TO JOHN O’ GROAT’S HOUSE
Unless for that modern knight-errant, the cyclist, speeding to achieve
the quest of John o’ Groat’s House, the far northern Highlands seem as
unduly neglected by tourists as the southern mountains of Wales. Yet
across the Moray Firth, that half insulates the north end of Britain,
lie charms and grandeurs none the less admirable for being somewhat out
of the scope of tourist tickets. The best face of this region it turns
to adventurers who brave the Hebridean seas; but also it has winning
smiles and impressive frowns for those who on the east side follow the
Highland line to its Pillars of Hercules.
The railway to the far north begins by running westward from Inverness
to round the inner basin of the Moray Firth at Beauly, indeed a _Beau
lieu_. Here, beside the ruins of a priory, is a seat of Lord Lovat,
whose shifty ancestor, after Culloden, lurked for six weeks in a secret
chamber of Cawdor Castle, but was finally run down in a hollow tree
after adventures trying for the age of fourscore and four. The falls of
Kilmorack make perhaps the finest point in a district full of
attraction. Gilliechrist is noted for a grim story that does not go
without question: in the church here a congregation of Mackenzies is
said to have been burned alive, to the sound of the bagpipes, by their
Christian enemies of Glengarry, a memory of ancient manners which
Wordsworth laments as “withering to the root.” One of Lord Lovat’s
hiding-places was an island in the river, that afterwards became a
summer retreat of Sir Robert Peel; and its romantic cottage was for a
time the home of the two Sobieski or Allan brothers who made a
mysterious claim to represent the Stuarts, and were treated with royal
honours by some Scottish families. They were a stately pair, after a
somewhat theatrical style, taking the part of silent Pretenders in the
Highland dress, on which they published a sumptuous volume. In later
years, when both were well-known figures in the Reading-room of the
British Museum, they, or at least one of them, came down to lodgings in
Pimlico, where I have heard pseudo-majesty calling for his boots from
the upper floor like a dignified Fred Bayham.
All this part of the railway is set among varied beauty, as it bends
away from the western mountains and curves about the heads of the deep
eastern firths. Beyond Beauly, it crosses the neck of the peninsula
called the Black Isle, on which stand the ex-cathedral city of Fortrose,
and Cromarty on the deep inlet guarded by its cave-worn Sutors, where
one can ferry over the mouth of this Cromarty Firth to the farther
promontory, ended by one of Scotland’s several “Tarbets,” name denoting
an isthmus or portage. Cromarty no longer exists as a separate and
much-separated county, of which Macbeth seems to have been Maormor or
satrap. Before the boundary
[Illustration: THE RIVER GLASS NEAR BEAULY, INVERNESS-SHIRE]
adjustment in our generation, several Scottish shires had outlying
fragments islanded within their neighbours’ bounds, an arrangement
probably due to the intrigues of interested nobles; but this one was all
_disjecta membra_, the largest lying away up in the north-west corner of
Ross, with which environing county Cromarty is now incorporated. The
county town, at the point of the Black Isle, still flourishes in a
modest way, after shifting its site so that the Cross had to be bodily
removed. It has reared at least two notable sons, one that literary
Cavalier Sir Thomas Urquhart, who so well translated Rabelais while a
prisoner in the Tower, whence he published other ingenious works that
but feebly represent his industry, for some hundreds of his manuscripts,
lost at the battle of Worcester, went to such base uses as lighting the
pipes of Roundhead troopers. The other was Hugh Miller, the
stone-mason’s apprentice, who rose to be an esteemed author, a geologist
of note, and editor of the _Witness_, that full-toned organ that lifted
with no uncertain sound the testimony of the Free Church.
This end of Scotland, like the south-west, has been strongly Whig in its
sympathies. Even its Highland clans were often led by their chiefs to
support the Protestant succession. It was a Mackay who commanded for
King William against Claverhouse; the Munroes did service to King George
against the Pretender; and President Forbes of Culloden kept the
Mackenzies, or many of them, from joining the prince, who at his mansion
spent a last quiet night on Scottish soil. Hugh Miller tells us how the
Cromarty folk watched the smoke of Culloden across the Firth, of their
rejoicing for Cumberland’s victory, and of their savage exultation over
Lovat’s head. Religious enthusiasm here was kin to that of the
Covenanters. To the south, as we have seen, lies a belt of Catholicism;
and some glens of the Highlands shelter knots of Episcopacy; but when
the Gael does take to Presbyterianism, he likes it hot and strong. This
was the diocese of the “Men,” those inquisitorial elders who played such
a severe part in church life of older days. The Free Church movement
found great acceptation in the Highlands, so much so that in many
parishes the Old Kirk has been almost deserted. And the Free Church in
the far north is still largely officered by a school of ministers, who,
fervidly rejecting the conclusions of criticism and latitudinarian
liberality, are known as the “Highland host,” by humorous inversion of a
phrase that once applied to an instrument of the prelatical party. The
recent broadening of this body’s base has here been fiercely resisted,
some congregations even coming to blows over Disruption principles.
There was a time when the Sabbath could be said not to come above the
Pass of Killiecrankie; but now the northern Highlands are the fastness
of a Sabbatarianism that dies hard all over rural Scotland. In Ross, the
late Queen Victoria had the unwonted experience of being refused horses
for a Sunday journey by a postmaster incarnating the spirit of John
Knox; then it is understood that Her Majesty gave directions he should
in no way suffer for conscience’ sake. There were “godly” lords in these
parts, to whose influence Hugh Miller attributes this temper of faith;
and here was the diocese of that “Black John” the “Apostle of the
North,” whose field-preachings stirred the bones of martyrs to old
prelatic tyranny.
It is no wonder that Hugh Miller became a champion of the Free Church in
its pristine glow. Alas! his promising career was cut short by his own
hand. It is believed that the trial of reconciling the Mosaic geology
with advancing science proved too much for his brain. Had his lot been
cast in our generation, divines of his own beloved communion would have
taught him more accommodating interpretations, that might have helped to
a longer lease of usefulness one of Scotland’s many self-taught sons,
whose _Schools and Schoolmasters_ remains the best book on this
countryside.
At Dingwall, the little county town of Ross, which, like the Devonshire
Torrington, has been fondly thought to resemble Jerusalem in site, a
short branch line turns westward to Strathpeffer, the Scottish
Harrogate, thriving apace since it got a railway. Till then its clients
were chiefly local, many of them seeking an antidote to more potent
waters distilled hereabouts; but now in the later part of the season it
is crowded with visitors from both sides of the Border. Strathpeffer has
varied advantages to bring patients all the way from London. It boasts
the strongest sulphur water in the kingdom, also such an effervescing
chalybeate spring as is rarer in Britain than in Germany; it has adopted
peat baths, douches, and other balneological devices from the Continent;
while a remarkably good climate helps it to distinction among northern
spas. It is sheltered by mountains from the wet and windy west; then its
show of flourishing crofts, originally granted to a disbanded Highland
regiment, attests a genial summer; and beside the Pump-room Highland
Eves tempt the drinkers with tantalising piles of strawberries,
forbidden by the faculty as plum-pudding at Kissingen; but it is to be
feared that British invalids are less docile to _Kurgemäss_ rules. The
village lies in a valley begirt by charming scenery of “dwarf Highlands”
about the course of the Conon and other streams. Hugh Miller worked here
as a mason lad, and his “recollections of this rich tract of country,
with its woods and towers and noble river, seem as if bathed in the rich
light of gorgeous sunsets.” The long summer evenings light up patches of
heather over which is the way to such beauty spots as Loch Achilty, the
Falls of Conon, and the Falls of Rogie, that have been compared to
Tivoli. Close at hand is Castle Leod, famed for enormous Spanish
chestnuts that give the lie to Dr. Johnson; and farther off are other
ancient mansions, Brahan Castle, whose gardens were laid out by Paxton;
Coul with its fine grounds, and the spectral ruin of Fairburn Tower.
Above the village the wooded ridge of the Cat’s Back leads to a noble
view from green Knockfarril, where is perhaps the best of the “vitrified
forts” so common in the far north. Rheumatic patients would once
celebrate their cure by dancing a Highland fling before the Pump-room, a
saltatory exercise said to have originated in the experience of a kilt
among midges. To prove themselves sound in wind and limb, Sassenach
visitors might ascend Ben Wyvis, the “Mount of Storms,” a ten-miles
tramp or pony ride. There is no difficulty on the way unless a bog at
the bottom, that must be skirted in wet weather; and the prospect from
the top is rarely extensive in proportion to the trouble of reaching it:
on a fine day may be seen the mountains of Argyll, of Braemar, of
Sutherland, and of Skye, perhaps grandly half revealed through distant
haze or thunderstorm.
[Illustration: MOOR OF RANNOCH, PERTHSHIRE AND ARGYLLSHIRE]
At Dingwall diverges also the branch line to Lochalsh, the ferry for
Skye. This takes one through a real Highland country, where at
Auchnasheen goes off the coach route to Loch Maree, which some judge the
finest scene in Scotland. Less smiling than Loch Lomond, it lies more
wildly among naked pyramids of quartz, Ben Slioch the most conspicuous
point of them, but this lake has the same beauty of wooded islets at the
lower end, where a group of half-drowned hillocks “form a miniature
archipelago, grey with lichened stone, and bosky with birch and hazel.”
On one of these are the ruins of a chapel of the Virgin Mary, who was
perhaps godmother to Loch Maree. Beyond it open the sea-inlets Torridon,
Gairloch, and Loch Ewe; and the coast northwards by Ullapool and Loch
Inver is pierced by deep fiords and overlooked by grand summits, worn
down from Himalayan masses of old. On the road from Garve to Ullapool,
beside the strath looking down to Loch Broom, an oasis of greenery
enshrines the Measach Falls of Corriehalloch, a stream tumbling through
a deep-bitten chasm, which some have pronounced the grandest Highland
scene in the _genre_ of that Black Rock ravine mentioned below. If we
are ever to reach John o’ Groat’s House let us turn away from the
transparent waters of this coast and from the gloomy glories of Skye.
The sportsmen to whom these northern wilds are best known would not
thank any guide of idle tourists, and such a guide must be pitied in his
task of repeating epithets.
From Dingwall the railway holds up the side of the Cromarty Firth by a
country of Munroes and Mackenzies, who have taken all the world for
their province. A notable natural feature here is the chasm of the
Black Rock, through which a stream from Loch Glass leaps in a series of
cascades gouging out an open tunnel that sometimes is only a few yards
wide at the top, whence one looks down upon waters foaming into gloomy
linns, an American cañon in miniature, its edges bristling like the
Trossachs, its mouth thus described by Hugh Miller:--
“The river--after wailing for miles in a pent-up channel, narrow as
one of the lanes of old Edinburgh, and hemmed in by walls quite as
perpendicular, and nearly twice as lofty--suddenly expands, first
into a deep, brown pool, and then into a broad, tumbling stream,
that, as if permanently affected in temper by the strict severity
of the discipline to which its early life had been subjected, frets
and chafes in all its after course, till it loses itself in the
sea. The banks, ere we reach the opening of the chasm, have become
steep and wild and densely wooded, and there stand out on either
hand giant crags, that plant their iron feet in the stream; here
girdled with belts of rank, succulent herbs, that love the damp
shade and the frequent drizzle of the spray; and there, hollow and
bare, with their round pebbles sticking out from the partially
decomposed surface, like the piled-up skulls in the great
underground cemetery of the Parisians.... And over the sullen pool
in front we may see the stern pillars of the portal rising from
eighty to a hundred feet in height, and scarce twelve feet apart,
like the massive obelisks of some Egyptian temple; while in gloomy
vista within, projection starts out beyond projection, like column
beyond column in some narrow avenue of approach to Luxor or Carnac.
The precipices are green, with some moss or byssus, that, like the
miner, chooses a subterranean habitat--for here the rays of the sun
never fall; the dead mossy water beneath, from which the cliffs
rise so abruptly, bears the hue of molten pitch; the trees, fast
anchored in the rock, shoot out their branches across the opening,
to form a thick tangled roof, at the height of a hundred and fifty
feet overhead; while from the recesses within, where the eye fails
to penetrate, there issues a combination of the strangest and
wildest sounds ever yet produced by water: there is the deafening
rush of the torrent, blent as if with the clang of hammers, the
roar of vast bellows, and the confused gabble of a thousand
voices.”
Turning away from the sea, the line soon strikes it again at the ancient
borough of Tain, on the Dornoch Firth. Near the head of the inlet we
cross into Sutherland, and soon by the gorge of the Shin come to Lairg,
port of the mail-cars that cruise into far corners of this county. The
southern land, whose name tells how it was once counted part of nakeder
Caithness, has truly northern features of mountains and open moors,
lakes, “waters,” “straths,” and the “kyles” of its coast, those deep
narrow sounds taking their Gaelic name from the same root as Calais.
Three of its five sides are washed by the sea. The interior is chiefly
given up to deer and sheep, with here and there an oasis of moorland
farm, rescued from the heather as Holland from salt water, and only by
ceaseless industry held against Nature’s encroachments. Too much of the
land, indeed, makes “a wilderness of brown and ragged moorland,” whose
“monotonous features” are “masses of wet rock and dark russet heather,
black swamps, low and bare hills, and now and again the grey glimmer of
a stream or tarn” among heights “dulled with hurrying showers and
glittering out again to the sun.”
The fish of its inland waters is one of Sutherland’s richest harvests.
Its lakes are legion; one large parish alone is said to contain hundreds
of sheets; and the coming and going of anglers keeps up the good roads
and fair inns of a thinly-populated region, from which have been swept
away the traces of homes made desolate by the “Sutherland evictions.”
Loch Shin, running half across the county from Lairg, is the longest
lake, about which man has waged feeble war with the sternness of Nature;
but the wildest scene is Loch Assynt, near the west coast, tapering
among a group of grand mountains such as the Sutherlandshire Ben More
and the three-peaked mass of Quinaig. This remote nook seems neglected
by authors, yet a picturesque novelist might here find material for a
second _Legend of Montrose_, whose last adventure brought him to be
captured by Macleod of Assynt and confined in the Castle of Ardvreck. As
for the features of the west coast, behind which rise so wildly
weather-worn crags above glacier-planed glens and fiords, like those of
Norway on a smaller scale, they are thus summed up by Mr. John Sinclair
in his _Scenes and Stories of the North of Scotland_:--
“The Gaelic word ‘Assynt’ is a compound and signifies ‘out and in.’
If so, like almost all place-names in the Highlands, it is most
fitting and felicitous. Indeed it applies admirably, not only to
the district so called, but to the entire west coast of Sutherland
from the borders of Ross-shire to Cape Wrath itself. Looking, for
instance, at the map, we can still see in the endless contortions
of the shore, as we used to do when children, the figures and
profiles of men and beasts--not one of them in any degree like to
any other. There are brows flat and high on the headlands; eyes
large and small in the lochs and tarns; noses Roman, Grecian,
_retroussé_, on the rocky capes; bay-mouths wide and narrow, open
and shut, drooping in sadness, curving upward in joy; chins which
are impudent, and chins which are retiring; cheeks smooth and
furrowed, shaven and bearded; and in all these you can clearly see,
if you have any discernment at all, grumpy grandfathers and
grinning fools, laughing children and scolding
[Illustration: THE ISLES OF LOCH MAREE, ROSS-SHIRE]
dominies, gaping crocodiles and snarling monkeys, weeping maids and
wistful lovers. The surface of the country inland from the shore is
extremely varied, rugged, and wild, but full of interest and charm
for healthy and buoyant natures. If you believe, as I for one do,
that in order to see the beauties and taste the sweets of land and
water there is needed not only sight but _insight_, which is
something far more and better, you will find at every turn of the
highway new matter of surprise and admiration. Island-studded bays
like Badcall, picturesque retreats like Scourie; deeply indented
lochs like Laxford, the ‘Fiord of salmon’; distant views of a
mountain-chain of peaks; long successions of rocky knolls crowned
with brushwood and heather--these are a few of the elements which
go to make up the panorama between Assynt and the Kyle of Durness.
When at length you look down over the brindled cliffs of Cape
Wrath; when you behold its rugged masses of God-made masonry; when
you hear the thunder-throb of the waves in its vaulted caverns;
when you gaze to south and west and north over the hungry heaving
sea, you can but look and marvel and adore.”
The north coast, with its Cave of Smoo and its Kyles of Durness and of
Tongue, is also grandly broken. The east shore, along which the railway
runs to Helmsdale, is rather a strip of fields and woods. In the
south-east corner lies Dornoch, which enjoys the distinction of being
the smallest county town in the kingdom, literally a village, with a
restored Cathedral as proof of city dignity, and on the site of its
Episcopal palace a prison that has been closed for want of custom among
the honest Highlanders. There has been little crime here since the last
witch was burned on British soil in 1722 at Dornoch. What brings
strangers to Dornoch, now that it has a railway branch, is its
golf-links, extending for thousands of acres on the seashore; and this
far-northern understudy of St. Andrews offers a remarkably good autumn
climate, often mild up till Christmas. Not much bigger is Golspie, with
its sea-girt pile of Dunrobin, seat of the ducal family that, owning
most of Sutherland, and having incorporated the title and estate of
Cromarty as well as the English peerages of Stafford and Gower, can hold
up its head as the largest landowner in Britain. With a thousand or so
people of its own, Golspie has a good hotel, from which strangers may
visit the Dunrobin Glen and waterfall, the traces of gold-working that
once promised to pay in this neighbourhood, and Ben Bhraggie
conspicuously crowned by Chantrey’s statue of the first Duke of
Sutherland.
Above Helmsdale, the Ord ridge makes the Caithness frontier, round the
end of which winds what is literally a highroad into our northernmost
county, described by Pennant as more terrible than the Penmaenmawr track
that used to be the bugbear of travellers to Ireland. The road has been
improved, but the railway is here forced away from the sea, seeking an
entry into Caithness farther inland. The southern part of this county is
still Highland, where the train runs on miles and miles over unbroken
stretches of heather; then farther north these fall away into a windy
expanse of hollows and ridges, in which Nature would seem to have come
short of material for ending off our island with picturesque effect; the
central part has even been called the most forlorn wilderness in
Britain. Caithness, like other countrysides, has been “improved” in our
time; but still it shows wide, cheerless prospects of bog and waste,
with peat stacks more frequent than trees, and scattered, turf-walled
houses having their thatch bound on by straw ropes and weighted down by
stones to keep them from being blown away. Verses signed by the
well-known initials, “J. S. B.,” set in a frame of honour at John o’
Groat’s House, describe the bareness and bleakness of these poor fields,
fenced by
Flagstones and slates in a row
Where hedges are frightened to grow;
and
Shrubs in the flap of the breeze,
Sweating to make themselves trees.
The most flourishing production of Caithness appears to be the
flagstones, layers of mud and fish bones pressed together ages ago,
which its quarries send forth to pave more genial regions. Its waters,
too, grow a valuable crop, as one may know who has ever seen the
multitudinous herring-fishing fleet set sail from Wick in the long
summer twilight. Angling can be had in a chain of some dozen lochs
drained by the Thurso river that runs through the county from south to
north, at the mouth of which over 2500 salmon were once netted in one
haul. In the south, if heather were edible, the folk should be fat; and
below darkly naked cones, we find glens such as Berriedale, in parts
rich as well as romantic, like a miniature Switzerland of which Morven
is the Matterhorn.
Here again we have a duodecimo edition of Highlands and Lowlands bound
together. In the north-east the people are tall and sturdy, with plain
marks of Scandinavian origin, like their _sters_ and _dales_. On the
south and west rather, we find clans bearing such names as Mackay,
Sutherland, Keith, and Gunn, the last certainly a Norse tribe who can
wear only an adopted tartan. Most illustrious of all were the Sinclairs,
that held the now dwindled Earldom of Caithness, one of those Norman
families settling themselves so masterfully all over Scotland. From this
farthest point of the kingdom, hundreds of them followed their Earl to
Flodden, and hardly one came back to tell the tale of that “Black
Monday,” since when, it is said, no Sinclair will cross the Ord ridge on
a Monday. Another sore loss fell on the clan a century later, when a
certain Colonel Sinclair, heedless of what foreign enlistment
regulations had then taken shape, led a regiment of his clan to serve
Gustavus Adolphus against Norway, but, attacked by Norwegian peasants in
a narrow gorge, more than half of them were crushed beneath rocks hurled
down from above, as the French soldiers in Tyrol, or the Turks in
defiles of the Kurdish Dersim. The monument on the spot records the
death of fourteen hundred kindly Scots, which appears an exaggeration;
but it is said that not a score escaped with their lives. Many other
grim and gory tales might be told of this race, as some are in Mr. John
Sinclair’s book above mentioned. The shells of castles fringing these
shores have as often as not had a Sinclair lord at one period or other,
like Castle Sinclair, almost crumbled away, while the older Girnigo, on
to which it was built, still stoutly defies the weather. To-day the most
outstanding branch of the family is that of Thurso, first distinguished
in a new field by Sir John Sinclair’s _Statistical Account of Scotland_,
and by his improvements in the county; then by the author of _Holiday
House_, and by more than one dignitary of the English Church. This
family is notable for stature as well as
[Illustration: MOOR AND MOUNTAIN, ROSS-SHIRE]
wisdom. I forget whether it was Catherine Sinclair’s father or brother
who was said to have three dozen feet of daughters; and when he put down
a new pavement--probably from his own quarries--opposite his house in
Edinburgh, it was readily nicknamed the “Giant’s Causeway.” The main
branch of the Sinclairs, whose titles at one time, says Sir Walter,
might have wearied a herald when they were not so rich as many an
English yeoman, is represented near Edinburgh by the ruins of Rosslyn
Castle and the monuments of that beautiful chapel--
Where Rosslyn’s chiefs uncoffined lie
Each baron for a sable shroud
Sheathed in his iron panoply.
The railway, forking for the only Caithness towns, Wick and Thurso, with
their ports Pulteneytown and Scrabster, does not give a fair view of the
county. Its most impressive features, as at our other Land’s End, are to
be looked for in its rim of brown cliffs, tight-packed layers of
flagstones, their faces “etched out in alternate lines of cornice and
frieze,” here dappled by hardy vegetation, there alive with clamorous
sea-fowl. Like the granite, slate, and serpentine edges of Cornwall,
these sandstone rocks have been carved by wind and water into boldest
shapes of capes and bays, dark caverns, funnels, overhanging shelves and
gables, swirling “pots” and foaming reefs, isolated stacks lashed by
every tide, broken teeth bored and filled by every storm, and the deep
chasms here called _geos_, that sometimes lead down to beaches rich in
fine and rare shells, for one, “John o’ Groat’s Buckie,” akin to the
cowries of the tropics. In the damp crevices, also, grow rare herbs such
as that “Holy Grass” found by Robert Dick of Thurso, one of Mr.
Smiles’s “discoveries” in the species of self-helped naturalists. More
truly than of Cornwall, it may be said that Caithness seldom grows wood
enough to make a coffin. Where Cornwall comes short of Caithness is in
the numerous castles, not all of them left to decay, that on the verge
of those northern precipices might often be confounded with Nature’s own
ruins. It was only about the beginning of the eighteenth century that
such strongholds could be deserted for snugger mansions. Here, in 1680,
was the scene of our last private war, when the head of the Breadalbane
Campbells invaded Caithness with a small army, that overcame the
Sinclairs, it is said, by the wily stratagem of causing to be stranded
on their coast a ship freighted with whisky to drown the enemy’s
prudence and resolution.
Traces of older inhabitants are very frequent in Caithness, its moors
thickly strewn with hut circles, standing stones, tumuli, and those
curious underground excavations known as “Picts’ Houses,” which appear
to have been dwellings rather than burial-places. One usual feature of
such burrows is the cells and passages fitting a smaller race than our
noble selves, who must crawl on hands and knees in grimy explorations
not likely to be undertaken by the general tourist. Hence there is
reason to suppose that Scotland and other countries have been inhabited
by a stunted race of aborigines, like the dwarfish Ainos of Yesso or the
pygmies who turn up in various parts of Africa. Mr. David MacRitchie, an
antiquary who has paid special attention to so-called Pictish remains,
is doughty champion of a theory which connects the dimly historic Picts
or Pechts and the legendary Fians with the whole fabulous family of
fairies, elves, goblins, brownies, pixies, trolls, or what not, who are
represented as dwarfish and subterranean, issuing forth from their
retreats to hold varied relations of service or mischief with ordinary
men. The name of the Fians, belonging to Ireland as well as to the
Scottish Highlands, and fitly represented in the dark doings of Fenians,
may point to Finland, where small Laplanders still exist in flesh and
blood. The “good people,” who long haunted Highland and Lowland
glens,--but it seems they cannot abide the scratching of steel pens or
the squeaking of slate pencils,--were apt to be tiny, of retiring
habits, and in the way of disappearing underground. So the fairies may
have been real enough, for all the scorn of that “self-styled science of
the so-called nineteenth century.” Scott, who seems well disposed to the
theory, tells us of stunted, servile clans, such as the M‘Couls, who
were hereditary Gibeonites to the Stewarts of Appin. In our own time
Hebridean herds have been found encamped inside beehive hillocks of turf
such as opened to take in the captives of fairy adventure. As for the
objection that such beings sometimes appeared as giants rather than
dwarfs, it will be remembered how a similar transformation came quite
easy to Alice in Wonderland, how _omne ignotum pro magnifico_ is very
apt to hold true in a misty climate, and how visions of the spiritual in
this country have often had an origin disturbing to the senses--
Wi’ tippenny we’ll fear nae evil,
Wi’ usquebaugh we’ll face the devil.
But neither Mr. MacRitchie, in his _Fians, Fairies, and Picts_ and
other writings, nor any of his brother ethnologists, has much to tell us
about John o’ Groat, whose house is the shrine of so many cyclists,
wheeling piously from the Land’s End, a road of more than nine hundred
miles at the shortest, through hundreds of villages, scores of towns,
and dozens of cities or places of fame. All that way they come to see a
low grassy mound and a flagstaff in front of an hotel, a mile or two
west from the pointed stacks of Duncansbay Head. The story goes that
this John was a Dutchman by descent, whose family, split into eight
branches, kept up meeting for an annual feast; then to avoid squabblings
for precedence, John hit on the idea of an octagonal table in an
eight-sided house, with eight doors and eight windows, in which, let us
trust, his kinsmen were not at sixes and sevens. Here we may have some
hint of such a contest for chieftainship as is not unknown among
Highland clans, else the folk-lorists must find this a hard text to
expound. Three, seven, and nine are all mystic numbers; five is
time-honoured in the East, as four in the Western world; two and ten
have a practical importance; six bears with it a sense of satisfaction,
as do a dozen or a score; thirteen and fourteen fit themselves to legend
and superstition; even four-and-twenty blackbirds have been sagely
interpreted as the hours of the day and night; but what can one say of
eight in tale or history? It might take a mathematician to make a myth
here. Maybe the points of the compass, doubled for the sake of emphasis,
are at the bottom of it. Perhaps there is some political allusion to
James VI.’s Octavian board of administrators. Or may some printer, short
of copy, not
[Illustration: CRAGS NEAR POOLEWE, ROSS-SHIRE]
have tried his hand at composing an octavo legend? Possibly the story is
more or less true, in which the Scotticised Dutchman is further stated
to have flourished as owner of a ferry to the Orkneys. The suggestion
that his fare was a groat must give way before the fact of Groat being
apparently a real Dutch name. Nor is it “past dispute” that here geese
are bred from barnacles, as asserted by sundry authors, among them that
tourist of Cromwell’s time, Richard Franck, who seems to have made his
way so far, and gives us much quaint information about divinity,
scenery, and fishing, spoilt by a most affected style, by slap-dash
spelling of names, and by an evident “scunner” at his model Izaak
Walton.
One thing seems certain, that John o’ Groat was a humbug if he gave out
this non-existent house of his for the northernmost point of our
mainland, as stiff-kneed cyclists fondly reckon. That honour properly
belongs to Dunnet Head, the lofty line of red cliffs stretching to the
east of Thurso Bay, hollowed out by billows that shake the lighthouse on
the farthest point, from which one looks to the Orkneys over the “still
vexed” Pentland Firth. I wonder if that modern John o’ Groat be still to
the fore, who some twenty years ago was presented with a testimonial for
his constancy in carrying across the mail during the lifetime of a
generation. He belonged to a school of ancient mariners who had the
knack of smelling their way about the sea, whereas our modern Nelsons,
it seems, don’t know where they are till they have gone down into their
cabin and worked out a sum. I once crossed with this “skeely skipper,”
and was much struck by his method of navigation. A thick fog came on
half-way across a tide that races at ten miles an hour; then to clear
his inner light, he had up a glass of grog, through which he took
frequent observations. Every now and again he stopped the engines and
bawled out into the fog without any response; but when at last a muffled
hail came back, we were within a hundred yards of Scrabster Pier. On
another occasion, he is said to have hit it off still more closely,
carrying away the pier-head as a proof of his straight-steered course.
But here we must turn back, lest a darkless summer day tempt us to cross
to Orkney, and on to the much-battered Shetlands by the stepping-stone
of the Fair Isle, whose name, like that of the foreign Faröe Isles,
denotes not beauty but sheep. This muggy and windy archipelago, indeed,
is hardly Scottish ground, but an ex-Danish possession, held in pledge
by us for a princess’s dowry that seems like to be paid on the Greek
Calends. Its people indignantly decline to be called Scotchmen. And
though our Thule has grand and fine features of its own, too often
wrapped in fog, they are hardly such as go to make up the character of
Bonnie Scotland.