The Great Conglomerate--Its Undulatory and Rectilinear
Members--Knock Farril and its Vitrified Fort--The old Highlanders
an observant race--The Vein of Silver--Summit of Knock Farril--Mode
of accounting for the Luxuriance of Herbage in the ancient Scottish
Fortalices--The green Graves of Culloden--Theories respecting the
Vitrification of the Hill-forts--Combined Theories of Williams and
Mackenzie probably give the correct account--The Author's
Explanation--Transformations of Fused Rocks--Strathpeffer--The
Spa--Permanent Odoriferous Qualities of an ancient Sea-bottom
converted into Rock--Mineral Springs of the Spa--Infusion of the
powdered rock a substitute--Belemnite Water--The lively young
Lady's Comments--A befogged Country seen from a
hill-top--Ben-Wevis--Journey to Evanton--A Geologist's
Night-mare--The Route Home--Ruins of Craighouse--Incompatibility of
Tea and Ghosts--End of the Tour.
I was once more on the Great Conglomerate,--here, as elsewhere, a
picturesque, boldly-featured deposit, traversed by narrow, mural-sided
valleys, and tempested by bluff abrupt eminences. Its hills are greatly
less confluent than those of most of the other sedimentary formations of
Scotland; and their insulated summits, recommended by their steep sides
and limited areas to the old savage Vaubans of the Highlands, furnished,
ere the historic eras began, sites for not a few of the ancient
hill-forts of the country. The vitrified fort of Craig Phadrig, of the
Ord Hill of Kessock, and of Knock Farril,--two of the number, the first
and last, being the most celebrated erections of their kind in the north
of Scotland,--were all formed on hills of the Great Conglomerate. The
Conglomerate exists here as a sort of miniature Highlands, set down at
the northern side of a large angular bay of Palaeozoic rock, which
indents the _true_ Highlands of the country, and which exhibits in its
central area a prolongation of the long moory ridge of the Black Isle,
formed, as I have already had occasion to remark, of an _upper_ deposit
of the same lower division of the Old Red,--a deposit as noticeable for
affecting a confluent, rectilinear character in its elevations, as the
Conglomerate is remarkable for exhibiting a detached and undulatory one.
Exactly the same features are presented by the same deposits in the
neighborhood of Inverness; the _undulatory_ Conglomerate composing, to
the north and west of the town, the picturesque wavy ridge comprising
the twin-eminences of Munlochy Bay, the Ord Hill of Kessock, Craig
Phadrig, and the fir-covered hill beyond in the line of the Great
Valley; while on the south and east the _rectilinear_ ichthyolitic
member of the system, with the arenaceous beds that lie over it, form
the continuous straight-lined ridge which runs on from beyond the moor
of the Leys to beyond the moor of Culloden. There is a pretty little
loch in this dwarf Highlands of the Brahan district, into which the old
Celtic prophet Kenneth Ore, when, like Prospero, he relinquished his
art, buried "deep beyond plummet sound" the magic stone in which he was
wont to see the distant and the future. And with the loch it contains a
narrow, hermit-like dell, bearing but a single row of fields, and these
of small size, along its flat bottom, and whose steep gray sides of
rustic Conglomerate resemble Cyclopean walls. It, besides, includes
among its hills the steep hill of Knock Farril, which, rising bluff and
bold immediately over the southern slopes of Strathpeffer, adds so
greatly to the beauty of the valley, and bears atop perhaps the finest
specimen of the vitrified fort in Scotland; and the bold frontage of
cliff presented by the group to the west, over the pleasure grounds of
Brahan, is, though on no very large scale, one of the most
characteristic of the Conglomerate formation which can be seen
anywhere. It is formed of exactly such cliffs as the landscape gardener
would make if he could,--cliffs with their rude prominent pebbles
breaking the light over every square foot of surface, and furnishing
footing, by their innumerable projections, to many a green tuft of moss,
and many a sweet little flower. Some of the masses, too, that have
rolled down from the precipices among the Brahan woods far below, and
stand up, like the ruins of cottages, amid the trees, are of singular
beauty,--worth all the imitation-ruins ever erected, and obnoxious to
none of the disparaging associations which the mere show and
make-believe of the artificial are sure always to awaken.
Whatever exhibited an aspect in any degree extraordinary was sure to
attract the notice of the old Highlanders,--an acutely observant race,
however slightly developed their reflective powers; and the great
natural objects which excited their attention we always find associated
with some traditionary story. It is said that in the Conglomerate cliffs
above Brahan, a retainer of the Mackenzie, one of the smiths of the
tribe, discovered a rich vein of silver, which he wrought by stealth,
until he had filled one of the apartments of his cottage with bars and
ingots. But the treasure, it is added, was betrayed by his own
unfortunate vanity, to his chief, who hanged him in order to serve
himself his heir; and no one since his death has proved ingenious enough
to convert the rude rock into silver. Years had, I found, wrought their
changes amid the miniature Highlands of the Conglomerate. The sapplings
of the straggling wood on the banks of Loch Ousy,--the pleasant little
lake, or lochan rather, of this upland region,--that I remembered having
seen scarce taller than myself, had shot into vigorous treehood; and the
steep slopes of Knock Farril, which I had left covered with their dark
screen of pine, were now thickly mottled over with half-decayed stumps,
and bore that peculiarly barren aspect which tracts cleared of their
wood so frequently assume in their transition state, when the plants
that flourished in the shade have died out in consequence of the
exposure, and plants that love the open air and the unbroken sunshine
have not yet sprung up in their place. I found the southern acclivities
of the hill covered with scattered masses of vitrified stone, that had
fallen from the fortalice atop; and would recommend to the collector in
quest of a characteristic specimen, that instead of laboring, to the
general detriment of the pile, in detaching one from the walls above, he
should set himself to seek one here. The blocks, uninjured by the
hammer, exhibit, in most cases, the angular character of the original
fragments better than those forcibly detached from the mass, and
preserve in fine keeping those hollower interstices which were but
partially filled with the molten matter, and which, when shattered by a
blow, break through and lose their character.
One may spend an hour very agreeably on the green summit of Knock
Farril. And at almost all seasons of the year a green summit it
is,--greener considerably than any other hill-top in this part of the
country. The more succulent grasses spring up rich and strong within the
walls, here and there roughened by tufts of nettles, tall and rank, and
somewhat perilous of approach,--witnesses, say the botanists, that man
had once a dwelling in the immediate neighborhood. The green luxuriance
which characterizes so many of the more ancient fortalices of Scotland
seems satisfactorily accounted for by Dr. Fleming, in his "Zoology of
the Bass." "The summits and sides of those hills which were occupied by
our ancestors as _hill-forts_," says the naturalist, "usually exhibit a
far richer herbage than corresponding heights in the neighborhood with
the mineral soil derived from the same source. It is to be kept in view,
that these positions of strength were at the same time occupied as
_hill-folds_, into which, during the threatened or actual invasion of
the district by a hostile tribe, the cattle were driven, especially
during the night, as to places of safety, and sent out to pasture in the
neighborhood during the day. And the droppings of these collected herds
would, as takes place in analogous cases at present, speedily improve
the soil to such an extent as to induce a permanent fertility." The
further instance adduced by the Doctor, in showing through what
protracted periods causes transitory in themselves may remain palpably
influential in their effects, is curiously suggestive of the old
metaphysical idea, that as every effect has its cause, "recurring from
cause to cause up to the abyss of eternity, so every cause has also its
effects, linked forward in succession to the end of time." On the bleak
moor of Culloden the graves of the slain still exist as patches of green
sward, surrounded by a brown groundwork of stunted heather. The animal
matter,--once the nerves, muscles, and sinews of brave men,--which
originated the change, must have been wholly dissipated ages ago. But
the effect once produced has so decidedly maintained itself, that it
remains not less distinctly stamped upon the heath in the present day
than it could have been in the middle of the last century, only a few
years after the battle had been stricken.
The vitrification of the rampart which on every side incloses the grassy
area has been more variously, but less satisfactorily, accounted for
than the green luxuriance within. It was held by Pennant to be an effect
of volcanic fire, and that the walls of this and all our other vitrified
strongholds are simply the crater-rims of extinct volcanoes,--a
hypothesis wholly as untenable in reference to the hill-forts as to the
lime-kilns of the country: the vitrified forts are as little volcanic as
the vitrified kilns. Williams, the author of the "Mineral Kingdom," and
one of our earlier British geologists, after deciding, on data which his
peculiar pursuits enabled him to collect and weigh, that they are _not_
volcanic, broached the theory, still prevalent, as their name testifies,
that they are artificial structures, in which vitrescency was designedly
induced, in order to cement into solid masses accumulations of loose
materials. Lord Woodhouselee advocated an opposite view. Resting on the
fact that the vitrification is but of partial occurrence, be held that
it had been produced, not of design by the builders of the forts, but in
the process of their demolition by a besieging enemy, who, finding, as
he premised, a large portion of the ramparts composed of wood, had
succeeded in setting them on fire. This hypothesis, however, seems quite
as untenable as that of Pennant. Fires not unfrequently occur in cities,
among crowded groups of houses, where walls of stone are surrounded by a
much greater profusion of dry woodwork than could possibly have entered
into the composition of the ramparts of a hill-fort; but who ever saw,
after a city fire, masses of wall from eight to ten feet in thickness
fused throughout? The sandstone columns of the aisles of the Old
Greyfriars in Edinburgh, surrounded by the woodwork of the galleries,
the flooring, the seating, and the roof, were wasted, during the fire
which destroyed the pile, into mere skeletons of their former selves;
but though originally not more than three feet in diameter, they
exhibited no marks of vitrescency. And it does not seem in the least
probable that the stonework of the Knock Farril rampart could, if
surrounded by wood at all, have been surrounded by an amount equally
great, in proportion to its mass, as that which enveloped the
aisle-columns of the Old Greyfriars.
The late Sir George Mackenzie of Coul adopted yet a fourth view. He
held that the vitrification is simply an effect of the ancient
beacon-fires kindled to warn the country of an invading enemy. But how
account, on this hypothesis, for ramparts continuous, as in the case of
Knock Farril, all round the hill? A powerful fire long kept up might
well fuse a heap of loose stones into a solid mass; the bonfire lighted
on the summit of Arthur Seat in 1842, to welcome the Queen on her first
visit to Scotland, particularly fused numerous detached fragments of
basalt, and imparted, in some spots to the depth of about half an inch,
a vesicular structure to the solid rock beneath. But no fire, however
powerful, could have constructed a rampart running without break for
several hundred feet round an insulated hill-top. "To be satisfied,"
said Sir George, "of the reason why the signal-fires should be kindled
on or beside a heap of stones, we have only to imagine a gale of wind to
have arisen when a fire was kindled on the bare ground. The fuel would
be blown about and dispersed, to the great annoyance of those who
attended. The plan for obviating the inconvenience thus occasioned which
would occur most naturally and readily would be to raise a heap of
stones, on either side of which the fire might be placed to windward;
and to account for the vitrification appearing all round the area, it is
only necessary to allow the inhabitants of the country to have had a
system of signals. A fire at one end might denote something different
from a fire at the other, or in some intermediate part. On some
occasions two or more fires might be necessary, and sometimes a fire
along the whole line. It cannot be doubted," he adds, "that the rampart
was originally formed with as much regularity as the nature of the
materials would allow, both in order to render it more durable, and to
make it serve the purposes of defence." This, I am afraid, is still
very unsatisfactory. A fire lighted along the entire line of a wall
inclosing nearly an acre of area could not be other than a very
attenuated, wire-drawn line of fire indeed, and could never possess
strength enough to melt the ponderous mass of rampart beneath, as if it
had been formed of wax or resin. A thousand loads of wood piled in a
ring round the summit of Knock Farril, and set at once into a blaze,
would wholly fail to affect the broad rampart below; and long ere even a
thousand, or half a thousand, loads could have been cut down, collected,
and fired, an invading enemy would have found time enough to moor his
fleet and land his forces, and possess himself of the lower country.
Again, the unbroken continuity of the vitrified line militates against
the signal-system theory. Fire trod so closely upon the heels of fire,
that the vitrescency induced by the one fire impinged on and mingled
with the vitrescency induced by the others beside it. There is no other
mode of accounting for the continuity of the fusion; and how could
definite meanings possibly be attached to the various parts of a line so
minutely graduated, that the centre of the fire kindled on any one
graduation could be scarce ten feet apart from the centre of the fire
kindled on any of its two neighboring graduations? Even by day, the
exact compartment which a fire occupied could not be distinguished, at
the distance of half a mile, from its neighboring compartments, and not
at all by night, at any distance, from even the compartments farthest
removed from it. Who, for instance, at the distance of a dozen miles or
so, could tell whether the flame that shone out in the darkness, when
all other objects around it were invisible, was kindled on the east or
west end of an eminence little more than a hundred yards in length? Nay,
who could determine,--for such is the requirement of the
hypothesis,--whether it rose from a compartment of the summit a hundred
feet distant from its west or east end, or from a compartment merely
ninety or a hundred and ten feet distant from it? The supposed signal
system, added to the mere beacon hypothesis, is palpably untenable.
The theory of Williams, however, which is, I am inclined to think, the
true one in the main, seems capable of being considerably modified and
improved by the hypothesis of Sir George. The hill-fort,--palpably the
most primitive form of fortalice or stronghold originated in a
mountainous country,--seems to constitute man's first essay towards
neutralizing, by the art of fortification, the advantages of superior
force on the side of an assailing enemy. It was found, on the discovery
of New Zealand, that the savage inhabitants had already learned to erect
exactly such hill-forts amid the fastnesses of that country as those
which were erected two thousand years earlier by the Scottish aborigines
amid the fastnesses of our own. Nothing seems more probable, therefore,
than that the forts of eminences such as Craig Phadrig and Knock Farril,
originally mere inclosures of loose, uncemented stones, may belong to a
period not less ancient than that of the first barbarous wars of
Scotland, when, though tribe battled with tribe in fierce warfare, like
the red men of the West with their brethren ere the European had landed
on their shores, navigation was yet in so immature a state in Northern
Europe as to secure to them an exemption from foreign invasion. In an
after age, however, when the roving Vikings had become formidable, many
of the eminences originally selected, from _their inaccessibility_, as
sites for hill-forts, would come to be chosen, from _their prominence in
the landscape_, as stations for beacon-fires. And of course the
previously erected ramparts, higher always than the inclosed areas,
would furnish on such hills the conspicuous points from which the fires
could be best seen. Let us suppose, then, that the rampart-crested
eminence of Knock Farril, seen on every side for many miles, has become
in the age of northern invasion one of the beacon-posts of the district,
and that large fires, abundantly supplied with fuel by the woods of a
forest-covered country, and blown at times into intense heat by the
strong winds so frequent in that upper stratum of air into which the
summit penetrates, have been kindled some six or eight times on some
prominent point of the rampart, raised, mayhap, many centuries before.
At first the heat has failed to tell on the stubborn quartz and feldspar
which forms the preponderating material of the gneisses, granites,
quartz rocks, and coarse conglomerate sandstones on which it has been
brought to operate; but each fire throws down into the interstices a
considerable amount of the fixed salt of the wood, till at length the
heap has become charged with a strong flux; and then one powerful fire
more, fanned to a white heat by a keen, dry breeze, reduces the whole
into a semi-fluid mass. The same effects have been produced on the
materials of the rampart by the beacon-fires and the alkali, that were
produced, according to Pliny, by the fires and the soda of the
Phoenician merchants storm-bound on the sands of the river Belus. But
the state of civilization in Scotland at the time is not such as to
permit of the discovery being followed up by similar results. The
semi-savage guardians of the beacon wonder at the _accident_, as they
well may; but those happy accidents in which the higher order of
discoveries originate occur in only the ages of cultivated minds; and so
they do not acquire from it the art of manufacturing glass. It could not
fail being perceived, however, by intellects at all human, that the
consolidation which the fires of one week, or month, or year, as the
case happened, had effected on one portion of the wall, might be
produced by the fires of another week, or month, or year, on another
portion of it; that, in short, a loose incoherent rampart, easy of
demolition, might be converted, through the newly-discovered process,
into a rampart as solid and indestructible as the rock on which it
rested. And so, in course of time, simply by shifting the beacon-fires,
and bringing them to bear in succession on every part of the wall, Knock
Farril, with many a similar eminence in the country, comes to exhibit
its completely vitrified fort where there had been but a loosely-piled
hill-fort before. It in no degree militates against this compound
theory,--borrowed in part from Williams and in part from Sir
George,--that there are detached vitrified masses to be found on
eminences evidently never occupied by hill-forts; or that there are
hill-forts on other eminences only partially fused, or hill-forts on
many of the less commanding sites that bear about them no marks of fire
at all. Nothing can be more probable than that in the first class of
cases we have eminences that had been selected as beacon-stations, which
had not previously been occupied by hill-forts; and in the last,
eminences that had been occupied by hill-forts which, from their want of
prominence in the general landscape, had not been selected as
beacon-stations. And in the intermediate class of cases we have probably
ramparts that were only partially vitrified, because some want of fuel
in the neighborhood had starved the customary fires, or because fires
had to be less frequently kindled upon them than on the more important
stations; or, finally, because these hill-forts, from some disadvantage
of situation, were no longer used as places of strength, and so the
beacon-keepers had no motive to attempt consolidating them throughout by
the piecemeal application of the vitrifying agent. But the old Highland
mode of accounting for the present appearance of Knock Farril and its
vitrified remains is perhaps, after all, quite as good in its way as any
of the modes suggested by the philosophers.[20]
I spent some time, agreeably enough, beside the rude rampart of Knock
Farril, in marking the various appearances exhibited by the fused and
semi-fused materials of which it is composed,--the granites, gneisses,
mica-schists, hornblendes, clay-slates, and red sandstones of the
locality. One piece of rock, containing much lime, I found resolved into
a yellow opaque substance, not unlike the coarse earthenware used in the
making of ginger-beer bottles; but though it had been so completely
molten that it had dropped into a hollow beneath in long viscid trails,
it did not contain a single air-vesicle; while another specimen,
apparently a piece of fused mica-schist, was so filled with air-cells,
that the dividing partitions were scarcely the tenth of a line in
thickness. I found bits of schistose gneiss resolved into green glass;
the Old Red Sandstone basis of the Conglomerate, which forms the hill,
into a semi-metallic scoria, like that of an iron-smelter's furnace;
mica into a gray, waxy-looking stone, that scratched glass; and pure
white quartz into porcellanic trails of white, that ran in one instance
along the face of a darker-colored rock below, like streaks of cream
along the sides of a burnt china jug. In one mass of pale large-grained
granite I found that the feldspar, though it had acquired a vitreous
gloss on the surface, still retained its peculiar rhomboidal cleavage;
while the less stubborn quartz around it had become scarce less
vesicular and light than a piece of pumice. On some of the other masses
there was impressed, as if by a seal, the stamp of pieces of charcoal;
and so sharply was the impression retained, that I could detect on the
vitreous surface the mark of the yearly growths, and even of the
medullary rays, of the wood. In breaking open some of the others, I
detected fragments of the charcoal itself, which, hermetically locked up
in the rock, had retained all its original carbon. These last reminded
me of specimens not unfrequent among the trap-rocks of the Carboniferous
and Oolitic systems. From an intrusive overlying wacke in the
neighborhood of Linlithgow I have derived for my collection pieces of
carbonized wood in so complete a state of keeping, that under the
microscope they exhibit unbroken all the characteristic reticulations of
the coniferae of the Coal Measures.
I descended the hill, and, after joining my friends at
Strathpeffer,--Buchubai Hormazdji among the rest,--visited the Spa, in
the company of my old friend the minister of Alness. The thorough
identity of the powerful effluvium that fills the pump-room with that of
a muddy sea-bottom laid bare in warm weather by the tide, is to the
dweller on the sea-coast very striking. It _is_ identity,--not mere
resemblance. In most cases the organic substances undergo great changes
in the bowels of the earth. The animal matter of the Caithness
ichthyolites exists, for instance, as a hard, black, insoluble bitumen,
which I have used oftener than once as sealing-wax; the vegetable mould
of the Coal Measures has been converted into a fire-clay, so altered in
the organic pabulum, animal and vegetable, whence it derived its
fertility, that, even when laid open for years to the meliorating
effects of the weather and the visits of the winged seeds, it will not
be found bearing a single spike or leaf of green. But here, in smell, at
least, that ancient mud, swum over by the Diplopterus and the
Diplacanthus, and in which the Coccosteus and Pterichthys burrowed, has
undergone no change. The soft ooze has become solid rock, but its
odoriferous qualities have remained unaltered. I next visited an
excavation a few hundred yards on the upper side of the pump-room, in
which the gray fetid breccia of the Strath has been quarried for
dyke-building, and examined the rock with some degree of care, without,
however, detecting in it a single plate or scale. Lying over that
Conglomerate member of the system which, rising high in the Knock Farril
range, forms the southern boundary of the valley, it occupies the place
of the lower ichthyolitic bed, so rich in organisms in various other
parts of the country; but here the bed, after it had been deposited in
thin horizontal laminae, and had hardened into stone, seems to have been
broken up, by some violent movement, into minute sharp-edged fragments,
that, without wear or attrition, were again consolidated into the
breccia which it now forms. And its ichthyolites, if not previously
absorbed, were probably destroyed in the convulsion. Detached scales and
spines, however, if carefully sought for in the various openings of the
valley, might still be found in the original laminae of the fragments.
They must have been amazingly abundant in it once; for so largely
saturated is the rock with the organic matter into which they have been
resolved, that, when struck by the hammer, the impalpable dust set loose
sensibly affects the organs of taste, and appeals very strongly to those
of smell. It is through this saturated rock that the mineral springs
take their course. Even the surface-waters of the valley, as they pass
over it contract in a perceptible degree its peculiar taste and odor.
With a little more time to spare, I would fain have made this breccia of
the Old Red the subject of a few simple experiments. I would have ground
it into powder, and tried upon it the effect both of cold and hot
infusion. Portions of the water are sometimes carried in casks and
bottles, for the use of invalids, to a considerable distance; but it is
quite possible that a little of the _rock_, to which the water owes its
qualities, might, when treated in this way, have all the effects of a
considerable quantity of the _spring_. It might be of some interest,
too, to ascertain its qualities when crushed, as a soil, or its effect
on other soils; whether, for instance, like the old sterile soils of the
Carboniferous period, it has lost, through its rock-change, the
fertilizing properties which it once possessed; or whether it still
retains them, like some of the coprolitic beds of the Oolite and
Greensand, and might not, in consequence, be employed as a manure. A
course of such experiments could scarce fail to furnish with agreeable
occupation some of the numerous annual visitants of the Spa, who have to
linger long, with but little to engage them, waiting for what, if it
once fairly leave a man, returns slowly, when it returns at all.
In mentioning at the dinner-table of my friend my scheme of infusing
rock in order to produce Spa water, I referred to the circumstance that
the Belemnite of our Liasic deposits, when ground into powder, imparts
to boiling water a peculiar taste and smell, and that the infusion,
taken in very small quantities, sensibly affects both palate and
stomach. And I suggested that Belemnite water, deemed sovereign of old,
when the Belemnite was regarded as a thunderbolt, in the cure of
bewitched cattle, might be in reality medicinal, and that the ancient
superstition might thus embody, as ancient superstitions not
unfrequently do, a nucleus of fact. The charm, I said, might amount to
no more than simply the administration of a medicine to sick cattle,
that did harm in no case, and good at times. The lively comment of one
of the young ladies on the remark amused us all. If an infusion of stone
had cured, in the last age, cattle that were bewitched, the Strathpeffer
water, she argued, which was, it seems, but an infusion of stone, might
cure cattle that were sick now; and so, though the biped patients of
the Strath could scarce fail to decrease when they knew that its infused
stone contained but the strainings of old mud, and the juices of dead
unsalted fish, it was gratifying to think that the poor Spa might still
continue to retain its patients, though of a lower order. The pump-room
would be converted into a rustic, straw-thatched shed, to which long
trains of sick cattle, affected by weak nerves and dyspepsia, would come
streaming along the roads every morning and evening, to drink and gather
strength.
The following morning was wet and lowering, and a flat ceiling of gray
cloud stretched across the valley, from the summit of the Knock Farril
ridge of hills on the one side, to the lower flanks of Ben-Wevis on the
other. I had purposed ascending this latter mountain,--the giant of the
north-eastern coast, and one of the loftiest of our second-class
Scottish hills anywhere,--to ascertain the extreme upper line at which
travelled boulders occur in this part of the country. But it was no
morning for wading knee-deep through the trackless heather; and after
waiting on, in the hope the weather might clear up, watching at a window
the poorer invalids at the Spa, as they dragged themselves through the
rain to the water, I lost patience, and sallied out, beplaided and
umbrellaed, to see from the top of Knock Farril how the country looked
in a fog. At first, however, I saw much fog, but little country; but as
the day wore on, the flat mist-ceiling rose together, till it rested on
but the distant hills, and the more prominent features of the landscape
began to stand out amid the more general gray, like the stronger lines
and masses in a half-finished drawing, boldly dashed off in the neutral
tint of the artist. The portions of the prospect generically distinct
are, notwithstanding its great extent and variety, but few; and the
partial veil of haze, by glazing down its distracting multiplicity of
minor points, served to bring them out all the more distinctly. There
is, first stretching far in a southern and eastern direction along the
landscape, the rectilinear ridge of the Black Isle,--not quite the sort
of line a painter would introduce into a composition, but true to
geologic character. More in the foreground, in the same direction, there
spreads a troubled cockling sea of the Great Conglomerate. Turning to
the north and west, the deep valley of Strathpeffer, with its expanse of
rich level fields, and in the midst its old baronial castle, surrounded
by coeval trees of vast bulk, lies so immediately at the foot of the
eminence, that I could hear in the calm the rush of the little stream,
swollen to thrice its usual bulk by the rains of the night. Beyond rose
the thick-set Ben-Wevis,--a true gneiss mountain, with breadth enough of
shoulders, and amplitude enough of base, to serve a mountain thrice as
tall, but which, like all its cogeners of this ancient formation, was
arrested in its second stage of growth, so that many of the slimmer
granitic and porphyritic hills of the country look down upon it, as
Agamemnon, according to Homer, looked down upon Ulysses.
"Broad is his breast, his shoulders larger spread,
Though great Atrides overtops his head."
All around, as if topling, wave-like, over the outer edges of the
comparatively flat area of Palaeozoic rock which composes the middle
ground of the landscape, rose a multitude of primary hill-peaks, barely
discernible in the haze; while the long withdrawing Dingwall Frith,
stretching on towards the open sea for full twenty miles, and flanked on
either side by ridges of sandstone, but guarded at the opening by two
squat granitic columns, completed the prospect, by adding to its last
great feature. All was gloomy and chill; and as I turned me down the
descent, the thick wetting drizzle again came on; and the mist-wreaths,
after creeping upwards along the hill-side, began again to creep down.
When I had first visited the valley, more than a quarter of a century
before, it was on a hot breathless day of early summer, in which, though
the trees in fresh leaf seemed drooping in the sunshine, and the
succulent luxuriance of the fields lay aslant, half-prostrated by the
fierce heat, the rich blue of Ben-Wevis, far above, was thickly streaked
with snow, on which it was luxury even to look. It gave one iced
fancies, wherewithal to slake, amid the bright glow of summer, the
thirst in the mind. The recollection came strongly upon me, as the fog
from the hill-top closed dark behind, like that sung by the old blind
Englishman, which
"O'er the marish glides,
And gathers ground fast at the lab'rer's heel,
Homeward returning."
But the contrast had nothing sad in it; and it was pleasant to feel that
it had not. I had resigned many a baseless hope and many an idle desire
since I had spent a vacant day amid the sunshine, now gazing on the
broad placid features of the snow-streaked mountain; and now sauntering
under the tall ancient woods, or along the heath-covered slopes of the
valley; but in relation to never-tiring, inexhaustible nature, the heart
was no fresher at that time than it was now. I had grown no older in my
feelings or in my capacity of enjoyment; and what then was there to
regret?
I rode down the Strath in an omnibus which plies between the Spa and
Dingwall, and then walked on to the village of Evanton, which I reached
about an hour after nightfall, somewhat in the circumstances of the
"damp stranger," who gave Beau Brummel the cold. There were, however, no
Beau Brummels in the quiet village inn in which I passed the night, and
so the effects of the damp were wholly confined to myself. I was soundly
pummelled during the night by a frightful female, who first assumed the
appearance of the miserable pauper woman whom I had seen beside the
Auldgrande, and then became the Lady of Balconie; and, though
sufficiently indignant, and much inclined to resist, I could stir
neither hand nor foot, but lay passively on my back, jambed fast behind
the huge gneiss boulder and the edge of the gulf. And yet, by a strange
duality of perception, I was conscious all the while that, having got
wet on the previous day, I was now suffering from an attack of
nightmare: and held that it would be no very serious matter even should
the lady tumble me into the gulf, seeing that all would be well again
when I awoke in the morning. Dreams of this character, in which
consciousness bears reference at once to the fictitious events of the
vision and the real circumstances of the sleeper, must occupy, I am
inclined to think, very little time,--single moments, mayhap, poised
midway between the sleeping and waking state. Next day (Sunday) I
attended the Free Church in the parish, where I found a numerous and
attentive congregation,--descendants, in large part, of the old devout
Munroes of Ferindonald,--and heard a good solid discourse. And on the
following morning I crossed the sea at what is known as the Fowlis
Ferry, to explore, on my homeward route, the rocks laid bare along the
shore in the upper reaches of the Frith.
I found but little by the way: black patches of bitumen in the sandstone
of one of the beds, with a bed of stratified clay, inclosing nodules, in
which, however, I succeeded in detecting nothing organic; and a few
fragments of clay-slate locked up in the Red Sandstone, sharp and
unworn at their edges, as if derived from no great distance, though
there be now no clay-slate in the eastern half of Ross; but though the
rocks here belong evidently to the ichthyolitic member of the Old Red,
not a single fish, not a "nibble" even, repaid the patient search of
half a day. I, however, passed some time agreeably enough among the
ruins of Craighouse. When I had last seen, many years before, this old
castle,[21] the upper stories were accessible; but they were now no
longer so. Time, and the little herdboys who occasionally shelter in its
vaults, had been busy in the interval; and, by breaking off a few
projecting corners by which the climber had held, and by effacing a few
notches into which he had thrust his toe-points, they had rendered what
had been merely difficult impracticable. I remarked that the huge
kitchen chimney of the building,--a deep hollow recess which stretches
across the entire gable, and in which, it is said, two thrashers once
plied the flail for a whole winter,--bore less of the stain of recent
smoke than it used to exhibit twenty years before; and inferred that
there would be fewer wraith-lights seen from the castle at nights than
in those days of _evil spirits_ and illicit stills, when the cottars in
the neighborhood sent more smuggled whiskey to market than any equal
number of the inhabitants of almost any other district in the north. It
has been long alleged that there existed a close connection between the
more ghostly spirits of the country and its distilled ones. "How do you
account," said a north country minister of the last age (the late Rev.
Mr. M'Bean of Alves) to a sagacious old elder of his Session, "for the
almost total disappearance of the ghosts and fairies that used to be so
common in your young days?" "Tak my word for 't, minister," replied the
shrewd old man, "it's a' owing to the _tea_; when the _tea_ cam in, the
ghaists an' fairies gaed out. Weel do I mind when at a' our neeborly
meetings,--bridals, christenings, lyke-wakes, an' the like,--we
entertained ane anither wi' rich nappy ale; an' whan the verra dowiest
o' us used to get warm i' the face, an' a little confused in the head,
an' weel fit to see amaist onything whan on the muirs on our way hame.
But the tea has put out the nappy; an' I have remarked, that by losing
the nappy we lost baith ghaists an' fairies."
Quitting the ruin, I walked on along the shore, tracing the sandstone as
I went, as it rises from lower to higher beds; and where it ceases to
crop out at the surface, and gravel and the red boulder-clays take the
place of rock, I struck up the hill, and, traversing the parishes of
Resolis and Cromarty, got home early in the evening. I had seen and done
scarcely half what I had intended seeing or doing: alas, that in
reference to every walk which I have yet attempted to tread, this
special statement should be so invariably true to fact!--alas, that all
my full purposes, should be coupled with but half realizations! But I
had at least the satisfaction, that though I had accomplished little, I
had enjoyed much; and it is something, though not all, nor nearly all,
that, since time is passing, it should pass happily. In my next chapter
I shall enter on my tour to Orkney. It dates one year earlier (1846)
than the tour with which I have already occupied so many chapters; but I
have thus inverted the order of _time_, by placing it last, that I may
be able so to preserve the order of _space_ as to render the tract
travelled over in my narrative continuous from Edinburgh to the northern
extremity of Pomona.