Strath Lunndaidh, to the west of Golspie, interests me because it seems to be the only local settlement which still has evidence of its pre-clearance structures, including the remains of the township's buildings, enclosures, inbye fields and a head dyke. More, it has the remains of a much older history in the form of at least five Bronze Age to Iron Age hut circles, clearance cairns of similar age, and some rather enigmatic short sections of what seem rather aimless walls.
Some of these features are shown on the OS map of the area. So far, we have only reached the hut circles just to the north of the SE end of the loch, but a search for information about the area on the internet produced a surprise - a paper about it written by a local researcher, Nick Lindsay. As well as identifying and locating four more hut circles than the map shows, he has unearthed some details of the much more recent pre-clearance settlement.
The name, Lunndaidh, seems to be derived from the Pictish for a wet, boggy place. From 1784 the area was part of the land Captain Alexander Sutherland rented from the Sutherland estate, and in 1798 there were nine men from Strathlundy who 'contributed for the support of the Government’. Although the infamous clearance factors William Young and Patrick Sellar took over the lease of Captain Sutherland's Culmaily farm in 1810 and immediately cleared most of his other tenants, they left Strath Lunndaidh, in which there were then a dozen tenants and their families, until about 1819 or 1820, when the strath was finally cleared.
There is much more in Nick Lindsay's paper but, with this knowledge, I'm looking forward to our next visit to the strath, when we'll try to get as far as the settlement remains at the NW end of the loch.
Link to Nick Lindsay's paper, in .pdf format, is here.
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