Scottish Authors > Carolina Oliphant, Lady Nairne Poet 1766-1845

Carolina Oliphant was born at Gask, Perthshire, on 16th August 1766. The Oliphants of Gask and her mother's family, the Robertsons of Struan, were noted for their unswerving loyalty to the Jacobite cause. Both Carolina's father and grandfather were "out" in the '45 Rising and had to leave Scotland after Culloden. The family home was secured by relatives buying it in the sale of forfeited estates.

This family sympathy for the Jacobite cause is reflected in much of Carolina Oliphant's work, such as The Hundred pipers, Will ye no come back again and Wha'll be King but Charlie?. Her own sympathies were, however, much wider and in The Pentland Hills, a poem on the Covenanters - men and women who, she wrote, had:

...so much right feeling and heroism amongst them that they merit a place in Scottish song.

She even criticised the great Jacobite hero figure James Graham of Claverhouse:

Oh, Claverhouse! fell Claverhouse!

Thou brave but cruel Graham!

Dark deeds like thine will last for aye,

Linked wi' thy blighted name.

Oliphant's feeling for landscape and nature is reflected in works like The Auld house (a tribute to her birthplace, the Old House of Gask) and The Rowan tree and her appreciation of the human comedy is shown in The Laird o' Cockpen. A more serious note was struck in poems like Caller herring:

Wha'll buy my caller herrin?

Oh, ye may call them vulgar farin' -

Wives and mithers, maist despairin',

Ca' them lives o' men.

and in the moving The Land o' the Leal, a poem inspired by the death of a friend's infant daughter.

Much of her work was published anonymously - contemporary convention frowning on a woman in her social position writing for publication. She was a keen collector of folk tunes, providing new words for those that inspired her as did her contemporaries, Burns and Hogg. Much of her work was contributed in this form, under the pen-name of Mrs Bogan of Bogan, to Robert Purdie's The Scottish minstrel (1821-24) edited by RA Smith.

In 1806 aged 41, she married her second cousin, Major William Nairne. They had one son, born in 1808. In 1824, following George IV's visit to Edinburgh in 1822 and Walter Scott's campaigning, Parliament restored the forfeited Jacobite peerages and Major Nairne regained the family Barony. He died in 1830 and Lady Nairne later travelled in Europe with her invalid son who died in 1837. She died at Gask, aged 79, on 26th October 1845 and a posthumous collection of verse, Lays of Strathearn, was prepared by her sister. A granite cross was erected to her memory in the grounds of Gask House.

A collection of sixteen Songs by Lady Nairne was published by Akros in 1996 and a number of her songs and poems are widely anthologised.

Brian D Osborne

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