Furnace Cottage, May 2025

This is probably the most emotional photo I have ever taken, apart from photos of my wife and our baby sons. This stone cottage is where my grandmother was born in 1892, and where she lived for the first 9 or 10 years of her life. Her father was the gamekeeper for the Letterewe Estate on Loch Maree, which several locals have informed me is considered the most beautiful loch in Scotland.

It’s hard to describe the feeling. We are all “from” some place, some country or city “over there”. My ancestors hailed from French Canada, Ireland, Newfoundland, and back awhile, from France and England. Those are big places and I’ll never be quite sure about the pieces of land they actually trod upon. Except for this one place, where a woman I actually met and knew as Granny was born, was schooled, and played as a child.

Some people are lucky to know the village and house where their parents and grandparents were born. Now I feel the rootedness that comes with that knowledge.

It’s pretty certain that almost nothing has changed on this spot in the 133 years since her birth or the 144 years since her parents, Robert and Mary Mackenzie, arrived at the estate. Which makes it even a more remarkable scene. No roads or suburban bungalows or electric poles. It is as if the entire 20th Century failed to happen.