He acted as administrator
of the Mackenzie estates during the minority of his nephew, the
grandfather of the first Earl of Cromarty, and was said to have been a
man of much ability and considerable culture for the times in which he
lived. At the same time he was a man of strong personality though of
evil repute in the Gaelic-speaking districts, as the following couplet
still current among the common people showed:
The three worst things in Scotland--
Mists in the dog-days, frost in May, and the Tutor of Kintail.
The story went that the tutor had a quarrel with a woman who appeared to
have been quite as strong-minded as himself. She was a dairymaid in
Strathconon with whom he had an agreement to supply him with a stone of
cheese for every horn of milk given by each cow per day. For some reason
the weight of cheese on one occasion happened to be light, and this so
enraged the tutor that he drove her from the Strath. Unfortunately for
him the dairymaid was a poetess, and she gave vent to her sorrow in
verse, in which it may be assumed the tutor came in for much abuse. When
she obtained another situation at the foot of Ben Wyvis, the
far-reaching and powerful hand of the tutor drove her from there also;
so at length she settled in the Clan Ranald Country in Barrisdale, on
the shores of Loch Hourn on the west coast of Inverness-shire, a place
at that time famous for shell-fish, where she might have dwelt in peace
had she mastered the weakness of her sex for demanding the last word;
but she burst forth once more in song, and the tutor came in for another
scathing:
Though from Strathconon with its cream you've driven me,
And from Wyvis with its curds and cheese;
While billow beats on shore you cannot drive me
From the shell-fish of fair Barrisdale.
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