THE HEART OF SCOTLAND
_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_
BONNIE SCOTLAND
CONTAINING =75= FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS
IN COLOUR BY
SUTTON PALMER
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THE HIGHLANDS AND
ISLANDS OF SCOTLAND
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IN COLOUR BY
WILLIAM SMITH, JUN.
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[Illustration: THE PASS OF KILLIECRANKIE]
THE
HEART OF SCOTLAND
PAINTED BY
SUTTON PALMER
DESCRIBED BY
A. R. HOPE MONCRIEFF
[Illustration]
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MCMIX
Preface
“Bonnie Scotland” pleased so many readers that it came to be
supplemented by another volume dwelling mainly on the western “Highlands
and Islands,” which was illustrated in a different style to match their
wilder and mistier features. Such an addition gave the author’s likeness
of Scotland a somewhat lop-sided effect; and to balance this list he has
prepared a third volume dealing with the trimmer and richer, yet not
less picturesque region oftenest visited by strangers--that is,
Perthshire and its borders. This is shown to be the _Heart of Scotland_,
not only as containing its most famous scenery, but as best blending
Highland and Lowland charms, and as having made a focus of the national
life and history. Pict and Scot, Celt and Sassenach, king and vassal,
mailed baron and plaided chief, cateran and farmer, Jacobite and
Hanoverian, gauger and smuggler, Kirk and Secession, here in turn
carried on a series of struggles whose incidents should be well known
through the _Waverley Novels_. But these famous romances seem too little
known to hasty readers of to-day; and some glimpses of Perthshire’s past
life may not prove over-familiar, at least to strangers in a county
where the author is at home.
Contents
PAGE
I. PERTHSHIRE 1
II. TAYSIDE 20
III. ATHOLL 52
IV. BREADALBANE 80
V. STRATHEARN 104
VI. THE MACGREGORS 134
VII. ROB ROY AND HIS SONS 160
VIII. MENTEITH 182
List of Illustrations
1. The Pass of Killiecrankie _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
2. A Highland Moor 8
3. A Highland Strath 17
4. Perth from the Slopes of Kinnoull Hill 24
5. Autumn in the Highlands 33
6. Dunkeld and Birnam 40
7. A Highland Cottage 49
8. The Trossachs 56
9. The Falls of Tummel 65
10. The Moor of Rannoch 72
11. The Head of Loch Tay 81
12. The Dochart 88
13. “The Lady of the Woods” 97
14. A Highland River 104
15. A Highland Lake 113
16. Glenfinlas 120
17. Loch Lubnaig 129
18. In the Macgregor Country 136
19. Loch Achray 145
20. The Head of Loch Lomond 152
21. Silver Strand, Loch Katrine 161
22. The River Teith 168
23. The Crags of Ben Venue 177
24. Stirling Castle 192
THE HEART OF SCOTLAND
I
PERTHSHIRE
My text is taken from a writer to whom every discourse on our country
goes for authority and illustrations.
Among all the provinces in Scotland, if an intelligent stranger
were asked to describe the most varied and the most beautiful, it
is probable he would name the county of Perth. A native, also, of
any other district of Caledonia, though his partialities might lead
him to prefer his native county in the first instance, would
certainly class that of Perth in the second, and thus give its
inhabitants a fair right to plead, that--prejudice
apart--Perthshire forms the fairest portion of the northern
kingdom.
Scott was an alien in Perthshire, his judgment of which, then, should be
“neither partial nor impartial,” as the Provost of Portobello desired;
while it is so much my native heath that I give it no place but that of
first in all the counties of Britain. There can be small doubt of the
verdict pronounced by visitors, who take the Scottish Highlands as the
cream of our island’s scenery, and in most cases know little of the
Highlands beyond this central maze of mountains and valleys, falling to
the rich plain of Strathmore, spread out between the rugged Grampians
and the green hills of Ochil and Sidlaw.
Here arose the ancient Alban, or realm of Alpin, the core of historic
Scotland, a name that has been fondly identified with that of the Alps;
but I am not going to entangle myself in the snares of philology. If the
Perthshire Bens seem insignificant beside the Alps, for the former, at
least, no boastful pretensions are made by their sons, who familiarly
speak of them as the “hills” rather than the mountains. _Hill_, indeed,
is used in the Highlands in a rougher sense, to denote the wild heathy
land as distinct from the cultivated glen. I have heard an old-fashioned
sportsman speak of going out on “the hill,” when he was actually
descending to a lower level; and so R. L. Stevenson has it--
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
Alban appears to have extended above Perthshire, taking in at least the
headwaters of the Spey and other streams flowing north. It certainly
included the basin of the Tay and the upper waters of the Forth. And as
Lowland and Highland scenery are finely mingled on these rivers, so here
met and blended the confluent torrents of blood and language swelling
into a steady stream of national life. What may be called a Scottish
kingdom first took shape on the banks of Tay, where long was fixed its
chief seat. Something like a pattern spun by the shuttle of war comes at
last to light on a torn web of blood-dyed, mist-dimmed checks and
stripes, hitherto a puzzling blur for the most erudite spectacles. The
Muse of early history seems like that chameleon, whose fate was
explained by a Highland soldier: “I put it on my bonnet and it went
black; I put it on my coat and it turned red; but when I let it oot on
my kilt, the tartan fairly bursted it.”
It is an old reproach against us that every Scot looks on himself as
descended from “great and glorious but forgotten kings.” If, indeed, we
calculate by geometrical progression how many millions of ancestors each
of us can claim in the last thirty generations or so, the chances seem
to be against any Briton not having some strain of quasi-royal blood in
his veins. Scotland had, at least, many kings to be descended from,
several apocryphal dozens of them, as named and numbered by George
Buchanan, before he comes down to chronicles that can be verified. But
to our critical age, the long row of early royal portraits exhibited at
Holyrood, painted by a Dutchman at so much the square foot, seem worth
still less as records than as works of art. The most ardent Scottish
patriot no longer sets store by such fables as historians like Hector
Boece wove into their volumes; nor is it necessary to examine so fond
imaginations as that of descent from a Pharaoh’s daughter, Scota, or
from a Ninus king of Nineveh. Finn and Fergus, Oscar and Ossian, we must
leave in cloudland, looking downwards to pick our steps over slippery
rock and boggy heather, among which there is no firm footing upon traces
of an aboriginal pre-Celtic stratum of humanity.
When the Romans garrisoned rather than occupied southern Scotland, and
made reconnoitring expeditions into the north, its fastnesses were
stoutly defended by fierce Caledonians, woodland savages, and Picti,
painted warriors, who may or may not have been the same people. If the
same, they may well have split into hostile tribes, warring against each
other like the kindred Mohawks and Hurons, sometimes amalgamated by
conquest, sometimes uniting to make raids on richer Lowland clearings.
After the false dawn of Roman annals ceases to throw a glimmer on those
hardy barbarians, darkness again falls over mountain and forest, lit
only by the twinkling lamp of adventurous missionaries. Then the
twilight of middle-age history shows a Pictish kingdom seated in
Charlemagne’s age on the Tay and its tributaries, but there presently
overthrown by pushful invaders.
These were the Dalriad Scots from Ireland, who began their independent
career by getting precarious foothold on the nearest coastland
promontory of North Britain. Baffled, as it seems, in an attempt thence
to master the country of their origin, then driven, perhaps, from their
coast settlements by a stronger swarm of Scandinavian hornets, this
stirring race shoved their way across the western Highlands to take a
firmer stand in the heart of Scotland, when Kenneth MacAlpine overthrew
the Pictish kingdom at Scone, its capital. Buchanan reports two
successive battles, the scene of the former a few miles off, at
Forteviot, where he makes Kenneth act on the motto of the Celtic
Society, _Olim Marte, nunc arte_. His chiefs, we are told, not being
very keen for the encounter, while they lay snoring off their drink, the
king worked upon them by means of a young cousin of his, disguised as
an angel in phosphorescent fish-skins, and equipped with a sort of
primitive megaphone, through which he roused the sleepers by a promise
of victory, then slipped off his celestial raiment to disappear in the
darkness before these heavy-headed warriors were wide awake. It is not
often we are taken so well behind the scenes of a miracle.
At Forteviot, a name whose prefix is held as one of the rare Pictish
vocables left to build philological theories, Kenneth appears to have
fixed his own seat. The capital of such a kingdom would be no more
permanent than Abyssinia’s chief camp at Gondar or Abbis Abbeba. At all
events it was hereabouts that currents of molten metal came together to
mingle, cool and harden into the foundation of the Scottish nation. As
yet it was the kingdom of Alban which spread around like a lava flood,
to overrun a more or less imperfect amalgamation of Briton and Saxon to
the south, of Norseman and Celt to the north and west, while, on all
sides, it once and again had nearly been drowned by fresh waves of
invasion from the Baltic. When, nearly two hundred years after Kenneth’s
Perthshire victories, Malcolm II. had added Lothian and Strathclyde to
his volcanic realm, the style of Scotia appears in history, by which the
settlers now dominant in Caledonia seem to kick off their connection
with Ireland, where their name dies out as it is born again in the
growing Scotland, and Duns Scotus becomes no longer in danger of being
confused with a Scotus Erigena.
There is early Scottish history boiled down to a page or two, on which
one might work in other changes that had made less violent progress,
while the tops of the Grampians were being weather-worn into silt for
the Tay. Those Picts had been in part conquered by the Cross before they
fell under the sword. The disciplined faith of Rome overlaid the wild
Christianity implanted from Iona. The ecclesiastical metropolis was
removed from the West to Dunkeld, then for a time to Abernethy, another
old Pictish centre, and finally to St. Andrews. Intercourse with the
world, and especially with the Norman conquerors of England, imported
the feudal system with its dovetailing of power and ambition between
kings who were in turn sovereign and vassal on different estates of
their territories. The English tongue began to absorb that of the Gael,
as the Celtic leaven seemed to be lost in the Saxon dough. But when
Malcolm Canmore and his Anglicising queen did so much to bring Scotland
into touch with its more civilised neighbour, they moved their chief
seat no nearer the new border than Dunfermline.
For long after Scotland had developed into a vertebrate organism, its
heart beat in the geographical centre. Its kings were crowned at Scone,
Charles II. the last of them, when indeed the immemorial sanctity of
that Pictish palace had fallen into some disesteem. The adjacent city of
Perth, with its Castle, its Cathedral, and its four monasteries, was the
Winchester of Scotland, as Scone the Westminster. The early Parliaments
met at Perth more often than at other towns that might suit the
convenience of kings who had to be much on the move through their
agitated dominion. During the English intrusion, Perth was garrisoned by
the Edwards’ lieutenants, and suffered repeated attacks from Wallace and
Bruce, who found concealment and rallying-place in the wild woods
within a few miles of the city walls. The honour of being the capital
was not definitely taken from Perth till the murder of James I. showed
it too near the stormy Highlands, while the Dunedin citadel seemed no
longer in close peril from the English side.
Before the seat of government came to be fixed at Edinburgh, king and
parliament are often found at Stirling, with Linlithgow for the
Versailles of Scottish Royalty. Perth still held a high place,
recognised by a decree of James VI. as second in the kingdom. Down to
the end of his reign, its Provosts were as often as not the great lords
of the neighbourhood. It had a leading voice in national opinion. Some
of the earliest martyrs suffered here; then here broke out the first
tumult of the Reformation. Later on, it became a hot focus of
Presbyterian and Covenanting zeal; and after the popular worship had
been firmly established, it was around Perth that sprang up several of
its sectarian offshoots.
Accident of situation rather than its own choice again made Perth a
centre of affairs, when Mar’s melting army lay here through the winter
of 1715, watching King George’s force at Stirling; and the forlorn Old
Pretender reached Scone in time to chill the spirits of his partisans,
already too near freezing-point. Prince Charlie made a more dashing
appearance at Perth for a few days; but when he had marched on, the
douce burghers let it be seen that their hearts did not go with him.
They more warmly received the Duke of Cumberland, as representing the
orderly settlement that was good for trade. The wild Highlandman, with
his uncanny weapons and his unbusiness-like sentiments, was here looked
on as suspiciously as the Red Indian warrior in a border city of
America, who in New York or Philadelphia would draw more sympathy or
staring curiosity. The Fair City, while willing to keep friends with the
Tory lairds whose names have been familiar to her for centuries, cast
her douce vote for prosperity and progress. In the Georgian age she
gained some such reputation as Norwich in England, cultivating arts and
letters as well as trade, and becoming known, in a modest way, by her
printing presses, of which the _Encyclopædia Perthensis_ was the most
notable production.
Meanwhile, the blending of once hostile races had gone on faster in the
centre of Scotland than at its extremities. Where first a national
government had come into being, a higher organisation of tribal life was
evolved. Here, as elsewhere, civilisation proceeded by steps over which
civilised philanthropy shakes its head. The Perthshire Highlands, not to
speak of Strathmore, contained fertile straths and valleys that offered
themselves as cheap reward for the followers and favourites of Scottish
kings. Norman, Saxon, and still farther-fetched adventurers got charters
to make good by the sword against the sons of the soil. Its lords,
native or _fremd_, lost and won at taking a hand in the general game of
Scottish history, as when the abetters of Bruce turned out to have
played on the right card, or again, when the murderers of James I. paid
dearly for their crime, to the profit of those who hunted them down.
But, in the main, plaids did not hold out against coats of mail, so that
for centuries the great lords of Perthshire have been of Lowland origin.
Like doughty Hal Smith of the
[Illustration: A HIGHLAND MOOR]
Wynd, the sons of the plain in old times had claws as sharp as the
mountain cats’; it was only when cultivators and craftsmen had ceased to
handle arms, unless for holiday sport, that a spate of Highland war
could burst through the passes, even then soon to scatter and spend
itself in the face of disciplined resistance.
But while those strangers rose to power and wealth upon the heather,
they fell captive to its spirit, taking on the manners, sentiments, and
dress of the dispossessed clans. The Stewarts from England, the
Campbells from Ireland, was it? the Drummonds from Hungary or where?
among other names of chivalrous antecedents, bloomed out as clans, with
new tartans, feuds, and legends, to complicate the native pattern of
flesh and blood; and in no long time they became more Highland than the
Highlanders themselves. Most remarkable is the adoption of what has come
to be called the Scottish national dress, which, according to some
modern critics, ought rather to be the mackintosh. There was a time when
Stewart or Murray looked on the plaid as badge of a savage foeman; there
would be a time when the imported Highlanders grew as proud of kilt and
bagpipes as if these had come down to them straight from Adam. All over
the world have gone those badges of a race that gave them to its
conquerors in exchange for its proudest blood. The cult of the tartan,
revived in our own age by romantic literature and royal patronage, is an
old story. One of the early emigrants to the Southern States of America
is said to have rigged out all his negroes in kilts and such-like,
teaching them also to speak Gaelic and to pipe and reel among cotton
fields and cane swamps. But when one of those blackamoor retainers,
liveried in a kilt, was sent to meet a practically-minded countryman
landing from Scotland, the effect of so transmogrified a figure proved
appalling. “Hae ye been long oot?” stammered the newcomer, and took his
passage back by the next ship.
Away from Scotland, all true Scots carry over the world an outfit of
which the colours, the trimmings, and the gewgaws come from the
Highlands, while the hard-wearing qualities of the stuff are rather of
Lowland manufacture. Both spinning and dyeing, I maintain, have best
been done in Perthshire, a county of varied aspects, which set me the
example of passing to a change of metaphor. It is in this central region
that a right proportion of the Saxon dough and the Celtic yeast, baked
for centuries by fires of love and war, have risen into the most crusty
loaf of Scottish character. In the damp western Highlands and the cold
north the baking may have been less effectual, producing a more spongy
mass, not so full of nutriment, but more relished by some as a change
from the stodginess of modern life. In some parts of the Lowlands,
again, the dough turns out more dour and sour, not enough leavened by
fermentations that leave it too leathery for all teeth. While all over
Scotland there has been going on a more or less thorough interaction and
coalescence of once repellent bodies, in Perthshire, I assert, the
amalgamation has been most complete. “Hae ye been happy in yer jeels?”
is a civil question I have heard one old wife ask of another. Here
nature seems to have been happy in a due mixture of sweet and acid,
shredded and stirred, boiled and moulded, with the success of Dundee
marmalade.
The same fusion as between Highlander and Lowlander, between Norman and
Saxon, it has been the work of time to bring about between Northerner
and Southerner, the process there hindered by a fixed border-line of
hostile memories, of variant creeds, customs, and laws, going to keep up
natural antipathies. But such fences are now so much fallen down that
there is little to stop different breeds from straggling on to one
another’s fields, the movement indeed being mostly one way, since the
leaner flock is more tempted from hill-sides eaten bare to the green
pastures of the south. What is as yet a mechanical mixture tends to
become a chemical one, as these wandering atoms find affinities in a
fresh environment; then the substance of national life should be
enriched, as every generation goes on incorporating the coarse
good-humour and practical temper of the plainsman, with the generous
affections and mettlesome hardihood of the mountaineer. The result as
yet may be best seen in London, that crucible of blood and manners,
where there are Englishmen who would fain affect to be Scots, and Scots
who have forgotten all but their pride in Scotland. I met one such the
other day in a train, who had his boy arrayed in a kilt, but neither of
them knew what tartan it was. Where a Campbell wears the colours of a
Cameron with indifference, he unconsciously continues what was begun by
a Graham or a Gordon inventing a tartan for himself, and may end in
plaid and tweed taking their turn of fashion with serge and broadcloth,
when _Tros Tyriusque_ are indistinguishably mixed in one name and
nature.
Such is a consummation devoutly to be wished. But there are centrifugal
as well as centripetal forces at work. When the fear of a foreign foe no
longer hangs over us, we fall into wars of interests, of classes, of
sexes; and piping times of peace breed likewise artificial injuries,
useless martyrdoms, unpractical patriotisms, by which we would fain set
our teeth on edge from the real sufferings of our fathers. Idly
retrospective persons find nothing better to do than to rub up old sores
into an imitation of plague spots, instead of leaving them to heal and
vanish in the way of nature. Some discontented spirits among my
countrymen have lately been agitating for the protection of Scottish
rights and sentiments: it would appear more to the purpose if Englishmen
got up a league to bar out northern aggrandisement. While the sovereign
of the United Kingdom is bound to be of Scottish descent, and while
custom fills the English archbishoprics with an apostolic succession of
sons of the Covenant, there still, indeed, remains such a scandal as the
Prime Ministership being occasionally open to mere Englishmen. This
apart, however, most of our grievances may be comfortably digested by
chewing the cud of the Union in John Bull’s own spirit of easy
good-nature.
Laurel crowns cleave to deserts,
And power to him who power exerts:
Hast not thy share? On wingèd feet,
Lo! it rushes thee to meet.
And all that Nature made thine own,
Floating in air, or pent in stone,
Shall rend the hills and cleave the sea,
And like thy shadow follow thee.
The sorest gall of Scotland seems to be that her name has been like to
merge in England’s greater one, to which smart a plaster must be applied
in the revived title of Britain. No school-book would sell north of the
Tweed in this generation that let an English army serve a king of
England. Yet we cannot play the censor on the speech of our Continental
neighbours, who denounce as England the power that has ruled the waves
to their loss; and it is England which so many sons and dependents, in
so wide regions of the world, speak of as “home.” In the London Library
some vague hint of dirks and claymores has availed to keep Scottish
History a separate department; but one notes with concern how works on
the Topography of Scotland are scattered under the head of England,
while London is set up with a heading to itself. But what is this slight
to the carelessness of foreign authors quoting Scott and Burns among the
English poets!
It is perhaps inevitable that a firm with a long title should come to be
best known by the name of the prominent partner. One never could be
expected to style Messrs. Quirk, Gammon, and Snap in full, unless by way
of formal address; had it been no more than Dodson and Fogg, one might
make shift at an Austria-Hungary bracketing. Lord Bute is accused of
prompting George III. to pride in being born a _Briton_; but the
grievance seems more philosophically handled in a story of two Sandy
tars at Trafalgar, one of whom found fault with Nelson’s famous signal:
“‘England expects’--aye, but nothing about poor old Scotland!” was his
grumble. “Hoots!” answered his comrade, “don’t they know that every
Scotsman is sure to do his duty?”
I confess to having lukewarm sympathy with the perfervid patriotism that
is too ready to find quarrel in straws. Scotland has got quite her share
of practical benefit from the “sad and sorrowful Union,” and need not
grudge to England the nominal advantages of size and wealth, which the
latter sometimes appears to occupy as caretaker for her neighbour. So
long as Scottish enterprise, thrift, and industry are allowed fair play
on both sides of the Border, it seems childish to lament over lost
titles and ensigns, toys of history, that only in a museum may escape
being broken, and sooner or later will be swept into time’s dustbin.
When one sees how we have peacefully imbued our fellow subjects with our
best blood, I for one am not too sorry that our dark record of feuds and
slaughter and bigotry falls into its place in the background of a
grander scene, and that instead of cherishing thistly independence as a
romantic Norway or an austere Portugal, we merge our national life into
the greater kingdom’s, which, by good luck or good guidance, has come to
stand so high in the world for freedom, enlightenment, and solidity. In
this kingdom we take much the same place as the Manchus in China. All
over the world we go forth to prosper like that Chosen People of the old
dispensation, with this difference, that we have our Sion in our own
hands, to which come pilgrims from all nations. The comparison would fit
better if it allowed me to call Perthshire the Scottish land of Judah.
True Scots should have more philosophy than to imitate unenlightened
patriotisms that would interrupt a natural process defined by Herbert
Spencer as change from an incoherent homogeneity to a coherent
heterogeneity accompanied by the dissipation of motion and the
integration of matter. So Penelope peoples, in their darkness, undo the
work of civilising daylight. Let Bohemia rage and the states of the
Balkans imagine vain things. But why should Scotland waste time and
electric light on looking back too fondly to the things that are behind,
while she cannot help pressing forward to the inevitable destiny before
her? With the warning of Ireland at hand, some of us cry out for Home
Rule and such-like retrogressions that might go to giving back, at one
end of the United Kingdom, the shadow of its cloudy dignity along with
the substance of its old discords.
Where is this reactionary _Particularismus_ to stop? There are parts of
Caledonia which, in its stern and wild times, were independent of each
other, some that still are as different from one another in blood and
speech, as most of Scotland is from England. Shall Badenoch or Buchan
awake its overlaid individuality? May not Galloway and Strathclyde set
up for recognition of their ex-independence? Then why not encourage
Strathbogie, the Cumbraes, the Braes of Bonny Doon, or the parish of
Gandercleugh, to lament upon the fate that has made them members of one
greater body? Nay, now that the clans are broken up, could they not
contrive to respin their warp of local loyalty, crossing the woof of
national patriotism? Such _reductio ad absurdum_ is worth thinking
about, when at this moment there are signs of relapse in the long
convalescence from that Jacobite fever that “carried” hard heads as well
as soft hearts, and set old grudges against the Union flaunting in
plaid and philibeg.
I am informed of a movement for putting the kingdom of Fife in its right
place before a world too apt to jest at its pretensions. These are many
and serious. Of old, _Fibh_ had kings of its own, of such immemorial
antiquity that their very names, much more their portraits, are not
forthcoming. Enclosed between two firths, this region makes almost an
island, with the Ochils as border-line cutting it off from the rest of
Scotland. Thus the Roman legions thundered by it; and its maiden
independence was never violated, if we reject a scandalous suggestion as
to Cupar being the Mount Graupius of Tacitus. The kings of Scotland were
much at home here, notably Malcolm Canmore, that effectual founder of
the modern kingdom. If Bruce were born who knows where, he came to be
buried at Dunfermline. History tells how Queen Mary was lodged at
Lochleven, and how more than one King James had to be snatched away, by
force or fraud, from his chosen residence in Fife. The dialect of Fife,
mixed with that of Lothian, made the standard Court language, while
Gaelic was ebbing out of the Perthshire straths. The see of the old
Scottish Church was at St. Andrews, where arose the first northern
university, the local Saint Regulus being supplanted by that apostle
who, according to scoffers, was chosen as Scotland’s patron because of
the keen eye he showed on earth for loaves and fishes. In Protestant
days, several of the religious leaders--Knox, the Melvilles, the
Erskines, John Glas, Edward Irving, Thomas Chalmers--were all either
natives of or sojourners in Fife. This
[Illustration: A HIGHLAND STRATH]
many-havened coast was the nursery of the Scottish navy and commerce.
The most famous national product, next to flesh and blood and whisky, is
golf, whose headquarters are in the East Neuk of this choice shire. When
we consider the many towns of Fife, its wealth in horn and corn, and
coal and fish, its output of textile fabrics, and remember its past
history, should we not allow that this and not Perthshire is truly the
heart of Scotland? It has even a Wales in Kinross, whose craving for
separate status might one day raise a troublesome question. Nor does it
want a classic bard to invoke for it the trumpet of fame:
Nymphae, quae colitis highissima monta Fifaea,
Seu vos Pittenwema tenent, seu Cralia crofta,
Sive Anstraea domus, ubi nat haddocus in undis,
Codlineusque ingens, et fleucca et sketta pererrant
Per costam, et scopulis lobster monifootus in udis
Creepat, et in mediis ludit whitenius undis, _etc._
Gentle reader, can you guess what standard poet I quote? _Je vous le
donne en cent._ The most hackneyed citation, it seems, ought nowadays to
be labelled, for when in _Bonnie Scotland_ I aired a verse beginning,
“Fairshon had a son who married Noah’s daughter,” a certain Caledonian
newspaper critic was moved to applaud by calling for the author. Such be
the proficient patriots who scunner at King Edward’s title as Seventh
across the Tweed, and at other bawbeeworths of offence to Scottish
nationality!
After this fling by the way, I fall back into my jogtrot. It seems
claimable for Fife, then, that its county council be glorified as a
parliament sitting by turns at Cupar, Dunfermline, and Kirkcaldy; or,
at least, that in a revived Scottish parliament its representatives
shall assert their old privilege of voting first, before that
presumptuous Perthshire. The sovereign’s title raises some difficulty.
Edward VII., of course, is out of the question. But it has to be
admitted that Edward I. of England received the homage of Fife at
Dunfermline, so his present Majesty might justly be styled Edward II.
_qua_ King of Fife. There being, indeed, a doubt as to how far Edward
Baliol made his reign a _fait accompli_ in Fife, some precisians propose
to meet the case by treating our king locally as the second and a half
Edward. In the army, of course, it is not to be borne that the Fife
contingent shall be lumped together with English forces. In future, one
or more British regiments must be equipped and distinguished as Fifers.
The epithet Fifeish should come into more constant use; but as
misconception might arise from vulgar misuse, _Fifeian_ may be coined as
an untarnished adjective, the old one to be applied to the less
admirable or more commonplace features of the county, its distilleries,
railway junctions, colliery villages, east winds, and so forth, while a
discrimination is to be made in quoting those qualities and achievements
that have made Fife the noblest member of the greatest empire in the
world, whose style shall forthwith run, at least in local acts, The
Kingdom of Fife, with the adjacent kingdoms of Scotland, England, and
Ireland, and the rest of the British dominions, etc., etc.
For Perthshire, I make no such pretensions to isolated dignity, only for
having set a pattern to all Scotland, and thus exhibiting some title to
be taken as hub of the universe. But in rambling over its hills and
glens, I hope to let it show for itself the truth of Scott’s estimate,
justified by his reference to other writers, such as might be quoted by
the hundred, all in the same tale of due admiration.
It is long since Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, with that excellent
taste which characterises her writings, expressed her opinion that
the most interesting district of every country, and that which
exhibits the varied beauties of natural scenery in greatest
perfection, is that where the mountains sink down upon the
champaign, or more level land. The most picturesque, if not the
highest hills, are also to be found in the county of Perth. The
rivers find their way out of the mountainous region by the wildest
leaps, and through the most romantic passes connecting the
Highlands with the Lowlands. Above, the vegetation of a happier
climate and soil is mingled with the magnificent characteristics of
mountain-scenery; and woods, groves, and thickets in profusion,
clothe the base of the hills, ascend up the ravines, and mingle
with the precipices. It is in such favoured regions that the
traveller finds what the poet Gray, or some one else, has termed,
Beauty lying in the lap of Terror.
II
TAYSIDE
I see that certain critics accuse me of being flippant, discursive,
garrulous, gossiping, everything that your gravely plodding writers are
not, and they no doubt find readers to their mind. It must be confessed
that as a model of style I have an eye rather on the upper waters of the
Tay, with its swirls and eddies and ripples, than on its broad and
placid flow by the fat Carse of Gowrie. All I can say for myself is that
I keep my course amid windings and tumblings, and that my foaming
shallows may sweep along the same silt as loads drumlier currents lower
down. Yet one loves to please all tastes, within reason, so for once let
me try to be as steady and slow as the mill-lead at Perth, which, if all
traditions be true, began as a Roman aqueduct, and so may give itself
airs of classical authority.
The Tay, then, is the principal river of Scotland, which discharges into
the North Sea a larger volume of water than any other in Britain. Its
head-streams rise upon the borders of Argyll, but only after issuing
from Loch Tay does it assume a name apparently derived from a Celtic
word for quiet-flowing water, in other parts of the kingdom taking such
forms as _Taw_ and _Tavy_. The Tay has its course of 120 miles almost
entirely in Perthshire, receiving many tributaries from the mountains on
either side, and thus draining a basin of some 2400 square miles. At
Perth it becomes navigable for small vessels, and debouches at the
thriving port of Dundee, where its estuary separates the shires of
Forfar and Fife. For further details, see any geographical work.
There now! no Aristarchus can find fault with that paragraph, in which I
have not broken into a single anecdote or metaphor, though tempted to
say _en passant_ that the basin of the Tay only needs flattening out to
over-measure that of the Thames. But this formal style sits on me as
uneasily as Saul’s armour upon David, so I leave it to rust in the works
of reference; and as a stone for my scrip, snatch up a well-worn
quotation already slung by a mightier hand:
“Behold the Tiber!” the vain Roman cried,
Viewing the ample Tay from Baiglie’s side;
But where’s the Scot that would the vaunt repay
And hail the puny Tiber for the Tay?
Scots are not in the way of belittling their own advantages; but a
certain Italian writer gravely comments on this statement by giving an
estimate as to the depth of the Tiber at Rome, whereas he himself has
seen a bare-legged boy wading the Tay above Perth bridge to pick up
pebbles. Being unable to refute his main contention, I would have him
know that this laddie was probably risking wet breeks at low tide, not
in search of pebbles, but of pearls, sometimes picked up here; that a
bridge would naturally be built near a ford; and that a mile higher up,
beyond the tide-flow, the Tay is deep enough to drown boys in its
treacherous pools, and might make Julius Caesar himself call for help if
he tried swimming across it in spate. If classic poets are to be
trusted, yellow is the best epithet of the Tiber, while Ruskin
admiringly tells us how the pools of the Tay glint brown and blue among
black swirls and rippling shallows. In the matter of climate, at all
events, we are not going to let any foreigner over-brag us, for as the
local poet, Alexander Glas, exclaims beside the Tay:
In scorching sun, the Italian cries in vain:
O, happy, happy Caledonian swain!
Whose groves are ever cool, and mild the skies,
Where breezes from the ocean ever rise.
This bard, perhaps, was not aware that the snow lies longer on Soracte
than on Kinnoull Hill; nor does he confess that for two or three months
in the year the happy Caledonian swain may now and then welcome Italian
ice-cream merchants; and in fair prose he ought to own his ocean breezes
for east winds on this side of the country. The city of Perth, indeed,
stands hardly a score of miles back from the sea, and made a thriving
port in days when it was an advantage to unload goods up-country, well
out of the way of attack. Its mariners carried on not only a coasting
trade, but sailed to the Hanse ports, and took a turn at fighting with
their English rivals when competition would sometimes be pushed to the
point of piracy. It appears that trading craft plied as far up as Scone,
below which a row-boat is now apt to stick in shallow rapids.
Through the international war-time flourished at Perth a notable line of
Mercers, who appear as wealthy traders, magistrates, and benefactors of
their native city, sometimes rising to higher posts in the state, coming
to make noble alliances through which their head branch is now engrafted
in the Lansdowne title. The old staple trade of the Fair City was
glove-making; its skinners became an important corporation, and tanning
held out to our day, but has been overlaid by dyeing, trades that might
all merge into each other. Perhaps as a branch of dyeing sprang Todd’s
Perth Office Ink, which I note to be now glorified as Moncrieff’s Ink,
and long may it flow under that auspicious name! Another industry of
Perth used to be shipbuilding, where, up to the end of the eighteenth
century, vessels came and went by the hundred, and a smack sailed for
London every few days. Perth was in the way of improving her port and
deepening its approaches, when railways brought about a permanent low
tide in the Tay traffic.
While ships were growing larger, the Tay estuary had been silting up and
narrowing as its flat shores were reclaimed into the fertile Carse of
Gowrie. This dry ground was won by _inches_, a name often met along
Tayside, where what were once islands have become welded on to the
shore. The Inches, _par excellence_, are the public parks above and
below Perth; _the_ Inch being its North Inch, in which the Romans are
fondly believed to have hailed their Campus Martius--_Parvam Trojam,
simulataque magnis Pergama_.
Higher up the river, in its great bend to the south, another flat bears
the suggestive name of “Bloody Inches”; and the Perth Inches too have
been arena for many a fray. The chief martial memory of the South Inch
is as site of Cromwell’s citadel, in the construction of which were used
the walls of the Greyfriars, with hundreds of its tombstones, besides
other monuments of the city. The North Inch is best known to fame for
the battle of the Clans in 1396, when threescore Highlandmen let out
most of their quarrelsome blood before an excited multitude, the king
and court looking on from what served as a grand stand, the Gilten
Arbour in the Dominican Gardens, a structure that probably stood near
the present site of the Perth Academy in Rose Terrace.
There can be no doubt about the authenticity of this battle; a record is
extant of making the lists for it, the number of combatants being
expressly stated as sixty. But, among the pregnant confusion of Highland
names, it is not easy to be sure who those champions were. We used to be
taught from _Tales of a Grandfather_ that they represented hostile
confederacies called the Clan Kay and the Clan Chattan, the latter
perhaps wild cats of the mountains, the former by no means to be
identified with the Mackays of the north. But the Kay and the Chattan
names appear to cover one another, while the other party seems better
distinguished as the Clan Quhele, in whom some see the Camerons and a
hint of Loch_iel_, others the Macdougals, their name thus transformed by
a _tour de force_ of etymology, while also it has been conjectured that
this mysterious clan did not survive its defeat, scattered and absorbed
into luckier kindreds.
A writer, wearing both the names of Shaw and Macintosh, who has given
piously profound study to
[Illustration: PERTH FROM THE SLOPES OF KINNOULL HILL]
the subject, concludes that those adversaries were the sons of an Adam
and a Dougal, clans known to have fought against each other in the wars
of Bruce, which as likely as not means an old tribal feud. Adam, it
seems, in this wet climate, is quite capable of being weathered down
into Ay, Hay, or Kay. The name Dougal sounds in Gaelic something like
_Gooil_, or _Hooil_, which Lowland writers might make a shot at as
_Quhele_, _Quhevil_, _Queill_, _Chewill_, and other forms in which it
appears. Their rivals in certain books are called _Clachinyha_, which
Dr. R. C. Maclagan claims as the origin of his own name, and to
illustrate the contention, presents some forty spellings of Maclagan
varied through four centuries, also nearly a dozen used by the same
family in the records of one generation. Not only at home, indeed, are
Scottish names apt to be transmogrified. Belize, in Honduras, is said to
be a corruption of Wallace, the pirate, not the patriot; and there is a
story that a Macdougal, shipwrecked of old on the Barbary coast, so much
impressed himself on the natives as a _santon_ that his tomb stood
mumbling godfather to the port of Mogador.
In Wyntoun’s Chronicle, the leaders’ names are anglicised as “Christy
Johnson” (Gilchrist MacIan) and “Sir Farquhar’s son,” the latter
elsewhere called Little Schea or Shaw. The Shaws hold themselves a
branch of the Mackintoshes, who claim the headship of Clan Chattan, also
claimed by the MacPhersons, “sons of a parson,” or at least of some one
boasted by a certain bard as a “superior person.” The matter seems to
have begun with an encounter in which the Sheriff of Angus was
killed--a long way from the Cameron country--in quelling such a
disturbance as often vexed the Highland line. The king sent the Earls of
Dunbar and Crawford to do what justice could be done upon this outrage;
and they have the credit of suggesting the settlement of an obstinate
feud by picked bloodshed in the royal presence. Some writers have wasted
ink on the feebleness of Robert III. as to blame for what strikes them
as a revolting scene; but such a show of gladiatorship was as much in
keeping with the manners of the age as a football match with ours; and
to the king’s advisers it no doubt seemed excellent policy to let those
wild cats cripple or punish each other in a holiday spectacle. As a
matter of fact it is recorded that the border had peace from the
caterans for long after this signal blood-letting. “The forwardest of
both parties being slain,” says George Buchanan, “the promiscuous
multitude, left without leaders, gave over their trade of sedition for
many years after, and betook themselves to their husbandry again.”
The early historians differ as to details. Eachin MacIan, the young
chief who loses heart, owes a good deal to Scott’s dramatic instinct;
but Goethe was not well posted in the facts, when to Eckermann he
extolled the novelist’s “art” in “contriving” to make one man fail on
the day of combat that his place may be taken by the hero, Smith: “there
is finish! there is a hand!” One story makes the fugitive escape by
swimming before the fight. Several mention a man as missing from the
Clan Quhele ranks, to fill whose place a sturdy Perth craftsman
volunteered on promise of reward. More than one Perthshire family has
been proud to claim descent from this bandy-legged champion. If it be
true, as somewhere stated, that his posterity, the Gows, were recognised
as a shoot of Clan Chattan, it may be that Harry Smith was the real
Conachar, apprenticed at Perth to a trade which Highland chiefs might
well see cause to patronise. Scott, however, seems romancing in putting
the combatants into shirts of mail. All the accounts agree as to two
bands of next to naked Highlandmen hacking and hewing each other with
swords, axes, and dirks, till of one side only ten or eleven were left
sorely wounded, and of the other, one escaped or was taken prisoner, his
fate being variously stated as pardon and hanging. No doubt the show
furnished as much satisfaction to its public as when, sixty years ago,
the German traveller, J. G. Kohl, found the Inch again covered with
people eager to see a circus clown give bold advertisement to his
company by crossing the Tay in a washing-tub drawn by four geese. It has
been supposed, by the way, that the combat of Highlanders may have been
arranged partly for the amusement of a body of French knights then
visiting the Scottish court, and no doubt finding it dull as well as
rude.
Since that slaughterous day, some real fights and many sham ones have
been enacted on the Inch of Perth. Of one I may say, _pars magna fui_,
and though my militation was without glory it did not want an accursed
bard who, in the columns of the _Perthshire Constitutional_, sang, a
long way after Tennyson, how “some one had blundered.” These were the
early days of the Volunteer movement, inspired by more zeal than
knowledge, when, in my teens, I served as sole officer to a company of
the Perthshire Volunteers, after some slight apprenticeship in a school
cadet corps, equipped with discarded carbines. One of my first
appearances in efficient arms was at the head of a column that marched
on to the lower end of the Inch before more spectators than would be
gathered about the arena of that clan-combat. The foe here coming into
view, it behoved my company to extend in skirmishing order, covering the
deployment of our column into line. So much I could do; and we found
ourselves exposed in the van facing a hostile line of Dundee Highlanders
who held the centre of the Inch. But the report of what then befell is
so little to our credit that I throw it into shamefaced small print.