Hath many a drear and distant region seen,
[Illustration: A HIGHLAND RIVER]
Windest thy downward way with slackened force,
As with the journey thou hadst wearied been;
And, all enamoured of these margins green,
Delight’st to wander with a sportive tide,
Seeming with refluent current still to glide
Around the hazel banks that o’er thee lean.
Like thee, wild stream, my wearied soul would roam
(Forgetful of life’s dark and troublous hour)
Through scenes where fancy frames her fairy bower,
And, Love enchanted, builds his cottage home:
But time and tide wait not, and I, like thee
Must go where tempests rage and wrecks bestrew the sea.
The “drear and distant regions” are now more admired than the “margins
green,” through which the Earn creeps into the Tay a few miles below
Perth, where the great river broadens as an estuary about its reclaimed
islands. The steamer trip from Perth to Dundee makes a local ploy rather
than a tourist link, so few Southrons set eyes on those fat banks backed
by richly wooded hills and crags. A little above the confluence stand
the ruins of Elcho Castle, which Baddeley dismisses as “commonplace,”
and Black finds unworthy of any epithet; but the race it nursed still
stands high among Scotland’s nobles; and in or about it was a lair of
Wallace’s most daring adventures. A little below, over the Fife border,
lies the old seaport of Newburgh, surrounded by outlying spurs of the
Ochils that give fine prospects across the Carse of Gowrie upon the
opposite amphitheatre of the Sidlaws. Tourists seldom stop at Newburgh
to see the adjacent Lindores Abbey and Lindores Loch, and the site of
one of Wallace’s battlefields: so much the worse for the tourist. Two or
three generations ago, he could not so easily have avoided Newburgh,
when it was a noted station of posting and coach traffic from Perth.
To me, the flat Rhynds about the mouth of the Earn are of special
interest, since they were long the home of my forbears, edged off the
Hill of Moncrieff by a junior branch of the same stock, then again
taking refuge across the Tay, when their dwindled possessions here had
been sold to the house of Elcho. And time was when the eyes of all
Scotland turned to this now obscure corner. A mile south of the Earn’s
boldest crook, about the Western Rhynd peninsula, Abernethy is still
visited by antiquaries for its mysterious round tower, standing over
seventy feet high beside the church that has given Dr. Butler, its
incumbent, material for a goodly volume. He makes no doubt that this
tower was built upon their native models by Irish ecclesiastics,
refugees from rude Danish invasion of their own saintly island. The only
other such structure in Scotland, left unruined, is at Brechin, both of
them better built than the Irish round towers on which ’prentice hands
may have been tried. Sculptured stones of still greater antiquity have
here escaped iconoclastic zeal, to be broken relics of Abernethy’s
former state, poor and out of the way as it stands now.
The guide-books are content to dismiss Abernethy as an “ancient Pictish
capital,” but it was also a famed sanctuary till the Reformation, and
even later, a place of pilgrimage to the oak-tree shading the grave of
nine holy maidens. For a generation this became the metropolis of the
Church of Alban, while its primacy was passing from Dunkeld to St.
Andrews. Later on, it made a hotbed of Protestant zeal and of the
fissiparous energy that rent Scottish Presbyterianism with fresh
secessions. This is a matter on which I am tempted to be garrulous, as
several progenitors of mine were leaders here, both of Kirk and Dissent,
among them Archibald Moncrieff, minister of Abernethy for more than half
a century, through the trying times of the Covenant. The parish church
contains two communion cups given by those pious ancestors, in whose
memory its font was presented by the late Sir Alexander Moncrieff, his
own name better known to warriors than to priests.
In _Bonnie Scotland_, I made bold to bring up my generations-back
grandparent, Alexander Moncrieff, one of the four Original Seceders; and
now I would still further trespass on the reader’s patience by
borrowings from the _Travels_ of the Rev. James Hall of Walthamstow, who
more than a century ago, halting at Abernethy, noted some amusing
memories of those early Seceders. Ebenezer Erskine, ex-minister of
Stirling, was the leader of the body; but Hall calls Abernethy their
metropolis, and Moncrieff their patron, as being not only dissenting
minister but chief laird of the parish--no very exalted rank when,
according to this author, the title was given to any rent-free yeoman of
the Ochils, such as one he mentions who supplemented an income of ten
pounds a year by the trade of a carpenter, while the family “mansion”
made a small public-house.
The dissenting minister of Abernethy was at least wealthy enough to
build a new church for his adherents, which for a time served also as
college of the new sect. Some score of students boarded with the
farmers--at the modest rate of two shillings or so a week--attending
divinity lectures of the laird, who is said, in case of need, to have
ministered to their carnal as well as their spiritual wants. For further
instruction they would walk into Perth to sit at the feet of Mr. Wilson,
another father of Secession. In his old age Moncrieff was fain to hold
classes at his own house of Culfargie. After his death in 1761, this
Stoic school became peripatetic, moved first to Alloa with his younger
son, William Moncrieff, then straggling about in the wake of its best
qualified teachers, till the Seceders stooped their spiritual pride to
share the national provision of university training, supplemented by a
regular divinity college at Edinburgh. But it seems that their teaching
in philosophy, apart from divinity, with Locke’s _Essay on the Human
Understanding_ as text book, went on for a time longer at Abernethy,
under Matthew Moncrieff, heir to Alexander’s estate and ministry. Mr.
Hall tells a sly story of a callow student in those later days, who from
the Established minister borrowed a Euclid, which he got through in a
week: “I have read all the enunciations, which seem to be true enough
and very good reading; I did not trouble myself about the _A’s_ and
_B’s_.”
The poverty of the Seceders was not helped by their split into Burghers
and Anti-burghers, the latter the more strict sect, who flourished
rather in the north half of Scotland; then these sects again became
cross-divided as “New Lichts” and “Auld Lichts,” burning dimly still in
Mr. Barrie’s kailyard. Hall, himself a benighted Erastian, describes the
Secession theory in general as “a mixture of Popish tenets with those of
English dissenters.” He was so far right that the Seceders held, as
strongly as any Hildebrand, that the State should be the servant of the
Church, also that their body was the only true Church of Scotland, which
clung faithfully to the Covenant, consecrated for a century as
quasi-sacramental. Alexander Moncrieff, who stood doughtily by the
Cæsarship of the house of Hanover, is said to have been hardly
restrained from setting off for London to present the Covenant, on full
cock, at the wigged head of George II.
Later on, the Covenant was quietly allowed to drop, and the Seceders
relaxed their strict aloofness. Matthew Moncrieff, it seems, was of a
cheerfully social disposition counteracting his hereditary fanaticism.
There is a tradition that he had worn a red coat for a short time,
fighting, as his father preached, for King George. He had a worldly turn
for sport, and though he did not dare to shoot, he kept a couple of
greyhounds, to the scandal of his congregation. The English parson
reports a tale of him as well known. One Sunday, as he was riding across
the Ochils to preach, a hare started up, at which he flicked with his
whip, and even forgot himself so far as to gallop a little way after
poor puss. For this offence he was delated by his own servant before the
Presbytery, that rebuked him to contrition; then it would long be cast
up against him how he had broken the Sabbath. When his name came up
among the more severe, heads were gravely shaken: “He is a man that
would gar anybody like him--but oh! that beast”--to which less
strait-laced admirers would respond, “Hoot! he’s no’ a wrang man, for a’
the beast.” This phrase, “for a’ the beast,” Mr. Hall declares to have
become proverbial in that part of the country as denoting a fly in the
amber of character.
Matthew’s wife had a disintegrating effect on the body, a Miss Scott
from Fife, who, if we may believe Hall’s informants, was only a Seceder
skin-deep, and turned a natural bent for wit and raillery to making fun
of her husband’s congregation. She did not scruple to be close friends
with the parish minister, Dr. Gray, and his wife; then, while the
dissenting laird still thumped his pulpit every Sabbath against the
errors of Erastianism, the rival spiritual authorities lived on the best
of terms through the week, as could not but go to temper sectarian
bitterness, though for a time the more zealous Seceders frowned on this
compromising intimacy, as Mr. Pickwick at Sergeant Buzfuz exchanging
salutations with his own advocate. So, by and by, acrimonious zeal
cooled down all round, dying out altogether in my own family, as
“Sandemanianism” did among their neighbours the Sandemans. Some members
of our line seem, indeed, to have backslidden far from ancestral
austerity. A descendant of the Abernethy ministers became a London
tradesman--landlord of the “Rainbow” in Fleet Street by some
accounts--whose son, William Thomas Moncrieff, put on the stage _Tom and
Jerry_, with other once popular plays that did not keep him from dying
at the Charterhouse, a fellow-pensioner of Colonel Newcome. About the
same time as John Home scandalised even the lukewarm Establishment by
coming out as a playwriter, a tragedy less famous than _Douglas_ had
been published by John Moncrieff, who seems not to have long survived
it; and nothing else is known of him but that he was a dominie of sorts
at Eton, apparently private tutor to some sprig of nobility.
Of what came to be called United Presbyterianism and is now grafted on
to the United Free Church, a sturdier root first flowered in this
parish, ripening through generations into the gracious and kindly nature
of the author of _Rab and his Friends_. The first of a notable
succession of John Browns was a herd laddie here, who, like other
barefooted Scottish loons, contrived to pick up Latin and Greek almost
without schooling. There is a well-known story of his leaving his sheep
for a night walk of twenty-four miles into St. Andrews to buy a Greek
Testament, which was given him for nothing, on his proving that he could
read it. He is said to have tried the packman’s trade, but to have
carried it on in too unworldly spirit for success. When he applied for
ordination among the Seceders, I am sorry to say that my forefather
would have barred him out on suspicion that his learning came from the
devil; but this firm believer in witchcraft was overruled, and the
self-taught scholar grew to be famed as Dr. John Brown of Haddington.
These are hints of what spirit was fermenting about Abernethy under the
cold Georgian star, when in Scottish straths and glens plain living
nourished much high or hot thinking. A coarser spirit was not wanting
when, as Mr. Hall notes, the public-houses of the neighbourhood did
their chief trade on Sundays, with people tramping into Abernethy to
attend the Seceder meetings, and those of the Relief Church that soon
set up another standard of dissent. He gives at some length an anonymous
report of the “occasion” here in 1776, that is, the annual
administration of the Sacrament, spread out over a week, when preaching
flowed all day in a great tent, surrounded with booths and stands to
supply refreshment to a crowd estimated by thousands, the whole
encampment stretching out the best part of a mile. If the preacher
failed in fire or unction, his hearers, as in the House of Commons,
would drop off to the beer-barrels, flocking back to the tent when some
popular Boanerges broached hotter eloquence. Such scenes, a survival of
Covenanting conventicles, often degenerated into the scandals of Burns’s
“Holy Fair”; and it is only in our time that they cease to be recalled
by the “Preachings,” now abolished among the leading churches as having
become too much of a worldly holiday.
Travellers of Mr. Hall’s period had no admiration for the “dreary glen
of Abernethy,” nor much for the more richly planted Glenfarg into which
it leads, the latter now the main pass from Fife into Perthshire. But
this tourist parson duly admired the view from the Wicks of Baiglie,
extolled by Scott as unmatched in Britain, yet commonly missed by
railroad tourists since the leisurely day when the charms of Glenfarg
inspired Ruskin, at the precocious age of seven, to verse which may be
left unquoted. The Ruskin carriage, indeed, came by the new turnpike
that shirks that higher ground where Scott gained life-long memories of
the delight with which, as a boy of fifteen, making his first
independent excursion, from the back of his pony he looked down on such
an “inimitable landscape.”
This reminiscence of his touches a chord in my own heart, for it was on
a boy’s pony that I, too, made wide
[Illustration: A HIGHLAND LAKE]
acquaintance with Strathearn and Strath Tay. But in my case there were
hindrances that may not have presented themselves to the begetter of
_Waverley_. To him this choice country might not be so much shut up by
high park walls, or by enclosures of the rich strath lands. And in my
day there were toll bars on the roads, when a schoolboy’s pocket-money
was scrimper than seems to be the lot of this generation. One could not
ride a dozen miles in any direction without counting the cost. The
cheapest roads were twopenny ones, which thus became the most familiar.
On one or two, the charge for my small steed was threepence, which
required more consideration. One forbidding highway proudly demanded
fourpence, though on it you could trot a couple of miles before reaching
the expensive barrier. And when one had treated oneself to a fourpenny
scamper along it, there came a second lion on that path. For more than a
mile a railway ran beside the road, on the same level, separated only by
a hedge, as alarming to inexperienced Highland shelties as the broad
bridge on which another railway crossed another road askew, so as to
form a miniature Grotto of Prosilippo, where overhead might come
rumbling an invisible thunderstorm as one sped through its gloomy pass.
Once, having paid my fourpence, I had pushed on almost to the end of the
perilous stretch, when a train puffed and rattled up to meet me, which
my horsemanship failed to make the pony face in a philosophic spirit.
For all I could do, it swerved round and took to racing the engine along
the flat road, for a time keeping company with its bogy. On that highway
race, John Gilpin would not have been in it. If I had no wig to fly
away, and no stone bottles swinging by my side, what bothered me was
having an open knife in my hand, with which I had been cutting a switch
from the hedgerow, as the monster came upon us from round a corner. Our
headlong course was at last stopped by a gipsy or such-like wayfarer, as
shamefaced guerdon for whom I had only twopence in my pocket, nearly
drained by that unconscionable toll. Such trivial reminiscences I set
down partly to please myself, partly to explain how my familiarity with
this region is oddly incomplete, as in the case of a student who knew
all about Africa, America, and Asia, but had stopped subscribing to the
Encyclopædia before it touched on Europe. Yet the reader must take fair
notice that there are few roads hereabouts upon which I may not be
tempted to trot out my own early memories; and if, belike, he likes not
this mood of anecdotage, let him turn to the article on Strathearn in
some ponderous cyclopædia or plodding guide-book.
Mr. Hall, for his part, did not despise the trout-fishing for which the
Farg was notable in my youth; and he had a good day’s sport, when so few
strangers sought its shady course that he found some difficulty in
getting his host to make out a bill, that for two days’ entertainment of
man and beast, including a bottle of wine and other beverages, came to
less than ten shillings. By Culfargie, the little Farg runs into the
Earn, here a goodly river of smooth channels and deep pools, meandering
through a rich valley between the wooded bluffs of Moncrieff Hill and
the green slopes of the Ochils. Except for its craggy walls, there is
nothing Highland about this part of the strath, as thickly set with
mansions, farms, and woods as any snug scene of England. Of it, I have
already spoken in _Bonnie Scotland_; and will only add that Mr. Hall was
scandalised at the numbers of old bachelors he found resorting to the
Spa of Pitkeathly, then as frequented as “St. Ronan’s Well,” where it
appears that bachelors, young and old, were very apt to get into
mischief.
Above the Bridge of Earn, over which goes the high road to Perth, the
river is crossed by the two converging railway lines that tunnel through
Moncrieff Hill to burst into daylight on the Tay. It is the next reaches
of the winding Earn that are hardly known to strangers, unless in
glimpses from the train; yet here it flows by scenes of as much historic
interest as beauty. Forgandenny is a picturesque village, beside which
an old mansion, destroyed by fire, has been replaced by a new one,
notable for its fine gardens, like so many other seats in the
neighbourhood. Forteviot, a little higher up, has come down from the
rank of an ancient royal seat. Here died Kenneth McAlpine, 860, after
hammering the Picts into a new kingdom; and for three centuries later
shadowy Scottish kings are seen flitting through a royal stronghold that
stood on the tongue of land between the Earn and its tributary the May.
The May, one of the merriest and sweetest of Ochil streams, trips down
by the park of Invermay and the “birks” sung before Burns. As
“Endermay,” this spot inspired the Earn-born poet, David Mallet or
Malloch, whom Dr. Johnson belittled, but he filled a considerable place
in London literary life of his generation. Opposite Invermay, on the
northern slope of the Earn, stands Dupplin Castle, seat of Lord
Kinnoull, whose richly wooded grounds are now renowned, and the gardens
nursing exotics such as an araucaria thought to be the largest in the
kingdom.--“Oh, Dr. Johnson, Dr. Johnson, oh!” But these noble avenues
stand on what was once Dupplin Moor, where in 1332 Edward Balliol and
his English allies made such a slaughter among the Scots “that the dead
stood as high from the ground as the full length of a spear,” and the
work of Bannockburn was for a time undone; indeed the boy king David’s
crown might have been wholly lost, had not Edward of England’s hands
been then too full, grasping at the lilies of France as well as the
Scottish thistle that so often proved a sore handful.
Above Dupplin comes Gask, home of the Oliphants, one of whom was to win
victories of sentiment for the lost Jacobite cause dear to this family.
Carolina, Lady Nairne, the “Flower of Strathearn,” had as warm a heart
for her native stream as for memories of Prince Charlie.
Fair shone the rising sky,
The dewdrops clad wi’ many a dye,
Larks lilting pibrochs high
To welcome day’s returning.
The spreading hills, the shading trees,
High waving in the morning breeze,
The wee Scots rose that sweetly blows
Earn’s vale adorning!
The ruins of Gascon Hall beside the river claim to have made a refuge
for William Wallace, when, hunted by a sleuth-hound through Gask wood,
he struck off the head of his flagging comrade Fawdon, then could not
so easily lay that traitor’s or hinderer’s ghost. The present mansion is
the third or fourth worn out here by the Nairne family. It stands on the
site of a Roman camp, with a Roman road beside it, one of many bits of
way still locally known as “street roads.” At Gask we look over to the
mouth of Strathallan, the pass between the Ochils and the foothills of
the Grampians, that must often have echoed the clank of Roman arms.
Across the moor of Orchill, with Wade’s military road running beside it,
the Ardoch Camp is best preserved of such Roman fortresses in Britain,
and one of the largest, laid out to contain an army of 25,000 men. And
hereabouts, in Celtic stones and place-names, there are thick traces of
still older history, overgrown by the plantations and steadings of a
race enriched from regions where the Cæsars’ eagles never flew.
Ardoch stands out of the Earn basin, and the Allan flows to the Forth.
From the end of the Ochils, the Ruthven Water is their last tributary to
the Earn, whose next affluent comes off Highland moors. Strathallan
Castle seems to belie its name in being on the north side of the pass by
which the Caledonian railway debouches on a plain studded with notable
names. Here is Tullibardine, cradle of the Atholl Murrays; Kincardine
Castle shows how Montrose’s ancestral home was ruined by Argyll in their
tit-for-tat warfare; and the gallant Grahames had Aberuthven for their
burial-ground.
The chief place on this side is Auchterarder, where the first shot was
fired in the Disruption of 1843. Nor is this the sole note of the
neighbourhood in Scottish Church history. Behind Auchterarder, the
upper waters of the Ruthven come down from Gleneagles, a beautiful gorge
in the Ochils, leading over to Glendevon. Gleneagles was the old home of
the Haldanes, now replaced here by their kinsman Lord Camperdown; but
Mr. Haldane, whose name is familiar as author of our “Territorials,” has
still a seat on the Ochil slopes at Cloanden. This war-minister--who
rose to political note at an early age, for as a schoolboy I can
remember being taken into his nursery to see him invested with his first
dignity as “the new baby”--bears a name that has been better known to
Scotland in connection with its religious life, when, a century ago, his
grandfather and granduncle became the Wesleys of the Kirk then sunk to
its zero of cold morality.
Robert and James Haldane, nephews of Admiral Duncan, began life as
high-spirited lads with fair prospects of worldly fortune. The elder had
dispositions towards the ministry, repressed at a time when the Scottish
Church seemed no career for gentle blood; the younger declined the
chance of a partnership in Coutts’ Bank. The one spent some early years
in the Navy, while the other, entering the East India Company’s service,
under family influence rose to be a captain at twenty-five, a post he
could sell for a small fortune. Leaving the sea young, both brothers
conceived an evangelical enthusiasm, at first somewhat tinged with the
early hopes of the French Revolution, which so many nobler spirits of
their day hailed as a new dispensation--
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!
For the Haldanes, as well as for Wordsworth, the democratic heaven soon
clouded over; and the brothers turned their zeal to the spread of the
gospel, after the model of such Southron preachers as Charles Simeon and
Rowland Hill, both of whom carried their awakening into Scotland. Robert
sold his estate of Airthrey, beautifully situated on the Ochils, and
proposed devoting his life and means to a mission in India, a scheme
nipped in the bud by the authorities there. James took to
field-preaching, to the scandal of parish ministers and magistrates,
itinerating all over Scotland, through the Highlands, and as far as the
Orkneys and Shetlands. Robert’s gifts were less in the way of eloquence;
he rather gave himself to organisation of the effort, training lay
preachers, buying circuses both in Edinburgh and Glasgow as chapels, and
issuing the tracts which by his school were held as special means of
grace.