GALLOWAY
The Whig country included Galloway, that rough south-western corner that
stretches its Mull towards Ireland in what Boece calls “ane great snout
of crags.” The whole promontory formed by the stewartry of Kirkcudbright
and the county of Wigtown, once known as Upper and Lower Galloway, and
then taking in parts of Ayr and Dumfries, seems to concentrate many of
the qualities of Scotland, _Land und Leute_. This northern Cornwall lent
itself of old as a scene for dark romance, whose combats glitter here
and there through deepest mists of history. Its Attacott people, Picts
or what not, mixed with Scots from Ireland and Gaels from who knows
where, run to dark hair and the tallest forms of Britain, perhaps even
of Europe, while their character is a blend of especially perfervid
spirit. Though this corner was the first foothold of Christianity on the
mainland, it long remained notable for untamed fierceness, like that of
the northern mountain cats. So near England, it came to glow with a
patriotism more fervent than its loyalty; and some of the doughtiest
exploits of Wallace and Bruce were done upon its borders, not always
indeed with the help of the Galwegians. Mr. S. R. Crockett, who in a
generation too forgetful of _Guy Mannering_ has come forward to give
Galloway its fair share of fame, tells us how most of its gentry, as
well as its long-limbed and hot-hearted peasants, threw themselves into
the Covenant struggle, their “Praying Societies” throughout making camps
of resistance and protest against the persecutors; and in quieter times
the same enthusiasm has flared up into will-o’-the-wisp fanaticism bred
among the moss hags. Later on, as we know from Scott, the wild coasts of
Galloway reared a daring breed of smugglers to testify for what they
called “fair trade” with the Isle of Man. That trans-atlanticised
firebrand, Paul Jones, hailed from Galloway, to which he came back to
threaten the mouth of his native Dee.
Whatever this people’s hand finds to do, it has been apt to do it with
might and main. What it chiefly finds to do in our day is the rearing of
cattle, that seem to thrive best on the promontories of our island; then
also Galloway has given its name to a hardy horseflesh, and pigs, too,
are largely reared in this region. Such an authority as the author of
_Field and Fern_ judges no beef better than that which matches the brawn
of Galloway men. And these tall fellows have the name of living to a
good old age, as witness the Galloway story of a man of threescore and
ten found “greeting” when his father had given him “his licks” for
throwing stones at his grandfather.
By this time the reader must have an inkling how the names Highland and
Lowland are but relative. The knobbed area of Scotland, which, as a
native boasted, would be as big as England “if ye flattened it oot,”
consists mainly of two uplands, that of the south smaller, greener, and
less boldly mountainous, between which dips a more thickly peopled
interval, at one point but forty miles broad from sea to sea, where only
the rich river straths and the coast plains are right lowlands, never
out of sight of sheep-dotted hills. Galloway is mainly a wild region of
rocks, lochs, moors, and bogs, in the north rising to mountains almost
as high as any in England. This ground seems too much neglected by
tourists, who yet might find here and there smart hotels to their mind,
oftener the more old-fashioned inns where they would have to do not with
managers and foreign waiters, but with housewifely Meg Dods and decent
servant lasses, now instructed by the spread of knowledge no longer to
mistake a tooth-brush as an instrument for sharpening the appetite
before dinner. We Scots have a grudge against southrons for the degree
to which they have sophisticated the hotels on more frequented routes,
especially in the matter of charges. The butterfly-travellers as well as
the bee-travellers should have a grievance against their landlords
(Limited) not so much for making hay while the holiday sun shines, as
for the tyranny that tries to impose upon them boarding-house
regulations at Piccadilly prices. My grudge at those exotic
caravanserais is that they try to set all their guests “feeding like
one,” and draw out the chief meal of the day through that sweetest hour
of the northern summer--
’Twixt the gloaming and the mirk,
When the kye come hame.
[Illustration: A BIRCH-WOOD IN SPRINGTIME, BY LOCH MAREE, ROSS-SHIRE]
This grumble and others one need not make in Galloway, where strangers
not too pock-puddingish about being “done well,” would find a hearty
welcome and openings for exploring a country sacred through memories of
patriots and martyrs, dotted with ruined shrines and with strongholds of
Douglases, Kennedys, Gordons, who in their lifetime loved better to hear
the lark sing than the mouse squeak. From Newton-Stewart, not yet wide
awake to its capabilities as a tourist centre, one has half a day’s walk
northwards into the heart of the Galloway Highlands, where Merrick
raises its heathery Pentedactylon above the lovely Glen and Loch of
Trool, one of the fastnesses of Bruce’s _Wanderjähre_. Another goal in
these hills is Murray’s Monument, commemorating one of Scotland’s gifted
herd-loons, who with homely schooling raised himself to be Doctor of
Divinity and Professor of Oriental Languages. Three heights in Galloway
bear the name of Cairnsmore, the highest Cairnsmore of Carsphairn,
approached from the town of New Galloway by Loch Ken, Kenmure Castle,
and the beautiful Glenkens. Passing beyond Carsphairn to Dalmellington,
we can strike by rail into the native country of Burns, who at the
Galloway spa of Lochenbreck wrote down his “Scots wha hae,” meetly
composed by him, it is said, on a wild ride through a stormy night.
The chief town of Galloway is Stranraer, port of the shortest
sea-crossing to Belfast, by Loch Ryan; but the nearest point to Ireland
is Portpatrick, where that saint could step across the Channel long
before so much money had been sunk on an abandoned harbour. The lion of
Portpatrick is the glen and ruin of Dunskey; as that of Stranraer the
grounds of Castle Kennedy, nursing exotics that attest the mildness of
this western shore. The Irish express trains dash also past the beauties
of Glenluce and its ruins haunted by legends of Michael Scott the
Wizard, of Peden the Covenanting prophet, and of that hapless Bride of
Lammermoor, whose story seems to have been distorted as well as
transplanted to the other side of the country. Luce Bay separates the
Mull of Galloway from a broader promontory in which the lochs of Mochrum
are perhaps the finest nook. Its southern point is the green “Isle” of
Whithorn, where Scottish Christianity was planted by St. Ninian; and
still stand fragments of the famous monastery sought by James of the
Iron Belt, and many another penitential pilgrim. On the same branch line
from Newton-Stewart, Wigtown rears above its bay a monument of that
shamefullest tragedy of the Covenanting persecutions, when two women
martyrs were fastened to stakes to be drowned by the tide. At the mouth
of the Cree is Creetown, “Portanferry” of _Guy Mannering_, from which
can be visited caves fit to shelter Dirck Hatteraick, and the ruins of
Barholm, that claims to be “Ellangowan,” and to have given concealment
to John Knox. Gatehouse of Fleet is a picturesque place in the district
illustrated by the Faed brothers’ pictures, and sanctified by the
preaching of Samuel Rutherford. Farther east, on its inlet, is reached
the county town Kirkcudbright, church of St. Cuthbert, who would hardly
know his own name as now pronounced _Kirkoobry_. Here we have an
interesting museum of Galloway antiquities; and a few miles off is
Dundrennan Abbey, poor Mary’s last resting place in her troubled
kingdom, whence she gave herself to the mercy of Elizabeth after her
flight from Langside. The Kirkcudbright branch takes us back to the main
line at Castle Douglas, near which stands the grim tower of a stronghold
whose lords were once a terror to their own country, while over the
Border English nurses would hush babes to rest with--
Hush ye, hush ye, dinna fret ye:
The Black Douglas shall na’ get ye!
Like too many other noble Scottish names, this one has sadly
degenerated, its last exploit to be proud of ending in the catastrophe
that cut short Lord Francis Douglas’s life on the first ascent of the
Matterhorn; and his brother, the late Marquis of Queensberry, made some
stir in the world, least unenviably perhaps by the Queensberry rules of
boxing. Several members of the family have in modern days come to an
obscurely tragic end, as if urged by the Nemesis of forgotten bloodshed.
Their chief title, the Dukedom of Queensberry, had passed to the house
of Buccleuch, along with the princely seat of Drumlanrig in Nithsdale.
The oldest bridge in Scotland leads over the Nith to the largest town of
the southern counties, out of Galloway in the letter, but not in the
spirit. Dumfries, originally the fastness of Frisian pirates whose stock
would “go far,” is set among famous sites and relics. In the Church of
its Greyfriars, Bruce stabbed the Red Comyn, a deed “made siccar” by an
ancestor of the Empress of the French. Near the town are the remains of
Lincluden Abbey, “ruins yet beauteous in decay.” To the south, on the
Galloway side of the estuary, Criffel’s cone rises above the walls of
Sweetheart Abbey, built by John Baliol’s widow as tomb in which her
husband’s heart should lie upon her own. On the opposite side stands
another stately ruin, Caerlaverock Castle, where in the churchyard lies
“Old Mortality,” as “Jeanie Deans” rests at Irongray. To the north is
Lochmaben, the castle, perhaps the birthplace, of Robert Bruce. But the
name that first rises to memory in this Nithsdale countryside is Robert
Burns, tenant of Ellisland under that Dalswinton laird for whom is
claimed the honour of the earliest steamboat experiments. Bruce,
possibly born at Turnberry Castle on the Carrick coast, may have been an
Ayrshire man like Burns, who came to end his broken life at Dumfries,
now counting itself honoured by the sepulchre of one who thus wrote his
own epitaph--
The poor inhabitant below
Was quick to learn and wise to know,
And keenly felt the friendly glow,
And softer flame;
But thoughtless follies laid him low,
And stained his name.
Scotland’s heart warms to the memory of Robbie Burns, over whose sayings
and doings in lifetime big wigs about Dumfries were shaken and grave
eyes upturned. As if in repentance for his hard life and troubled death,
his countrymen will now hear no word against the poet, who could be
severe enough on his own frailties. And if mortal ever deserved kindly
judgment, it was he whose heart went out not only to his Jeans and
Annies, but to his “auld mare Maggie,” to a hare wounded by
[Illustration: ON THE RIVER AYR, AYRSHIRE]
“barb’rous art,” to dumb cattle left out in a storm, even to such a
“poor earth-companion and fellow-mortal” as a field-mouse; he who would
not willingly have crushed with his ploughshare a “wee, modest,
crimson-tippit flower”; who had no hatred for the very enemy of
mankind--“Wad ye take a thought and mend!” It is vain to deny or conceal
that “he had twa faults, or maybe three,” but fate indeed gave him hard
measure. Had his sphere been a higher one, he would not have been the
man he was; yet with a little ease, with wise friends to counsel
“prudent, cautious self-control,” with Pitt’s port or even Byron’s hock
and soda-water instead of tippenny and usquebaugh among spell-bound
tavern cronies, might he not have lived to draw as good an income from
the Civil Service as Wordsworth, to become a douce elder of the Kirk,
and to take a seat among the orthodox _bon vivants_ of the _Noctes_? As
it is, his humble birthplace draws more pilgrims than come to
Stratford-on-Avon from all over the world, for--
Who his human heart has laid
To Nature’s bosom nearer?
Who sweetened toil like him, or paid
To love a tribute dearer?
Through all his tuneful art, how strong
The human feeling gushes!
The very moonlight of his song
Is warm with smiles and blushes!
This singer of the people’s joys and sorrows represents the soft side to
a strong nature. From the scene of his last days it is but a step to
Annandale, cradle of a neighbour genius that is Scotland’s boast rather
than her darling. Thomas Carlyle, who ascended into such a clear heaven
of contempt for the “mostly fools” of his “swindler century,” fell short
of Burns in one highest point of wisdom. He knew himself hardly better
than did his amazed contemporaries; and seems never to have guessed what
short work some of his admired strong men would have made of one who
preached the gospel of silence in such long-drawn screeds of rhetoric,
rising often to a falsetto note. An unchristianised Calvinist and
Covenanter; a poet “wanting the accomplishment of verse”; a painter in
“hues of earthquake and eclipse”; a philosopher who “thought in a
passion”; a Stoic who could not abide the crowing of a cock; an
historian who “saw history in flashes of lightning”; a reformer “calling
down fire from heaven whenever he cannot readily lay his hand on the
match-box”; a painful preacher who has ministered more amusement than
repentance; a prophet who could not recognise the master force of his
own age; a ferocious moralist and a bitter humorist, this “great
imperfect man” owes much of his renown to a gnarled eccentricity which
at first scared away readers, but more to the ardour that has inspired
so many minds rejecting both his premises and his conclusions. To some
who receive _Sartor Resartus_ into the canon of immortality, his
idolatry of strength, so natural to the sedentary, bilious student,
seems the weakness of his character, through which he was led to work up
bloodshot halos for unscrupulous violence, from his fancy picture of Dr.
Francia to his fond glorification of Frederick the Great, till at last
he appears struggling to pervert his own moral judgment. A countryman of
his who, but for another weakness, might have made himself better
known, Patrick Proctor Alexander, has well exposed his obliquity of
vision in a burlesque that shows as much wisdom as fooling; and to my
mind the soundest judgment of Carlyle comes across the Atlantic from
James Russell Lowell:--
“If not a profound thinker, he had what was next best: he felt
profoundly, and his cry came out of the depths. The stern Calvinism
of his early training was rekindled by his imagination to the old
fervour of Wishart and Brown, and became a new phenomenon as he
reproduced it subtilised by German transcendentalism and German
culture. Imagination, if it lays hold of a Scotsman, possesses him
in the old demoniac sense of the word, and that hard logical
nature, if the Hebrew fire once gets fair headway in it, burns
unquenchable as an anthracite coal-mine. But to utilise these
sacred heats, to employ them, as a literary man is always tempted,
to keep the domestic pot a-boiling--is such a thing possible? Only
too possible, we fear; and Mr. Carlyle is an example of it. If the
languid public long for a sensation, the excitement of making one
becomes also a necessity of the successful author, as the
intellectual nerves grow duller and the old inspiration that came
unbidden to the bare garret grows shyer and shyer of the
comfortable parlour. As he himself said thirty years ago of Edward
Irving, ‘Unconsciously, for the most part in deep unconsciousness,
there was now the impossibility to live neglected--to walk on the
quiet paths where alone it is well with us. Singularity must
henceforth succeed singularity. O foulest Circean draught, thou
poison of Popular Applause! madness is in thee and death; thy end
is Bedlam and the grave.’ Mr. Carlyle won his first successes as a
kind of preacher in print. His fervour, his oddity of manner, his
pugnacious paradox, drew the crowd; the truth, or, at any rate, the
faith that underlay them all, brought also the fitter audience,
though fewer. But the curse was upon him; he must attract, he must
astonish. Thenceforth he has done nothing but revamp his telling
things; but the oddity has become always odder, the paradoxes more
paradoxical. No very large share of truth falls to the apprehension
of any one man; let him keep it sacred, and beware of repeating it
till it turn to falsehood on his lips by becoming ritual.”
After all Carlyle was not wholly a typical Scotsman. His stock seems to
have come from Cumberland, and his birthplace, not far from the Border,
is one of Scotland’s less bonnie _airts_. He was very Lowlandish,
indeed, in some features: in his perfervidness, in his intolerance, in
the coarseness of mental grain that chuckles over abusive nicknames, and
in volcanic stirrings of sympathy that enabled him to appreciate Burns.
He was above all himself, _Der Einzige_, as he proclaimed others, a most
portentous and vigorous force in literature, that has been transmuted
into different modes of intellectual motion. Whatever rank this
coruscating star may eventually take in the firmament of fame, its
spectrum is not that of Scotland. At the best, he represents but one
side of his country’s nature, as appears in his grudging and belittling
view of Scott, who more fully unites the chequered elements of the
national character.
In a generation much blinded by literary superstitions and idolatries,
Scotsmen should faithfully testify to Scott as the truest genius of
their country. With him for guide, we entered his beloved Borderland; he
has seldom been far from us as we passed through its scenes and
monuments, and still on the rhinns of Galloway and in the dales of
Dumfries, his shade attends us; nor does it wholly vanish as we cross
the Solway viaduct into “Happy England,” pronounced by a recent American
writer, after his lights, “a section more beautiful perhaps to the
eye,” forsooth, than Bonnie Scotland, but “certainly not one which
appeals more forcibly to the imagination.” Burns did something, Carlyle
almost nothing, towards fusing angry memories of the past into one
national sentiment. To the spells of that Wizard of the North we chiefly
owe it that now “Highland and Lowland, all our hearts are Scotch!” as a
romancer of our own time exclaims, who elsewhere recalls Stewart of
Garth’s story how, when a Highland regiment landed at Portpatrick after
long exile, the kilted veterans flung themselves down to kiss the ground
of Galloway, so far from their native heath.
THE END
_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_.
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Typographical error corrected by the etext transcriber:
frailities=> frailties {pg 250}