It was with a light heart and a pleasing consciousness of holiday that I
set out from the inn at Allermuir to tramp my fifteen miles into the
unknown. I walked slowly, for I carried my equipment on my back--my
basket, fly-books and rods, my plaid of Grant tartan (for I boast myself
a distant kinsman of that house), and my great staff, which had tried
ere then the front of the steeper Alps. A small valise with books and
some changes of linen clothing had been sent on ahead in the shepherd's
own hands. It was yet early April, and before me lay four weeks of
freedom--twenty-eight blessed days in which to take fish and smoke the
pipe of idleness. The Lent term had pulled me down, a week of modest
enjoyment thereafter in town had finished the work; and I drank in the
sharp moorish air like a thirsty man who has been forwandered among
deserts.
I am a man of varied tastes and a score of interests. As an
undergraduate I had been filled with the old mania for the complete
life. I distinguished myself in the Schools, rowed in my college eight,
and reached the distinction of practising for three weeks in the Trials.
I had dabbled in a score of learned activities, and when the time came
that I won the inevitable St. Chad's fellowship on my chaotic
acquirements, and I found myself compelled to select if I would pursue a
scholar's life, I had some toil in finding my vocation. In the end I
resolved that the ancient life of the North, of the Celts and the
Northmen and the unknown Pictish tribes, held for me the chief
fascination. I had acquired a smattering of Gaelic, having been brought
up as a boy in Lochaber, and now I set myself to increase my store of
languages. I mastered Erse and Icelandic, and my first book--a monograph
on the probable Celtic elements in the Eddic songs--brought me the
praise of scholars and the deputy-professor's chair of Northern
Antiquities. So much for Oxford. My vacations had been spent mainly in
the North--in Ireland, Scotland, and the Isles, in Scandinavia and
Iceland, once even in the far limits of Finland. I was a keen sportsman
of a sort, an old-experienced fisher, a fair shot with gun and rifle,
and in my hillcraft I might well stand comparison with most men. April
has ever seemed to me the finest season of the year even in our cold
northern altitudes, and the memory of many bright Aprils had brought me
up from the South on the night before to Allerfoot, whence a dogcart had
taken me up Glen Aller to the inn at Allermuir; and now the same desire
had set me on the heather with my face to the cold brown hills.
You are to picture a sort of plateau, benty and rock-strewn, running
ridge-wise above a chain of little peaty lochs and a vast tract of
inexorable bog. In a mile the ridge ceased in a shoulder of hill, and
over this lay the head of another glen, with the same doleful
accompaniment of sunless lochs, mosses, and a shining and resolute
water. East and west and north, in every direction save the south, rose
walls of gashed and serrated hills. It was a grey day with blinks of
sun, and when a ray chanced to fall on one of the great dark faces,
lines of light and colour sprang into being which told of mica and
granite. I was in high spirits, as on the eve of holiday; I had
breakfasted excellently on eggs and salmon-steaks; I had no cares to
speak of, and my prospects were not uninviting. But in spite of myself
the landscape began to take me in thrall and crush me. The silent
vanished peoples of the hills seemed to be stirring; dark primeval faces
seemed to stare at me from behind boulders and jags of rock. The place
was so still, so free from the cheerful clamour of nesting birds, that
it seemed a _temenos_ sacred to some old-world god. At my feet the lochs
lapped ceaselessly; but the waters were so dark that one could not see
bottom a foot from the edge. On my right the links of green told of
snake-like mires waiting to crush the unwary wanderer. It seemed to me
for the moment a land of death, where the tongues of the dead cried
aloud for recognition.
My whole morning's walk was full of such fancies. I lit a pipe to cheer
me, but the things would not be got rid of. I thought of the Gaels who
had held those fastnesses; I thought of the Britons before them, who
yielded to their advent. They were all strong peoples in their day, and
now they had gone the way of the earth. They had left their mark on the
levels of the glens and on the more habitable uplands, both in names and
in actual forts, and graves where men might still dig curios. But the
hills--that black stony amphitheatre before me--it seemed strange that
the hills bore no traces of them. And then with some uneasiness I
reflected on that older and stranger race who were said to have held the
hill-tops. The Picts, the Picti--what in the name of goodness were they?
They had troubled me in all my studies, a sort of blank wall to put an
end to speculation. We knew nothing of them save certain strange names
which men called Pictish, the names of those hills in front of me--the
Muneraw, the Yirnie, the Calmarton. They were the _corpus vile_ for
learned experiment; but Heaven alone knew what dark abyss of savagery
once yawned in the midst of this desert.
And then I remembered the crazy theories of a pupil of mine at St
Chad's, the son of a small landowner on the Aller, a young gentleman who
had spent his substance too freely at Oxford, and was now dreeing his
weird in the Backwoods. He had been no scholar but a certain imagination
marked all his doings, and of a Sunday night he would come and talk to
me of the North. The Picts were his special subject, and his ideas were
mad. "Listen to me," he would say, when I had mixed him toddy and given
him one of my cigars; "I believe there are traces--ay, and more than
traces--of an old culture lurking in those hills and waiting to be
discovered. We never hear of the Picts being driven from the hills. The
Britons drove them from the lowlands, the Gaels from Ireland did the
same for the Britons; but the hills were left unmolested. We hear of no
one going near them except outlaws and tinklers. And in that very place
you have the strangest mythology. Take the story of the Brownie. What is
that but the story of a little swart man of uncommon strength and
cleverness, who does good and ill indiscriminately, and then disappears?
There are many scholars, as you yourself confess, who think that the
origin of the Brownie was in some mad belief in the old race of the
Picts, which still survived somewhere in the hills. And do we not hear
of the Brownie in authentic records right down to the year 1756? After
that, when people grew more incredulous, it is natural that the belief
should have begun to die out; but I do not see why stray traces should
not have survived till late."
"Do you not see what that means?" I had said in mock gravity. "Those
same hills are, if anything, less known now than they were a hundred
years ago. Why should not your Picts or Brownies be living to this day?"
"Why not, indeed?" he had rejoined, in all seriousness.
I laughed, and he went to his rooms and returned with a large
leather-bound book. It was lettered, in the rococo style of a young
man's taste, 'Glimpses of the Unknown,' and some of the said glimpses he
proceeded to impart to me. It was not pleasant reading; indeed, I had
rarely heard anything so well fitted to shatter sensitive nerves. The
early part consisted of folk-tales and folk-sayings, some of them wholly
obscure, some of them with a glint of meaning, but all of them with some
hint of a mystery in the hills. I heard the Brownie story in countless
versions. Now the thing was a friendly little man, who wore grey
breeches and lived on brose; now he was a twisted being, the sight of
which made the ewes miscarry in the lambing-time. But the second part
was the stranger, for it was made up of actual tales, most of them with
date and place appended. It was a most Bedlamite catalogue of horrors,
which, if true, made the wholesome moors a place instinct with tragedy.
Some told of children carried away from villages, even from towns, on
the verge of the uplands. In almost every case they were girls, and the
strange fact was their utter disappearance. Two little girls would be
coming home from school, would be seen last by a neighbour just where
the road crossed a patch of heath or entered a wood and then--no human
eye ever saw them again. Children's cries had startled outlying
shepherds in the night, and when they had rushed to the door they could
hear nothing but the night wind. The instances of such disappearances
were not very common--perhaps once in twenty years--but they were
confined to this one tract of country, and came in a sort of fixed
progression from the middle of last century, when the record began. But
this was only one side of the history. The latter part was all devoted
to a chronicle of crimes which had gone unpunished, seeing that no hand
had ever been traced. The list was fuller in last century;[1] in the
earlier years of the present it had dwindled; then came a revival about
the 'Fifties; and now again in our own time it had sunk low. At the
little cottage of Auchterbrean, on the roadside in Glen Aller, a
labourer's wife had been found pierced to the heart. It was thought to
be a case of a woman's jealousy, and her neighbour was accused,
convicted, and hanged. The woman, to be sure, denied the charge with her
last breath; but circumstantial evidence seemed sufficiently strong
against her. Yet some people in the glen believed her guiltless. In
particular, the carrier who had found the dead woman declared that the
way in which her neighbour received the news was a sufficient proof of
innocence; and the doctor who was first summoned professed himself
unable to tell with what instrument the wound had been given. But this
was all before the days of expert evidence, so the woman had been hanged
without scruple. Then there had been another story of peculiar horror,
telling of the death of an old man at some little lonely shieling called
Carrickfey. But at this point I had risen in protest, and made to drive
the young idiot from my room.
"It was my grandfather who collected most of them," he said. "He had
theories,[2] but people called him mad, so he was wise enough to hold
his tongue. My father declares the whole thing mania; but I rescued the
book, had it bound, and added to the collection. It is a queer hobby;
but, as I say, I have theories, and there are more things in heaven and
earth----"
But at this he heard a friend's voice in the Quad., and dived out,
leaving the banal quotation unfinished.
Strange though it may seem, this madness kept coming back to me as I
crossed the last few miles of moor. I was now on a rough tableland, the
watershed between two lochs, and beyond and above me rose the stony
backs of the hills. The burns fell down in a chaos of granite boulders,
and huge slabs of grey stone lay flat and tumbled in the heather. The
full waters looked prosperously for my fishing, and I began to forget
all fancies in anticipation of sport.
Then suddenly in a hollow of land I came on a ruined cottage. It had
been a very small place, but the walls were still half-erect, and the
little moorland garden was outlined on the turf. A lonely apple tree,
twisted and gnarled with winds, stood in the midst.
From higher up on the hill I heard a loud roar, and I knew my excellent
friend the shepherd of Farawa, who had come thus far to meet me. He
greeted me with the boisterous embarrassment which was his way of
prefacing hospitality. A grave reserved man at other times, on such
occasions he thought it proper to relapse into hilarity. I fell into
step with him, and we set off for his dwelling. But first I had the
curiosity to look back to the tumble-down cottage and ask him its name.
A queer look came into his eyes. "They ca' the place Carrickfey," he
said. "Naebody has daured to bide there this twenty year sin'--but I see
ye ken the story." And, as if glad to leave the subject, he hastened to
discourse on fishing.