Mountains--The Lochaber Axe, Ancient and Modern.
"With occasional gales, by no means out of place or untimeous at this
date [October 1873], with the sun already in its retrogression, almost
half-way back through Scorpio, the weather is upon the whole mild and
more autumn-like than was any portion of autumn proper itself. Winter,
as yet, has hardly descended lower than the highest summits of our
mountain ranges, and how beautiful in the golden after-glow, even at
this season, are these same mountain peaks, impending over us like
so many living presences! Tutelary divinities we sometimes fancy
them, interested in all that belongs to the dwellers at their feet,
with living hearts under their rocky ribs, loving us even as we love
them, if we only knew it, and speaking to us in their own solemn and
mysterious language, as at midnight, in our communings with the stars,
we are startled now and again by the weird, inexplicable sighs and
sounds, and deep-toned murmurings that seem to rise from glen and
corry and frowning gorge--sounds of much meaning, doubtless, if one
only knew the language, and could respond, as the sea seems to do,
in the palpitation of its heaving waves, and the boom of its billows
upon the beach. Pantheism and atheism are the very antithesis and
antipodes of each other--errors both, just as blind credulity is
the antithesis of stubborn unbelief--but, if forced to decide in
favour of either, give us pantheism for choice, as the more poetical,
at least, and pardonable error of the two; for the recognition of a
Divine intelligence pervading and dwelling lovingly in all things is
surely preferable to the cold and bloodless anti-creed that professes
to have searched the universe for a God, but failed to find Him. For
our own part, we have dwelt so long among the mountains, and within
sight and sound of the sea, that we have learned to love them with a
strange, undefinable affection, such as one bestows only on what is
at once weird and mysterious, as well as intelligent and potent, and,
upon the whole, beneficent and friendly. So impressed are we with this
feeling at times, that we fear that, however weighty the advantages
otherwise, a city life for us would now be irksome and unenjoyable,
and anything like a lengthened sojourn in a mountainless land, far
from the sight of ocean waves, well-nigh unendurable. There is some
meaning, however wild and improbable it may seem at first sight,
in the theory that accounts for the Egyptian pyramids as erected by
a nomade people, who finally settled along the valley of the Nile,
in remembrance of the mountains of their native land, and to serve
instead of these mountains in making the astronomical observations
for which the ancient Assyrians and Chaldeans were so famous. Be these
things as they may, we dearly love the mountains by which our humble
home is surrounded, whether basking in jubilant sunshine or wrapt
in sorrowing cloud, whether robed in midsummer green, in autumnal
purple, in brown and gold, or snow-covered and ice-bound to their
base; what time the day is shortest, and the sun, almost shorn of
his beams, shines but faint and far down at its farthest point of
southern declination. It is recorded of Queen Mary, of sanguinary,
or rather igneous memory, that so affected was she by the loss of
Calais, that had been in the possession of England since the victory
at Cressy under the gallant Edward III., upwards of two hundred years
previously, that she declared in her last moments that, if her body
was opened after death, the name of the lost city would be found
written upon her heart; probably the nearest approach to anything
like poetry to be found in any word or act of her dark and bigoted and
wholly unhappy life. If such things were possible--and the ancients,
at least, believed they were--we should be apt to say the same in our
own case of the mountain ranges and sea views around us, with which
we have held such intimate fellowship for upwards of twenty years.
If one asked us where he could get coals, we should without hesitation
be disposed, were it but to keep the well-known proverb in countenance,
to direct him to Newcastle-on-Tyne. If he consulted us as to where
he could best procure a serviceable and trustworthy sword-blade
of finest workmanship and highest value, we should probably direct
him to Damascus or Toledo. If slings and slingers, we should send
him to the Balearic Isles; if bows and arrows, and how to use them
with perfectest dexterity, to the Parthians; and in so advising the
anxious inquirer for coals, or the warlike weapons in question, we
should probably be disposed to feel that we had advised him wisely
and well. And suppose one wanted a "Lochaber axe," where would he
most naturally look for it but in Lochaber? And yet, in all Lochaber
there is probably at this moment not a single specimen of a weapon
at one time so common and so peculiar to the district as to have
been called after it. The Secretary of the Royal Institution of
a seaport city of England wrote us lately, begging us to procure
for them a Lochaber axe, to be placed in a collection of shafted
weapons in their museum. He wrote as if he thought there need be no
difficulty about the matter; living as we do in Lochaber, he seemed
to think that we could lay our hands upon such a weapon as easily
as upon a tuft of heather or a twig of birch. We were, of course,
obliged to write him in reply that neither in Lochaber proper, nor,
so far as we knew, in any of the neighbouring districts, was there to
be found a single specimen of the formidable weapon in question. There
should be a good many Lochaber axes in the country however, though
not in Lochaber. We wonder if such a thing as a "Jeddart staff"
could be had to-day in its proper locality? We recollect that during
Her Majesty's first visit to Scotland in 1842, when she was received
by such a splendid gathering of the Clans at Dunkeld, there was a
company of a hundred men, commanded by the Honourable Captain James
Murray, brother of Lord Glenlyon, the biggest men that could be got in
Athole and the surrounding districts, all armed with Lochaber axes,
and a very fine sight they were as they poised and swung about their
ponderous and terrible weapons. We were then but a boy at school,
just entering upon our teens, but the appearance of these kilted
giants, with their dreadful battle-axes, is as fresh and vivid as if,
since that bright and beautiful September noon, hardly thirty days
had elapsed, instead of upwards of thirty years. We doubt, however,
if the Lochaber axe, so called, as seen at Dunkeld on the occasion
referred to, and as usually shown in our collections of weapons, is at
all a true representative of the ancient arm so formidable in many a
dour conflict in the hands of the Camerons, Macmartins, Macmillans,
and Macphees of Lochielside, Glenarkaig, and Glenlochy, and of the
Macdonalds of the Braes, and Mackenzies of Lochlevenside. The weapon
as now shown is decidedly too big, too ponderous and unwieldy ever to
have been used in actual fight. Only a Clan Samson or Clan Goliath,
and all of them of ancestral stature and strength, could hope to
wield such an arm in the heat and hurry of conflict with anything
like dexterity and ease. Like the immense two-handed "Wallace" style
of sword that is sometimes shown to you as having been the favourite
weapon of some celebrated warrior of the middle ages and subsequent
centuries, but which it is simply impossible that any mere man could
ever have wielded with effect in actual fight, the modern Lochaber
axe is too gigantic for use, and must have been manufactured, a big
pattern of a lesser weapon, merely for parade and show. That a weapon
of the kind, however, once existed, and was a favourite arm with the
men of Lochaber, is unquestionable, and a truly formidable weapon it
must have been. With a crescent axe face to cut with, it had a hook at
the back by which horsemen could be caught hold of and dragged from
their saddles, to be despatched at leisure as they lay helpless upon
the ground. The shaft was necessarily of considerable length, about
six feet, of ash or other tough wood, and of no greater girth than
a common hay-fork handle. The shaft of the modern weapon, however,
is between seven and eight feet long, and of a girth that an ordinary
hand does not suffice to grasp. The axe proper, too, or head of the arm
usually shown as a Lochaber axe, is nearly twice the weight of that
of the older and more business-like weapon. An Indian tomahawk with
a six-foot shaft, or a mediæval knight's battle-axe with a six-foot
handle, such as that with which the Bruce cleft the skull of Henry de
Boune at Bannockburn, would probably be nearer to the pattern of the
original Lochaber axe than the ridiculously big and cumbrous modern
article. You remember the scene in Scott's Lord of the Isles--
"Of Hereford's high blood he came,
A race renown'd for knightly fame.
He burn'd before his Monarch's eye,
To do some deed of chivalry.
He spurr'd his steel, he couched his lance,
And darted on the Bruce at once.
"As motionless as rocks, that bide
The wrath of the advancing tide,
The Bruce stood fast. Each breast beat high,
And dazzled was each gazing eye.
The heart had hardly time to think,
The eyelid scarce had time to wink,
While on the King, like flash of flame,
Spurr'd to full speed the warhorse came!
The partridge may the falcon mock,
If that slight palfrey stand the shock;
But, swerving from the knight's career,
Just as they met, Bruce shunn'd the spear.
Onward the baffled warrior bore
His course--but soon his course was o'er!
High in his stirrups stood the King,
And gave his battle-axe the swing.
Right on De Boune, the whiles he pass'd,
Fell that stern dint--the first--the last!
Such strength upon the blow was put,
The helmet crush'd like hazel nut;
The axe shaft, with its brazen clasp,
Was shiver'd to the gauntlet grasp.
Springs from the blow the startled horse,
Drops to the plain the lifeless corse.
First of that fatal field, how soon,
How sudden fell the fierce De Boune!"
A real Lochaber axe-head we have seen, never the complete weapon
properly shafted, though surely real and genuine specimens of the
old and famous war-arm must be found in some of our museums. At what
period the Lochaber axe ceased to be carried as a battle-arm by the
Highlanders it is impossible to say; probably soon after the general
introduction of fire-arms into the northern half of the kingdom,
for it was certainly not used in the '45, nor, so far as we know,
in the '15, nor even in the wars of Montrose; so that for upwards of
two hundred years at least it has not been used in actual combat.