Down Memory Lane: Warlock burnings and brewery links – the Haugh in Inverness has a fascinating and sometimes grim history

A MALE witch, or warlock, was sentenced to be burned to death in December 419 years ago at Haouche Heid, or ‘head of the Haugh’, yet that place of flaming execution is now a quiet area of our city off Castle Street, writes columnist Bill McAllister.

Donald Moir was tried in the Tolbooth beside the Steeple in an era when religious extremism swept Scotland. The luckless Moir was claimed to have herbs and bits of cloth sewn into his coat collar with which to cast daily spells.

When baker Robert Stewart was ill, Moir took four small pieces of flesh from the Stewart’s ankle with the stated intention to bury them under a hawthorn tree and thus heal the patient. Instead, he is alleged to have, in what the prosecutor claimed was a diabolic rite, thrown the fragments in to the Mill Burn. Shallow evidence, indeed.

The Haugh area is first flagged up in King William the Lion’s Royal Charter of 1180 and the name comes the Old Scots ‘Halche’, meaning flat land by the river. The area was on royal land and thus a separate small community from Inverness. Indeed, the riverbank north of Ness Islands was named Castle Haugh.

It is again mentioned in a 17th century document, and by the 19th century the village was locally known as Haughton. In the 1820s, its main thoroughfare was Russell Road, which today comprises Haugh Road and Island Bank Road.

The Haugh has a significant manufacturing tradition.

At the foot of today’s View Place stood the Haugh Mill, originally Castlehill Mill, which took its water from the river near Bellfield Park. There was controversy in the 15th and 16th centuries, with claims that this removal of Ness water had a harmful effect on salmon fishing. It is ironic that modern anglers still cast not far from the area.

The mill vanished in the 1780s or 90s and its site was used for a woollen manufacturing mill which was in operation by 1832.

View Place, linking Castle Street with the Haugh, was established around 1820, with houses leading down the slope.

Further down, the Haugh Brewery had been built before 1820 in a courtyard shape. Some 20 years later it was Ross’s Caledonian Brewery, whose highly popular product ‘Inverness Ale’ was being transported to pubs and hotels in many parts of Scotland.

The Buchanan family acquired the brewery in 1858 and continued to produce beer there right up to the start of World War I, so the Haugh has a brewing tradition of around 200 years.

After the war, the premises were converted to a mineral water production business, although one part of the courtyard continued as the Haugh Brewery Tap.

The other three sides of the courtyard were demolished in the 1960s, but the Brewery Tap part was reshaped to become the Haugh Bar. This was a popular hostelry until one extrovert owner announced he was banning English people from his pub, attracting UK-wide media coverage!

The bar premises are now a block of flats just along from the Haugh Court senior citizens’ development.

Further along, just before Bellfield Park and around Gordonville Road, is a neat array of narrow streets, built after 1811 as a planned village development. Dryburgh town house, at 63 Haugh Road, dates from the early 1800s.

Opposite the foot of View Place, is Ness Bank Church, built for £8500 and dedicated on December 22, 1901. The congregation’s previous church, built in the late 1860s at the corner of the newly-built Union Street, was taken down stone by stone and rebuilt in Alness!

An old open space near where Ness Bank Church stands, was in the 1880s used for grazing goats and became known as ‘The Billy Goatie’.

The Haugh, once at the edge of Inverness, is now fairly central, but still retains its sense of a small, distinct, pleasant community, despite being where once beer brewed and a ‘witch’ burned.

– Sponsored by Ness Castle Lodges.