SCENES AND LEGENDS
OF
THE NORTH OF SCOTLAND.
SCENES AND LEGENDS
OF
THE NORTH OF SCOTLAND;
OR,
The Traditional History of Cromarty.
BY HUGH MILLER,
AUTHOR OF ‘THE OLD RED SANDSTONE,’ ETC. ETC.
_EIGHTH EDITION._
EDINBURGH:
WILLIAM P. NIMMO.
1869.
DEDICATION
TO
SIR THOMAS DICK LAUDER
OF GRANGE AND FOUNTAINHALL, BARONET.
HONOURED SIR,
I am not much acquainted with what Goldsmith has termed the ceremonies
of a dedication. I know, however, that like other ceremonies, they are
sometimes a little tedious, and often more than a little insincere. But
it is well that, though dulness be involuntary, no one need deceive
unless he wills it. There are comparatively few who seem born to think
vigorously, or to express themselves well; but since all men may be
honest, though all cannot be original or elegant, every one, surely,
may express only what he feels. In dedicating this little volume to
you, I obey the dictates of a real, though perhaps barren, gratitude;
nor can I think of the kind interest which you have taken in my
amusements as a writer, and my fortunes as a man, without feeling that,
though I may be dull, I cannot be insincere.
There are other motives which have led to this address. He who
dedicates, more than expresses his gratitude. By his choice of a
Patron, he intimates also, as if by specimen, the class which he would
fain select as his readers; or, as I should perhaps rather express
myself, he specifies the peculiar cast of intellect and range of
acquirement from which he anticipates the justest appreciation of his
labours, and the deepest interest in the subject of them. Need I say
that I regard you, Sir Thomas, as a representative of the class whom
it is most my ambition to please? My stories, arranged as nearly as
possible in the chronological order, form a long vista into the past
of Scotland, with all its obsolete practices and all its exploded
beliefs. And where shall I find one better qualified to decide
regarding the truth of the scenery, the justness of the perspective, or
the proportions and costume of the figures, than he whom contemporary
genius has so happily designated as the “Poet and Painter of the great
Morayshire Floods?” I can form no higher wish than that my work may
prove worthy of so discerning a critic, or that you, Sir, may be as
fortunate in your _protégé_ as I in my patron.
I am, I trust, no _hypocrite_ in literature, but a right-hearted
devotee to whom composition is quite its own reward. If my little
volume succeed, I shall be gratified by reflecting that the pleasure
derived from it has not been confined to myself; if it fail, there
will be some comfort in the thought that it has proved, to at least
one mind, a copious source of entertainment. Besides, I am pretty
sure, I shall be sanguine enough to transfer to some production of the
future, the few hopes which, in the past, I had founded on it. And when
thinking of it as the “poor deceased,” I reflect that, at worst, it
was rather dull than wicked, and that it rather failed in performance
than erred in intention; I shall not judge the less tenderly regarding
it, when I further remember that it procured for me the honour of your
notice, and furnished me with this opportunity of subscribing myself,
Honoured Sir,
With sincere respect,
Your humble friend, and obedient Servant,
THE AUTHOR.
CROMARTY, 1834.
NOTE TO THE SECOND EDITION.
The present edition contains about one-third more matter than the
first. The added chapters, however, like those which previously
composed the work, were almost all written about twenty years ago,[1]
in leisure hours snatched from a laborious employment, or during the
storms of winter, when the worker in the open air has to seek shelter
at home. But it is always less disadvantageous to a traditionary work,
that it should have been written early than late. Of the materials
wrought up into the present volume, the greater part was gathered about
from fifteen to twenty years earlier still; and though some thirty-five
or forty years may not seem a very lengthened period, such has been
the change that has taken place during the lapse of the generation
which has in that time disappeared from the earth, that perhaps scarce
a tithe of the same matter could be collected now. We live in an age
unfavourable to tradition, in which the written has superseded the
oral. As the sun rose in his strength, the manna wasted away like
hoar-frost from off the ground.
In preparing my volume a second time for the press, I have felt
rather gratified than otherwise, that, at least, much of what it
contains should have been preserved. The reader will here and there
find snatches of dissertation, which would perhaps not be missed if
away--which, at all events, had they not been written before, would
have remained unwritten now; but which I have spared, partly for the
sake of the associations connected with them, and partly under the
impression that the other portions of the work would have less of
character if they were wanting. Some of these dissertative fragments
I have, however, considerably abridged, and there were others of a
similar kind in the first edition which have been wholly suppressed. In
my longer stories I have, I find, exercised the same sort of liberty
in filling up the outlines as that taken by the ancient historians in
their earlier chapters. Livy in the the times of the Empire could write
speeches for Romulus and Junius Brutus, and introduce them into his
narrative as authentic; and Tacitus details as minutely, in his Life
of Agricola, the deliberations of the warlike Caledonians as if he
had formed one of their councils. Even the sober Hume puts arguments
for and against toleration into the mouths of Cardinal Pole and his
opponents which belonged to neither the men nor the age. But though I
have, in some cases, given shade and colour to the original lines, in
no case have I altered the character of the drawing. I have only to
state further, that the reader, when he finds reference made, in the
indefinite style of the traditionary historian, to the years which have
elapsed since the events related took place, must add in every instance
twenty additional twelvemonths to the number; the some thirty bygone
years of my narratives have stretched out into half a century, and the
half century into the threescore years and ten.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
PAGE
My Old Library and its Contents--The Three Classes of
Traditions--Legend of Sludach--Singular Test of
Character--The Writer’s Pledge, 1
CHAPTER II.
Alypos--Etymological Legends--Epic Poetry of the Middle
Ages--Astorimon--The Spectre Ships--Olaus Rudbeck, 10
CHAPTER III.
The Bay of Cromarty--The Old Coast Line--The Old Town--The
Storms of the Five Winters--Donald Miller’s Wars with the
Sea, 25
CHAPTER IV.
Macbeth--Our earlier Data--The Fions of Knock-Ferril--The King’s
Sons--The Obelisks of Easter Ross--Dunskaith--The Urquharts
of Cromarty--Wallace--The Foray of the Clans--Paterhemon, 36
CHAPTER V.
Remains of the Old Mythology--The Devotional Sentiment--Interesting
Usages--Rites of the Scottish Halloween--The Charm
of the Egg--The Twelfth Rig--Macculloch’s Courtship--The
Extinct Spectres--Legend of Morial’s Den--The Guardian Cock, 55
CHAPTER VI.
A Scottish Town of the 17th Century--The Old Castle of the
Urquharts--Hereditary Sheriffship, 75
CHAPTER VII.
Sir Thomas Urquhart, 86
CHAPTER VIII.
The Reformation--Outbreaking at Rosemarkie--Sir John Urquhart
of Craigfintrie--The Ousted Ministers--Mr. Fraser of
Brea--Luggie, 105
CHAPTER IX.
The Chaplain’s Lair, 124
CHAPTER X.
The Curates--Donald Roy of Nigg--The Breaking of the Burgh--George
Earl of Cromartie--The Union, 143
CHAPTER XI.
Important Events which affect the Religious Character--Kenneth
Ore--Thomas Hogg and the Man-horse--The Watchman of
Cullicuden--The Lady of Ardvrock--The Lady of Balconie, 157
CHAPTER XII.
The Fisherman’s Widow, 177
CHAPTER XIII.
The Story of John Feddes--Andrew Lindsay, 194
CHAPTER XIV.
The Chapel of St. Regulus--Macleod the Smuggler--The Story of
Sandy Wood, 209
CHAPTER XV.
The Poor Lost Lad--A Ballad in Prose--Morrison the Painter, 221
CHAPTER XVI.
The Economy of Accident--The Black Years--Progress of the
Pestilence--The Quarantine--The Cholera, 235
CHAPTER XVII.
Martinmas Market--The Herring Drove--The Whale-Fishers--The
Flight of the Drove--Urquhart of Greenhill--Poem--William
Forsyth--The Caithness Man’s Leap, 250
CHAPTER XVIII.
Sandy Wright and the Puir Orphan, 267
CHAPTER XIX.
Tarbat Ness--Stine Bheag o’ Tarbat, 279
CHAPTER XX.
The Mermaid--The Story of John Reid--Maculloch the Corn-Agent--The
Washing of the Mermaid, 290
CHAPTER XXI.
The Bad Year--Sandison’s Spulzie--The Meal Mob, 305
CHAPTER XXII.
The Forty-Five--Nanny Miller’s Onslaught--The Retreat--The
Battle of Culloden--Old John Dunbar--Jacobite Psalm, 319
CHAPTER XXIII.
The Dropping Cave--The Legend of Willie Millar--A Boy
Adventurer--Fiddler’s Well, 329
CHAPTER XXIV.
Wars of the Town’s-people--Maculloch the Lawyer--The
Law-Plea--Roderick and the Captain--Mr. Henderson, 342
CHAPTER XXV.
The Churchyard Ghost--My Writing Room--The Broken Promise--The
Polander--The One-eyed Stepmother--The Pedlar--The
Green Lady--Munro the Post, 357
CHAPTER XXVI.
The Literati of Cromarty--Johnie o’ the Shore--Meggie o’ the
Shore--David Henderson--Macculloch of Dun-Loth, 377
CHAPTER XXVII.
The Gudewife of Minitarf, 395
CHAPTER XXVIII.
The Old School, and what it produced--Dr. Hossack--The hard
Dominie--Mr. Russel the minister--The Cock-Fight--Maculloch
the Mechanician, 408
CHAPTER XXIX.
The Itinerant Sculptor--Kirk-Michael--The Apprentice’s Dream--The
Wild Wife--Gordon of Newhall--Sir Robert Munro--Babble
Hanah, 432
CHAPTER XXX.
George Ross, the Scotch Agent, 449
CHAPTER XXXI.
The Burn of Eathie--Donald Calder--The Story of Tom M’Kechan--Fause
Jamie, 461
CHAPTER XXXII.
Our Town Politics--The First Whig--The Revolution--The Democracy--The
Procession--Hossack’s Pledge--The County Meeting--The
French War--Whiggism of the People, 473
SCENES AND LEGENDS.
THE TRADITIONAL HISTORY OF CROMARTY.
CHAPTER I.
“Tradition is a meteor, which, if once it falls, cannot be
rekindled.”--JOHNSON.
Extremes may meet in the intellectual as certainly as in the moral
world. I find, in tracing to its first beginnings the slowly
accumulated magazine of facts and inferences which forms the stock in
trade on which my mind carries on its work of speculation and exchange,
that my greatest benefactors have been the philosophic Bacon and an
ignorant old woman, who, of all the books ever written, was acquainted
with only the Bible.
[Sidenote: MY OLD LIBRARY AND ITS CONTENTS.]
When a little fellow of about ten or twelve years of age, I was much
addicted to reading, but found it no easy matter to gratify the
propensity; until, having made myself acquainted with some people in
the neighbourhood who were possessed of a few volumes, I was permitted
to ransack their shelves, to the no small annoyance of the bookworm and
the spider. I read incessantly; and as the appetite for reading, like
every other kind of appetite, becomes stronger the more it is indulged,
I felt, when I had consumed the whole, a still keener craving than
before. I was quite in the predicament of the shipwrecked sailor, who
expends his last morsel when on the open sea, and, like him too, I set
myself to prey on my neighbours. Old greyheaded men, and especially
old women, became my books; persons whose minds, not having been
preoccupied by that artificial kind of learning which is the result of
education, had gradually filled, as they passed through life, with the
knowledge of what was occurring around them, and with the information
derived from people of a similar cast with themselves, who had been
born half an age earlier. And it was not long before I at least
_thought_ I discovered that their narratives had only to be translated
into the language of books, to render them as interesting as even the
better kind of written stories. They abounded with what I deemed as
true delineations of character, as pleasing exhibitions of passion, and
as striking instances of the vicissitudes of human affairs--with the
vagaries of imaginations as vigorous, and the beliefs of superstitions
as wild. Alas! the epitaph of the famous American printer may now be
written over the greater part of the volumes of this my second library;
and so unfavourable is the present age to the production of more,
that even that wise provision of nature which implants curiosity in
the young, while it renders the old communicative, seems abridged of
one-half its usefulness. For though the young must still learn, the
old need not teach; the press having proved such a supplanter of the
past-world schoolmaster, Tradition, as the spinning-wheel proved in
the last age to the distaff and spindle. I cannot look back on much
more than twenty years of the past; and yet in that comparatively
brief space, I see the stream of tradition rapidly lessening as it
flows onward, and displaying, like those rivers of Africa which lose
themselves in the burning sands of the desert, a broader and more
powerful volume as I trace it towards its source.
It has often been a subject of regret to me, that this oral knowledge
of the past, which I deem so interesting, should be thus suffered to be
lost. The meteor, says my motto, if it once fall, cannot be rekindled.
Perhaps had I been as conversant, some five or ten years ago, with the
art of the writer as with the narratives of my early monitors, no one
at this time of day would have to entertain a similar feeling; but I
was not so conversant with it, nor am I yet, and the occasion still
remains. The Sibyline tomes of tradition are disappearing in this part
of the country one by one; and I find, like Selkirk in his island when
the rich fruits of autumn were dropping around him, that if I myself
do not preserve them they must perish. I therefore set myself to the
task of storing them up as I best may, and urge as my only apology
the emergency of the case. Not merely do I regard them as the produce
of centuries, and like the blossoms of the Aloe, interesting on this
account alone, but also as a species of produce which the harvests of
future centuries may fail to supply. True it is, that superstition
is a weed indigenous to the human mind, and will spring up in the
half-cultivated corners of society in every coming generation; but then
the superstitions of the future may have little in common with those of
the past. True it is, that human nature is intrinsically the same in
all ages and all countries; but then it is not so with its ever-varying
garb of custom and opinion, and never again may it wear this garb in
the curious obsolete fashion of a century ago.--Geologists tell us
that the earth produced its plants and animals at a time when the very
stones of our oldest ruins existed only as mud or sand; but they were
certainly not the plants and animals of Linnæus or Buffon.
[Sidenote: THE THREE CLASSES OF TRADITIONS.]
The traditions of this part of the country, and of perhaps every
other, may be divided into three great classes. Those of the first
and simplest class are strictly local; they record real events, and
owe their chief interest to their delineations of character. Those of
the second are pure inventions. They are formed mostly after a set of
models furnished perhaps by the later bards, and are common--though
varying in different places according to the taste of the several
imitators who first introduced them, or the chance alterations which
they afterwards received--to almost every district of Scotland. The
traditions of the third and most complex class are combinations of
the two others, with in some instances a dash of original invention,
and in others a mixture of that superstitious credulity which can
misconceive as ingeniously as the creative faculty can invent. The
value of stories of the first class is generally in proportion to their
truth, and there is a simple test by which we may ascertain the degree
of credit proper to be attached to them. There is a habit of minute
attention almost peculiar to the common people (in no class, at least,
is it more perfect than in the commonest), which leads them to take a
kind of microscopic survey of every object suited to interest them;
and hence their narratives of events which have really occurred are
as strikingly faithful in all the minor details as Dutch paintings.
Not a trait of character, not a shade of circumstance, is suffered to
escape. Nay more, the _dramatis personæ_ of their little histories are
almost invariably introduced to tell their own stories in their own
language. And though this be the easiest and lowest style of narrative,
yet to invent in this style is so far from being either low or easy,
that with the exception of Shakspere, and one or two more, I know not
any who have excelled in it. Nothing more common than those faithful
memories which can record whole conversations, and every attendant
circumstance, however minute; nothing less so than that just conception
of character and vigour of imagination, which can alone construct a
natural dialogue, or depict, with the nice pencil of truth, a scene
wholly fictitious. And thus though any one, even the weakest, can
mix up falsehoods with the truths related in this way, not one of a
million can make them amalgamate. The iron and clay, to use Bacon’s
illustration, retain their separate natures, as in the feet of the
image, and can as easily be distinguished.
The traditions of the second class, being in most instances only
imperfect copies of extravagant and ill-conceived originals, are much
less interesting than those of the first; and such of them as are
formed on the commoner models, or have already, in some shape or other,
been laid before the public, I shall take the liberty of rejecting.
A very few of them, however, are of a superior and more local cast,
and these I shall preserve. Their merit, such as it is, consists
principally in their structure as stories--a merit, I am disposed
to think, which, when even at the best, is of no high order. I have
observed that there is more of plot and counter-plot in our commonest
novels and lowest kind of plays, than in the tales and dramas of our
best writers; and what can be more simple than the fables of the Iliad
and the Paradise Lost!--From the third class of traditions I trust
to derive some of my choicest materials. Like those of the first,
they are rich in character and incident, and to what is natural in
them and based on fact, there is added, as in Epic poetry, a kind of
machinery, supplied either by invention or superstition, or borrowed
from the fictions of the bards, or from the old classics. In one or
two instances I have met with little strokes of fiction in them, of a
similar character with, some of even the finest strokes in the latter,
but which seem to be rather coincidences of invention, if I may so
express myself, than imitations.--There occurs to me a story of this
class which may serve to illustrate my meaning.
[Sidenote: LEGEND OF SLUDACH.]
In the upper part of the parish of Cromarty there is a singularly
curious spring, termed Sludach, which suddenly dries up every year
early in summer, and breaks out again at the close of autumn. It
gushes from the bank with an undiminished volume until within a few
hours before it ceases to flow for the season, and bursts forth on its
return in a full stream. And it acquired this peculiar character, says
tradition, some time in the seventeenth century. On a very warm day of
summer, two farmers employed in the adjacent fields were approaching
the spring in opposite directions to quench their thirst. One of them
was tacksman of the farm on which the spring rises, the other tenanted
a neighbouring farm. They had lived for some time previous on no very
friendly terms. The tacksman, a coarse, rude man, reached the spring
first, and taking a hasty draught, he gathered up a handful of mud,
and just as his neighbour came up, flung it into the water. “Now,”
said he, turning away as he spoke, “you may drink your fill.” Scarcely
had he uttered the words, however, when the offended stream began to
boil like a caldron, and after bubbling a while among the grass and
rushes, sunk into the ground. Next day at noon the heap of grey sand
which had been incessantly rising and falling within it, in a little
conical jet, for years before, had become as dry as the dust of the
fields; and the strip of white flowering cresses which skirted either
side of the runnel that had issued from it, lay withering in the sun.
What rendered the matter still more extraordinary, it was found that
a powerful spring had burst out on the opposite side of the firth,
which at this place is nearly five miles in breadth, a few hours after
the Cromarty one had disappeared. The story spread; the tacksman,
rude and coarse as he was, was made unhappy by the forebodings of his
neighbours, who seemed to regard him as one resting under a curse; and
going to an elderly person in an adjoining parish, much celebrated for
his knowledge of the supernatural, he craved his advice. “Repair,”
said the seer, “to the old hollow of the fountain, and as nearly as
you can guess, at the hour in which you insulted the water, and after
clearing it out with a clean linen towel lay yourself down beside it
and abide the result.” He did so, and waited on the bank above the
hollow from noon until near sunset, when the water came rushing up
with a noise like the roar of the sea, scattering the sand for several
yards around; and then, subsiding to its common level, it flowed on as
formerly between the double row of cresses. The spring on the opposite
side of the firth withdrew its waters about the time of the rite of
the cleansing, and they have not since re-appeared; while those of
Sludach, from that day to the present, are presented, as if in scorn,
during the moister seasons, when no one regards them as valuable, and
withheld in the seasons of drought, when they would be prized. We
recognise in this singular tradition a kind of soul or Naiad of the
spring, susceptible of offence, and conscious of the attentions paid
to it; and the passage of the waters beneath the sea reminds us of the
river Alpheus sinking at Peloponnesus to rise in Sicily.
[Sidenote: SINGULAR TEST OF CHARACTER.]
Next in degree to the pleasure I have enjoyed in collecting these
traditions, is the satisfaction which I have felt in contemplating the
various cabinets, if I may so speak, in which I found them stored up
according to their classes. For I soon discovered that the different
sorts of stories were not lodged indiscriminately in every sort of
mind--the people who cherished the narratives of one particular class
frequently rejecting those of another. I found, for instance, that the
traditions of the third class, with all their machinery of wraiths
and witches, were most congenial to the female mind; and I think I
can now perceive that this was quite in character. Women, taken in
the collective, are more poetical, more timid, more credulous than
men. If we but add to these general traits one or two that are less
so, and a few very common circumstances; if we but add a judgment
not naturally vigorous, an imagination more than commonly active, an
ignorance of books and of the world, a long-cherished belief in the
supernatural, a melancholy old age, and a solitary fireside--we have
compounded the elements of that terrible poetry which revels among
skulls, and coffins, and enchantments, as certainly as Nature did
when she moulded the brain of a Shakspere. The stories of the second
class I have almost never found in communion with those of the third;
and never heard well told--except as jokes. To tell a story avowedly
untrue, and to tell it as a piece of humour, requires a very different
cast of mind from that which characterized the melancholy people who
were the grand depositories of the darker traditions: they entertained
these only because they deemed them mysterious and very awful truths,
while they regarded open fictions as worse than foolish. Nor were
their own stories better received by a third sort of persons, from
whom I have drawn some of my best traditions of the first class, and
who were mostly shrewd, sagacious men, who, having acquired such a
tinge of scepticism as made them ashamed of the beliefs of their weaker
neighbours, were yet not so deeply imbued with it as to deem these
beliefs mere matters of amusement. They did battle with them both
in themselves and the people around them, and found the contest too
serious an affair to be laughed at. Now, however (and the circumstance
is characteristic), the successors of this order of people venture
readily enough on telling a good ghost story, when they but get one to
tell. Superstition, so long as it was living superstition, they deemed,
like the live tiger in his native woods, a formidable, mischievous
thing, fit only to be destroyed; but now that it has perished, they
possess themselves of its skin and its claws, and store them up in
their cabinets.
[Sidenote: THE WRITER’S PLEDGE.]
I have thus given a general character of the contents of my departed
library, and the materials of my proposed work. My stories form a kind
of history of the district of country to which they belong--hence
the title I have chosen for them; and, to fill up some of those
interstices which must always be occurring in a piece of history
purely traditional, I shall avail myself of all the little auxiliary
facts with which books may supply me. The reader, however, need be
under no apprehension of meeting much he was previously acquainted
with; and, should I succeed in accomplishing what I have purposed, the
local aspect of my work may not militate against its interest. Human
nature is not exclusively displayed in the histories of only great
countries, or in the actions of only celebrated men; and human nature
may be suffered to assert its claim on the attention of the beings
who partake of it, even though the specimens exhibited be furnished
by the traditions of an obscure village. Much, however, depends on
the manner in which a story is told; and thus far I may vouch for the
writer. I have seriously resolved not to be tedious, unless I cannot
help it; and so, if I do not prove amusing, it will be only because I
am unfortunate enough to be dull. I shall have the merit of doing my
best--and what writer ever did more? I pray the reader, however, not to
form any very harsh opinion of me for at least the first four chapters,
and to be not more than moderately critical on the two or three that
follow. There is an obscurity which hangs over the beginnings of all
history--a kind of impalpable fog--which the writer can hardly avoid
transferring from the first openings of his subject to the first pages
of his book. He sees through this haze the men of an early period “like
trees walking;” and, even should he believe them to be beings of the
same race with himself, and of nearly the same shape and size--a belief
not always entertained--it is impossible for him, from the atmosphere
which surrounds them, to catch those finer traits of form and feature
by which he could best identify them with the species. And hence a
necessary lack of interest.