaps the occupant of the family pile can assist. Cawdor Castle, built around 1370, is near Nairn, east of Inverness, so I point the rental north. I have called ahead and she's expecting me but she's not exactly welcoming a long-lost cousin. Even assuming I have Cawdor blood in my veins, we're related only by marriage: she's a Bohemian blueblood, born Angelika Lazansky Freiin von Bukowa in Prague, and raised in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).

The second wife of the sixth earl, now the Dowager Countess, she reminds me of Penelope Keith in To the Manor Born. She pronounces "pound" to rhyme with "mind" and she presides over the 235ha of the estate from a cluttered homely office straight out of Country Life. Her cut-glass smile and haughty froideur persuade me that it's probably not a good idea to mention the classic family feud of which she is the central figure. You know how it is: earl left her the castle; eldest son, the seventh earl, got the grouse moor; stepdaughter wrote an article for Tatler magazine describing her as "a stepmother from central casting" and "Lady Macbeth Mk II".

That Macbeth connection isn't off-limits, though. That's an old family story, though I'd always wondered why we would want to whakapapa back to a henpecked mass murderer. And the yarn started to spring a few leaks when I read the play, anyway.

As Shakespeare tells it, Macbeth wasn't a Cawdor (that's the traitor executed in Act I) but the Thane of Glamis; he was given the second title as a reward for bravery (so much for hereditary pedigree).

Shakespeare always played fast and loose with the facts. The real Macbeth, a very different fellow from the Shakespearean one, died in 1057, more than 300 years before the castle was built. He did kill Duncan, but in battle; he was neither Glamis nor Cawdor, he was not a murderous maniac; and he was certainly no relation of mine.

"Shakespeare is very good PR for me," says Lady Cawdor, referring to the play's role in luring the 90,000 paying visitors a year who help her balance the books, "but he didn't do the real Macbeth any favours".

I learn that the family name was Calder until 1510 when Muriel, a tender 12-year-old, married John Campbell of Argyll and the Campbells of Cawdor came into being. (This, incidentally, implicates them in the infamous Glencoe Massacre, which is why a late colleague, name of McDonald, was so given to curse my name).

The Dowager Countess tells me I am not the first Calder to drop by.

"There are sometimes people who arrive and say 'we think we are related' and that's fine," she says, but her tone of voice suggests that most of them bring more than a vague idea that a great-grandfather was born in Chesterfield.

I drive away from Cawdor, slightly abashed but not much surprised. I'm not entirely sure what I was looking for but I know what I have found: my name is a speck afloat in a measureless sea of history and genealogy.

Yet, oddly, there is a sense of connection. In Inverness or Edinburgh, I keep glimpsing people who look like old aunts. I am served in bars by dead ringers of cousins or uncles. It must count for something that I find the Scots manner of speaking the most mellifluous of the British regional accents and that the skirl of the bagpipes makes the nape prickle.

But getting no closer to my presumed Scottish ancestry - much less one-handed monarchs - has not left me feeling rootless. One commercial British ancestry website exhorts us to "find out what makes you you", but that makes too much of it for me.

I do know that even if I had found a whole kilted clan of cousins in Morayshire, my roots would still be firmly embedded in New Zealand soil. That's what poet Allen Curnow called "the trick of standing upright here".

But the fruitless search was a hell of a lot of fun. And just to be safe, I bought a scarf in the "family" tartan. It is a souvenir of what might have been - but almost certainly never was.

CHECKLIST

Getting there: Cathay Pacific flies daily to London via Hong Kong. From October 1, all flights will feature the economy class shell seat which offer more privacy. Fares start from $2170. Excellent train services connect Edinburgh and Nairn.

Finding your roots: Scotland has proclaimed 2009, the 250th anniversary year of the birth of poet Robbie Burns, as Homecoming Year and is encouraging people of Scots descent to trace their roots.

ScotlandsPeople is the official source of genealogical information. All its digitised databases are online, but you can't smell the paper - or the heather - from here.

Cawdor Castle: Cawdor Castle has its own website and is worth a visit, not for the spurious Macbeth connection but because the castle, which is lived-in half the year, has some fabulous artworks including ravishing Flemish tapestries, drawings by Dali and portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Extensive flower gardens and woods in the grounds make for fine rambling.

Further information: See visitbritain.com and visitscotland.com

Peter Calder went looking for his roots with assistance from Cathay Pacific Airways, VisitBritain and VisitScotland.