Tour Scotland short travel video clip, with Scottish music, of the Lady Grange cottage on ancestry, genealogy, history visit to Hirta, Scottish Gaelic: Hiort, the largest island in the St Kilda archipelago in the Outer Hebrides. Now without a permanent resident population, the island had nearly all of St Kilda's population of about 180 residents in the late 17th century and 112 in 1851. It was abandoned in 1930 when the last 36 remaining inhabitants were evacuated to Lochaline on the mainland. Rachel Chiesly was a daughter of a convicted and hung murderer. She married a man named James Erskine in 1707. He shortly after became Lord Grange and Rachel took on the title of Lady Grange. The couple had nine children together but led a tumultuous marriage. Erskine was unfaithful and Rachel was described as a stormy woman, prone to fits of rage and madness. When Erskine decided the marriage was over, he sent Rachel to live in the country with her children. But Rachel was an outspoken lady and unhappy with his decision, she threatened to expose his true political allegiance. Despite Erskine’s position in the union government he was in fact a Jacobite sympathiser. In a bid to keep Rachel quiet, Erskine enrolled two of his friends to kidnap her. He planned to send her away to the remote islands of the west of Scotland to never be found again. She was dragged off and sent to Linlithgow, then Stirling. Then through the Highlands and across the Minch to Heisker off the coast of North Uist. It was then she was sent to St Kilda where she would spend the next seven years. She in a stone in the village meadows, which had earthen floors and rain pouring down the inside walls in bad weather. In the winter she had to scoop out the snow with her hands from behind her bed. A far cry from the luxuries she was used to back in Edinburgh. She spent her time on St Kilda drinking what whisky she could get her hands on and wandering the shores at night bemoaning her fate. The island locals were kind to Rachel during these seven years. Eventually they managed to smuggle one of her letters back to a friend in Edinburgh. A party of men came together to rescue her but by the time they had reached the island she had been moved on. It was after this that she landed in Trumpan in Waternish, on the Isle of Skye. She was said to have died shortly after in May of 1745 without ever seeing her family or returning to the city again. Lady Grange was buried in the Trumpan Church in Waternish.
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