PIBROCHS AND CORONACHS
Long before reaching Ben Nevis the delicate-eared Southron may shudder
at a far-heard strain, which some strangers, indeed, find “not so bad
as it sounds,” as the Frenchman said of Wagner’s music, while others
will indulgently admit—
It was wild, it was fitful, it died on the breeze,
It wandered about into various keys;
It was jerky, spasmodic, and harsh, I declare,
But still—it distinctly suggested an air.
The bagpipes need no apology in ears to the manner born. They are well
beloved in the Lowlands as in the Highlands; and even about a London
terminus one is hardly more safe from them than in the wilds of Lorne
or Lochaber. When the savant St. Fond came to Edinburgh, grave Adam
Smith, learning that he held music part of the wealth of nations,
took him to a bagpipe competition, which he describes as exciting
such enthusiasm among sober citizens as might be expected on what is
not the native heath of this instrument. It was once, indeed, no more
specially Scottish than it was English, Irish, Italian, or, for the
matter of that, European. What seems to have been added to it in the
Highlands is the great drone, helping the pipes to express a fierce
or melancholy music, whose strains, in turn exulting and wailing,
recommended themselves strongly to the keenly-set feelings of the Gael.
The chief’s piper was an hereditary official in several clans, often
one of no little dignity, having his acolytes and his pipe-bearer, and
not condescending to play for common revels. There was a college of
M’Crimmon pipers at Dunvegan in Skye, where the Macdonalds maintained a
rival school of MacCarters; and the names of other champion performers
are not forgotten. The piper held his head so high in the Celtic world
that still Highland pride seems typified in the swelling port and strut
of his degenerate descendants. His finer notes are in danger of being
lost, now that they will not be so much called on for occasions of
state or mourning; but as often as we relapse into the savagery of war,
there is found no screech like the bagpipe’s to heat men’s hearts to
slaughter point, as some of our modern Highland stocks may have known
to their cost when first they encountered the true children of mountain
mists. In older days, “the harp that once through Tara’s halls” is
claimed as the stately music of the Highlands also, and if we went far
enough back, we might find cows’ horns the only music known to rude
warriors, till some effeminate stranger introduced among them an art
nursed on sunny Mediterranean lochs and sounds. But the reader need not
fear to be let in for an antiquarian lecture. The bagpipes will serve
me like the blessed word Mesopotamia as text for a rambling discourse
on past and present in the country looked down on by Ben Nevis.
It seems typical of the new order that Ben Nevis, one of those
mountains said to be held on a snowball tenure, belongs in part to a
Southron whose very name denotes “England’s cruel red,” and in part
to a family which has blended the once hostile blood of Campbell and
of Cameron with that of Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote, the “Justice
Shallow” whose deer Shakespeare poached, according to Elizabethan
scandal. No contrast could be greater than between this property and
the Lucys’ lordly park in the flat Midlands. Rising to the heaven that
names it, from a base thirty miles in circumference, the highest crest
of Britain is not so much a towering peak as “a colossal bundle of the
hugest of Scotland’s mountains rolled into one mighty mass” of cloudy
ridges and stupendous precipices, whose magnitude grows on the beholder
from various aspects, most impressive perhaps that of the dark gulf
filled with rolling mists that opens on the north-east side. These
stern steeps that once echoed to pibrochs and coronachs, and gave their
fallen stones for the cairns of many a forgotten feud, were in our
generation crowned by a monument of the spirit of a new age. Monument
indeed, for as I write comes news that the Ben Nevis Observatory has
been deserted through an unromantic lack of funds, which in any other
civilised country would have been supplied from the public purse.
For years this cloudy post was garrisoned by a band of intrepid weather
watchers, bearing the brunt of the great Atlantic storms, in whose
teeth they snatched hints to build up scientific meteorology. Not
that their knowledge has as yet risen much beyond its foundations,
when Mr. Robert Omond, the first captain of that crow’s nest, truly
then to be called highest British authority on the subject, rebukes
more confident seers by the dictum that our weather’s “coming events
cast their shadows before” no farther than a day or two, and then not
for certain. More striking results were deserved by the devotion of
these hermits of science. With hares, foxes, and weasels for nearest
neighbours, their chief complaint seems to have been of only too many
visitors, in summer at least, when scores daily would toil up the
path made for constructing and provisioning their eyry, whereon the
weak-kneed Lowlander may stumble and murmur; yet had he seen this road
“before it was made,” he would rather bless the Scottish Meteorological
Society that has done so much for it under such arduous circumstances.
But again they would be weeks without seeing a human face, even on a
postage stamp, unless some adventurer made an Alpine ascent through
the snow to bring news from the outer world to their hermitage, built
strong and solid like a lighthouse. At the height of summer banks of
dirty snow may be found on the top, where John Leyden and his friends
had an August snowball fight. In winter the crew of observers were
often buried in snow-banks, through which they must dig themselves
out; or it would be all they could do, roped together, to struggle
against the wind to their instruments a few yards off. Sometimes it
was impossible to crawl to windward against such a gale as once for
fifteen hours kept them imprisoned in their cramped quarters, the only
exposed window broken by a bombardment of hard snow lumps torn up and
hurled by the wind. Rainbows proved rare so far up in the clouds, and
so did heavy thunderstorms, though the air has at times been found
alive with frizzlings and cracklings of invisible electricity that made
men’s hair stand on end; and once their telegraph apparatus was fused
by lightning. As often as not their mountain solitude was wrapped in
dark, dank, chilly fog, through which they durst not lightly trust
themselves by the edges of the perilous abysses around. In one day they
measured more than seven inches of rain. But again that ark of theirs
would stand up in glorious sunshine above the lower tops lying islanded
in a sea of mist, which had rolled back from the top to leave its high
tide-mark sparkling with feathery crystals. I once spent ten Christmas
days at Bournemouth without a glimpse of the sun, when a letter came
from the top of Ben Nevis reporting a fortnight of dry, clear weather,
lit through the short day by a wonderful play of colours in the sky.
And at all seasons, from their hundred-mile prospect point above the
clouds, the observers might catch wonderful optical phenomena, coronæ
of most vivid colouring painted on a film of scud-cloud, fog-bows,
both solar and lunar, and the weird adumbration called “glories,”
described by Mr. Omond:
In winter when the sun is low, even at noon, the shadow of a person
standing near the cliff that runs all along the northern side of Ben
Nevis is cast clear of the hill into the valley below. In bright
winter weather this deep gloomy gorge is often full of loose shifting
fog, and when the shadow falls upon it, the observer sees his head
surrounded by a series of coloured rings, from two to five in number,
varying in size from a mere blotch of light up to a well-defined arch
6 or 8 degrees in radius. This phenomenon does not present quite the
same appearance as the better-known Brocken Spectre, for here the
shadow of the observer, in consequence of the distance of the mist
from him, does not appear unnaturally large; in fact the image of
one’s head appears as a mere dark speck in the centre of the coloured
rings. These glories are less common in summer—though they have been
seen near sunrise and sunset.
[Illustration: PORT ASKAIG, ISLAY]
At the foot of Ben Nevis lies Fort-William, a town once dubbed
Gordonsburgh, and before that Maryburgh, in honour of Dutch William’s
consort; but its old name was Inverlochy, famed by Montrose’s dashing
victory over Argyll, as by a former battle between the forces of James
I. and his troublesome vassal, the Lord of the Isles. Cloudier history
would have it an ancient royal seat of Scotland, where King Achaius is
fondly believed to have made a treaty with Charlemagne, first seal of
that league between two kingdoms often united in enmity to England.
These are ticklish subjects: MacCulloch the geologist was hereabouts
turned away from even Highland hospitality because he could not
believe that Fingal made the parallel roads of Glenroy, in which Nature
seems so artfully to have copied the works of man.
Legendary chroniclers have placed at Inverlochy the site of a great
commercial city in the Highland golden age; but the only trace of such
antiquity is, not far off, one of those “vitrified forts,” puzzling
savants as to whether their ramparts were turned to slag by accident or
design. There is a painful suspicion that the old castle, at one time
held by the Comyns, may have been the work of an English king, three
centuries before James VI. tried to found a town about it as civilising
agent for the Highlands. It was certainly General Monk who began the
modern fort that in William’s time became strengthened to hold out
against ill-equipped besiegers. This work, impregnable in 1745, has now
yielded to the railway company, whose station takes its place. Before
the railway came here, Marshal Wade’s roads and Telford’s Canal had
bridled the wild Highlandman as effectually as that chain of military
posts hence reaching up to the Moray Firth by Kil-Comyn, the modern
Fort-Augustus, and by Castle Urquhart on the banks of Loch Ness. This
was another fortress of the Black Comyns, then of the Grants, taken
by Edward I.’s soldiers, and assailed by many a fierce foe, till it
gracefully surrendered to the shafts of time.
The Earth builds on the Earth
Castles and towers;
The Earth says to the Earth,
All shall be ours.
From Ben Nevis we look over that great cleft in which Loch Linnhe,
running up from the Firth of Lorne, is continued by the lakes of
Glenmore, a natural boundary-line for the Inner Highlands. The
so-called Highland line formed by the face of the Grampians running
obliquely from the Clyde across the Forth and Tay, then beside
Strathmore to Aberdeenshire, walls in the Outer Highlands, in the
main long mastered by stranger lords, who, indeed, soon fell under
the Celtic charm and brought themselves to be as Gaelic as the born
Gaels, not the less demonstratively as Saxon speech and Lowland customs
crept in by the mountain passes. It is across that central cleft we
must look for the _Bretagne bretonnante_ of Scotland, among secluded
lochs and glens where the people were longer sheltered from outside
influences. The noblest summits and the most famous scenes are to the
east of the Great Glen; perhaps the grandest mountain mass is the block
of the Cairngorms in the north-east, below which Balmoral basks in the
sunshine of royal favour; but to the west rather lingers the soul of
the Highlands. This is particularly true of the Inverness bens, glens,
and lochs between Ben Nevis and Skye, a region that has for its proper
name “The Rough Bounds” (_Garbh Crioch_), while it made part of old
Argyll, “coast of the Gael,” a name once extending as far up as Loch
Broom.
Glenmore is a highway of civilisation well trodden by tourist
generations. Of late years the extension of the West Highland line to
the coast has opened up further romantic wilds, thick set with ruined
strongholds and shrines, with crosses and cairns, and with monuments
of less-forgotten history. One column marks the spot where Charles
Edward raised his standard in Glenfinnan; another commemorates the
Lochiel Cameron who died at Quatre Bras, as loyal to King George as
his fathers to Charles and James. In those cloudy recesses, beyond the
forts of the Great Glen, gathered silently the storm of 1745 to whirl
far over Britain. Here Macdonalds and Camerons only half-welcomed their
rash prince, the old chiefs too prudent not to see the risks of his
enterprise, yet too proud to hold back from it when hot young heads
panted to meet the Lowlands in battle array. The first encounter was on
the Spean, by whose valley a branch line now holds up the Great Glen
to Fort-Augustus. The main line winds round the head of Loch Shiel,
and on to the deep fiords near Arisaig, where the adventurer reached
the mainland, and whence he made his perilous escape. From Arisaig,
looking out on the picturesque islands Eigg, Rum, and Muck, the railway
follows the coast to Mallaig, opposite the southern end of Skye, a
region hitherto almost beyond the waterproofed tourist’s ken, if not
the sportsman’s, now plying his expensive pastime among the lonely
graves of clans who, for all their pride and valour, went down before
the disciplined stranger because they could not keep their swords off
one another.
[Illustration: THE ISLAND OF RUM, FROM ARISAIG]
It was not by chance of weather that Charles Edward landed in these
parts, to start his Phaeton career from the Rough Bounds. Hence,
if we take in Badenoch to the east and Lochaber to the south-east, came
the strongest bodies of fighters in that lost cause, whose poet tells
us how “the fiery cross was sped” with news that the “Prince had come
again.” As a matter of prosaic fact, the fiery cross seems to have gone
out of fashion by 1745, when the only mention I can find of it is in
Perthshire, there used, not very successfully, as summons to arms both
for and against the Prince. On the Dee and the Tay he found followers,
not so numerous as his well-wishers; but within a day’s march from
Glenfinnan was the first and the best recruiting-ground of “the clans
of Culloden.” This second-hand phrase I have “lifted” from Mr. Henry
Jenner’s series of articles in the _Royalist_, organ of the “White
Rose League,” in which the subject is naturally treated with special
sympathy. There is no lack of sympathy for those slain and scattered
clansmen, their memory held in honour by that House that seems in
little danger of being bowed off its throne by the “White Rose” ladies
and gentlemen, when the top of Ben Nevis flared with bonfires to
hail Queen Victoria’s Jubilee and King Edward’s Coronation. We are
perhaps too ready to forget the coarse features of a life dressed in
blood-stained tartans, and what might have come of Prince Charlie’s
winning a kingdom whose liberties have thriven best under sovereigns
making neither picturesque nor lovable figures in history. But if we
wish to drop a tear for the last romance of Britain, it may well be
done under the rainy sky of the Rough Bounds, that sent out so many
champions to dye the White Rose in bootless blood.
It is not to be understood that all those bellicose clansmen were
born in the allegiance to which they might be soldered on by choice
or circumstances. As among the Red Indian tribes, there seems to have
been frequent adoption of “broken men,” or fugitives from another
name. We know how chieftains of the good old time were in the way of
gathering about them adventurous banditti, whose bond of union was
congenial bloodshed as well as kindred blood. The proudest Cameron of
our day can be less sure of not having Campbell blood in his own veins
than of its having stained his forefathers’ hands. The portion of a
Highland heiress would sometimes be part paid in “a set of stout men,”
who henceforth had to be loyal to the husband’s tartan. Another hint
of how clans, themselves no thoroughbred stock, might become mixed
together is found in that ugly story of two hundred Farquharson bairns,
made orphans by Gordon and Grant swords, scrambling in a half-naked
herd to be fed like pigs from a trough at Huntly Castle, till the
softer-hearted Grant chief adopted them into his own tartan. When the
“Stewarts of Appin” went out in 1745, more than half the dead and
wounded of their contingent appear bearing the names of miscellaneous
Macs, who, had they not gathered to this standard, might have been
swallowed up with others among the loyal Campbells.
Lochaber was the country of the Camerons, whose leader, the “gentle
Lochiel” of 1745, appears one of the noblest Highland nobles, as to
whom, when he died a colonel in the French service, a poet on the other
side of politics declared that he “is now a Whig in heaven.” He exerted
himself to put down _creagh_ raids among his clansmen; but the old
blood was stronger in another Cameron of the French army, who, after
Culloden, under the name of “Sergeant Mòr” became renowned as a Rob Roy
of Lochaber. Lochiel’s brother, Dr. Cameron, betrayed and hanged in
1753, made the last martyr of Jacobitism. Sir Alan, son of one of the
Camerons of Culloden, lived to raise three battalions for King George,
whose fame and name have been inherited by the Cameron regiment,
now perhaps enlisting no more Camerons than find their way into the
Cameronian corps of such different origin. The most celebrated Cameron
was the Lochiel of Cromwell’s time, Sir Ewen the Black, who came to the
chieftainship as a boy, and died under George I., a doughty champion of
the Stuarts through his long life. Argyll, his guardian, had sent him
to school to be brought up in sound Whig principles, but, like other
boys one knows of, he “preferred the sport of the field to the labours
of the school.” Among the exploits attributed to him is the killing of
the last wolf in Britain, an honour also claimed for a later Nimrod
farther north. In his teens he was already at the head of the clan, a
thorn in the side of Campbells, Covenanters, and English Roundheads;
and after being the last royalist to submit to General Monk, he lived
to fight beside Dundee at Killiecrankie, then to send his clansmen out
in 1715, when he himself, it is said, came to be rocked in a cradle
of second childhood; but another account describes him at ninety as
able to read the smallest print and keeping all the teeth with which
he had torn out the windpipe of one of Cromwell’s officers, as they
locked in a deadly struggle like FitzJames and Roderick Dhu.[2] In the
interval he had waged many private wars, notably with his neighbours
the Mackintoshes, which luckily ended in a treaty wiping out the feud
of centuries. The last clan battle in the Highlands appears to be that
between the Mackintoshes and the Macdonalds of Keppoch, fought in
Glenroy, 1688.[3]
[2] Mr. Drummond-Norie, in his _Loyal Lochaber_, records the amusing
legend “of an incident that occurred during Sir Ewen Cameron’s visit
to London many years later. He had occasion to go into a barber’s shop
to get his beard and hair dressed. The garrulous barber having fixed
him in position, and probably guessing from his accent that he was not
born south of the Tweed, remarked: ‘You are from the north, sir, I
believe?’—‘Yes,’ answered Lochiel, ‘I am; do you know people from the
north?’—‘No,’ shouted the angry barber, ‘nor do I wish to; they are
savages there. Would you believe it, one of them tore the throat out
of my father with his teeth; and I only wish I had the fellow’s throat
as near me as I have yours just now!’”—The end of the tale is that
Lochiel never again trusted himself in the hands of a barber.
[3] In _Bonnie Scotland_ I rather loosely spoke of the Campbell
invasion of Caithness as the last private war, meaning by this term to
exclude a collision between adjacent clans.
The Mackintoshes were a branch—with the fear of Cluny Macpherson
before us, we must not say the senior branch—of that Clan Chattan that
fought on the Inch of Perth, from which also appear to have sprung
the Camerons, the Shaws, the Macgillivrays, the Farquharsons, and
several other names. Their opponents, the Clan Kay, seem more shadowy.
Those Mackintoshes are said to have been once at home about Lochaber;
but the later world they bustled in was farther north, where they had
for neighbours the Red Comyns of Badenoch, as once the Black Comyns
of the Great Glen. The Comyns were a clan of Norman origin, at one
time masters in Lochaber, as again for a time were the Gordons, whose
head, Lord Huntly, vied with Argyll in playing chief policeman for the
Highlands. There is a grim story of the Mackintoshes and the Comyns:
the one clan bidden by the other to a feast at which, these cat-and-dog
_convives_ sitting alternately, the appearance of a boar’s head was
to be signal for the hosts to stab each man his guest; but the guests
had the very same idea, and carried it out with more prompt dexterity.
Chroniclers strangely differ as to which clan here played the active
and which the passive part; and the same story, with the same doubt,
is told of my Forbes forebears and their Gordon neighbours. It must be
feared that such treachery made part of Highland social amenities in
the good old days. A record more honourable to the Clan Chattan is of a
battle that left in the hands of the Murrays—mere Lowlanders disguised
in tartan—some two hundred Mackintosh prisoners, from not one of whom
could torture or shameful death wring the secret of their chief’s
hiding-place. Another Mackintosh chief was not so lucky, who stooped
to put himself in the hands of the Marchioness of Huntly, and as
humiliating condition of forgiveness for injuries, even laid his head
upon the kitchen block, when this dissembling dame had it struck off
by the cook’s hatchet—so much for trusting a Gordon! In the ’45 the
clan did not stand shoulder to shoulder, its chief, an officer in King
George’s militia, falling prisoner to his own wife, “Colonel Anne,” who
had taken the field on Prince Charlie’s side. In later times, after
the benignant fame of Sir James the Reformer, this name’s most shining
exploit has been the invention of an armour against rain, the enemy
most to be feared among those mountains, where the Mackintosh of our
degenerate days perhaps does not disdain to cover his gay tartan with a
waterproof.
[Illustration: THE RIVER SPEY NEAR FOCHABERS]
Of his rival, Cluny Macpherson, it was told in my youth how he sternly
rebuked an effeminate clansman who visited him under an umbrella.
The Cluny of Culloden was the hardy chief who for years after lurked
in a “cage” of sticks and turf, close to his own castle, where he
occasionally ventured himself, and once had nearly been caught by the
redcoats through the unheroic accident of his getting so drunk that his
servants had to carry him out in a plaid and hide their unconscious
bundle in the woods till the search was over. The most widely famed
Macpherson in modern days was that author or editor of “Ossian.” If
any of this clan desire more unquestioned renown, let him invent some
defence of proof against the midges that are the most bloodthirsty
swarms of the Highlands, now that the pibroch and the coronach die away
in dance music.
For his services at Bannockburn the Lord of the Isles was rewarded by
Bruce by a grant of Lochaber. So this region in part, with the Rough
Bounds, came to be the country of the Macdonalds, in their various
septs, distinguished by the name of their seat, or sometimes by a
minor patronymic, as the MacIans of Ardnamurchan and of Glencoe, while
some came to write themselves Macdonell, but all boasting to be of
the great Somerled’s line, in which, indeed, the sons of Dougal seem
entitled to the first birthright. The clan Donnachie, though disguised
as Robertsons, claim also to be of the same stock. Other septs, now
bearing separate names, were as proud to count themselves of Donald’s
prolific race. The Macintyres, for instance, “sons of the carpenter,”
tell about their ancestor, an illegitimate shoot of the Lord of the
Isles, that when in a boat with his father, the peg coming out, the
whole crew would have been drowned if this ready youngster had not
chopped off his thumb with an axe to stop the hole, and the admiring
chief exclaimed, “The thumb-carpenter!”—a nickname that stuck. A
Lowland hero under the same circumstances would probably have been
canny enough to use his thumb as a plug without cutting it off.
Wherever they came from, the Macintyres drifted inland into Lorne,
and at Glenorchy gave birth to Duncan Ban, one of the most famous
of unlettered Gaelic bards, who died in 1812 as a veteran of the
Edinburgh City Guard, his muse more scrimply fostered than that of
Burns, though now his memory is honoured by a stately monument at
Dalmally. He fought in the ’45, perhaps not very heartily, as a private
soldier of King George, while his contemporary rival, Alexander
Macdonald, was out with Prince Charlie, in whose praise he made the
very popular song of _Morag_. There would be few of his name on the
other side; and Mr. Jenner, for his part, stoutly denies the story that
Culloden was lost through the Macdonalds holding back in offended pride.
At Ardtornish, on the Morven coast, the Lords of the Isles held
parliaments of their own, and once presumed to make a treaty with an
English king, foe of their lightly regarded suzerain. Even when that
quasi-regal state had crumbled, we find Macdonald chiefs proposing
negotiations with Queen Elizabeth, sending out troops to fight in
Ireland, and hiring mercenaries to serve in their own private wars.
Their name, made famous abroad by the Duke of Tarentum who served
Napoleon so well, became at home split into sub-clans not always on
the most clannish terms. Heaven forbid that any peaceful scribbler
should touch that bristling question, which of the sons of Donald
represents the senior branch from John of the Isles? Between Clanranald
and Glengarry has been in hot dispute a distinction which to the mere
Sassenach might suggest that between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. I am
instructed by an earnest genealogist that Clanranald, now a peaceful
householder of London, is the true prince. The Glengarry family, on the
other hand, has made more noise in the world. The heir of Glengarry,
like his neighbour Lochiel, viceroy of an exiled chieftain, held his
head gallantly in and after the ’45; but alas! his memory has lived to
be branded as “Pickle the Spy” in two books by which Mr. Andrew Lang
turns an accusing light on the “shabby romance” of later Jacobitism.
This blot of then invisible ink on his scutcheon would be unknown to
the Glengarry of Scott’s day—“XVII. Mac-Mic-Alaister,” as he styles
himself on a local monument—who posed so proudly, the last of the
chiefs. His friend, Sir Walter, speaks of him as a Highland Quixote,
and is understood to have taken him as model for Fergus M’Ivor. But the
chief of _Waverley_ showed more sense and more craft than Glengarry,
who in town and country strutted about with his “tail,” including a
bard, whose strains have been drowned by those of our Lowland last
minstrel. Not to speak of his controversy with Clanranald, more than
once this warm-hearted but hot-headed hero had to answer to the law
for violent proceedings in the good old style. He killed a young
grandson of Flora Macdonald in a duel, for which he was tried and
acquitted, the code of honour being still received as testimony in
courts. At the coronation of George IV. he appeared in full Highland
costume, including showy pistols which set a lady screaming at him
for a would-be regicide; and the indignant chief had to submit to
disarmament, in vain protesting that his weapons made as much part of
the character as his tartans. When the fat king came to Edinburgh in
kilts, and poor Scott sat down on the glass out of which sacred majesty
had drunk, Glengarry insisted on his swash-bucklers being adopted
in the royal bodyguard. He appeared to most advantage as a Nimrod,
lying out on the hills for a week together in his kilt and plaid. His
excellent breed of deerhounds was celebrated, one of them as Scott’s
Maida, named after a battle in which the chief’s brother fought for
King George. Such a picturesque survival of the past died, 1828, in a
prosaically modern accident, leaping from a steamboat that had struck
the rocky shore, where Loch Linnhe narrows to the bent Loch Eil. A
thousand guests came to his funeral feast and coronach.
It was quite in keeping with this chief’s personage to leave his
estate so much encumbered that the heir had to seek new fortunes in
Australia. Now, there is hardly a Macdonald in this country, once safe
for no other name, while there are thousands thriving in one corner of
Nova Scotia and in the Glengarry county of Ontario, where a jury has
been known to be half Donald Macdonalds. Much of Glengarry’s property
passed to Edward Ellice, a well-known Liberal statesman of the Bright
and Cobden period, intimate with men of light and leading whom the old
Glengarrys would have looked on as anathema. On Loch Quoich, the “cup”
so well filled by rain, stands a luxurious shooting lodge, provided
with electric light, motor-cars, and comforts undreamed of in the
Saltmarket, its visitors’ book enshrining a generation of distinguished
autographs. Glenquoich has been let on a long lease to a famous
Sassenach brewer, who here entertains King Edward VII. in princely
style among the wilds through which that poor Chevalier slunk ragged
and hungry, scared from the camp fires of his pursuers, and glad to
take refuge in a cave of robbers, scorning to betray him for more gold
than was ever handled by Pickle the Spy. A royal visit called forth an
article in the _Scotsman_, whence one may borrow a purple patch:
If there is in Scotland a grander view than can be seen from the shore
of Lochquoich on an autumn evening, the writer does not know of it.
The fairy land of the Celt was one of “seven bens and seven glens and
seven mountain moors,” but the moors and the glens and the bens around
Glenquoich fall to be numbered by the hundreds, and not by sevens.
Sheer from the water edge rise the mountains, green at their base,
flecked with heather along their sides, ridge upon ridge, peak upon
peak, overwhelming the mind with a feeling of that Omnipotence which
weigheth the mountains in scales and the hills in a balance, before
whom men are altogether vanity. West from the lodge the loch bends
slightly towards the south, and, narrowing as it recedes, it stretches
out towards the setting sun, pushing a tapering finger among the roots
of the giant hills; and the farther west it goes, the higher rise the
enveloping mountains. And the wonderful autumn sunsets of the west
flush them all—Sguir a’ Mhoraire, Sguir a’ Shlaidhemh, Sguir Gairoch,
Meall a’ Choire Bhuidh—till their splintered peaks and pinnacled
heads glow and glitter in amethyst and gold, while their sides gleam
with a hundred polished silver shields, and the stray clouds, sailing
inward from the western sea, glide high over their crests, swimming
in glory. And the light, still radiant above, fails in the corries
below, covering the slopes with a deep, deep blue, such a blue as one
sees only in the west when a mountain comes athwart the setting sun.
When the evening is still (and often the wind that rustles during the
day sinks at eve into a calm), the face of the loch is as a sheet of
glass, and deep in its translucent depths. The mountain crests and the
transfigured clouds melt one into another, trembling with the ecstasy
of their mingling, till the whole face of the loch is a veil through
which there glows a kaleidoscope of radiant colours, darting hither
and thither as if greeting and embracing one another.
[Illustration: INVERLOCHY CASTLE AND BEN NEVIS]
The Rough Bounds include a dozen freshwater lochs that hitherto
have had too little note in guide-books, the most renowned of them
Loch Arkaig, where the Macdonalds and other clans tried to rally
after Culloden, and where Prince Charlie’s treasure was hidden to
be a Nibelungen hoard of contention among their leaders. One of his
hiding-places here, near Lochiel’s seat, Achnacarry, was a cave in the
“Dark Mile,” a scene not less deserving of fame than the Trossachs.
Then the shores of this region present “one continued succession of
picturesque and grand objects, in every variety that can be produced
by bays, promontories, rocks, straits, and islands,” their aspects
again varied by “silent calm succeeding to all the fury of a raging
ocean, by the dark tempest and gale, the bright blue of the cloudless
sky, and the evening and morning splendours of a lingering sun.” From
Ardnamurchan, the westernmost swell of the mainland, the coast is
almost equally divided between bare peninsular ridges and deeply
pierced fiords, often wooded to the water’s edge, or bordered by
meadows that glow greener below the savage rocks of their background,
where sometimes Nature would seem to have heaped up materials for some
abandoned design. The intricate inlets of Loch Moidart are succeeded by
those about Arisaig, then comes the freshwater trough of Loch Morar,
tumbling down to the sea under a bridge at its mouth. A narrow ridge
keeps this from mingling with the tide of Nevis, “Loch of Heaven,”
itself separated by the Knoidart Hills from Loch Hourn, “Loch of Hell,”
indeed a place of gloom, its approach pronounced by Lord Avebury “the
most desolate and savage scene” in Scotland; and it gave a congenial
home to Barrisdale, that ruthless tyrant of Jacobite days, whose
chivalrous varnish Mr. Andrew Lang has roughly scratched to show the
Tartar beneath. Thus we come to Glenelg with its Pictish doons and its
Hanoverian barracks of Bernera, for which, a quarter of a century after
Culloden, a corporal and six men were garrison enough. Beyond this Skye
almost touches the mainland.
The Rough Bounds are now broken in on by the line to Mallaig; but
should the _laudator temporis acti_ be scared away from that thread of
iron rail, he can turn his back on such intrusion, holding down Loch
Shiel or Loch Sunart to the mountainous promontory of Ardnamurchan;
or southwards on the peninsula of Morven; or into the Moidart country
northwards, fastnesses of the old customs, the old tongue, and the old
faith. But ah!—
Deserted is the Highland glen,
And mossy cairns are o’er the men
That fought and died for Charlie!
The scattering and displacing of the clans had begun before Culloden,
when the heads of the Camerons and the Macdonells were in exile with
their legitimate sovereign. On the edge of the Rough Bounds the
Government had settled strangers, some of whom proved but perverse
agents of their civilising mission. Soon after 1715, as we learn
from a story in Burt, Glengarry had already been invaded by a troop
of woodcutters under leadership of an English Quaker. An industrial
undertaking of a kind rare in the Highlands was the lead-mining at the
head of Loch Sunart, where Strontian, famed also for a rare variety
of spar, has given its name to the metal whose carbonate was first
found here. Iron-smelting was another promoted industry. What with
miners, woodcutters, English flunkeys, Lowland shepherds, transported
gillies, rich proprietors, and sporting tenants, the population is
much transmogrified since the days when each glen made a more or less
happy family, as often as not on unhappy terms with its neighbours.
Of all the strangers brought here upon Marshal Wade’s roads, the most
effectual missionaries of the new order have been the Presbyterian
clergy, ordained to scant sympathy with the line that tried in vain to
dragoon them into Prelatism. Norman Macleod tells the story that when
a Morven laird came to church with a pistol, threatening to shoot the
minister if he prayed for the king, that undaunted divine laid two
cocked pistols on the pulpit cushion, and kept both eyes wide open
while performing this ticklish part of his function.
But where the Church by law established has the stipends, there are
still nooks where Rome has the hearts of the people, elsewhere over the
Highlands much given to the Free Church, two generations old. The best
preserves of Catholicism lie here and there on this west coast, taking
in some of the opposite islands, and straggling across the centre of
the Highlands into Braemar. Of these oases of faith, as seen from one
point of view, from another it is said that, as in Switzerland and
in Baden, they can be distinguished at a glance from the Protestant
districts by their aspect of greater poverty, with concomitant
shortcomings. At least they have a chance to be richer in the spirit of
a people once more disposed to the principles of the _Royalist_ than
to those of the _Edinburgh Review_. The Free Church clergy have been
specially inquisitorial against old customs, fostered rather by the
priests, who, so long as mass be not neglected, smile indulgently at
the diversions and the memories of their flock, nor frown too sternly
even at superstitious traditions. There was a time, of course, when
this Church appeared as champion of the new against the old. It may
be that in future generations we shall find enthusiasts as earnestly
contending for “Sabbath blacks” as once for tartans, cherishing
magic-lantern lectures when such have replaced Highland reels, and
sighing over the beloved national strains of the hurdy-gurdy silenced
by the gramophone, the diabolophone, or whatever sweetness musical
invention have in store for us—so easily do new customs grow to old
ones, and so soon are conservative souls set firm on their high horse
of sentiment!
Yet as the bagpipes have had a long lease in the Highlands, they
may be good for many lives still, in spite of clerical and artistic
condemnation. Nature here sets keynotes for the fierce exultation of
the pibroch and the wail of the coronach, with which are in tune the
songs and stories of this people. I am not going to wake the ghost of
Fingal, nor to rouse echoes of controversy over Ossian, a poet said
to have been blind like Homer and Milton, if he were not of the same
shadowy stuff as Thomas the Rhymer: he has been guessed as identical
with the Welsh Taliesin. Fin MacCoul’s kingdom of Morven is unknown to
history; but at least, for the Gael both of Albin and of Erin, such a
hero lived in popular imagination as truly as Arthur and Achilles. It
seems pretty well settled that the poems first published under Ossian’s
name owed much to Macpherson, who thus showed truly unpoetic modesty in
standing back from renown that rang through Europe, though in England,
nowadays, Leslie Stephen is not the only critic to yawn over what once
enchanted Goethe and Napoleon; and Macaulay speaks with his cock-surest
scorn “of a story without evidence and of a book without merit.” It
is also agreed that Macpherson worked upon some documents, human or
written. When Dr. Johnson came hunting purblindly for evidence against
a real Ossian, there were bards alive in the Highlands who could
neither read nor write, yet whose poems passed as household words from
one unlettered fireside to another.
In the next century scores of collections of Gaelic poetry came to be
made; and still monotonous strains are murmured in the native tongue
of the mountains. There are also stirring marches and choruses, like
_Gabhaidh sinn an rathad mòr_, a tune known to Cockneys as their
degraded “Kafoozlem,” that from the mouths of Appin Stewarts pealed
defiance to the Macintyres, who had their own clan anthem in the
grand song of _Cruachan Beann_. But sadness is the main note of these
intricate and assonant metres, long drawn out round themes of love,
war, and misfortune, like the “old unhappy things” of Ossian. In later
times hymns as long as sermons have coloured the Celt’s less active
life. Angry satire is another mood of his muse, and riddles seem to
have had zest for his boyish mind; but he shows little taste for hearty
humour. In Scotland we have a vulgar saw that it takes a surgical
operation to force a joke into an Englishman’s head; and that reproach
might as truly be applied to a pure Highlandman, of whom it is well
said that his very language, in its weakness of a present tense, seems
always looking forward to a melancholy future or back to a melancholy
past.
Nor have schoolbooks and newspapers yet banished the homely tales and
traditions that linger about the smouldering light of peat fires. We
have seen how these legends often recall those of other lands, all
shaped as they may have been in some far-off nursery of the race. But
here they take on sombre colours and congenial shadows, flickering and
glooming in the alternation of long pale twilights and short dark days.
One interest they lack, that hinted at in the phrase “smoking-room
stories,” a spice better relished in Saxon palaces than in Gaelic
shieling or bothy. The character of these tales is well expressed by
Alexander Smith, who, if he did not know Gaelic, had a poet’s ear for
the universal language of human nature, and moreover seems to have
drawn at that fountain of Highland folk-lore, J. F. Campbell’s _Popular
Tales of the West Highlands_:
As the northern nations have a common flora, so they have a common
legendary literature. Supernaturalism belongs to their tales as the
aurora borealis belongs to their skies. Those stories I have heard
in Skye, and many others, springing from the same roots, I have had
related to me in the Lowlands and in Ireland. They are full of witches
and wizards; of great wild giants crying out, “Hiv! Haw Hoagraich!
It is a drink of thy blood that quenches my thirst this night”; of
wonderful castles with turrets and banqueting halls; of magic spells
and the souls of men and women dolefully imprisoned in shapes of
beast and bird. As tales few of them can be considered perfect; the
supernatural element is strong in many, but frequently it breaks
down under some prosaic or ludicrous circumstance: the spell exhales
somehow, and you care not to read further. Now and then a spiritual
and ghastly imagination passes into a revolting familiarity and
destroys itself. In these stories all times and conditions of life are
curiously mixed, and this mixture shows the passage of the story from
tongue to tongue through generations. If you discover on the bleak
Skye shore a log of wood with Indian carvings peeping through a crust
of native barnacles, it needs no prophet to see that it has crossed
the Atlantic.... Many of these stories, even when they are imperfect
in themselves, or resemble those told elsewhere, are curiously
coloured by Celtic scenery and pervaded by Celtic imagination. In
listening to them, one is specially impressed by a bare, desolate,
woodless country; and this impression is not produced by any formal
statement of fact, it arises partly from the paucity of actors in
the stories, and partly from the desert spaces over which the actors
travel, and partly from the number of carrion crows, and ravens, and
malign hill-foxes which they encounter in their journeyings. The
“hoody,” as the crow is called, hops and flits and croaks through
all the stories. His black wing is seen everywhere. And it is the
frequent appearance of these beasts and birds, never familiar, never
domesticated, always outside the dwelling, and of evil omen when they
fly or steal across the path, which gives to the stories much of their
weird and direful character. The Celt has not yet subdued nature. He
trembles before the unknown powers. He cannot be sportive for the fear
that is in his heart. In his legends there is no merry Puck, no Ariel,
no Robin Goodfellow, no half-benevolent, half-malignant Brownie even.
These creatures live in imaginations more emancipated from fear. The
mists blind the Celt on his perilous mountain-side, the sea is smitten
white on his rocks, the wind bends and dwarfs his pine wood, and as
Nature is cruel to him, and as his light and heat are gathered from
the moor, and his most plenteous food from the whirlpool and the foam,
we need not be surprised that few are the gracious shapes that haunt
his fancy.
Campbell of Isla was just in time to save from oblivion the Gaelic
shape of far-travelled tales which even a generation ago the Gael felt
half ashamed to repeat before unsympathetic strangers, and which now
linger only in secluded glens and islands, told in the native tongue
round peat fires by old folks too dim-eyed for newspapers. Superstition
dies harder than romance; but of his superstitions he still less
cares to speak, nor always to confess them to himself. They too are
catholic and human, shaped by the environment of his life from the same
materials as in fatter lands have dwindled to a horse-shoe nailed on a
stable door. The student of mankind needs little research to fashion
such shadowy images as come so ready to the mind’s eye, “where every
object of nature, even the unreasoning dreams of sleep, are mirrors
which flash back death”; and from the Highlander’s misty shrouds of
moor and sea, from the wraiths of his swollen waters, from ominous
lights burning on cruel waves, from ghostly stirrings and tappings
about his lone home, he may well have turned to the faith preached by
St. Columba, yet is slow of assured belief that—
God’s in His heaven,
All’s right with the world!