At Aberdeen Johnson had found awaiting him a letter from London which
must have been six days on the road.[533] He did not receive another
till he arrived at Glasgow, nearly ten weeks later. He was now going
“to the world’s end _extra anni solisque vias_, where the post would be
a long time in reaching him,” to apply to the Hebrides the words which
four years later he used of Brighton.[534] It was only seven and twenty
years before he drove out from Aberdeen that the Duke of Cumberland
with six battalions of foot and Lord Mark Kerr’s dragoons had marched
forth along the same road to seek the rebels. With a gentle breeze and
a fair wind his transports at the same time moved along shore.[535]
Though no military state waited upon our travellers yet their fame
went before them. At Ellon, where they breakfasted, the landlady asked
Boswell: “Is not this the great Doctor that is going about through the
country? There’s something great in his appearance.” “They say,” said
the landlord, “that he is the greatest man in England, except Lord
Mansfield.” [Sidenote: THE ROAD TO SLAINS CASTLE.] They turned here
out of their course to visit Slains Castle, the seat of the Earl of
Errol. The country over which they drove this day was more desolate
than any through which they had as yet passed. In one place, writes
Johnson, “the sand of the shore had been raised by a tempest, and
carried to such a distance that an estate was overwhelmed and lost.”
Sir Walter Scott, who in the summer of 1814, sailed along the shore in
a Lighthouse Yacht, says that northwards of Aberdeen “the coast changes
from a bold and rocky to a low and sandy character. Along the Bay of
Belhelvie a whole parish was swallowed up by the shifting sands, and
is still a desolate waste. It belonged to the Earls of Errol, and was
rented at £500 a year at the time. When these sands are past the land
is all arable. Not a tree to be seen; nor a grazing cow, or sheep, or
even a labour-horse at grass, though this be Sunday.”[536] The Earl who
welcomed Johnson to Slains Castle had done what he could to overcome
nature. “He had cultivated his fields so as to bear rich crops of every
kind, and he had made an excellent kitchen-garden with a hot-house.”
His successors have diligently followed in his steps, and taking
advantage of a hollow in the ground have even raised an avenue of
trees. They can only grow to the height of fifteen or twenty feet, for
when the shoots rise high enough to catch the blasts from the North Sea
they are cut down the following winter. [Sidenote: SLAINS CASTLE.] The
situation of the Castle struck Johnson as the noblest he had ever seen.
“From the windows (he said) the eye wanders over the sea
that separates Scotland from Norway, and when the winds beat
with violence, must enjoy all the terrific grandeur of the
tempestuous ocean. I would not for my amusement wish for a
storm; but as storms, whether wished or not, will sometimes
happen, I may say, without violation of humanity, that I should
willingly look out upon them from Slains Castle.”
[Illustration: SLAINS CASTLE.]
Boswell was also impressed with the position of this old house, set
on the very verge of life. “The King of Denmark,” he says, “is Lord
Errol’s nearest neighbour on the north-east.” The Castle was built
on the edge of the granite cliffs, in one spot not leaving even a
foothold for the daring climber. A foolhardy fellow who had tried to
get round lost his life in the attempt. I was greatly disappointed
at finding that “the excellent old house” which Boswell describes,
with its outside galleries on the first and second story, no longer
remains. I had looked forward to standing in the very bow-window of
the drawing-room fronting the sea where Johnson repeated Horace’s Ode,
_Jam satis terris_. In the new building, however, the bow-window has
not been forgotten,—and there I looked out on the wild scene which
met his view. I saw “the cut in the rock made by the influx of the
sea,” into which the rash climber had fallen as he tried to go round
the Castle. Below me there were short slopes of grass ending in a
precipice. So near was the edge that a child could have tossed a ball
over it from the window. Red granite rocks in sharp and precipitous
headlands ran out into the sea. A fishing-boat with brown sails was
passing close by, while in the distance in a long line lay a fleet of
herring-smacks. The sea-birds were hovering about and perching on the
rocks, mingling their melancholy cries with the dashing of the waves.
The dark waters were surging through the narrow chasms formed by rocky
islets and the steep sides of the cliffs. For the storm-tost sailor it
is a dreadful coast. [Sidenote: A SHIPWRECK OFF SLAINS CASTLE.] On a
wild night in winter not many years ago one of the maids, as she was
letting down the blinds in the drawing-room, heard confused sounds
which came, she thought, from the servants’ hall beneath. The butler in
another part of the house had caught them too. Yet when they reproached
their fellow-servants with their noisiness they were told that it was
not from them that the sounds had come. They thought no more about it
that night, but next morning when the day broke the masts were seen of
a ship-wrecked vessel on the rocks below the Castle. The waves were
breaking over it, and not a soul was left alive. Then they understood
that it was the despairing cries of the unhappy sailors which had in
vain reached their ears. The story, that was told me as I stood looking
out on the sea, gave an air of sadness to a room which had already
raised sad thoughts in my mind. [Sidenote: THE EARL OF KILMARNOCK.] For
on the wall was hanging the portrait of an innocent and pretty boy who,
before so many years were to pass over him, on the scaffold on Tower
Hill was to pay the penalty of rebellion with his life.
“Pitied by gentle minds Kilmarnock died.”
On the table was lying a curious but gloomy collection of the prints
of his trial and execution.[537] Boswell’s rest was troubled by the
thoughts of this unhappy nobleman. He had been kept awake by the
blazing of his fire, the roaring of the sea, and the smell of his
pillows, which were made of the feathers of some sea-fowl. “I saw in
imagination,” he writes, “Lord Errol’s father, Lord Kilmarnock, who was
beheaded on Tower Hill in 1746, and I was somewhat dreary.”
In the drawing-room was hanging that fine whole-length picture of Lord
Errol, which led Johnson to talk of his friend, the great painter, and
“to conclude his panegyric by saying, ‘Sir Joshua Reynolds, sir, is the
most invulnerable man I know; the man with whom if you should quarrel,
you would find the most difficulty how to abuse.’”
In the rebellion of 1745, Lord Errol, following a plan not unknown
among the Scotch nobility, had served on the opposite side from his
father. At Culloden he had seen him brought in prisoner. “The Earl of
Kilmarnock had lost his hat, and his long hair was flying over his
face. The son stepped out of the ranks, and taking off his own hat
placed it over his father’s disordered and wind-beaten locks.”[538]
The young man in his loyalty to George II., did not follow the example
of his forefathers, for he was descended from at least three lines
of rebels. “He united in his person the four earldoms of Errol,
Kilmarnock, Linlithgow, and Callander.” The last two were attainted in
1715, and Kilmarnock in 1746.[539] As we gaze at the haughty-looking
man whom Reynolds has so finely painted in the robes of a peer, we
call to mind the coronation of George III., where he played his part
as High Constable of Scotland—“the noblest figure I ever saw,” wrote
Horace Walpole.[540] To Johnson he recalled Homer’s character of
Sarpedon.[541] At the coronation banquet in Westminster Hall, Walpole
thought, as well he might, on that “most melancholy scene” which he had
witnessed less than fifteen years before in that same hall, when the
earl’s father, “tall and slender, his behaviour a most just mixture
between dignity and submission,” had in vain pleaded for mercy.[542]
[Illustration: THE BULLERS OF BUCHAN.]
[Sidenote: THE BULLERS OF BUCHAN.]
From Slains Castle our travellers drove a short distance along the
coast to the famous Bullers of Buchan—“a sight,” writes Johnson,
“which no man can see with indifference, who has either sense of danger
or delight in rarity.” Boswell describes the spot as:—
“A circular basin of large extent, surrounded with tremendous
rocks. On the quarter next the sea, there is a high arch in the
rock, which the force of the tempest has driven out. This place
is called _Buchan’s Buller_, or the _Buller of Buchan_, and
the country people call it the _Pot_. Mr. Boyd said it was so
called from the French _bouloir_.[543] It may be more simply
traced from _boiler_ in our own language. We walked round this
monstrous cauldron. In some places the rock is very narrow;
and on each side there is a sea deep enough for a man-of-war
to ride in; so that it is somewhat horrid to move along.
However, there is earth and grass upon the rock, and a kind of
road marked out by the print of feet; so that one makes it out
pretty safely: yet it alarmed me to see Dr. Johnson striding
irregularly along.”
As the weather was calm they took a boat and rowed through the archway
into the cauldron. “It was a place,” writes Johnson, “which, though
we could not think ourselves in danger, we could scarcely survey
without some recoil of mind.” He thought that “it might have served
as a shelter from storms to the little vessels used by the northern
rovers.” Sir Walter Scott, however, was told that this was impossible,
for “in a high gale the waves rush in with incredible violence. An
old fisher said he had seen them flying over the natural wall of the
Bullers, which cannot be less than two hundred feet high.”[544] In the
_Gentleman’s Magazine_ for 1755 (p. 200), two strange pictures are
given of this curious place, which must surely have been drawn in St.
John’s Gate, Clerkenwell, by an artist who had never seen it.
[Sidenote: DUN BUY.]
Not far off is Dun Buy,[545] a lofty island rock placed in an angle
of the shore that is formed by no less lofty cliffs. The sea, with
its dark waters in endless rise and fall, washes through the narrow
channel, its ceaseless murmur answering to the cries of the countless
water-fowl who high up on the ledges breed in safety. On one side,
where there is a steep, grassy slope, Dun Buy can be scaled. I climbed
up it many years ago one hot summer’s day, and thought that I had never
seen so strange and wild a spot. Johnson had also visited it, but his
mind was not affected as was my young imagination, for he said that
“upon these rocks there was nothing that could long detain attention.”