“ABERDEEN AWA’!”
There seems no general name to fit a part of Scotland which has a very
marked character, that lowland shelf lying beyond the Grampians along
the Moray Firth, where the counties of Aberdeen, Banff, Moray, and Nairn
are comparatively flat on the north side, but on the south rise into
grand mountains. The “back end of the Highlands” would not be a
dignified title; “Moray and Mar” is not an inclusive one, nor is
“Deeside and Speyside.” One seems driven to indicate this as the
district of which Aberdeen is the capital, environed by the “four
nations,” Angus, Mar, Buchan, and Moray, a division of local mankind
copied by her university from Paris.
Angus _alias_ Forfar, and Kincardine _alias_ the Mearns, are lowland
counties whose streams come down from a Highland background to a
coast-line of broad sandy links on the Tay estuary, and weatherworn
sandstone cliffs facing the open sea. We might linger here by notable
names beyond Dundee--Arbroath, with its ruined Abbey, the scene of the
_Antiquary_; Montrose, that Flemish-like town that has belied its
Cavalier name by rearing such sons as Andrew Melville, the reformer, and
Joseph Hume, the
[Illustration: DUNNOTTAR CASTLE, KINCARDINESHIRE]
economist; Stonehaven, seat of the Barclays of Ury known in so different
ways; and Brechin, with its Cathedral and Round Tower, neighboured by
castles old and new. In this countryside settled the head of W. E.
Gladstone’s family, which, however, had moved from some _Gledstone_ or
“Hawk’s rock” in the south of Scotland to make fortunes in England by
trade. Sir Thomas, the great Liberal’s brother, was a sound
Conservative, of whom is told that at an election, seeing a son of the
soil anxious to salute him, he stopped his carriage, and accepted a
grasp of the horny hand, qualified by “For the sake o’ yer brither!”
By the wild glens of the North and South Esk let us pass into Braemar,
mountain region of Mar, the very cream of the Highlands, whose highest
summits, Ben Nevis left out of account, are grouped in the south of
Aberdeenshire. A generation ago Ben Nevis had not been crowned by
revolutionary surveyors, and Ben Macdhui was still held monarch of
Scottish mountains, keeping his state among the Cairngorms, that here
have half-a-dozen truncated peaks over or hardly under 4000 feet, Ben
Muich Dhui, as Gaelic purists would have us call it, Brae-riach,
Cairntoul, the Peak of Cairngorm, Ben-a-bourd, and Ben A’an, heads of
the grandest mountain mass in the British Isles. This is the native
heath of sturdy Highland stocks, Farquharsons, Macphersons, and
M‘Hardys, Durwards, Coutts, and Stuarts, of whose exploits and
traditions more than one book has been written. The folklorist will not
be surprised to find how the legends of Braemar re-echo those of other
lands. Here a crafty female Ulysses disables a giant and plays off on
him a joking name that puts the stupid fellow to a loss in calling for
help. Here a MacTell wins his liberty by shooting at a mark placed on
the head of his wife, with an arrow in reserve for the tyrant, in case
his first aim should not be true. Here an outlawed David in tartans lays
his sword on the throat of a sleeping Saul, then awakens him to
reconciliation. Here a squire of low degree comes by his high-born lass
in the end; and the youngest of three brothers of course wins the race
of fortune, though handicapped like a Cinderella.
This majestic crown of Scotland was chosen as the home of our late
Queen, but not then for the first time had Braemar and its Castleton to
do with royalty. If all tales be true, here was the cradle of Banquo’s
race, he to whom the fateful sisters promised a long line of kings,
himself cut off as foretaste of so many violent ends. Malcolm Canmore,
son of Duncan, had a seat at Braemar, where he often lived with his
Saxon wife. He is said to have founded the autumn gathering, now tamed
into a spick and span show of holiday Highlanders, but in old days a
grand hunting party, more than once an assemblage for serious purposes.
Taylor, the Water Poet, on his “Penniless Pilgrimage,” after being duly
rigged out in tartan, was taken by Lord Mar to the Braemar Hunt, when
under mountains to which this Cockney declares that “Shooters’ Hill,
Gad’s Hill, Highgate Hill, Hampstead Hill” are but mole-hills--
Through heather, moss, ’mongst frogs and bogs and fogs,
’Mongst craggy cliffs and thunder-battered hills,
Hares, hinds, bucks, roes are chased by men and dogs,
Where two hours’ hunting fourscore fat deer kills.
Lowland, your sports are low as are your seat,
The Highland games and minds are truly great!
It was under cover of the Braemar hunt of 1715, such a gathering as a
generation later had Captain Waverley for eye-witness, that Mar hatched
the Jacobite rebellion against George I., of which Scott aptly quotes--
The child may rue that is unborn
The hunting of that day.
When the Pretender’s standard was raised at the Castleton, a hollow of
rock by the Linn of Quoich, known as “the Earl of Mar’s Punchbowl,” is
said to have been filled with several ankers of spirits, gallons of
boiling water, and hundredweights of honey, a mighty brew in which to
drink success to that unlucky enterprise. In 1745, also, the sons of Mar
gave their blood freely to the cause of the Pretender, though this time
their lords were rather on the Whig side. Jacobite sentiment remained
strong in the district up to our own time. In 1824 was buried at
Castleton Peter Grant, who passed for being 110 years old, and probably
the last survivor of Culloden. To his dying day he would never drink the
Hanoverian king’s health, yet this constancy seems somewhat marred by
the fact that, like Dr. Johnson, he accepted a pension from the usurping
line. In our time all devotion to memories of Prince Charlie have been
transferred to the sovereign lady who here would have lived as a private
person, so far as possible, but was sore hindered by the snobbish
curiosity that mobbed her even in the village church. Not that Highland
loyalty is always enlightened, if we may believe a story told by Mr.
George Seton of one Donald explaining to another the meaning of the
Queen’s Jubilee: “When ye’re married twenty-five years, that’s your
silver wedding; and fifty years is your golden wedding; and if your
man’s deid, they ca’ it a Jubilee”!
Braemar, indeed, with its bracing air and glorious mountains, is not for
every tourist. Hotels are few and dear; there is little accommodation
between cot and castle; ramblers are not made welcome in the deer
forests around; and a countryside of illustrious homes cannot be left
open to all and sundry. When royalty be in residence, there are no doubt
keepers on the watch who have to guard something better than game; and
the trespassing stranger may find himself under observation as strict as
that of Dartmoor or Portland Island. In the promised elysium of
socialism both palaces and prisons may be turned into hydropathics; and
Braemar, 1000 feet above the sea, makes a princely health resort, with
no want of water. But access to this backwater of travel is itself
somewhat prohibitive to the strangers who would scamper over Scotland in
six days. The railway from Aberdeen comes no farther up the Dee than
Ballater. The direct access to Castleton is that of a long coach drive
by the Spittal of Glenshee. Pedestrians have the best of it in rough
tramps up Glen Tilt or Glen Clova from the south, or from Aviemore on
Speyside, over a pass 2750 feet high, and with a chance of losing their
adventurous way in Rothiemurchus Forest, where Messrs. Cook’s coupons
are of no avail. Once at the village capital of the district, one can
visit most of its lions on pony-back, the Falls of Corriemulzie and of
the Garrawalt, the Linn of Dee, Glen Cluny and Glen Callater, and even
the top of the mighty Muich Dhui, thus ascended by Queen Victoria. But
the Cairngorms show their jewels rather to him who, like
[Illustration: OLD MAR BRIDGE AND LOCHNAGAR, ABERDEENSHIRE]
Byron, can roam “a young Highlander o’er the dark heath,” climbing “thy
summit, O Morven of snow,” and getting cheerfully drenched among the
“steep frowning glories of dark Lochnagar.”
If peer or poet could hasten from these royal Highlands, Byron’s
restless muse might rejoice in the motor cars that now connect Braemar
with the fortunate Deeside railway. Down the strath of Dee, we descend
to the lowland country by beautiful gradations. Past the old and the new
Castles of Braemar, past Invercauld, Crathie, and Abergeldie, by the
“Rock of Firs” and round the “Rock of Oaks,” is the way to Ballater, a
neat little town about a railway terminus, that makes it more of a
popular resort. On the other side of the river are the chalybeate wells
of Pananich, one of those unfamed spas held in observance by country
folk all over Scotland. It was at a farmhouse here that Byron spent his
Aberdeen school holidays; and happy should be the schoolboy who can
follow in his steps, forgetting examinations and cricket averages. But
alas! for the Aberdeen citizen who, on trades’ holidays, seeks this
lovely scene when it is veiled in mist and pelting showers. Him the
Invercauld Arms receives as refuge; him sometimes a place of sterner
entertainment. There is also a temperance hotel. Over the Moor of
Dinnet, the railway takes us to Aboyne, another pleasant resort on
Deeside, along which we find hotels for tourists and sportsmen, a
hydropathic for health-seekers, a sanitorium for consumptives, and
thickening villages which, on the lower reaches, become the Richmonds
and Wimbledons of Aberdeen.
The Granite City of Bon Accord, with its old Cathedral and Colleges, if
for a little overgrown by that upstart Dundee, comes after Edinburgh and
Glasgow in dignity, well deserving such attention as Dr. Johnson gave to
its lions. It has shifted its site from the Don towards the Dee, between
whose mouths it almost touches the sands, and golf and sea bathing are
among its pleasures, while in an hour the Deeside railway runs one up
into the Highlands. The old town has here dwindled to a suburb, the new
one laid out with striking regularity and solidity, relieved by such
nooks as the Denburn Gardens, across which Union Street reaches by the
tower of the Town Hall to Castlegate and the Cross, where a colossal
statue of the last Duke of Gordon and an imposing block of Salvation
Army buildings represent a contrast of old and new times.
The Aberdonians, as is known, pride themselves on a hard-headedness
answering to their native granite. The legend goes that an Englishman
once attempted to defraud these far northerners, but the charge against
him was scornfully dismissed by an Aberdeen bailie: “The man must be
daft!” By the rest of Scotland, Aberdeen is looked on as concentrating
its qualities of pawkiness, canniness, and thrawnness; the Edinburgh man
cracks upon it the same sort of jokes as the Cockney upon Scotland in
general. The accent and dialect of this corner, strongly flavoured with
Norse origin and sharp sea-breezes, are quite peculiar. Norse origin, I
have said--and this has been held the main stock; but a recent
anthropological examination seems to show that even in seaward Buchan
only a minority of the school children are fair-haired. This sketch has
nothing for it but resolutely to forswear all such upsetting inquiries,
which nowadays go so far as to deny that any part of Scotland was purely
Celtic, and may some day prove us the original strain of Adam, whose
migration from Paradise to replenish the whole earth would be quite
consistent with a birthright in “Aberdeen awa’!”
Aberdeenshire is on the whole a matter-of-fact county, by industry rich
in “horn and corn,” not without its pleasant nooks, and on the south
rising into those royalest Highlands. Buchan, the most Aberdeenish part
of Aberdeen, has a grandly rugged coast, with the cauldron called the
Buller of Buchan, and the Dripping Cave of Slains for famous points,
till lately much out of the way of travel, but now a railway opens the
golf links of Cruden Bay, between the old and the new Slains Castles,
whose lord, as Boswell observed, has the king of Denmark for nearest
north-eastern neighbour to the High Constable of Scotland. Beyond, at
this bleak corner, come the fishing towns of Peterhead and Fraserburgh,
where Frasers are as thick as blackberries, their name, along the coast,
being no distinction without a _tee_-name (_agnomen_) by which a
prosperous fisherman may sign his cheques, or an ill-doing one be haled
before the sheriff.
Inland, Aberdeen is rather the country of the gay Gordons, no real
Hielandmen, but emigrants from the south, of whom it is not for me to
say good words, inasmuch as I am kin to their hereditary neighbours,
which is as much as to say enemies, the Forbes. Yet, “in spite of
spite,” one must admit that the Gordons flourish here, as on their
native borderland, in Poland, in Russia, indeed all over the world. The
“Cock of the North” has cause not to crow so boldly as of yore; and
regiments cannot now be raised by bounty of a Gordon Duchess’ kisses;
but no less than three noble houses of the name have seats in this
region, lordliest among them Gordon Castle, the northern Goodwood.
The interior of this promontory has a prevailing aspect of prosperous
commonplace; but here, too, are patches of romance and superstition.
Turriff, for instance, looks as quiet a little town as any in the
kingdom, yet at the Trot of Turriff was shed the first blood of our
civil wars. A pool in the river has a wild legend of family plate thrown
into it in those troubled times and found in guard of the devil by one
who dived for its recovery. This is a legend of Gicht, the home of
Byron’s mother, that also has the subterranean passage of tradition,
explored by so many a piper, whose strains were heard dying away
underfoot till they went silent in what uncanny world! Near Gicht, Fyvie
Castle contains a secret chamber which must not be opened on pain of the
laird’s death, and a stone that weeps for any approaching calamity to
his house. There came a new laird from London, a man of metropolitan
scepticism, nay, even a teetotaller, who regaled his scandalised
neighbours with zoedone and such like. He was reported to have given out
an intention of opening the secret chamber, but when pressed to do so in
presence of certain local dignitaries, he turned it off with a laugh.
Mark the sequel: this gentleman died suddenly very soon afterwards, so
he might have opened the fateful chamber _whatever_. One of the
treasures of the castle, a scrap of faded tartan from Prince Charlie’s
plaid, reverently preserved under a glass case, was being exhibited to
me by the parish minister, when he felt himself tapped on the shoulder
by
[Illustration: BALMORAL, ABERDEENSHIRE]
the laird: “Did I hear you say the _Pretender_?”--a softened form of
Lady Strange’s rebuke for the same lapse, “_Pretender_, forsooth, and be
dawmed to ye!” Another family in this district is believed, and believes
itself, never to have thriven since its head was cursed by a Macdonald
massacred in Glencoe. These are but samples of the old-world ideas that
turn up in the soil so carefully tilled by Johnny Gibb of Gushetneuk.
Maybe the reader has never heard of Johnny Gibb--then the loss is his.
This book is well known in Scotland as a head of the “kailyard” school
that has flourished here since the days of Galt, though only of late
some caprice of taste gave it a vogue in the south. The examples most
popular in England do not always commend themselves to Scotsmen, who
find one and another aspect of their character overcharged to move the
sighs or grins of barren readers. At home is better appreciated such a
writer as William Alexander, who, risen from herd loon to editor of an
Aberdeen paper, knew his countryfolk thoroughly, and depicted them with
an art that never oversteps the modesty of nature. One can hardly press
Johnny Gibb on a stranger, weighted as he is with an uncouth dialect and
with a serious stiffening of Disruption principles. But, to my mind, if
Dr. John Brown had not written _Rab and his Friends_, William
Alexander’s _Life among my ain Folk_ would be the flower of the
kailyard: a collection of humble Aberdeenshire idylls, as seen by a
shrewdly humorous eye, which can soften in not overstrained sentiment
when it regards the “little wee little anes” and “wee bit wifickies”
that draw from sons of a hard soil such endearing diminutives so
characteristic of their wind-bitten speech. If I am not mistaken,
George Eliot’s _Scenes of Clerical Life_ may have set a copy for these
round-hand pages, not to be taken as lessons in spelling, for only too
faithfully do they reproduce the local dialect.
Johnny Gibb deals with the essence of Presbyterianism, as distilled in
Aberdeenshire Strathbogie during the non-intrusion controversy. But this
part of the country is, in fact, much divided as to religious sentiment.
About Aberdeen, the old Episcopal church is still rooted in the soil,
elsewhere in Scotland rather a greenhouse plant. The Covenanters made
war upon this prelatic city, and in its county Montrose brewed the storm
that swept down upon Whigamore strongholds. Hereabouts it was
Presbyterian divines who, after the Revolution Settlement, had sometimes
to be inducted at the bayonet’s point upon unwilling parishioners; then
Cumberland’s soldiers marching to Culloden could find plenty of sport in
burning non-juring meeting-houses. The Roman Catholic element is still
strong also, especially in the Highland part, many of the clans, from
Aberdeen across to Skye, having stuck to the old faith. The Frasers have
two heads, him of the Lovat branch a Catholic, but his namesake of
Saltoun a Protestant. Blairs College on Deeside is a notable Catholic
seminary, containing fine portraits of Queen Mary and Cardinal Beaton.
The Roman Cathedral of Aberdeen has no cause to hide itself, but stands
up boldly among its Free Church neighbours. In some parts of Scotland, a
Papist is looked on askance, but in this northern belt, the two creeds
have come to a _modus vivendi_, the parish minister perhaps saying grace
before dinner and the priest returning thanks.
On the same shoulder of Scotland a similar contrast is shown in the
matter of climate. The point of Buchan ended by Kinnaird Head has the
name of being the coldest part of the kingdom, but farther up the Moray
Firth, the counties of Moray and Nairn are so situated and sheltered as
to be more genial than most of England. Forres, which Shakespeare vainly
imagined as a bleak and blasted heath “fit for murders, treasons,
stratagems,” has in fact the mean climate of London, cooler in summer,
warmer in winter; and the whole district vies with East Norfolk for the
honour of being Britain’s driest corner, so that the Forres Hydropathic,
with its miles of pine-wood walks, makes both a winter and a summer
resort, while a light and porous soil supports fat farming.
The country has many beauty spots also, even among its lowland features,
swelling to the Highlands of Brae Moray, from which Wolves of Badenoch
once swept down upon its folds as Roderick Dhus upon the Forth’s “waving
fields and pastures green.” The Findhorn, in whose valley Gordons and
Cummings have met lovingly, Professor Blackie calls “one of the finest
stretches of dark mountain water and picturesque wood in the Highlands.”
Mr. Charles St. John is eloquent in praise of this river, where he made
so careful studies in natural history. Rising in a wild solitude, it
leaves the open ground to hide its charms among noble forests and
beneath steep cliffs, at whose foot the angler may have to run for his
life, its sudden spates now pressed up in a gorge a few feet wide, then
making a bore-like wave on such a dark basin as that of the old Bridge
of Dulsie, “shut in by grey and fantastic rocks, surmounted with the
greenest of grass swards, with clumps of the ancient weeping birches
with their gnarled and twisted stems, backed again by the dark pine
trees. The river here forms a succession of very black and deep pools,
connected with each other by foaming and whirling falls and currents, up
which in the fine, pure evenings you may see salmon making curious
leaps.” Another notable reach shows the grounds of Altyre with its
heronry. From these wooded gorges, so rich in finned and feathered life,
the river emerges on a tamer plain, to enter the sea by the Sahara of
Culbin, a singular coast-line, where cultivated fields have been long
ago overwhelmed by sandhills, banks of shingle, and piles of stones, all
barren but for patches of bent and broom, sheltering huge foxes, hares,
and rabbits, that sally forth to prey upon the farms behind, like any
Highland chieftain. Moray and Nairn thus present a fine variety of
scenery, dotted by ancient mansions like Darnaway Castle, with its hall
that holds a thousand armed men, and Cawdor Castle, which one legend
makes the scene of Macbeth’s murder. No part of Scotland indeed, has
more ruined shrines and strongholds than the old _Moravia_, a name once
extending beyond the present bounds of Moray _alias_ Elgin.
Elgin, the town, built of a warm, yellow sandstone that helps it to a
cheerful look, may call itself a city in right of what seems to have
been the noblest Cathedral in Scotland, violated by wild Highlandmen
when this lowland strip too much invited plunder and ravage. The town
has other ruins to show, besides those of Pluscarden Priory some miles
off, and of Spynie Palace on the way
[Illustration: STRATH GLASS, INVERNESS-SHIRE]
to Lossiemouth, Elgin’s rising bathing-place, whose name should be
familiar to readers of George MacDonald’s novels. A little farther along
the coast, Nairn, which a Scots king boasted for so long as to have one
end in the Highlands, the other in the Lowlands, is now able to hold
itself up as the “Brighton of the North,” recommended by a mild climate,
and by golf-links on the shore, not perched on diabolic downs, as behind
the Londoner’s resort.
Gouty southrons may well find their way so far north, but they do ill to
pass by the recesses of this country, now that the Highland Railway cuts
straight across from Aviemore to Inverness. Grantown above Speyside,
indeed, is much sought as a high and dry health resort. Another place
that begins to put in a claim to the same favour is Tomintoul, at the
south end of Banff, the loftiest village in the Highlands, a hundred
feet or so higher than Buxton, and with a chalybeate well that would
work fashionable cures if it could only get a London doctor to patronise
it, while the sub-Alpine site and the mainly Catholic population might
help to give an illusion of _Swillingheim-am-Fluss_ or _Argent les
Eaux_. A very illustrious author expressed the picturesqueness of
Tomintoul by calling it the “dirtiest, poorest village in the whole of
the Highlands,” but that was a generation ago, and the Tomintoulers are
not likely to insist on perpetuating such a compliment, as Aberdeen
solicitors to this day take the higher style of Advocates, because once
so addressed by King James. A more famous spring, as yet, of this region
rises in a distillery which does not want a _vates sacer_--
Fairshon had a son who married Noah’s daughter,
And nearly spoilt ta Flood, by drinking up ta water,
Which he would have done, I verily believe it,
Had ta mixture been only half Glenlivet.
But we have jumped over Banff, which may resent being taken for an
appendage of Aberdeen,--long, narrow strip squeezed in between Moray and
Mar, as it runs up from its northern cliff face, set with fishing
villages, to the grand Highlands of Deeside. Banff has a bad name among
Scottish counties for a certain fault of morals which has been charged
upon all Scotland, though as a matter of fact it attaches only to some
parts, and pleas may be given in excuse: for one, the custom of such
irregular unions as under the name of “handfasting” were long winked at
in this corner; for another, the accommodating Scottish law that wipes
out by legal marriage a transgression too lightly treated by local
opinion, as not by Jean Armour’s lover when, now and then, his song
turned out a sermon. In other respects Banff may pose as a homespun
Arcadia. Some twenty years ago, when I knew it, there were not thirty
policemen in the whole county, and the county town was hard put to it to
confine prisoners for a single night. The only familiar crime was that
wont to be solemnly indicted before the Sheriff as “Making a great
noise, opposite, or nearly opposite the Free Church Manse, cursing and
swearing, and challenging to fight,” _i.e._ in the blunter English of
southern police courts, being drunk and disorderly; then it would be a
point of legal acumen not to fine the almost always repentantly avowing
offender more than he was likely to have at command. The authorities
stood in dread that some Englishman or the like would break the law more
seriously, as happened when a vagrant conjuror with an Italian name, but
speaking in a strong Whitechapel accent, conjured a pair of boots into
his illegal possession, and had to be sent all the way to Elgin at the
expense of the county. Later on, Banff got a jail of its own opened,
which I one day visited and found the only captive sociably doing a job
of work for the keeper’s wife. One case of theft, indeed, was not
unknown, that of boys brought into illicit relations with apples or the
like; but when an urchin was sentenced to be whipped for such puerile
weakness, the small police force, with the fear of his mother in their
eyes, struck, or rather refused to strike, and I believe the culprit
went scot-free.
The absence of vulgar crime is still more marked in the Highlands,
where, but for whisky and religious zeal, there would be little need of
magistrates. “Ye see, if they stole anything, they couldn’t get it off
the island,” a Bute cynic once explained to me; but on the mainland
opposite, I have known the ladies of a family leave their bathing dress
hanging over the hedge by the roadside for weeks together. It was only
on the grand and gallant scale that John Highlandman made a confusion
between _meum_ and _tuum_. But a distinctly litigious disposition in
trifles keeps northern lawyers from starving among clients who, like
Bartoline Saddletree and Peter Peebles, often cherish a strong amateur
interest in law. In Dandie Dinmont’s country, we know, a man was “aye
the better thought o’ for having been afore the Feifteen.”
Now that everybody subscribes to an Encyclopædia, it may not be
necessary to remind readers how the Scots law is founded on the Roman,
and how the practice of courts differs north and south of the Tweed. The
administration of justice in Scotland seems now an example to England,
whatever it may have been in the past. Feudalism died slow here. Baron
courts continued to be held to our own day, though shorn of such unjust
privilege as that by which the lord’s bailie decided questions between
himself and his tenants. There was a time when only high treason was
withheld from the jurisdiction of these private Solons. Then they lost
power to adjudicate in the “four pleas of the crown,”--murder, rape,
robbery, and arson, unless in the case of the slayer taken red-hand or
the thief _infang_ with the stolen property in his possession within the
barony bounds. So late as 1707 Lord Drummond was good enough to “lend”
his executioner to the city of Perth. After Culloden, hereditary judges
like the Baron of Bradwardine were wholly deprived of the right of
_furca et fossa_, the drowning of female and hanging of male offenders.
Yet a generation ago the dispensers of minor justice in certain towns
were the “bailies” of the superior, whom in one case I have known to be
an Australian squatter and his distant deputy a respectable carpenter,
while in such a town as Dalkeith, the Duke of Buccleuch appointed an
able lawyer as permanent magistrate. The adoption of the Police Act
brought this state of things to an end; and the baron’s judicial rights,
if not formally abolished, have practically dwindled out of existence.
The part of police magistrate and county court judge is doubled by the
sheriff, an official whose title may be a
[Illustration: A PEEP OF THE GRAMPIANS, INVERNESS-SHIRE]
stumbling-block to Englishmen, and still more to inquiring foreigners
like Count Smalltork. Nothing is apter to perplex our Continental
neighbours than the irregularities of our constitution, the overlapping
of boundaries, the general want of such symmetrical and consistent
arrangement as recommends itself to the Latin or the well-drilled Teuton
mind. What a pitfall for the foreign student of our institutions lies in
the fact of a sheriff being an honorary dignitary in an English county,
an elected constable in an American one, but a paid and permanent judge
north of the Tweed! The shire reeves here were in feudal times
hereditary lieutenants of the Crown, who, as the baron handed over
judicial authority to his clerkly bailie, appointed legal
representatives, still entitled Sheriffs Depute, also known as Sheriffs
Principal, as they have come to be. These well-paid offices are prizes
of the bar, held by successful advocates in Edinburgh, who only in
special cases or by way of appeal are called to judgment. The everyday
work of minor justice, civil and criminal, is done by resident paid
officials, called Sheriffs Substitute, each, in his own district,
wearing a halo of authority as “the Sheriff,” usually an advocate who
has resigned the risks of practice to devote himself to this safer if
less ambitious career, as is the case with the French magistracy. There
are also Justices of the Peace, as in England, but these do not come so
much before the public.
It need hardly be said that such a professional judge, assisted in
important criminal cases by a jury, and checked in civil suits by right
of appeal to his principal, makes a clearer fountain of justice than the
Great Unpaid of an English Bench, who with the best intentions as to
fairness must often depend on their clerk for law. In some points of
procedure, too, the Scottish system sets a good example to the English.
Prosecutions are not left in private hands, but are conducted by a
public official. The Procurator-Fiscal is the Attorney-General of the
Sheriff’s Court, also performing the duties of Coroner without the
meddling of a jury or reporters, though in late years public inquests in
certain cases of death have been introduced into Scottish practice.
Petty offenders are disposed of by the Sheriff off-hand. More serious
charges he remits to the consideration of the Crown officers in
Edinburgh, who decide before what court the prisoner shall be tried. The
first step is his being brought to private audience of the Sheriff, who,
taking care that he do not prejudice his cause, invites him to tell his
story, often the only way of getting at the real facts. Another
practical arrangement is that of a “pleading diet,” at which criminals
with no defence have a chance of submitting to the law and being
sentenced with as little ado as may be.
While certain crimes, made heinous by the law of Moses, are still marked
on the Scottish statute-book as to be punished with Draconian severity,
and while in “good old days” the gallows, the lash, and the
branding-iron were as freely used as south of the Border, the
administration of the law here has come to be notably mild. Executions
are rare, as, indeed, are cases of premeditated murder. In criminal
trials, a Scottish jury numbers fifteen, and their verdict is that of
the majority. Perhaps a deeper sense of the issues of life and death
begets a stronger reluctance to send a fellow-man to the scaffold, and
often prompts the verdict of “Not proven,” by which so many a criminal
goes free yet hardly stainless.
From Aberdeen to Inverness there are three railway routes over an
entanglement of Highland Railway and Great North of Scotland branches
that have their main knot at Elgin. One line runs from Banff along the
Moray Firth, giving fine views across to the opposite shore of Cromarty.
Another turns up the Spey, and by this beautiful strath would bring us
into the heart of the Highlands. The Speyside line considerately does
not hurry passengers through its picturesque environments. There is a
legend about this railway that the town council of Elgin--no wiser in
their generation than Oxford and Cheltenham--sent up to London a
deputation to oppose it in Parliament, when a Cockney crier made such
strange work of the names Elgin and Craigellachie, that the worthy
citizens sat on unconscious that the bill was being passed without
question.
The Speyside line has ways of its own, or had in former days, when I
once remonstrated with a clerk who had given me, unasked, a return
ticket, and he drily answered, “Ye needn’t take a return unless ye like;
but it’s cheaper”--as it was, by five shillings! At one stage of our
journey, the meeting of a Presbytery or some such function swelled the
company in the single carriage to nearly a score, which so much
exercised the mind of an elder that I heard him remark to a minister,
“Doesna this remind ye, sir, of the saying of Daniel the prophet, ‘_many
shall run to and fro_’?” As if exhausted by its unusual burden, the
train stopped some couple of hours at Craigellachie, giving one time to
make a “Spey cast,” but for the want of license and tackle. At the end
of nearly a day’s journey from Banff, I reached the Boat of Garten, too
late for any southward train that evening. Like other “boats” and
“bridges” of the Highlands, this has a snug little inn, enlarged I fancy
since then, when it had only one good bedroom, in which more than one
crowned head has lain to rest. A friend of mine was occupying this when
a telegram announced the arrival of the Empress of the French. Of course
he turned out, then the people of the house sought his advice in
adorning the chamber. He found them hastily fastening up over the
Empress’ bed their most striking work of art, which happened to be a
picture of the battle of Waterloo! Much more like Celtic courtesy was
the conduct of William Black’s Highland veteran, who scrupled to wear
his tartan trews before a Frenchwoman, for fear of reviving sore
memories.