Sometimes a story waits patiently on a bookshelf until the right moment arrives for us to read it. A few days ago, I was leafing through an old issue of SCOTS – Celebrating Scottish Heritage, Number Seven, published around the year 2000. Among the stories announced on its cover was one that caught my attention: The Lady Saltoun.

Inside, editor Susan Cromarty introduced her readers to Flora Fraser, Lady Saltoun of Abernethy, at her home in the rugged heart of the Cairngorms. The portrait accompanying the article shows a woman of unmistakable presence.

And Susan Cromarty’s introduction describes someone equally memorable: a highly regarded Scottish peer who combined extraordinary dynamism with charm and wit, and who was deeply conscious of the heritage entrusted to her.

I began reading out of curiosity. Then I reached one answer. And stopped. “We’re all one big family”.

Susan Cromarty had asked Lady Saltoun whether, as a woman at the head of a family, her perspective was different from that of male chiefs. Lady Saltoun didn’t think so. Her explanation was wonderfully simple:

“Members of the clan are all children, the kin of the Chief. We’re all one big family.”

Something in those words touched me deeply. Perhaps because Lady Saltoun was talking about something much older than an organization or an association. She was talking about belonging.

A woman carrying centuries of history

Flora Marjory Fraser was born in 1930 and succeeded her father, Alexander Fraser, Lord Saltoun, in 1979. She inherited not simply a title but a remarkable family history. The Frasers of Philorth represent the senior line of the Fraser name. This distinction is worth making because Scottish clan history can become wonderfully complicated…

Lady Saltoun understood herself as the custodian of that history. Susan Cromarty noted that her home contained a portrait of every head of the family dating back to 1570. Imagine living surrounded by those faces. Generation after generation looking down from the walls.

Heritage, in such a home, has names. Faces. Stories. Responsibilities. But Lady Saltoun was hardly a woman who lived only in the past.

She sat as a Crossbench peer in Britain’s House of Lords. Parliamentary records show her as Lady Saltoun of Abernethy from 1979, and she continued in the Lords after the major reforms of 1999. She was one of only five female hereditary peers elected to remain following those reforms, eventually retiring in December 2014.

Reading the interview today, it is her relationship with Scotland itself that stays with me: “The emotional force it exerts on Scots abroad”

She told Susan Cromarty how much she loved the Cairngorms mountains, the changing colours and the trees. For all the world she had seen, Scotland remained, to her, among its most beautiful countries.

Then their conversation turned to Scots living abroad. Lady Saltoun spoke of the longing people can feel to see Scotland again and again. Some, she observed, might never have seen Scotland at all. They could be generations removed from it. And still the pull remained. She called it an emotional force. I knew exactly what she meant. Because perhaps that mysterious pull is part of the reason Scotiana exists.

When Scotland travels across generations

My own connection with Scotland came through my father’s side of the family. My paternal grandmother was Scottish. Her father married a woman from the province of Quebec, and another branch of a Scottish story crossed the Atlantic. Then there was Glasgow. And my uncle. And there was Braemar.

My father owned a restaurant in Montreal called BRAEMAR. As I remember the family story, he acquired it from my uncle, who was born in Hamilton, near Glasgow and loved going to Braemar for his holidays. I grew up thousands of kilometres from the Cairngorms. Yet here I am, all these years later, writing about Scotland.

And here was Lady Saltoun, speaking from her Cairngorm home around the year 2000, describing precisely that strange phenomenon: how Scotland can retain its hold on people separated from it by oceans and even generations. Perhaps our ancestors carry more than names across the sea. They carry places, stories. affections.

Sometimes even a single word: Braemar.

What does it mean to belong to a clan?

There is another revealing passage in Cromarty’s interview. Lady Saltoun carefully explains the sometimes confusing relationship between her own Fraser line and the Fraser of Lovat line. Her answer is full of genealogy and history, but underneath it lies a much simpler idea. Clan was not merely about rank. It was about relationship.

That is why her answer about being a female chief is so striking. The question was about gender. Her answer was about family. She didn’t define leadership by whether the chief was a man or woman. She went directly to kinship:

We are all one big family. 

And that is where Lady Saltoun’s words travelled beyond Scottish history for me.

Different branches. One tree.

My own spiritual path has taught me to look increasingly beyond the distinctions we make between ourselves. Male. Female. Scottish. Canadian. Chief. Clansman. One generation. Another generation. Different names, different histories, different lives. Yet underneath those differences I believe there is a deeper kinship: that we are all children of God, part of one human family.

Lady Saltoun was speaking specifically about the Fraser family. I would never want to take her words out of their historical context. But sometimes another person’s words open a door inside us. Hers did that for me.

Different branches. One tree.

Perhaps that is one of the quiet gifts that the old idea of clan can still offer the modern world. Belonging does not have to mean excluding those who don’t belong. At its most generous, belonging can teach us something about how deeply we all need one another.

A woman at home in the Cairngorms

There is something delightful about the way Susan Cromarty ends her visit. After discussions of Parliament, Scottish history, clan leadership and the future of Scotland, the two women find themselves… in the kitchen. Lady Saltoun makes hot buttered crumpets and tea.

Outside stand the snow-dusted mountains of the Cairngorms: Ben Macdui, Braeriach and Cairn Toul. They talk about gardening. Gardening there was no small undertaking. Frost killed plants. Deer ate others. The winds sweeping from the mountains presented their own challenges.

Lady Saltoun acknowledged that age had made the heavy work difficult. Yet she still loved her garden. And then she said something that, read today, feels almost like a farewell: “Still, I love it here. I never want to be anywhere else.” She remained deeply associated with this part of Scotland throughout her life.

Lady Saltoun died on September 3, 2024, aged 93. Her eldest daughter, Katharine Fraser, succeeded her, and the Fraser story moved forward another generation. As family stories always do.

The ties that bind

I closed that old copy of SCOTS differently from the way I had opened it. I had expected to read about an interesting Scottish woman. Instead, Lady Saltoun had made me think about my grandmother. My father. My uncle in Glasgow. A Montreal restaurant named BRAEMAR. Scotland. And ultimately, belonging itself.

That is what heritage really is. Not simply preserving what happened before us but recognizing the threads that still run through us. Some are visible: portraits, tartans, names, houses, family trees. Others are almost invisible: a place we inexplicably long to visit, a story remembered from childhood, an old magazine we cannot quite bring ourselves to throw away.

And occasionally, one of those threads leads us somewhere unexpected. Mine led from a magazine published around 2000… to Lady Saltoun, to the Cairngorms, to Braemar, to Montreal and finally back to my own family.

Lady Saltoun called her clan one big family. Perhaps, if we follow the branches far enough toward their source, we may discover something even larger.

Different branches. One tree.

If you’ve been reading my Scotiana stories for a while, you may have noticed that I lingered a little longer with this one. Now you know why. Some stories simply have more threads to follow.

Thank you for following this thread with me. I hope it awakened a few threads of your own.

Janice

PS: With gratitude to Susan Cromarty and SCOTS – Celebrating Scottish Heritage, Number Seven, whose interview with Lady Saltoun inspired this reflection. The quotations from Lady Saltoun in this article are taken from the original copy of the magazine.

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