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Title: The Highlands and Islands of Scotland
Author: Moncrieff, A. R. Hope (Ascott Robert Hope)
Language: English
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Transcriber’s Notes.
Footnotes have been numbered in one continuous sequence.
Differences in hyphenation of specific words and missing punctuation
have been rectified where applicable.
The advertisments from the front of the book have been placed
at the end.
Bold print is denoted with equal signs, such as =20=.
Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).
THE HIGHLANDS AND ISLANDS
OF SCOTLAND
[Illustration: INVERNESS]
THE HIGHLANDS AND
ISLANDS OF SCOTLAND
PAINTED BY W · SMITH
JUN^[R.] · DESCRIBED BY
A · R · HOPE MONCRIEFF
PUBLISHED BY A · & C ·
BLACK·LONDON·MCMVII
[Illustration]
_Published April 1906
Reprinted with slight corrections, July 1907_
Preface
In _Bonnie Scotland_ was promised a further volume that should be
devoted to the sterner and wilder aspects of Caledonia. That book dealt
with the main body of Highlands and Lowlands, more familiar to the
gentle tourist for whose patronage it was a candidate. This one, whose
title might have been qualified as _West_ Highlands, deals with the
less visited side that is still Highland indeed, both in ruder natural
features and in a life holding out longer against the trimming and
taming of Sassenach intromissions. The author, as before, has tried to
weave a pattern of entertaining stripes and checks upon a groundwork of
information, all making a darker-hued tartan than is worn in the centre
of Bonnie Scotland. Another metaphor would put it that he has prepared
a brisk, perhaps frothy, but, it is hoped, not unpalatable, brew of
“heather ale,” which contains in solution more solid ingredients than
may be manifest to every reader.
Contents
CHAPTER I
PAGE
“TO THE HIGHLANDS BOUND” 1
CHAPTER II
TARTANS 19
CHAPTER III
THE LAND OF LORNE 43
CHAPTER IV
THE HOLY ISLES 65
CHAPTER V
PIBROCHS AND CORONACHS 88
CHAPTER VI
TOURISTS 117
CHAPTER VII
LOCHABER NO MORE! 146
CHAPTER VIII
THE OUTER HEBRIDES 171
CHAPTER IX
THULE 195
CHAPTER X
CHILDREN OF THE MIST 217
List of Illustrations
1. Inverness _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
2. Glen Rosa, Arran 8
3. Aberdeen from the Harbour Entrance 16
4. Cawdor Castle 30
5. Loch Linnhe 36
6. Inveraray Cross and Castle 44
7. Glencoe 52
8. Oban Bay at Night 56
9. The Islands of Oronsay and Colonsay 66
10. Iona Cathedral 68
11. Interior, Iona Cathedral 70
12. Staffa 72
13. The Island of Eigg 74
14. The Island of Canna 76
15. Tobermory 78
16. The Hills of Jura 82
17. Port Askaig, Islay 84
18. Ben Nevis 92
19. The Island of Rum, from Arisaig 96
20. The River Spey near Fochabers 102
21. Inverlochy Castle and Ben Nevis 108
22. Castle Urquhart, Loch Ness 120
23. Spinning in Skye 122
24. Glen Sligachan, Skye 128
25. Loch Coruisk, Skye 138
26. Skye Crofter 140
27. The Falls of Spean, Inverness-shire 148
28. Crofters’ Cottages, Onich, Inverness-shire 152
29. Reddin’ the Line 162
30. The Standing Stones of Callernish, Island of Lewis 172
31. A Hebridean Crofter’s House 178
32. Shelling Mussels, Cromarty 180
33. The Herring Fleet in Stornoway Bay, Island of Lewis 188
34. Carting Peat, Orkney 196
35. An Orcadian Fireplace 200
36. Kirkwall Cathedral, Orkney 206
37. Shetlanders 214
38. Caithness Coast near Dunnet Head 218
39. Kyle of Tongue and Ben Loyal 222
40. Dunrobin Castle, Sutherlandshire 226
_Map at end of Volume_
CHAPTER I
“TO THE HIGHLANDS BOUND”
Highlands and Islands, as we Scots chuckle to ourselves, is the one
phrase which an Englishman cannot mispronounce. I read lately a book
of Scottish travel by an American, who made my countrymen leave out
their _h_’s like any Cockney; then I at once laid aside this writer’s
observations as vain. The humblest Scot never drops an _h_, unless in
words like _hospital_, which the Southron painfully aspirates in his
anxiety not to be judged vulgar, as in living memory he has tacked this
test of breeding on to _h_umour and _h_umble. More fairly we may be
charged with overdoing the _h_ sound; and there are two or three words
in which we insert it: _huz_, for instance, said in some parts for
“us.” In the game of _anglicé_ “touch” or “tag,” my childish
conception of the formula “who’s _hit_?” made it a participle meaning
“struck” or “touched,” till I heard German children crying in like
case “_Ich bin es!_” when I did not know how _hit_ is the old English
pronoun, preserved by Scots dialects, which are the truest copies of
our national tongue.
Once, indeed—it was in Derbyshire—I came across a man speaking with
a strong West Highland accent, yet misusing the letter _h_. This
seemed such a prodigy that I made a point of getting it explained. It
turned out that he was the son of a Yorkshire shepherd, who had taken
service on the Isle of Mull. There the boy came to be most at home in
Gaelic, while what English he had was on a bad model—the reverse of
_lingua Toscana in bocca Romana_. His younger brothers, he told me,
grew up hardly speaking English at all, and he, the bilingual member
of the family, had often to interpret between them and their mother,
who could never get her tongue round the strange speech. We speak of a
mother-tongue; but it is from their play-fellows that active lads seem
to learn fastest. The Italian author De Amicis relates an experience
like that of this Yorkshire family: transplanted at the age of two from
a Genoese to a Piedmontese town, he picked up the Piedmontese dialect
so readily that his own mother could not always understand him when
once he got loose from her apron-strings.
In the far Highlands and Islands can still be found countrymen of
ours who speak no language but Gaelic, these hardly, indeed, unless
among older people, the rising generation being schooled into the
dominant tongue, in their case often a stiff book English, spangled
with Lowland idioms and native constructions. Distrust the author who
reports true Highlanders talking broad Scots after the school of
Stratford-atte-Bow. This remark does not fully apply to the Central and
Inner Highlands, where some generations have passed since people living
a mile off spoke tongues foreign to each other, as may still happen
on the borders of Wales. In the Highlands best known to tourists,
the blending of blood, language, and customs has gone so far that a
stranger may be excused for confounding a Perthshire strath with the
true kailyard scenery. Beyond the Great Glen, still more markedly
beyond the sounds, firths, and minches of the west coast, we find
Highlanders less touched by the spirit of a practical age, whose first
breath sets them shivering and drawing their tartans about them as
they wake from fond dreams of a romantic past. All Scotland, alas! has
been too much overrun by the alien clan of MacMillion, who, as one of
its most eloquent sons complains, go on cutting it up into “moors” and
“forests,” and its rivers into “beats.” Sheep farming on a large scale
and other industries have here and there brought Saxon sojourners,
like my Derbyshire acquaintance, to the western wilds. The aristocracy
are much Anglified, even in these “Highlands of the Highlands.” But
the mass of their human life is still Celtic, or at least Gaelic, if
language can be trusted, with an old blend of Teuton infused both by
sea and land, through Norse, Norman, and Saxon invaders, and with
touches of Spanish Armada or other shipwrecked blood surmisable here
and there among waifs and strays all going to make up a stock that may
have absorbed who knows what prehistoric elements. The controversy
between Thwackum and Square is not more famous than that hot debate
between Mr. Jonathan Oldbuck and Sir Arthur Wardour, which stands as
warning to a modest writer not to quarrel with any readers, at least
at an early stage of his book, by taking sides on certain much-vexed
ethnological and philological questions.
To reach those rain-bitten and wave-carved coasts where the true
Highlander mainly holds his own, we have various ways now made smooth
by arts which go on sapping his seclusion. It does not much matter
which way the stranger takes, for he can hardly go wrong, to understand
how right Gray was when he told his mole-eyed generation, “the Lowlands
were worth seeing once, but the mountains are ecstatic, and ought to be
visited in pilgrimage once a year.” All roads to the Inner Highlands
lead through the Outer Highlands, more fully described in _Bonnie
Scotland_.
For leisurely tourists the choice road is still by water, down the
Clyde from Glasgow. If the name of this river be derived, as is said,
from a Celtic word meaning _clean_, that title has become a mockery,
since its banks from Glasgow to Greenock sucked together the most
industrious life of Scotland. “Come, bright Improvement, on the Car of
Time!” sang Glasgow’s youthful poet, but lived to exclaim against the
questionable shape in which came a spirit he had invoked so hopefully:
And call they this Improvement?—to have changed,
My native Clyde, thy once romantic shore,
Where Nature’s face is banished and estranged,
And Heaven reflected in thy wave no more;
Whose banks, that sweetened May-day’s breath before,
Lie sere and leafless now in summer’s beam,
With sooty exhalations covered o’er;
And for the daisied green-sward, down thy stream
Unsightly brick-lanes smoke, and clanking engines gleam.
The banks of the Clyde have not grown more Arcadian since Campbell’s
day, so the traveller does well to hurry by rail over the windings
of the smoky river, embarking at Greenock or Helensburgh, where it
broadens out into a firth deep enough to drown the offences of man.
Here launch forth a fleet of steamboats, whose admirals, almost alone
in Britain, rival the luxurious arks of the Hudson and the Mississippi;
and here begins a “delectable voyage,” too often spoiled by rain, else
warmly praised by a hundred pens, for instance in Colonel Lockhart’s
_Fair to See_, one of the most amusing of Highland novels, as readers
might not guess from this opening passage:
The mountain panorama which greets you as you start, noble though it
be, is but the noble promise of still better things; for it cannot
show you the exquisite variety, the contrasts, the combinations, the
marvellous chiaroscuro, the subtle harmonies, the sublime discords,
that meet you and thrill you at every turn, passing through the inner
penetralia of all that is most glorious in the land of mountain and
of flood. Gliding through those strange sounds and estuaries, with
their infinite sinuosities, traced about peninsula and cape and
island—traced as it were with a design of delighting the eye with
sudden presentments of scenic surprises, as it were with a design of
furnishing not one, but twenty points of view, wherefrom to consider
each salient wonder and beauty round which they seem to conduct
you proudly on their glittering paths—there must be something far
wrong with you if you find no delight in all this. For here indeed
you have a succession of the noblest pictures,—no mere iteration
of rugged mountains, monotonous in their grim severity and sublime
desolation,—no mere sleepy tracts of unbroken forest, nor blank
heaths losing themselves vaguely in the horizon, nor undulating
expanses of lawn-like pasture-land, but with something of all these
features blending in each of the splendid series; every feature in
turn claiming its predominance, when all the others seem to pose
themselves about the one central object, sinking for the moment their
own individualities that it may be glorified.
For the first stage of this voyage, indeed, the shore is too much
masked by a long line of bathing and boating resorts, to which Glasgow
folk love to escape even from the comforts of the Saltmarket. On the
right-hand side stands Dunoon, whose fragment of ruined fortress looks
stranded above a flood of hotels, shops, and villas, in which several
villages have run together into a town. Farther down, on the Isle of
Bute, Rothesay makes the focus of Clyde pleasure trips, no mushroom
resort, but seat of an ancient royal castle that titled the heir of
Scotland. The Stuarts still flourish here in the person of the Marquis
of Bute, who is as great a man in the Principality of Wales as in the
Dukedom of Rothesay. The old town has expanded into a couple of miles
of esplanade, curving below green hills upon a land-locked bay, its
surface lively with yachts, pleasure boats, and steamers that in the
summer season turn out myriads of excursionists to sack the joys of
the place. I was about to belittle Rothesay by calling it the Southend
of Glasgow; but in view of its hydros, its mineral spring, and its
background of dwarf Highland scenery, its character may better be
expressed in terms of chemical analysis:
Torquay 21.00
Douglas 13.45
Cowes 16.00
Weston-super-Mare 14.10
Scarborough 14.00
Clacton 6.25
Blackpool 12.07
Residuum of Local Peculiarities 3.13
------
100.00
======
In winter, when “Wee Macgreegors” and the like desert its waters,
Rothesay becomes the Ventnor of Scotland, recommended by a sheltered
western mildness, which indeed its own guide-book advocate has to
qualify as “rather humid.” Even in ordinary winters it may bear
comparison with South Devon or the Isle of Wight, while sometimes a
whim of Nature has set the thermometer standing higher here than at
Mentone. This mildness is attested by exotic plants in Lord Bute’s
park, whose late owner, Disraeli’s “Lothair,” for a time maintained
colonies of kangaroos, beavers, and other outlandish creatures.
Whatever harsh things may be said of Eastern Scotland’s climate,
the West Highland skies are more apt to be “soft,” and to snow only
“whiles.” Some patriotic Scots go so far as to claim that their
country is on the whole warmer than England, no part of the former
being over forty miles from the Gulf Stream that so muggily wraps the
islands of our far north.
For the rest, Bute makes a miniature of the Highlands, once rich in
chapels and hermitages, as in monuments of a dimmer faith, too many of
which have been destroyed, like that monastic ruin carted away to baser
uses by a thrifty farmer, who thought to gain his lord’s approval for
“clearing” a beautiful spot. A modern memorial, not to be pointed out
to French visitors, is the woods of Southhall, planted by a veteran
owner as plan of the battle of Waterloo. The boss of the island, Barone
Hill, rises over 500 feet, from which, or from the park above Rothesay,
fond local eyes have tried to count a dozen counties, and half a dozen
are certainly in view. “Why don’t you pretend to see to America, while
you are about it?” quoth a rude Southron to some local prospect-monger;
and the dry answer was, “Ye can see farther than that—as far as the
moon!”
[Illustration: GLEN ROSA, ARRAN]
Bute, of course, sinks to a mere Isle of Wight when compared with the
grandeurs and loveliness of Arran, lying to the south. This island
indeed has scenery which some declare unsurpassed in Britain, notably
on the flanks of its Goatfell summit. Yet while Glen Rosa, Glen Sannox,
and Loch Ranza have often been famed by painters, it seems the case
that poets, novelists, and other artists in words make not much copy
out of the charms of Arran. One feels inclined to suspect authors
of Sybarite tastes, since a weak point of Arran as tourist ground
is, or has been, a want of accommodation under the shadow of a ducal
house that looked askance on building. The only two townlets on the
island, Brodick and Lamlash, count their population in hundreds; and
their hotels are hard put to it to accommodate the strangers who have
often had to be content with a shake-down in the room used as an
English chapel, or with shelter in one of the few bathing machines; I
have heard of a whole boatful of excursionists lodged in a hay-field.
Holiday quarters in this paradise are engaged for a year ahead,
and Piccadilly prices may have to be paid as rent of a hovel. Thus
hitherto Arran has been preserved as a haunt of real nature-lovers, and
within two or three hours’ sail of Glasgow one could find an almost
pristine solitude of purple heather and solemn crags all unprofaned by
watering-place gaiety or luxury. The sourest Radical of sound taste
might here exclaim, “God bless the Duke!”—not of Argyll—yet one
wonders what a late duke’s creditors thought of such a demesne being
kept clear from vulgar considerations of profit.
I am not going to try my hand at word-pictures of these glorious
landscapes, for “how can a man can what he canna can?” as I once heard
a Highland lad sagaciously express himself in our foreign tongue. One
had better not invite one’s readers even to land on Arran, lest there
might be a difficulty in getting them off again; but if they do, let
them not omit the ascent of Goatfell, no perilous adventure, for a view
hardly surpassed in Scotland, as shown in Black’s _Where shall we go?_
a work over which the present author has some rights of plagiarism.
The summit is composed of mighty rocks, ensconced among which one
may shelter from the searching wind and gaze in comfort at the wild
picture around and below—Glen Rosa at our feet, with its sharp
precipices beyond rising into the pinnacled heights of A Chir and
Cir Vohr; the saddle into Glen Sannox (the glen itself is invisible
from here), and the equally sharp and even loftier ridges beyond that
glen; the nearer range of Goatfell itself extending round a nameless
glen below us, and terminating in a sharp peak that overhangs the
village of Corrie; and beyond the limits of the island itself and the
broad belt of sea which allows the eye to range unchecked, a glorious
bewilderment of heights and hollows innumerable, with here the smoke
of a manufacturing town, and there the familiar shape of some mainland
mountain-giant, the view extending on a clear day, it is said, from
Ben Nevis to the Isle of Man.
Arran owes its unsophisticated state also in part to lying a little
off the highway of travel. Strong-stomached voyagers may round the
Mull of Cantyre, to be tossed upon Atlantic waves, and thus get a
chance of seeing Ailsa Craig, “Paddy’s Milestone,” whose cliffs are
in some respects finer than the much-visited Staffa. The gentle
tourist takes an easier and straighter line to Oban. His boat threads
the beautiful Kyles of Bute, then stands across to Tarbert, on the
Isthmus of Cantyre, from the farther side of which goes the steamer
to Islay. Up Loch Fyne is reached Ardrishaig, terminus of the big ark
whose Oban-bound passengers are transferred to a smaller craft for
the Crinan Canal cut, that brings them over to the island-studded and
cliff-cornered sounds of the west coast. Well then for the land-lubber
that he fares forward on one of Messrs. MacBrayne’s stout craft! To
play the Viking here without experience were a perilous task, so
thick-set are these waters with rocks and shallows, so tormented by
sudden shifty squalls, so distracted by currents, eddies, and rushing
tideways. But the steamer pants masterfully through the Dorus Mor,
keeps clear of the Maelstrom of Corryvreckan, whose roar may be heard
leagues off in calm weather, and steers safe along the islands of the
Firth of Lorne, past the great slate quarries on Easdale, round the
bridged island of Seil, and inside the dark heights of Kerrera, by a
narrow sound to reach its port at Oban, whose once mighty strongholds
are overshadowed by such an eruption of smart hotels and villas.
Here we come into touch with the Caledonian Railway, which is the
shortest way to this “Charing Cross of the Highlands.” Having entered
the mountains beyond Stirling Castle and Dunblane, passing near the
Trossachs and under the Braes of Balquhidder, the line turns westward
to wind through the mountains of southern Perthshire, and reaches
Argyll by some of Scotland’s grandest scenes, finding a way between
the head of Loch Awe and the mighty Ben Cruachan, after a glimpse, at
Dalmally, into the strath of Glenorchy, oasis-like after terrific Glen
Ogle and dreary Glen Lochy. The railway holds on through the stern Pass
of Brander, scene of the _Highland Widow_, where cairns still record
the crushing of the Macdougalls of Lorne by Robert Bruce. Then we gain
Oban by Loch Etive, whose upper part runs into one of the grandest
of Highland glens, and its waters rush out with the tide in Ossian’s
Falls of Lora, through the narrow throat now bridged by a branch to
Ballachulish.
On one side, this line takes in tributaries of tourist traffic from
Loch Earn and Loch Tay, and roads through the grand Breadalbane
Highlands marked by their name as heart of ancient Albin. On the other
side, by coaches and steamboats, Ben Cruachan is reached from Inveraray
or from the head of Loch Long. Campbell seems the dominant name now in
this country, but once it was the land of the Macgregors, whose hearts
still turn to fair Glenorchy, whence they were driven landless and
nameless. This ancient clan stood as model for Scott’s Vich-Alpines,
a name which they in fact claim as descended from Gregor, son of King
Alpin. Not every one reads Scott nowadays; few read his introductions
and miscellaneous essays; and perhaps nobody, without special interest
in the subject, will go through Miss Murray Macgregor’s elaborate
history of her name; so there will be many of my readers to whom may
not come amiss a short digression on the peculiar fortunes of a clan
distinguished by ferocity among warlike neighbours in a ruthless age.
It was not the Saxon that to them “came with iron hand,” but men of
their own blood and speech, who “from our fathers rent the land”
about which the moon could be significantly known as “Macgregor’s
Lantern,” as also indeed “Macfarlane’s Lantern,” and the lamp of other
Highlandmen bent on business that would not well bear brighter light.
From very early times the Macgregors passed for Ishmaelites, every
hand against them, their fastnesses again and again threatened by
commissions of fire and sword as soon as troubled Scottish kings could
attempt to settle the quarrels of the Highland border. Their most
resounding offence was the slaughter of the Colquhouns at Glenfruin
by Loch Lomond, a little before James VI. posted off to his softer
throne in London. This was a fair fight, made flagrant in tradition
by the murder of the Dumbarton schoolboys who had come out to see the
battle, as in our day lads might go some way to a football match. It is
stated that the Macgregor chief bid these non-combatants take refuge
in a church, either to keep them out of the way of shots, or to have
under his hand a troop of hostages from among the principal families in
Scotland; and that it was his foster-brother or some of his followers
who stabbed the unfortunate youths, to the chief’s indignation.
Another legend tells of a barn in which the poor boys were burned to
death. One tradition points out two murderers, who henceforth lived
as outlaws from the clan. Miss Murray Macgregor naturally defends her
kinsmen from the charge of an atrocity so heavily weighing on their own
conscience that for long no Macgregor would cross after nightfall the
stream in that “Glen of Sorrow,” believed to be haunted by the ghosts
of the victims. It is in print, though I cannot find any authority of
weight, that up to the middle of the eighteenth century the Dumbarton
schoolboys annually went through a ceremony of funeral rites on what
was taken for the anniversary of the massacre, their _dux_ being laid
on a bier and with Gaelic chants carried to an open grave as effigy of
those luckless predecessors.
The story of the scholars may have been exaggerated. But when eleven
score widows of the slain Colquhouns, dressed in black on white
palfreys, each bearing her husband’s bloody shirt on a spear, came
before James demanding vengeance, this object-lesson deeply moved
the pacific king. The very name of Macgregor was proscribed on pain
of death. The clan was handed over to the Campbells for execution;
and when its chief surrendered to Argyll on promise of escaping with
exile, this condition was kept to the letter by sending him over the
English border and at once bringing him back to be hanged at Edinburgh.
Throughout the century, acts of proscription against the Macgregors
were repeatedly renewed, most of them having to disguise themselves
as Campbells, Drummonds, Murrays, or other neighbour names, while
one branch, settled in Aberdeenshire, took that of Gregory, and some
wandered north as far as Ross. The bulk of their lands passed to the
Campbells. But still a tough stock of them held fast near their old
seats, not to be rooted out by all the power of the crown or of the
Campbells, as we know from Rob Roy’s exploits, who, “ower bad for
blessing, and ower good for banning,” hardly played the hero in the
political strife of his day, but did a good deal of doughty fighting
for his own hand.
This last of semi-mythical heroes had come to look on Argyll as a
protector, and turned his depredations chiefly against the house of
Graham; whereas in the former century many of the clan had followed
Montrose, which was worth to them the favour of Charles abolishing the
penal laws against their name, afterwards re-enacted under William. It
was not till George III.’s reign, when the tamed Macgregors had amply
proved their loyalty in arms as well as their ability in other walks
of life, that their proscription was finally annulled, the scattered
clan free to take their own name, for which they recognised Sir John
Murray as chief, in a deed signed by over 800 Macgregors. Rob Roy had
represented the junior branch of Glengyle, claiming descent from that
ruffian on whom was laid the blood of the Dumbarton scholars. Rob
appears to have died a Catholic; but a contemporary divine of his clan
tells how they were in the way of boasting that they had a religion
of their own, “neither Papist nor Protestant, just Macgregors!” So
much for a stock that seems to have been more unlucky but not more
undeserving, perhaps, than its neighbours.
In the Macgregor country the Caledonian line crosses its rival the West
Highland Railway, that from Helensburgh turns northward up the shores
of Loch Long and Loch Lomond to mount into the wilds of Perthshire, the
great Caledonian Forest of old, still showing a wide waste, the Moor
of Rannoch, about which lay hid Charles Edward in fact, as Stevenson’s
David Balfour in fiction slunk before the redcoat dragoons over that
naked moorland, crawling on all fours from patch to patch of heather
among its moss bogs and peaty pools. Above the loftiest point of the
line stands a shooting lodge which used to boast itself the highest
habitation in Britain, but has been far overtopped by the Observatory
on Ben Nevis, round whose snow-streaked flanks the railway turns west
at Fort-William towards its terminus on the coast.
[Illustration: ABERDEEN FROM THE HARBOUR ENTRANCE]
This is bound to be a somewhat flat chapter, in which one can merely
hint at the landmarks of rapid routes to the Inner Highlands, most of
them by scenery already traversed in _Bonnie Scotland_. From Ben Nevis
there is a straight way to Inverness by the bed of the Caledonian
Canal. To that “capital of the Highlands,” the high-road from the
centre of Scotland is by the famed Highland Railway over the wilds of
Atholl and Badenoch. Other lines lead less directly from the south to
Inverness. The Caledonian through Strathmore, and the North British
over the Firths of Forth and Tay, unite to reach Aberdeen by the rocky
coast on which stands out Dunottar Castle, that old Scottish Gibraltar,
honoured with the custody of the Regalia, and accursed by the cruel
confinement of Covenanters. At Aberdeen, close to the rounded and
trimmed beauties of Deeside, avenue for Balmoral and Braemar, one has a
choice of routes to Inverness, over a fine half-Highland, half-Lowland
country, or along the rocky coast of the Moray Firth. From
Inverness a single line runs on to the far north, with a branch to
the ferries of Skye, rivalled now by the West Highland extension to
Mallaig. Half a century ago Dean Stanley declared it easier to get
to Jerusalem than to Skye. Jerusalem to-day has its railway; while
Skye is reached by steamers from Oban, besides the easy crossings for
which cyclists wind upon good roads through the bens and glens beyond
Inverness.
Oban, Fort-William, and Inverness are the chief bases of West Highland
touring. To Lorne and to Lochaber we shall return anon. Of Inverness,
properly a Highland frontier city, if capital of the Highland Railway,
enough has been said in my former volume; but here I would take the
opportunity of correcting a slight anachronism by which I there spoke
of Inverness Castle as used for a prison. I learn that within the
last two or three years it has been freed from this degradation. The
Highlands have not much need of prisons; the Fiji Islanders did not
more quickly shift a character for fierce violence. But for whisky and
political or religious agitation, there would be little need of police
in this country. It is many a year since a Highlander was “justified.”
During the last quarter of a century or so, some half-dozen executions
have served all Scotland; and it is stated on good authority that not
one of the criminals was of native blood or religion; indeed, sound
Presbyterians have the satisfaction of noting—but let sleeping dogs
lie!
Peacefulness and honesty were not always characteristic virtues of
the Highlands; and even yet, now that we are about to visit Donald
in his native wilds, let us understand how, like the rest of us, he
has his weak points as well as his strong ones, both of them sometimes
exaggerated into a caricature as like the original as is the rigid
Highlander of a snuff shop. His critics are apt to dwell on certain
faults which may be often regarded as the seamy side of fine qualities
that also distinguish him. His groundwork of laziness will be chequered
by spells of energy and endurance. He may still put too much of the
hard drudgery on women; but he does not shrink from tasks of danger and
death. His want of smart practical turn goes with his readiness for
romantic imaginings. His hot temper is related to a pride that begets
chastity and courtesy as well as brawls. His loves as well as his
hates catch fire more briskly than in the coarser Saxon nature, whose
affections, indeed, if harder to kindle, may burn with an intenser glow
when once well alight. The Lowlander is a better man of business, but
the Highlander more of a gentleman, as the stranger will soon remark.
And now that old feuds have smouldered out, the dourest Whig will not
care to contradict a Tory poet—
Nowhere beats the heart so kindly
As beneath the tartan plaid.
All the same, Aytoun might have found cause to choose another epithet
for Highland hearts, if, in those loyal old days of his, wearing a
MacTavish plaid, let us say, he had chanced to forgather on some lonely
moor with the tartans of “ta Fairshon.”
CHAPTER II
TARTANS
Foreigners who expect to find all Scotland lit by a sunset of romance,
are disappointed in the paucity of kilts and plaids as touches of human
colour upon the Highland scenery. The tartan, indeed, has gone out
faster than some picturesque costumes of continental mountaineers. It
was when forbidden to wear it that the thrawn Highlander clung fondly
to his ancestral garb; now that he has his choice, though he may keep a
kilt and gay trappings to match for occasional display, he submits to
the hodden grey breeches of the Saxon for work-a-day wear. In our time,
indeed, aristocratic patronage has brought forth a holiday revival of
the Highland dress. Queen Victoria’s admiration set Braemar reblooming
with rainbow shows; and one Stuart peer of to-day is reported as
offering a kilt of his tartan gratis to any clansman who will oblige
him by displaying it. But these gauds are more visible on the edge of
the Highlands than in their recesses; least of all on the Islands,
where men rather affect seafaring blue, and it is chiefly old women who
cling to the tartan shawl as head-dress. There may be more philabegs
found in London than in Glasgow, or even in Inverness; and in Lochaber
or Badenoch you are less sure of encountering the tartan than on Surrey
heaths about Aldershot, or in the Hertfordshire meadows near Watford,
whither the Caledonian Asylum has now removed its company of young
Highlanders, that till a year or so back flaunted themselves in the
metropolis, exciting rude urchins to derisive cries of “Scotchie!” as
in lowland Scottish towns they might be greeted with “Kiltie, kiltie,
cauld legs!”
Those young Cockneys are as ignorant as some grown-up ladies and
gentlemen and not a few authors, who ought to know that the “garb of
old Gaul” is no more the “Scottish dress” than a tall hat and a red
cloak is the English national costume for women. The comic papers
caricaturing bank directors and church elders in tartans betray
themselves as published within sound of Bow Bells. A London illustrated
weekly lately put Lanarkshire miners into kilts, as a patch of local
colour. A few words, then, may not be wasted in enlightening popular
ignorance on a subject that has some real obscurities to invite learned
controversy among such pundits as concern themselves with “the cut of
Adam’s philabeg.”
And first let me remonstrate with Friend Ezra Q. Broadbrim of
Philadelphia and Miss Virginia M’Adam of Vermont, who profess to
be as much shocked at bare knees as at the Apollo Belvidere or the
Venus de Medici. A generation back England had a like squeamishness,
when even on the northern stage Rob Roy and the Dougal Cratur felt
it proper to wear tights; nay, a century ago certain prim ladies of
Edinburgh thought fit to publish in the _Courant_ how they must avert
their eyes from hairy-shanked cattle-drovers out of Highland glens.
The example of our athletic youth has gone to shame down such mock
modesty. As well be scandalised by the Scotch lasses who display their
comely limbs in washing-tubs, not so liberally, indeed, as did their
mothers, thanks to the leering of Cockney cads, who may be born at
Paisley as at Peckham! And let those who find the Highland dress too
Arcadian know to their confounding that the Celt, whether of Scotland
or Ireland, is a model for the Saxon in the morals that here seem open
to question. As to healthfulness, the experience of Highland soldiers
all over the world bears out Dr. Jaeger’s doctrine of a thick girdle
round the middle of the body being best for both hot and cold weather:
the seat of life protected, and the extremities left to take care of
themselves. There is a very Cockney novel of truly Cockney days, in
which “Sir Gregor Macgregor, Cacique of Poyais,” appears in the Fleet
Prison wearing a snuff-shop kilt, as represented by the artist; and a
visitor judges it as well he can’t go out, for fear of catching cold!
As to picturesqueness, ask any artist wrestling with his “Portrait of a
Gentleman”—heaven help him if Mars or Minerva cannot cast some cloud
over the lay figure draped by twentieth-century tailors!
The kilt is believed to be the oldest fashion of dress in the world,
the original material having been fig leaves, seaweeds, or such like.
In the days of Roman power a full skirt was the badge of civilisation,
distinguishing the _togati_ from _braccati_ barbarians. The whirligig
of time was to bring about an exchange of fashion as to form; but Pliny
and other writers describe the Celts of classic days as arrayed in a
kind of tartan. It may have been under some Epping Forest or Hampstead
Heath check that Boadicea hid her stripes, “bleeding from the Roman
rods.” There is question as to if, when, or how far the old Highlanders
gave up trews, tight-fitting hose all of a piece, for what seems to
have been a single piece of rough cloth wrapped about the upper and
belted about the lower part of the body. Bare legs was certainly the
feature that three centuries ago put the nickname “Redshanks” on both
Scottish and Irish kernes. A Norwegian king got at home the sobriquet
of Magnus Barefoot when he brought back from the Hebrides a fashion
of apparel he found there. On the other hand, there are parts of the
Highlands where the kilt appears never to have become popular, while in
some form or other the _breacan_, tartan, was everywhere worn by both
sexes, the first patterns of which may have been suggested by varied
hues of decay in Adam’s leafy garment: Eve, no doubt, had a new one at
frequent intervals from some Pandemoniac Paris.
The groundwork of ancient costume for Scottish and Irish Celts seems
to have been a linen shirt dyed with saffron or smeared with pitch;
and perhaps the poorer class habitually wore little more, while
the chieftains and their attendants learned from mailed foemen to
use defensive armour. But what has come, rightly or wrongly, to be
considered the characteristic dress of a Highlander was formerly the
belted plaid, the lower part of it plaited in the manner of the kilt,
the upper part capable of being folded round the body in various ways;
and hydropathists should be interested to know that to keep himself
warm when sleeping on the open ground, the hardy clansman used to dip
his loose wrapping in water. That story of the snowball pillow scouted
as effeminate luxury, is told of several clans; and Burt, early in
the seventeenth century, reports the scorn of Highland women for a
degenerate duinewassal who had donned a Lowland greatcoat. There could
have been no want of tough hardiness about the men who, under Montrose,
made marches of sixty miles a day by rough mountain paths.
By and by the idea would be hit on of separating body and skirt of an
encumbering costume that, serving both for dress and blanket, had to
be thrown off when it came to hot fighting or active business. Thus
was developed the _philabeg_ or little kilt which we know, in its
present form vainly said to be the invention of an Englishman, even
of an army-tailor, and, there is strange whisper, of some Quaker! J.
F. Campbell of Isla, Lord Archibald Campbell, and other writers make
out, however, by help of old pictures and older sculptures, a very good
case for antiquity both of the kilt and the diverse patterns of tartan.
John Major, teacher of Knox and Buchanan, speaks of the “wild Scots” as
dressed in “patchwork,” and going naked from mid-leg. A print in the
British Museum shows kilts among the Scottish auxiliaries of Gustavus
Adolphus. Sir R. M. Keith, in Frederick the Great’s time, wrote home
from Germany for “a plaid of my colours sewed and plaited on a waist
belt ... in which to show my nakedness to the best advantage”; but
he does not use the name _kilt_ for what in the army was at first an
undress uniform. “Till he got his plaid kilted on him” took some time;
and this phrase, used of one of the 1745 heroes, explains the name
which Burt spelt _quelt_.
There need be little doubt that the costume would be modified to
military exigencies on the raising of the Highland regiments between
the rebellions of 1715 and 1745. The kilt of those days appears to have
been more “cutty,” giving greater freedom to the limbs than now, when
it ought to touch the knee-cap, and its wet edge may cause sore rubs on
unhardened skin, as poor John Brown found when, for once in a way, sent
out walking in his philabeg livery. The sporran, used as a pouch, may
originally have been an apron for decency’s sake, and took its present
showy form in military trappings. Rob Roy’s is said to have been armed
with a pistol that would go off in hands trying to open it without
knowing the trick. A “snuff-mill” is mentioned as one of the appendages
in Georgian days. The broad bonnet, apparently a Flemish importation,
belonged to Lowland as well as Highland Scotland; its ornamental border
of dice is said to come from the _fesse chequée_ in the Stuart arms,
and to have been introduced as a Cavalier distinction from the plain
blue bonnets of the Roundheads. All over Scotland, too, was worn the
plaid, now shrunk in military use to little more than an ornament of
the “garb of old Gaul,” but in its full size capable of mantling the
body from head to heels. The ostrich plumes of Highland regiments
are, of course, modern excrescences, yet developed from the feathers
that marked the rank of chief and duinewassal. The ribbons behind the
bonnet are vain survivals of appendages which had a practical use in
tightening or loosening it, and might be drawn down as ear-flaps. But
the clansmen of old time probably went bare-headed, as barefoot but
for thin brogues of hide, that made no pretence of being waterproof,
and soon wore out upon metalled roads. Your wild Highlandman was sure
to carry a dirk, like a butcher’s knife, with as many other lethal
weapons as he could come by; and if he had no buskins in which to stick
his _skene-dhu_, he might keep it handy in his sleeve or a fold of his
plaid. Silver buttons, Stewart of Garth says, were worn by those who
had them, with the purpose of providing means for a decent funeral in
very probable case of need. As to the gewgaws that now go with this
dress, they must have been very exceptional when Burt describes a
Highlander’s plaid as commonly fastened by something like a fork or a
skewer. The same writer dwells on bare limbs frequently disfigured by
itch as a most unromantically displeasing feature of a costume which
he, for his part, found “far from acceptable to the eye.”
After Culloden, the wearing of the Highland dress was strictly
prohibited, the clansmen stripped of their beloved tartans along with
their arms. But it proved as ill to take the kilt as the breeks off
a Highlander. This attempt against half-national sentiment only went
to endear to the Celt his airy chequered garb; and the courts had to
deal with knotty cases like that of a mountaineer who stitched up
his kilt in the middle and pleaded that such a divided skirt met the
requirements of the law. Likely young men caught in the kilt were
handed over to the regiments in which they could wear it unblamed.
There is one comic case of a negro lad taken up for displaying the
tartan livery of his master, in which he may have resembled that
battalion of Hindoo Highlanders whom the Guicowar of Baroda provided
with pink silk fleshings as groundwork for their exotic array. Perhaps
_Humphrey Clinker_ is not to be taken as a sober authority, on which
we learn that when condemned to breeches by Act of Parliament, “the
majority wear them, not in their proper places, but on poles, or
long staves, over their shoulders.” The law seems not to have been
thoroughly enforced over the Highlands, and it became a dead letter
before being repealed, when the Pretender took to swilling himself out
of any risk of heroism. Now it’s
Up wi’ the bonny blue bonnet,
The kilt and the feather and a’!
But at that time the philabeg was as the smock frock of an English
peasant. One would affectionately remonstrate with Mr. Neil Munro,
who, in the seventeenth century, makes a gently-born hero “put on his
kilt for town.” A chief or gentleman commonly wore trews of tartan, as
Prince Charlie did at Edinburgh, where on one occasion his “Highland
garb” is reported as including “red velvet breeches”; and Waverley
assumed the Highlander in trews to the approval of his mentor, the
Baron of Bradwardine. Much farther back, for an excursion into the
Highlands, “FitzJames” had equipped himself with three ells of Highland
tartan at 4s. 4d. the ell, “to be hose to the king’s grace”; and there
is reason to suppose that the wearing of the trews was common in his
day. In the same century we have a note of “breekis” supplied to
Argyll’s son, whose pedagogue seems to have gone gowned in a plaid,
as became humbler station. A kilt, indeed, does not lend itself to
horsemanship. The supporters of Highland coats of arms are sometimes
represented as wearing one the kilt (occasionally marked as the
“servile” dress), the other trews, which latter Mr. David MacRitchie
(_Scottish Historical Review_, July 1904) insists on as the true form
of Celtic garb, handed down from the most ancient times, and would have
proud Sassenachs know that they took the use as the name of trousers
from the race they despised as half naked. Quoting Defoe, who describes
trews-wearing Highland soldiery as “like a regiment of merry Andrews
ready for Bartholomew Fair,” he boldly suggests that Harlequin may
belong to the clan of Celtic jugglers. But this writer appears a true
Celt in his love for lost causes and costumes. When bayonets began to
prick tartans, at all events, a belted plaid was the common wear of
henchmen and gillies: in the Lowlander’s eyes, as Macaulay says, the
dress of a thief. And even a smart thief’s sweetheart could boast of
her Gilderoy—
He never wore a Hieland plaid,
But costly silken clothes!
Highlanders of rank living among their dependants would sometimes
affect the popular garment, as an English squire may show himself
in corduroys; and queer figures they would have cut to our eyes,
when arrayed in what Boswell took for the true style of a Highland
gentleman, “purple camlet kilt, a black waistcoat, a short green
cloth coat bound with gold cord, a yellowish bushy wig, a large blue
bonnet with a gold thread button.” Even the clergy in the far north
occasionally vested themselves in the philabeg; an Anglican bishop has
struck Highlanders with surprise as one who superfluously wore both
kilt and trews, though not in the blue and white pattern recognised as
the clerical tartan.
In our time the fashion has swung round; and it is the Scottish
aristocracy who now cherish a dress in which youngsters look so well,
while unwise strangers too are tempted to bedeck themselves in such
unfamiliar gauds. I shall never forget the figure an old friend of
mine used to cut, who died a bearded Uhlan before the walls of Paris,
but in youth was moved to assume grand-maternal tartans as setting
for the typical aspect of a German student, round smooth face, gold
spectacles, long straight hair, and all. I have seen an Italian prince,
too, in this disguise, but thus he made no model for Salvator Rosa. If
a foreigner take to the “garb of old Gaul,” it is seldom he can live
up to it. _Cucullus non facit monachum._ “The white-kneed Cockney,
conscious of his kilt” may indeed be suspected half a mile off. (“How
white your knees are!” a recent novelist makes one of his characters
say admiringly to the hero in Highland dress.) I was about to lay it
down that this “garment of terrible possibilities” cannot be worn
becomingly without youthful usage; but I refrain on consideration that
most of the soldiers who swing their tartans so bravely have been
fettered in breeks till they took the king’s shilling.
To its military renown we mainly owe the preservation of the Highland
dress; but our kilted campaigners in India and Africa are not, as a
rule, men of the same breeding as those whose martial virtues were
first enlisted on the side of loyalty and order. No common soldiers
were the privates, some of whom rode to drill attended by a gillie to
carry their arms and uniforms. All of them would be fellow-clansmen or
belonging to the same district, serving under their natural chiefs, and
forming a happy regimental family, easily disciplined by leaders who
understood their manners and would humour their sensibilities. They had
the name of being “lambs in the house as lions in the field”; welcomed
after experience by poor folk upon whom they came to be quartered, who
at first might have shrunk from them as half-naked Scythians. Stewart
of Garth, himself an officer in the Black Watch, is most emphatic as to
the good conduct of this regiment, among whom for many years the lash
was never used, as it was daily in other corps. At a general punishment
parade the Highlanders would be excused from attendance, such an
example being held needless for them. When one of them did at last
come under the cat, he was banned by his fellows as plague-stricken;
and the men, we are told, would sometimes subscribe to buy out a bad
character, lest he should bring disgrace upon his company. These stern
warriors feared above all a threat to tell of their misconduct at home.
Out of their sixpence a day they, in at least one case, joined to pay a
chaplain of their own, organising themselves into a church with elders
elected from the ranks. Not a few of them sent part of that poor pay
home to the old people; while others had sold their bodies to the king
on condition of a farm lease given by the laird to the father they
might never see again.
[Illustration: CAWDOR CASTLE]
The Highlanders in those days were as noted for sobriety as for valour,
declares General Stewart, in proof of which he asserts that when rum
was served out on a campaign, the Highland soldiers alone could be
trusted with three or four days’ allowance at once, like officers.
There is indeed reason to hold that the Highlands have not always
deserved a name for intemperance. The former drink of the people was
ale, if not water; whisky does not figure in their ancient songs and
proverbs, as does the Pictish “heather ale,” the secret of making
which is long lost. With Pitt’s excise laws, we are told, began the
smuggling and illicit distillation that did so much to demoralise
a race which, if all stories are true, has sadly fallen away from
primitive virtue. So Stewart protests as to the temperance of the early
Highland regiments; yet more critical observers in George I.’s reign
speak of whisky houses as already a curse to the country from which
those troops were raised; and indeed all travellers of that date who
got themselves into print are apt to touch on a habit of “correcting”
or “qualifying” the rawness of Highland air, where a funeral, as well
as a feast, was like to end in a drunken fray, when dirks served for
forks.
General Stewart, it must be confessed, looked back on the Highlands
through a haze of full-dress tartan, glittering with silver settings
and jewelled memories! One can excuse this Gael for a little idealising
the memory of his fathers in arms. He admits that the first Highland
soldiers had some military failings, especially from the martinet’s
point of view. They could be led, but not driven. Like Red Indian
warriors, they took the warpath eagerly, but thought no shame of
dropping off at their own whim or convenience. Like Swiss mercenaries,
they often suffered acutely from _Heimweh_, drawing them back to their
beloved mountains. Desertions were frequent in early days, till the
clansmen had learned what it was to be soldiers. The wonder is they
were not more frequent among soldiers often enlisted by pressgang
methods. The discontents which repeatedly drove them into open
mutinies were bred out of misunderstandings, either on the part of
men whose ignorance of English blinded them to the nature of their
engagement, or of officers who could not make allowance for their
susceptible character; and they had real grievances in the bad faith
of the Government when they found themselves ordered abroad or drafted
into other regiments, contrary to the terms of their enlistment.
The 42nd—originally the 43rd—Regiment was first formed out of the
companies of the Black Watch in 1739. Three years later they were
marched into England, to their surprise and suspicion, soothed by a
representation that the king wished to see the finest regiment in his
service. Over the border they found themselves regarded with such
curiosity as to-day would be excited by the sight of our Maori or Sikh
auxiliaries; then their good conduct and imposing array were worth a
friendly reception, that for a time lulled their distrust. But this
awoke again in London, where rumours ran that they had been decoyed so
far to be transported to the American plantations; and the Cockneys of
that day, as well as the clowns of southern counties, seem to have been
more inclined to coarse jests than the northern English, who had better
cause for respecting the wild Highlandmen. Traitors were also at work
among them, putting into their heads the idea that “after being used as
rods to scourge their countrymen, they were to be thrown into the fire.”
Having been reviewed on Finchley Common by Marshal Wade, the regiment
gave itself leave to start bodily homewards, under the leadership of
a Macpherson corporal, taking a line across country between the two
great north roads, and dodging from wood to wood, so that for two or
three days their march could not be traced by the amazed authorities.
In a wood a few miles from Oundle they were intercepted and surrounded
by a force from Northampton; then, no doubt half-starved and much
bewildered, after some parley they surrendered. Three men were shot as
an example in the Tower. The rest let themselves be shipped over to
Flanders for a baptism of foreign fire at Fontenoy, where their conduct
proved so excellent that they were trusted with the service of covering
the retreat. After 1746 they had a long term of exile, from which, out
of more than a thousand, not a hundred men came back to their native
heath. Ever since—
We have sailed owre many a sea, my lad,
We have fought ’neath many a sky;
And it’s where the fight has hottest raged
That the tartans thickest lie.
The Highland regiments grew used to getting more than their fair
share of foreign service; but for long their fiery spirits were apt
to flare up into mutiny against real or imaginary injustice. After
such risings, when it was thought necessary to make an example, men
would come forward to offer themselves for trial and punishment as
scapegoats. Stewart tells a story of one private, marched to Edinburgh
to be tried for his life, who got leave of his officer to turn aside
alone to Glasgow for the settlement of important business, and, true
to his word, made a dramatic appearance at the last moment among his
fellow-prisoners, having struggled with accidental delays like the hero
of Schiller’s _Bürgschaft_.
It was vulgar crime that appears to have been almost unknown among
these touchy braves, whose virtues and failings remind us of honourable
schoolboys. By tens of thousands such men laid their bones all over
the world to pave the British Empire. Till the end of the century
fresh regiments could be raised from the Highlands, as well as corps
of Fencible militia and volunteers. The drain of the long French war
first made the supply run short. The ranks of the Highland regiments
began to be recruited from outside, from the scum of London and Dublin,
as Stewart bitterly complains; and this alloy went far to debase their
early character. There are too few real Highlanders in the ranks
since the glens from which they were recruited have been stocked with
sheep and deer in place of men. The Celt seems to have much lost his
martial ardour, now that other careers are open to him. In our day
recruits have actually been rejected from the Black Watch because they
could speak nothing but Gaelic, or perhaps as showing too much of the
ancestral grudge against discipline.
Of late years more care has been taken to give Scotsmen only the
privilege of serving in regiments for which recruits would willingly
come forward from all parts of the kingdom. The majority of “Highland”
soldiers are at least Lowland Scots, and some battalions have a
considerable percentage of real Highlanders, which will be much larger
in the militia contingent. But, as General Stewart noticed, Sassenachs,
Irishmen, Cockneys, and other aliens soon catch the infection of
enthusiasm for tartans, bagpipes, and the proud traditions of regiments
that are the Zouaves or Bersaglieri of our service. They have lost,
indeed, the old bonds of caste and custom that held them closely
together, for good and evil, like the Brahmin sepoys who stirred mutiny
in our Indian army. But still _esprit de corps_ is strong enough in
regiments to make them jealously loyal to their own special uniform.
In the South African war they needed more than one order to make them
hide their showy tartan by a khaki apron worn in front: the other
side an enemy is not expected to see. And when prosaic War Office
authorities talked of smudging all the bright stripes and checks into
some such plain dull tint as a less striking mark for Boer rifles,
the _veldt_ “heather was on fire” with wrath of Seaforth and Gordon
Highlanders who could not tell you where Seaforth is, or how the Gay
Gordons came to have to do with the Highlands. To reconcile this
sentiment with practical exigencies, a Scottish artist has lately been
at work designing tartans that will preserve the distinctive check in a
low-toned scheme of colour. This would be but a development of the old
practice, which in several cases distinguished a showy design for full
dress from the less _voyant_ effect of the clan’s hunting tartan.
It must be remembered that only in recent days has the Highlander, like
the Red Indian, become an abstract personage. The sentiment of Highland
soldiery was originally a more concrete one. They had faint idea of
general patriotism, and their loyalty was not so much to their race as
to their own chiefs and kin. The first bodies raised in the reign of
King William were largely Campbells and other loyal clans; but after
the rising of 1715 they were disbanded as of doubtful trustworthiness.
On the representation of General Wade and other officers, however, the
experiment was again tried of keeping the peace of the Highlands by
independent companies, on the principle of setting a thief to catch a
thief. Contemporary scandal-mongers even hinted that these watchmen
took turns of stealing and retrieving, so as to earn the old suspicion
against _custodes ipsos_. Each company would wear the tartan of its
captain, and be largely made up of his clansmen or dependants, who
conceived a new respect for law when it set them in arms against their
hereditary enemies. One captain was charged with stripping his tenants
of their best plaids for the soldiers to cut a gallant figure in on
parade occasions.
[Illustration: LOCH LINNHE]
When these companies came to be embodied as a regular regiment, the
question of uniform made a sore point among men of different clans. To
meet this difficulty the dark neutral Black Watch tartan is said to
have been devised, which forms the groundwork of several others; but it
is also claimed as one of the Campbell patterns, and half the original
captains belonged to that clan, foremost in furnishing soldiers
to guard Whig thrones. There were Highlanders of that day who would as
soon have worn a shirt of Nessus as Argyll’s trappings. Later corps,
raised by noblemen in their own country, naturally took the tartan
of their chiefs, whose names and colours are preserved in our modern
regiments, when Gordon and Cameron Highlanders are as like to be Smiths
and Robertsons. The grey kilting of the London Scottish corps seems
related to the fact that no clan tartan would be generally acceptable
to Highlanders of Hampstead, Highgate, and Hammersmith, few of whom
could pass a searching examination in tartanology.
Even ardent Celtic eyes, military or civilian, of our generation might
well be dazzled into confusing the brilliant array of Macdougalls
and Macdonalds, of Macleods and Macmillans; and it is not only
the Sassenach who needs the help of an illustrated dictionary for
distinguishing between some hundred recognised patterns, many of them
differing only by a shade, or a thin stripe of colour. Some clans, as
the Campbells and the Macdonalds, split into several branches, have
as many tartans, for the most part bearing a general resemblance, yet
to be recognised by an expert. Some give themselves the luxury of
different sets, one for full dress, another worn only by the chief and
his family. There is reason to understand that in old days a greater
variety of colours was displayed by the rich, while the poor had to
be content with simpler designs. Some patterns seem to be of no small
antiquity, handed down like the wampum records of a Red Indian tribe;
others may have been modified by circumstances or designed in rivalry
to those of neighbouring clans. Certain of the best-known clans, the
Gordons and the Grahams, for instance, came from the Lowlands, and
would have to equip themselves with a becoming tartan, as has been
done for Douglases and Dundases in quite modern times. Certain tartans
displayed in shop windows are undoubtedly of recent sartorial origin.
That now worn by the Cameron Highlanders was a blend designed for the
sake of harmony with King George’s red coat. The older patterns perhaps
depended on knowledge of or access to the natural dyes used in them,
got from heather, broom, roots, barks, seaweeds, or what not. Perhaps
they were coloured to some extent by defiance to hereditary enemies, as
in the case of the Campbell greens and the Cameron reds, contrasting
like the tints of Rembrandt and of Botticelli. The hue would often be
suggested by the need of slinking unseen upon sly game, over braes of
turf and heather; old writers indeed describe the general effect of
tartan as brown or heathery; and more glaring patterns could not have
been for everyday wear.
Highland as indeed Lowland kindreds also affected the wearing of some
plant in their caps, as the holly of Avenel, the thistle of Stewart,[1]
the broom of Forbes, the sprig of fir, box, or heath that is the
common badge of so many clans that it was only among near neighbours
it could make a mark of distrust or defiance. Another token was the
slogan or rallying-cry of the clan, often the name of some mountain or
conspicuous rock in its country, as “Cruachan” was for the Macintyres
and came to be for the conquering Campbells. There were further
peculiarities which the Gael could interpret as easily as a Mohawk read
the “sign” of Huron or of Delaware. But long before coming near enough
to excite the war-cry of his foes, the keen-eyed Highlander might make
out the hue of their tartans, warning him to be prepared for fight or
flight, as the case might be, when the strangers were not of a friendly
name. The Maclean reds and the Macleod yellows were like a danger
signal on each side. It was not so, indeed, with all neighbours, which
is almost as much as to say enemies. The Forbeses and the Gordons,
once living beside each other on cat-and-dog terms, have tartans ill
distinguished in general effect, by a thin line in the one case of
white, in the other of yellow, which it would take a very sharp-sighted
scout to pick out at musket range.
[1] One story of how this became the badge of Scotland suggests the
geese of the Roman Capitol: A Dane, moving stealthily to the attack of
some Scottish stronghold, trod in the dark upon a thistle, pricking out
of him a cry that alarmed the garrison.
One might suppose those old feuds quite forgotten in our days, but I
can quote a curious instance to the contrary. The tartan I have any
right to is that of Forbes, in which I went bedecked when I wore what
Wordsworth quite ultroneously belittles as—
The Roman kilt, degraded to a toy
Of quaint apparel for a half-spoilt boy.
“Half-spoilt” boy, quotha! I conceit myself, for one, brought up in more
decency and order than the poet who ran so wild on Cumberland fells,
wearing out his corduroys in nut-brakes, or unblushingly bare even of
“cast-off weeds” when he made “one long bathing of a summer’s day.” The
matter in hand is that at a more prudent stage of life, to save myself
from being “half-spoilt” by a cold journey “on an itinerant vehicle,”
I addressed myself to buy a plaid, Forbes tartan of course, but not
finding one thick enough in the shop, I humbled my ancestral pride
to put up with the Gordon pattern. This I did on two considerations:
first, that the objectionable yellow should in time bleach itself to
lamblikeness; second, that the ignorant natives of the country in which
I mainly live would not know the difference. But after exposure to wind
and rain for a generation, the hateful hue is as bright as ever; then
one day in an hotel ’bus, at Bournemouth of all places in the world, I
had as companions two elderly ladies who kept looking grimly askance at
that perverted tartan of mine.
“Sir,” said one of them abruptly, “I hope you’re not a
Gordon.”—“Certainly not,” replied I, somewhat taken aback; “but
why?”—“Because our people don’t like the Gordons!” quoth this frowning
dame; “we are Forbeses!” Shamedly I made confession of my fault,
declaring how, in spite of appearances, I too boasted that choicest
Highland descent; but my kinswomen heard me in the stony silence due to
a pretended Forbes in Gordon trappings.
Hereditary instincts awoke in me to lighten up their natural
resentment. I myself would think kindly of these unfortunate Gordons,
and speak of them with subdued reprobation, as becomes a son of the
nineteenth century. I feel no lust to lift from them a single head of
cattle, however come by, nor to strip them of any tatter of character
that may hang about their deplorable history. I strive to take a fair
view of them as fellow-men, and would fain disguise their badges of
infamy in the Perth dyeworks. Yet a candid spirit might well ask
whether no critical commentator have shown cause to suspect that the
enemy of mankind made his first _creagh_ against our happiness arrayed
in the Gordon tartan, its livid stripes on a green background readily
suggesting that allegory of a serpent form. The white lines of my
tartan are rather to be taken for traces of primitive innocence, as
even a Gordon must admit; and the dourest Forbes may agree that all
offence of the hostile colours has long been washed in brave blood.
The clannishness, which is the obverse of such inter-tribal grudges,
has not yet died out, albeit on the Stock Exchange a Macgregor makes no
better price for a Vich-Alpine than for a son of Somerled. In certain
secluded glens and islands is still rooted a minor patriotism which
does not wholly wither under the suns of the open world. “A’ Stewarts
are no sib to the king!” is the semi-Sassenach’s sneer at distant
calling of cousins between crofter and chieftain; yet his cherished
memories of descent go far to make the poorest Highlander something of
a gentleman. Nor is stretching out of the ties of kindred all upon
the inferior side. At least it will be only in recent times that the
Highland chief takes shame for his poor relations, who still may keep
some rags of the old loyalty. If you ask an English Brown whether he
be connected with a namesake, his first impulse is usually towards
emphatic denial, especially if he be in a condition to shun “brutes
that use the wrong kind of soap.” But the M’Brown is more apt to think
twice before repudiating any claim of far-off kinship, a fact cynically
explained by conditions, lasting longer in the north than in the
south, under which the greatest man’s life and property were safe in
proportion to the prevalence of his name and blood. It is not so long
ago since a Highlander had such a practical as well as a sentimental
interest in seeing about him none but his own tartan.
CHAPTER III
THE LAND OF LORNE
Among all the clans, the most numerous and the most powerful, in
modern times, have been the Campbells, who rose on the wreck of the
once predominant Macdonalds, ousting and absorbing men of other less
auspicious names till the new lords were firmly seated over Argyll and
a large part of Perthshire. This prosperity they owed to a knack of
choosing the stronger side, whereas Highlanders have been more apt to
figure as champions of falling causes. While less practically-minded
stocks stood “agin the government,” the Campbells usually proved
ready to recognise _de facto_ authority, to catch the flowing tide of
fortune, and to turn even godliness to gain in a manner supposed to
be more characteristic of the Lowland Scot. But the canniest of clans
had better success in earning fear than love from their neighbours.
The wilder chiefs looked on Argyll as an obnoxious good boy who pulled
out plums for himself from their seething confusion. Their Jacobite
sentiments came in part from an ancient respect for hereditary right,
in part from preference for a sovereign in no position to enforce
obedience; but often it was as much hatred of the Macallum More as love
of the Stuarts that drove Lochiels and Clanranalds into unprofitable
rebellion. “Fair and false as a Campbell!” is the reproach of sufferers
from that pushful race that, to threats and curses, gave back their
chuckling byword, “It’s a far cry to Loch Awe!” Jacobite poets are
of course very bitter against the line “of him who sold his king for
gold”; and when the cottar goodman had “waled a portion” enumerating
Job’s sheep and camels, his wife might well opine, “Maybe no the
same Cam’ells as at Inveraray, or I doobt there’d no be mony o’ the
sheep left.” But in the teeth of all ill-will, “the Campbells are
coming!” was the word for centuries, during which they went on serving
themselves heirs to the domains of the shadowy Prince Lorne, and
supplanting the sons of Somerled, more authentic Lords of the Isles.
They were, in short, one of the first clans to be civilised.
[Illustration: INVERARAY CROSS AND CASTLE]
I was at school with sons of this house, who were fair but not false;
and if its present head robbed me of an expected prize, that was
through the Campbell virtue of taking the likeliest means to attain
an end. The then Duke himself once attended our prize-day Exhibition,
when at the last moment it was well remembered to substitute “Wolsey, I
did not think to shed a tear!” or some such stock piece of inoffensive
declamation, for Aytoun’s “Burial March of Dundee,” in which a budding
Demosthenes had else reviled to their faces “the brood of false
Argyle.” So the name was commonly spelt in my days of spelling;
but the fashion now changes it to Argyll.
My own great-grandfather was born at Craignish, and it is not for me
to speak ill of his mother’s roof-tree. But if truth must be told,
antipathy to the modern lords of Lorne has not been confined to alien
clans. At school with us was another crew of Campbells, that prided
themselves on having kept their independence of the ducal chief, their
shrunken lands islanded amid his domain. They had some story which I
half forget, of ancestral charters hid away safe in a tree, when their
grasping overlord got into his possession those of other Campbells.
What I remember noting on a holiday visit was how these boys had been
taught not to pass the duke’s march without throwing a stone in sign
of undying enmity to the house of Argyll, a pious duty that would come
easy to boys in all times, but in our degenerate age was performed with
careless good-humour, none of these young mountain-cats being conscious
of any personal animosity. Old and new ways of life are mingled in
another story of stones which I vaguely recall from a western glen.
A Campbell had killed a Cameron—or it may have been the other way
on—to whose memorial cairn every passing Cameron added a stone of
remembrance, religiously pulled down by every Campbell. Thus the cairn
stood waxing and waning by a lonely moorside track, till a Campbell was
appointed postman on the beat, and his daily passage gave the monument
no fair chance.
The cradle of this race, so far as it is known to history, seems to
have been the Loch Awe valley below Ben Cruachan and the eastward
ridges about Loch Long, where the “Cobbler” had once for more poetic
name “Arthur’s Seat,” and a rocky peninsula became playfully styled
“Argyll’s Bowling-Green.” This country is as rich in romantic
associations as in natural beauty, famed by pen and pencil, chiefly
perhaps through P. G. Hamerton’s _Painter’s Camp in the Highlands_,
when with his faithful “Thursday” he took up Crusoe quarters on one
of the Loch Awe islands, before the solitude of its tombs was invaded
by steamboats and hotels. His readers will remember how he revels in
the colouring of these “changeful landscapes,” the greens and golds
against a background of rich heather, the velvet purples richer than
any king’s mantle, the rocks “plated” with thin snow, the patches of
blood-red fern in autumn, the masses of sun-lit snow in winter, the
stretches of calm lake reflecting green mountain slopes and tufted
islets, “the delicate half calms just dulled over with faint breathings
of the evening air,” the threads of fire which sunset shoots between
masses variously rippled that give the water a tartan pattern of
crimson, grey, and violet; the kaleidoscopic effects of sun and wind;
the azure blue of the distances, the pearly grey of rising clouds, the
Titianesque masses of evening gloom, the invisible vapours that even in
bright sunshine soften the outlines of crest and ridge.
The type of the most enjoyable Highland weather (says our connoisseur
in land and water scenery) is this:—The mountains in their own local
colour, not much altered by the effect; green for the most part, and
scarred with reddish, or purplish, or grey rocks, all outlines soft
and tender and vague, still perfectly well defined even in their
softness. The sky, a very pale lovely blue, delicately graduated;
the water, if under a pleasant sailing-breeze, as intensely blue as
ultramarine can get it, yet a very deep colour, not to be got out of
ultramarine alone, because there are purplish browns in it produced
by the play of the dark brown water with the azure sky-reflections.
Lastly, if the wind freshens, all this dark blue will be flecked with
snowy crests of breakers. Highland scenery is never so _lovely_ as
under this aspect.
Too often, indeed, these enchanting hues are buried in mists through
which it takes a painter’s eye to detect glimpses of grandeur or
beauty. Mrs. Hamerton, for her part, fresh from the sunny skies of
France, admits that the health of both suffered in the depressing
winter, “when the wind howls so piteously in the twisted branches
of the Scotch firs, and when the rain imprisons one for weeks
within liquid walls of unrelieved greyness.” But her husband can
tell how sometimes this valley may be baked by sunshine for weeks
and months together, till relief comes in a cloud-burst like that
of the Indian monsoon, such as he once beheld from the top of Ben
Cruachan, overwhelming what Christopher North held dearest of Scottish
lakes—“mountain-crowned, cliff-guarded, isle-zoned, grove-girdled,
wide-winding and far-stretching, with the many-bayed banks and braes
of brushwood, fern, broom, and heather, ... thou glory of Argyleshire,
rill-and-river fed, sea-armlike, floating in thy majesty, magnificent
Loch Awe!”
Hamerton was a poet as well as a painter, who in his _Isles of Loch
Awe_ has pictured the legends that take shape in such scenes. The most
striking of these is that of Inis Fraoch, a Celtic version of the
Hesperides story, with a modern love interest and a tragic ending. The
Hercules task imposed upon the young hero Fraoch, according to one
variant by his lady-love, but a more dramatic form gives this part to
a jealous rival, is to fetch from the island golden apples growing
there under charge of a dragon whose poisonous fangs do him to death,
and the fair-seeming fruit proves no less fatal to the maid, or else
she is made to die of grief. Another world-wide fancy ascribes the
origin of the lake to the heedlessness of a virgin who, overcome by
sleep, neglected her nightly task of sealing up a mystic fountain on
Ben Cruachan. A romantic tale, echoing from classical story and from
the banks of the Rhine, brings us into the Campbell traditions at
Kilchurn Castle. Seven years had its crusading knight been absent,
when in beggar’s rags, like Ulysses, he came home to find his wife
on the point of being forced into a hateful re-marriage. The strange
wedding guest begs a cup of wine at her hands, and when he gives it
back empty, the lady sees at the bottom a ring which she recognises
sooner than she does her husband, who then has no difficulty in
disposing of the insolent suitor. A truly practical feature is that
this Scottish Penelope’s task, through those long seven years, had been
no futile weaving and unweaving, but the building of that sturdy pile
that inspired Wordsworth’s muse as well as Hamerton’s, and gave a
hint for eerie fiction in Mrs. Oliphant’s novel _The Wizard’s Son_, as
previously it seems to have sat to Scott in his _Legend of Montrose_.
The descendants of that crusader spread northwards, displacing the
Macgregors of Glenorchy, and founding the lordship of Breadalbane
in Perthshire. Another cadet branch moved still farther north, long
after Macbeth’s time, to become Earls of Cawdor through one of those
profitable marriages that have been a Campbell custom. But the main
stock is the house of Argyll, which from obscure petty chieftainship
rose to command five thousand claymores in 1745. Not that all the
Campbells always stood shoulder to shoulder, as in 1715 Breadalbane’s
men fought for the Pretender, while Argyll led the bulk of his clan for
King George.
One might as well undertake the census of a hornets’ nest as
dogmatise on the descent of a Highland clan. The Argyll house, backed
by antiquaries like Skene, now repudiate the legend of a Norman
adventurer, “De Campo Bello” or Beauchamp, as having wed an heiress
of Loch Awe, though this origin would be quite in keeping with the
family traditions. A much more ancient source is claimed for them as
descendants of King Arthur, or of Diarmid, hero of Fingalian epics,
a descent that might make them akin to the Irish Dermotts. The name
Campbell is said to mean “Wry-mouth,” as Cameron “Crooked-nose,” from
the same root as appears in our winding Cam rivers. About the time of
the last Norwegian invasion under Haco, the clan comes to dim light in
two branches, the elder Macarthurs, the younger the sons of Colin or
Calain, a name perverted into MacCallum. The elder branch went under,
their tombs still to be seen on an island of Loch Awe. The younger
rose through marriage with a sister of Robert Bruce, and through
fighting for him against the Macdougalls of Lorne. The confirmation of
his sovereignty advanced this chief over confiscated estates of their
common foes. For generations a run of luck or policy kept increasing
the Campbells’ domain till they were lords of all Argyll and part of
the Islands, the conquered clans, if not exterminated or driven away,
being forced to take their name, as a Red Indian tribe has often
recruited itself by adoption of its prisoners or subjects. When the
elder Macarthurs were condemned as traitors under James I., the sons of
Colin basked in royal favour, and in the next reign the usurping chief
accepted a feudal lordship, which before long grew into the Earldom of
Argyll. Thenceforth they went on rising in the world, by cunning and
unscrupulousness, as their enemies put it, by prudence and enterprise,
as their friends say.
The Campbells generally stood on the side of law and progress, the
winning side in the long run; and it must not be forgotten how they
gave their quota of martyrs to the new religious spirit that has done
so much to tame the Highlands. It does not appear that they were more
ruthless than their neighbours, but more considerate and more lucky.
It may be that the dark hue of their tartans, blending with the green
hills and grey skies of Lorne, gave some help to their survival as
fittest in the Highland struggle for existence; while at court their
lords practised an art of mimicry that did not go the length of
neglecting the interests of Scotland when these came to be threatened
by English statesmen.
The worst thing that has been said about this clan is that they played
police for the throne with a clear eye to profit, and were too ready
to root out their own turbulent enemies in the name of law, their
chiefs even accused of instigating rebellions which they themselves
would be called on to suppress for a consideration. As far off as the
“bonnie house of Airlie” the Campbells pushed their fire-and-sword
process. Many an execution carried by them among the king’s rebels
is well forgotten; but one is still remembered that brought the
atrocities of romantic times almost down to newspaper days. From
Ballachulish and the slate quarries of Loch Leven all the tourists
take coach up Glencoe, catching a glimpse of austere wilds rightly
known only to those who wander on foot under the shadow of its stern
“Sisters” and the “Shepherds” of Loch Etive. For Ossian there could
be no fitter birthplace than this darkly famed glen. Its serrated and
bristling walls “have a barren strength and steepness which remind
one continually of the stone buttresses of Sinai”; yet the sunlight
shows weird Arabesque colourings of purple, green, and pink, often
dulled beneath a pall that seems nature’s mourning for the tragedy here
commemorated by a cross, and its scene still traced out by patches of
green round the site of ruined huts. “Even with sunshine,” Macaulay
found this “the very valley of the shadow of death.”
[Illustration: GLENCOE]
The story of the Glencoe massacre is renowned among many such deeds of
cruelty which have stained the heather; but it is not always recognised
how far this was a slaughter of Macdonalds by their hereditary enemies
the Campbells, acting under legal authority. Historians variously
apportion the guilt between the Earl of Breadalbane and the Master of
Stair, a minister who had the art to make King William accomplice in
the vindictive design. The innocence of the victims has been unduly
heightened for the sake of dramatic effect; and patriotic rage has
blindly charged the bloodshed upon English soldiers. The MacIan
Macdonalds of Glencoe were a band of sturdy cattle-thieves who, like
other Highland heroes of old, naturally lived in bad blood with
their neighbours; and an attempt to harry their fastness might have
passed as a fair exploit if not carried out with so base treachery.
Heavy winter snows having delayed the chieftain from bringing in his
submission to the Government by a fixed date, he was yet given to
believe it accepted. A detachment of Argyll’s regiment entered the
glen under pretence of friendship, and were received with Highland
hospitality, their commander, Campbell of Glenlyon, being connected
with the Macdonalds by marriage. This worthy is said to have played at
cards with the sons of the chieftain whom he had orders to murder next
morning, at which time every way of escape from the glen should be
closed by several companies marching up under his superior officer.
Before dawn of a winter morning the slaughter began with shooting down
the old chieftain at his bedside, his wife being so brutally ill-used
that she died next day. Similar scenes took place in the other homes
that had unsuspiciously received such guests. The story goes that the
soldiers had been loth to do their part in the butchery, but, once it
was on foot, they appear to have worked themselves up into a fury of
bloodshed, going even beyond their commission in killing children and
infirm elders. The Macdonalds, having hidden away their arms after the
submission, doubtless in hope to fight another day, found themselves in
no state to offer resistance. Scattered and surprised, they were shot
down like sheep, wherever the alarm did not warn them to escape. After
all, the plan of extirpation failed. Nearly forty men were slain; but a
larger number got away, with women and children, some of them to perish
in a snowstorm, which also saved many hardy Highlanders, as veiling
their flight and hindering the march of the force that should have
closed the passes on that woeful morning. Their homes were burned, and
from the glen were driven away five hundred horses, three times as many
cows, and large flocks of sheep and goats, cattle which the Macdonalds
may have come by in much the same violent manner.
Glencoe has now passed into the hands of a Canadian peer, a chief
of the great British clan Smith. Till lately its sheep-walks still
belonged to Macdonalds whom I knew in my youth. When news came from
India that one of this line had got into trouble through killing a
native, a neighbour of ours sapiently remarked, “The old massacre blood
coming out!” which seemed a confusion of active and passive. A most
efficient curse was that laid on the leader of the slaughterers, whose
descendants are understood to be conscious of it to this day. There is
a famous story, told in various forms, of one Campbell of Glenlyon,
on whom fell the duty of producing at the last moment a reprieve
for a condemned soldier. But in taking the paper from his pocket he
unwittingly pulled out the white handkerchief that was to be signal to
the firing party. Next moment the criminal lay dead, and the unhappy
officer covered his eyes with a cry—“The curse of God and of Glencoe!”
The brightest tradition relating to Glencoe is that noted by Scott,
how when Prince Charlie’s army marched by the house of Lord Stair it
was thought well to place a guard over it against the vengeance of the
Macdonalds, then the Glencoe chieftain proudly demanded for his own
clansmen to prove their military honour by fulfilling this duty.
Glencoe, Ben Cruachan, and other outskirts of the Land of Lorne rank
among the wildest scenes in Scotland. Loch Awe and Loch Etive are
hardly surpassed in fame; and Loch Creran has been called “one of
the loveliest and least known of Highland waters,” as comes to be
said of so many scenes beheld under congenial conditions. The general
aspect of this region, however, seems a blending of true Highland and
semi-Lowland, like the character and career of its lords. Robert
Buchanan tells us how it is “fair and gentle, a green pastoral land,
where the sheep bleat from a thousand hills, and the grey homestead
stands in the midst of its own green fields, and the snug macadamised
roads ramify in all directions from the tiny capital on the seaside,
with the country carts bearing produce, the drouthy farmer trotting
home at all hours on his sure-footed nag, and the stage coach, swift
and gay, wakening up the echoes in summer time with the guard’s cheery
horn.” Even its wilder nooks, as one can see from coach, railway, or
steamer, have been much broken up as sites for mansions and villas,
hotels and shooting-lodges; and in summer months farms and cottages in
a hundred glens are packed tight with holiday-making families from the
cities, whose seaside retreats threaten to turn the arms of the Clyde
into a gigantic Venice.
Inveraray, of course, is the county capital, a big village
picturesquely situated on a sea loch under the shade of lordly woods
about the duke’s castle, which in this century has for the first time
undergone the indignity of being let to a Southron. An old schoolfellow
of mine was once sheriff here, who, to save himself from “eating his
head off,” used to walk across the country to hold his court at Dunoon,
its biggest gathering of houses, best filled in summer. Campbeltown is
the most thriving burgh of business. But to the world the most familiar
name in Argyll is Oban, that international rendezvous showing as many
hotels as there are clans in the Highlands, and steamboats more than
might tow all the “lymphad” galleys of Argyll, overlooked from the
heights above by two modern towers of Babel.
[Illustration: OBAN BAY AT NIGHT]
At Oban the _genius loci_ seems too much exorcised by steam whistles,
and by the mob of knickerbockered and waterproofed tourists comparing
notes about their _tables d’hôte_. Few of these easy travellers find
their way into Knapdale, that long parish forming the upper part of the
Mull of Cantyre, which makes a characteristic stretch of this green
Land of Lorne. Happy days have I spent in youth among its low hills,
ten miles from the nearest steamboat pier or village. The name of the
place I cannot trust myself to spell, nor could most of my readers
pronounce it; but to me it meant paradise. It made the rough Tusculum
of a great Lancashire cotton-spinner, his son a schoolfellow of mine. A
moor rather than a mountain of the soft west, its strong point was as a
fishing quarter, having two trout streams opening into a long winding
estuary that looked out on the Paps of Jura and beyond across the wide
Atlantic. How we lads splashed through water fresh and salt, in those
“days by distance enchanted,” when no mist could cloud “the sunshine of
the breast,” when wet jackets and kilts seemed nothing but a joke, and
one hardly cared to keep a shod foot in that damp wilderness! We did
not enough appreciate our piscatorial blessings, where we might catch
dozens of troutlings any idle afternoon, with the chance of a grilse or
a yellow trout in the rivulet mouths, and deep-sea fishing in the
loch, down to the butchery of lythe, which, trailing bright feathers on
the coarsest tackle in the wake of the sunset, one hooked up as fast as
they could be drawn into the boat, each as long as one’s arm. How would
Piscators of this generation prize such opportunities, now probably let
at a pork-king’s ransom!
One holiday visit stands out in memory, when my schoolfellow and I
were lent the empty lodge, on condition of playing Robinson Crusoe
for ourselves. What could be more inviting to youngsters than such
a picnic! We took down by steamer from Glasgow an enormous round of
salt beef; we laid in a stock of bread at the nearest shop, ten miles
from our hermitage; and on this plain fare, with what fish we could
catch, we were prepared to live greatly independent. But the people of
the hill farm close at hand would not indulge our Spartanhood. Daily
they poured in upon us mutton, broth, bannocks, eggs, jam, honey, and
what not, so that we were fed up like turkey-cocks; and not a penny
would the goodman take for his friendly entertainment. _En Écosse,
l’hospitalité se donne_ has often been quoted sneeringly; but I can
answer for its truth in Knapdale.
It was for the sake of my friend’s father that we were so well treated,
and those who knew him best will understand why; but he did not command
the approval of all that countryside. For one thing, he was a hardened
“Erastian,” if my readers know what that means. When the Free Church
proposed to set up a tabernacle and applied to him for a subscription,
he growled out, “As soon as the parish church is full, I will build
you a new one out of my own pocket—not a penny till then!” For Free
Church students sent on awakening missions to those wilds, it was a
daring adventure to tackle the profane Englishman who would stroll
out on the Sabbath with a cigar in his mouth, though he did not miss
attending the English service held in the parish church mainly for his
benefit. One of these missioners received the crown of martyrdom at his
hands, or rather at his feet, for the poor fellow had no sooner begun
his remonstrance, “Sir, do you know this is the Lord’s Day?” than he
found himself vigorously kicked along the road. This was an arbitrary
as well as an open-handed gentleman, who, as a sound Tory and master of
a thousand workers, was disposed to look down on the Whig duke, so much
looked up to by the natives. He little knew how his only daughter would
marry a son of that duke, whose heir made a more brilliant match with a
princess, as to which _Punch_ hardly exaggerated the simple judgment of
Argyll: “Wasna’ the Queen a proud woman!”
_The_ duke has been a Campbell for time out of mind; but the silent
ruins round Oban are older than the intrusion of this name. Dunollie
Castle, close to the town, was lair of the Macdougalls, ancient lords
of Lorne, who still hold here a remnant of their shrunken domain,
and in their modest home behind the ruin have treasured that brooch
their forebear won from Robert Bruce. The larger Dunstaffnage, another
Macdougall stronghold, is believed to have been at one time seat of
the ancient Scottish kings, shrine of that mysterious “Stone of
Destiny,” fabled as Jacob’s Pillow, and St. Columba’s, which, after
many adventures by land and sea, was removed to Scone, and thence
to Westminster Abbey. Gylen Castle, on the island of Kerrera, was a
Macdougall eyry; Aros and Ardtornish guarded the Sound of Mull for the
Lords of the Isles. Across the Firth of Lorne the island shores are
haunted by Maclean legends. To the south, the castles and chapels of
Cantyre are Macdonald and Macmillan monuments; and Isla, now the most
prosaically prosperous of the Hebrides, shows traces of days when it
was chief seat of Somerled’s house. But most of those ruins, before
they fell into picturesque decay, had passed to Campbells, often by
deeds of fire and blood, often again by the marriages that have done
so much for this family, of whom it might be said, as of another clan,
that they put wedding rings on the fingers of the daughters, and dirks
in the hearts of the sons. In our day, indeed, the most thriving house
in Argyll seems to be that of Malcolm, whose head, it is said, can
walk forty miles on his own land. The name would show his ancestor
as “servant of Columba,” while the misnamed “Macallum” was at one
time “Gillespic,” the gillie of some bishop who would be pioneer of
civilisation before barons or dukes got grants from court.
Cantyre, with the adjacent Isla, appears to-day the most tamed part of
the West Highlands. This peninsula was almost depopulated by the great
plague of Charles II.’s reign; and to some extent became restocked
by Covenanting clients of Argyll from the Lowlands. There was a time
when it might be called the heart of Scotland, for here seems to have
been the first foothold of the Dalriad Scots, who, passing over from
Ireland, its cliffs only some dozen miles off the Mull of Cantyre,
spread their power far among the wild Picts, and their name before long
over the whole kingdom. Campbeltown boasts of having been their first
capital, now the largest burgh of Argyll, noted for its distilleries
and its fishing fleet, as for the adjacent coal-mine, which is the only
one in the Highlands, and for the grand golf-links on Machrihanish Bay,
another feature more frequent on the eastern side of Scotland.
But if Scotland take shame to have been colonised from Ireland, its
patriotic and poetic antiquaries point back to dimmer days, when an
Ossianic Conar sailed from Lorne to found a kingdom in the Emerald
Isle, long before its most thriving part was authentically overrun by
Scottish names. National pride has indeed little but mist from which to
weave theories of romantic early history, either for Albin or Erin. The
one thing certain is, that the people or peoples of these projecting
shores were in close connection of peace and war with each other. If
Columba carried the cross from Ireland into Scotland, Patrick had been
a Scotsman who devoted himself to the conversion of Ireland. And the
Isle of Man, which is said to have made part of his mission-field, long
stood in near relation with the Hebrides. The whole string of western
islands was formerly divided into Nordereys and Sudereys, the latter
being at one time under that bishop whose mysterious title Sodor and
Man is thus explained.
All these once belonged to the crown of “Norroway over the foam,” even
Cantyre, which, by the forced title of dragging a boat across its
narrow neck, shifty King Magnus brought into his island domain. As we
go farther north and out into the open sea, in place-names and other
marks we shall see clearer signs of that Norse conquest, which cannot
but have modified the stock of natives or previous invaders. For one
point, the philo-Celt can protest that if Highlanders be no strict
teetotalers, such a failing came not from the pious and sober Gael, but
through ungodly Goths, notoriously addicted to wassail as to bloodshed.
Then in Ireland, too, these thirsty Vikings have left some trace of
their customs.
Tamed and trimmed as much of Lorne has been, no Highland region shows
more variously those aspects of earth and sky, sublime, stern, sad, and
anon tender, that seem reflected in the character of the people. Sir
Archibald Geikie, who pushes scientific candour to the point of hinting
that Bannockburn would have gone otherwise had the ground been drained,
finds the Highlander’s nature moulded by his rugged hills and streaming
glens. The contrast between the Scottish and the Irish Gael, which some
would explain by the former’s stronger strain of Norse blood, this
author accounts for rather by the fact of the latter enjoying a milder
climate, a better soil, and more level fields, that give fairer play
to the natural buoyancy, good-humour, and quick wit of the Celt.
In the Highlander, on the other hand, these characteristics have been
replaced by a reserved, self-restrained, even somewhat sullen and
morose disposition. He is neither merry nor witty, like his cousin
across the Irish Channel. Yet he is courteous, dutiful, persevering;
a courageous foe, an unwavering ally, whether serving in the ranks
or leading his comrades where dangers are thickest. I am disposed to
regard this difference in temperament as traceable in great measure to
the peculiar condition of the Highlander’s environment. Placed in a
glen, often narrow and rocky, and separated from his neighbours in the
next glens by high ranges of rugged hills, he has had to contend with
a scant and stony soil, and a wet, cold, and uncertain climate. He has
to wage with the elements a never-ending battle, wherein he is often
the loser. The dark mountains, that frown above him, gather around
their summits the cloudy screen which keeps the sun from ripening his
miserable patch of corn, or rots it with perpetual rain as it lies
week after week on the sodden field. He stands among the mountains
face to face with nature in her wilder moods. Storm and tempest,
mist-wreath and whirlwind, the roar of waterfalls, the rush of swollen
streams, the crash of loosened landslips, which he may seem hardly to
notice, do not pass without bringing, unconsciously perhaps, to his
imagination their ministry of terror. Hence the playful mirthfulness
and light-hearted ease of the Celtic temperament have, in his case,
been curdled into a stubbornness which may be stolid obstinacy or
undaunted perseverance, according to the circumstances which develop
it. Like his own granitic hills, he has grown hard and enduring, not
without a tinge of melancholy, suggestive of the sadness that lingers
among his wind-swept glens, and that hangs about the birken slopes
around his lonely lakes.
There is little need to point the stronger contrast between this
dweller beside hungry mountains or cruel seas, and the otherwise
mingled race that has grown stout, ruddy, and jovial on Lowland or
Midland plains, among green pastures and still waters, where the
cattle, hardly raising a head to look beyond their own hedgerows,
may well be content with their lot, and the very dogs, familiar and
placable, will not always trouble to wag a tail at the wayfarer.
Generations of ancient peace have here tamed men’s spirits, quieted
their fears, and worn down their reverence to a sober respect for
honesty, good-fellowship, good-nature, prudence, prosperity, all the
qualities which make neighbours pleasant company and keep them from
coming on the parish. They think for the most part little enough of the
awful horizons of life, as they saunter through it from the christening
cake to the coffin, with an eye more often on the fruitful ground than
on the sky, unless for signs of the weather. A charm of homeliness
rests upon churches, halls, farms, and hamlets, scattered roomily in
secure confidence, where man may well nestle in the kindly lap of earth
and rejoice in nature’s gifts to a generation for which rough edges
of peril have been blunted by use and wont. Yet when she fondles not,
but scrimps their daily bread with frowns, her hardy sons love their
motherland the more dearly for her rare smiles, even though the poverty
of their home makes it easier for them to believe that elsewhere must
be their abiding city.
Lorne would be no Highland country if it had not as many relics of
devotion as of romance, some of them from days of chiefs and priests
who prayed and fought long before its Christian saints and its
half-Christian princes. Not any part of Scotland is more thickly set
with ruined chapels, broken graveyards, caves of Columba, and _Kils_
common as the _Llans_ of Wales, which mark the stations of Culdee
preachers. But also it abounds in cairns, barrows, and other nameless
memorials; and there is reason to suppose that many of its Christian
tombs have been adapted from pagan monuments far older than the cross
that consecrated them. Near Oban there is a remarkable serpent-shaped
mound, headed by a circle of stones, which appears to have been a high
place of superstition, kindred to that which raised similar mounds in
the Mississippi basin. This is but one of many Highland examples how
our shifting divisions of creed, name, and nation are now divergent,
now confluent, phases of the same human nature, that out of stocks and
stones, funeral piles and grave heaps, has developed its countless
temples, the barn-like Presbyterian kirks of Cantyre, as well as such
elaborately sculptured walls as long stood silent on Iona. But how slow
is the clan of Macadam to learn from their purest faith that Christian
and pagan, Scots and Irish, Celt and Saxon, Campbells and Macdonalds,
have nobler duties than cutting each other’s throats in the way of war
or trade!
CHAPTER IV
THE HOLY ISLES
Our critical age, while it develops a new reverence for the past,
has worked havoc among time-honoured etymologies of place-names. A
letter stolen into _Hebudes_, the old form of Hebrides, makes unstable
base for derivation from a heathen goddess represented in Christian
mythology by St. Bridget or St. Bride, whose name turns up so often
in the Highlands. But from time immemorial these warring seas clashed
around island sanctuaries. Christianity here took over many shrines of
an older worship, and long sacred fires to burn on new altars, with
ministrants and vestal virgins bound by holier vows. In books like Mr.
Frazer’s _Golden Bough_ we learn what outworn superstitions still lurk
in disguise about the walls of manse and schoolhouse; how children
having the Shorter Catechism by heart may play all unsuspecting with
relics of heathendom; how their fathers, while banning the sign of the
cross, preserve in ugly obelisks the idols of pagan high places; and
how the festivals of forgotten Baals may still command maimed rites
among those who frown at Christmas or Good Friday as recalling Romish
superstition. Mourners who abhor a form of prayer at the grave will
take a funeral out of its way that it may follow the course of the sun
after ancient custom. There are sacred wells in the Highlands, long ago
baptized by some Christian saint, that have not wholly exhaled their
ancient virtue in this or that disorder, and, at least within a few
years back, had yet their votive offerings of pins or bits of rag. It
is a question whether the renowned Loch Maree gets its name from the
Virgin Mary, or from a certain saint, Mourie, _alias_ Malruba, whose
memory became so confounded with that of a heathen bugbear that as late
as Covenanting days the Presbytery was scandalised to find bulls still
sacrificed to this dubious evangelist.
Old books speak of the western islands as sacred, some of the smallest
among them appearing specially hallowed ground. How did successive
adorations come to be concentrated on the low, bare islet of Iona,
lying a mile off the farther point of that long promontory called the
Ross of Mull? From the dawn of legend it seems to wear a misty halo.
Its oldest name means _the_ island; in Gaelic it is the Isle of the
Druids; then its _alias_ Icolmkill embalms the memory of St. Columba,
who from this beacon-fire lit the Gospel all over the Highlands. What
task that was may be guessed by the picnic pilgrims whose passage from
Oban often turns out so rough that not all of them are at ease to
indulge Dr. Johnson’s elevated mood among such sacred ruins.
[Illustration: THE ISLANDS OF ORONSAY AND COLONSAY]
Palladius is said to have been the earliest missionary to Scotland.
He was closely followed by St. Ninian, whose light seems to have
smouldered on the savage shores of Galloway, till from his dying hand
St. Patrick in the fifth century carried it over to Ireland to blaze
up before half of Europe. From this school of piety and learning in
the next century came St. Columba, as penance for sin devoting himself
to the conversion of the wild Picts. The legend goes that he first
disembarked on Oronsay, but quitted it because thence he could still
catch sight of his beloved Ireland. Landing on Iona, he buried his boat
lest he should be tempted to return. But he had no sooner settled his
little band in rough wattled buildings than they were building other
coracle craft of wicker-work covered by skins, in which to launch forth
on the perilous Hebridean seas and up the long inlet of lake and glen
that opens the heart of the Highlands. In the second half of his busy
life he pushed repeated journeys to the far north, to the Orcades,
even, it is said, as far as Iceland, preaching through interpreters,
founding mission stations, and planting civilisation as well as faith
among barbarous people. With the double text _laborare_ and _orare_, he
taught his followers to make the best of that poor soil of Iona, from
which such pregnant seeds went forth on every wind. He is said to have
copied the Gospels three hundred times with his own hand.
This saint had his weaknesses, those of his creed and time. He would
allow no woman on Iona, nor even a cow, for “where there is a cow,
there is a woman; and where is a woman—” we know what monks thought
of Eve’s daughters. An adjacent islet was given up to a nest of nuns
who had fluttered towards this cold halo. So great waxed the fame of
Columba’s sanctity that pilgrims sought his retreat from all parts of
Western Christendom; and a sore pilgrimage that must have been that
ended at the point of Mull, where a miraculously strengthened hail
would bring over a boat from the island. Still the saint’s memory looms
through a cloud of miracle and fable, behind which we catch the human
proportions and qualities of a strong good man, who had such power of
winning hearts.
[Illustration: IONA CATHEDRAL]
It is possible that his part in the conversion of Scotland has been
exaggerated. In his lifetime St. Kentigern was at work among the
Cumbrian Britons, and the two evangelists are said to have met at
Glasgow. About the time of his death landed in Kent those Roman
missionaries who were long on such dissenting terms with the native
church that the Anglian saint Guthlac, after spending a night of
terror, beleaguered as he believed by Welsh Christians, gave thanks
in the morning to find how the assailants of his hermitage had been
no worse than devils. The Culdees, whom Presbyterians have claimed as
spiritual forefathers free from Popish error, are taken for disciples
of St. Columba, though some Roman writers go about to invest them
with Augustinian orthodoxy. Into heathen Northumbria also went his
missionaries, to encounter those of Rome over a great part of
England; and on the east coast the Holy Isle of Lindisfarne grew to be
another Iona.
While Scotland went on being dotted with the Culdee chapels and
monasteries, Iona became a Christian Mecca, as well as a centre of
education and missions. The bodies of princes and chiefs were brought
here to be buried in sacred ground, as Persians to-day undertake long
perilous pilgrimages to lay the bones of their dead beside those
of Hussein or of Imam Reeza, whose tombs, as Iona was, are still
sanctuaries of refuge from human justice or revenge. Sixty kings of
Scotland, Ireland, and Norway have been counted as buried in this
little isle, some of them perhaps since before Columba’s time. Duncan
and Macbeth are fabled to lie here side by side; yet when we come
to more authentic kings, this royal sepulchre seems no longer in
reverence, for even Alexander II., who died conveniently on the island
of Kerrera, was carried for burial all the way to Melrose.
There can be no more impressive sight than the burial-ground with its
sculptured stones and worn crosses that mark now the undistinguished
dust of men who at least “did not expect to be so soon forgotten.” By
the twelfth century Cluniac monks had taken the place of the original
garrison, more than once broken up by raids of Norse pirates. The
oldest building is St. Oran’s Chapel, believed to have been erected by
the pious Margaret, Malcolm Canmore’s English queen, who built also the
chapel in Edinburgh Castle. The Nunnery appears to be later work, and
the Cathedral to date from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century.
These memorials, hastily visited by drenched and sea-sick tourists,
make but fragments of the ecclesiastical state that once flourished
on Iona. Its monuments came to be rudely treated at the Reformation,
when all but two of 360 crosses are understood to have been thrown into
the sea by an iconoclastic Presbytery, unless some of them had been
transported to the mainland, as perhaps was that fine one preserved at
Campbeltown. The memorial chapels seen by Dean Munro at the end of that
century have since disappeared. The high altar of white marble still
stood at the time of Pennant’s visit. About 1830 vanished obscurely
the last of the black stones on which Highlanders of old swore their
most binding oaths, perhaps the oldest of all Iona’s relics, once as
sacred as the corner-stone of the Kaâba. So late as the English reign
of James I., at the prompting of that pacific king, two clans met here
to make a solemn covenant of peace after centuries of bloodshed. Now
the Cathedral, given up by the late Duke of Argyll to the Church of
Scotland, is being restored; and the choir has been already turned into
a place of Presbyterian worship for its small congregation. The marble
quarries of the island, one hears, are again to be exploited for the
adornment of other churches.
[Illustration: INTERIOR, IONA CATHEDRAL]
Nine miles to the north of Iona lies Staffa, whose columned caves can
hardly have escaped serving as pagan fanes—
Where, as to shame the temples decked
By skill of earthly architect,
Nature herself, it seemed, would raise
A minster to her Maker’s praise!
Like the kindred scene of the Giant’s Causeway, this island is
dedicated to the dim memory of Fingal, and has a reversible legend of
the tricks played by a comic Scottish on an Irish giant, whose parts
are exchanged in Paddy’s version of the story. Fingal’s Cave is entered
by tourists when the weather allows; but sometimes they cannot even
land, and in any case will be so pressed for time on their day-trip
from Oban that one may quote to them Miss Gordon Cumming’s more
leisurely taken view of a famous spectacle, which moved Scott’s friend
Erskine to tears:
A wondrous fane indeed, with the perfect symmetry of its countless
gigantic columns, and marvellous roof, formed (like the strange
pavement outside, and like the gallery on which we stand) of the
broken bases of hexagonal pillars, which fit together in faultless
honeycomb. The colouring, too, is a marvel of beauty, for this basalt
combines every tint of rarest marble that ever human skill brought
together to decorate the costliest temple. Warm red and brown and
richest maroon tones prevail, but the whole gleams with green and gold
lichen and seaweed, while here and there a mosaic of pure white lime
has filtered through, encrusting the pillars, which seem transformed
to snowy alabaster. Ever and anon, the innermost depths of the great
chancel gleam with a sudden flash, as the clear green wave comes
swelling in, overflowing the causeway of broken pillars that forms so
marvellous a pavement, and breaking in pure white foam, which shows
more dazzling against the gloom of that sombre background, and casting
trembling reflecting lights, which trickle and waver over every
hidden crevice of roof, or clustered columns. Quick as thunder-roar
follows the lightning-flash is that white gleam succeeded by a booming
sound, louder than the thunder itself, yet mellow as the sweetest note
of some huge organ, and wakening echoes deeper and more sonorous than
ever throbbed through dim cathedral aisles;—echoes which linger and
repeat themselves on every side, and are but hushed for one moment of
awful silence while the exquisite green water recedes, only to rush
back again with renewed force, re-awakening that thrillingly-solemn
chorus, which, in ages long gone, earned for this cave its old Gaelic
name of _Uaimh Bhinn_, “the melodious cavern.” Altogether it is a
scene of which no words can convey the smallest idea, and as we pass
suddenly from the glaring sunlight into that cool deep shade, and
look down into the wondrous depths of that world of clear crystalline
green, we cannot choose but believe that we have invaded the chosen
home of some pure spirit of the sea—some dainty Undine, whose low
musical notes we can almost think we discern, mingling with the voice
of the waves.
[Illustration: STAFFA]
Johnson did not take the trouble to turn aside to Staffa, which had
been brought to notice about that time by Sir Joseph Banks; and there
is reason for belief that the title “Fingal’s Cave” was imposed by this
savant. But indeed the Doctor had passed unwittingly near other marvels
of columnar basaltic formation, such as are found in many parts of
the Hebrides, sometimes on a more enormous scale, if not so regularly
finished as at Staffa. MacCulloch, who says much the same of Ulva,
declares that had Staffa remained unknown, the caverned promontory of
Duin, near Duntulm at the north-east corner of Skye, would have
won like celebrity. Then all round the eastern side of this headland
the same formation is continued, where Loch Staffin’s name proclaims
its relationship with that “Isle of Columns,” and the “Kilt Rock” takes
its title from a chequered display of many-coloured strata crossed by
lines of grass, bearing up monstrous plaits and stripes of stone, red,
brown, and yellow. The Shiant Isles between Skye and Lewis show another
grand columnar façade rising out of the sea. The island of Eigg abounds
in small ranges of basalt more or less exposed, all overshadowed by
the mile-long organ-face of its Scuir, that at one point towers to a
height of about 1300 feet, a more gigantic Giant’s Causeway piled up in
tiers to the clouds, till often its head seems to hang in air, like an
enchanted castle beleaguered at its base by glooms and mists, whirling
forth from the fearsome peaks of Rum.
Skye has as many memories of Columba as if here had been the home of a
saint whose name has been associated with more West Highland chapels
and caves than there are modern churches in that wide diocese of his.
Near Iona, Colonsay is named after him, as Oronsay from his companion
Oran, the ruins of a monastery still visible on the latter, and the
abbey on the former not yet forgotten. But one cannot enumerate all
the remains of ancient piety scattered over the Hebrides, in most
cases ill accessible to hasty curiosity. The chances of reaching and
in rough weather of landing on those islands give consideration how
cut off from the world they were before the days of Watt and Macadam,
and under what difficulties the sturdy apostles carried on their work.
Some out-of-the-way islands may still have to go without ordinances of
the Church for months or years together. Some islets are garrisoned
by a single family, or by the crew of a lighthouse, who in one case
were swept away together by the cruel Atlantic waves, an accident
proclaimed by the dying out of their lantern. There are parishes like
that of the “Small Isles,” where the minister has to be sailor as well
as divine; yet often his boat must turn back in sight of an expectant
congregation. On the mainland, too, inlets and swollen rivers may make
getting to church no matter of course. Norman Macleod tells of Morven,
where his grandfather’s stipend began at £40 a year, that it contained
2000 souls scattered over 130 square miles with a seaboard of 100
miles, and not a road in the parish. I have known cases where people
walked a dozen miles or so to church; I have had farther to go myself,
but that was to a “chapel,” attendance at which, one fears, made excuse
for a Sabbath drive. It is no wonder if Highlanders are found a little
behindhand in theological fashions, while zealous for the faith as they
understand it to have been once delivered to Presbyterian saints.
[Illustration: THE ISLAND OF EIGG]
Even in sight of Oban hotels one may still find them so near and yet
so far. I once spent some time on the green island of Lismore, “the
great garden,” that lies as one of the breakwaters of that smart
tourist-haven. Not so much of a garden now, this island was an
old seat of the Argyll Bishops. The _Book of the Dean of Lismore_
is a famous sixteenth-century collection of Gaelic poems. Later on,
the Presbyterian minister of the island had a grandson who became
Lord Macaulay. Forty years ago its only mansion preserved what had
been for a time the Catholic College now flourishing on the Dee, its
Refectory, fitly enough, being used as a dining-room, while the chapel
was desecrated by division into a smoking-room and a carpenter’s shop.
The then owner was a lady who without scandal may be called peculiar.
Though herself from the Lowlands, if I am not mistaken, her whim was
to play the Highland chieftainess of the good old time. The tenants
were encouraged to bring cases before her for decision, Donald’s hen
scratching in Duncan’s garden, or such like; and as the judgment, along
with a mild admonition to the offender, usually included a bottle of
whisky presented to each party, there was no lack of recourse to her
amateur jurisdiction. As became her state, she kept a barge in which
to go shopping at Oban, but the crew were always hard to get together,
still more so from the whisky shops of the town. One day, on the way
back, a midshipman of our party took upon himself to steer and give
orders in such a quarter-deck tone that the offended Highlanders
mutinied by lighting their pipes, folding their arms, and sullenly
letting us drift about a long afternoon at the will of the currents,
till either Celtic pride relented or some touch of Caledonian prudence
counselled keeping us all out of mischief, when the presuming youth had
humbled himself so far as to own that it takes local experience to
navigate those waters. The distance across in a straight line may be
some half-dozen miles, and the alternative way to Oban was by walking
or driving a score of miles and passing three arms of the sea.
[Illustration: THE ISLAND OF CANNA]
The only other house of anything like gentility on the island was
the minister’s, who took in dipsomaniacs to board, shut off from
temptation by rushing tides. My fellow-guests were, all but one, lads
of my own age, who in this social solitude had a grand time of it,
fishing, swimming, and crawling over rocks to stalk shy seals that
basked on the outer side of the island, cheerfully drenched and tanned
by turns, like ourselves. Our hostess we hardly saw, as one of her
peculiarities was being invisible all day, and haunting the house by
night. It may seem ungracious to tell such tales of a too hospitable
lady, dead many a day, but the fact is that I do not remember even
her name, which I never heard till she haled me, almost by force, to
her fortress, whence it was quite an adventure to get away. I had to
bribe an English servant, another remarkable “character,” who played
the part of masterful factotum in this domain. With his connivance
I was to slip out at 2 A.M., to be driven to the farther end of the
island, and there by boat to waylay a steamer on its zigzag course
from the Outer Isles. At the moment of escape, to my confusion, the
_châtelaine_ turned up, who did not try to detain me, but insisted on
being my companion, and caused such delay by her vagaries that I nearly
missed the steamer, then much offended the Highland boatmen by too
peremptorily bidding them haste, as if I were a chief of Ulva’s Isle
with Lord Ullin’s daughter on board instead of an eccentric widow lady.
That strange imprisonment on Lismore would have been a more irksome
experience later in life; yet I have often thought what a chance of
making “copy” was there lost to a writer of books.
What travel among those broken shores was before steamboats—the
boarding of which from pierless islands may still be adventurous—we
may guess from David Balfour’s troubled wanderings, from the delays
of Dr. Johnson’s difficult tour, and from the fact that when old Dr.
Macleod went to college at Glasgow the journey from Morven by land
and water took ten days. Inns also are still few and simple in such
poorly peopled wilds, where to guard the distressful Celt against a
besetting sin his lords have sometimes enacted a private prohibition
of liquor law. Nor has this stretch of the southern Hebrides much to
tempt the general tourist from his lines of more luxurious travel. Some
points well deserve an hotel and guide-book notice, such as the grand
quartzite masses of the Paps of Jura, commanding a view from Skye to
the Isle of Man; and the map of islets and inlets spread out, weather
permitting, below the triple-crested Ben More of Mull, whose little
white capital Tobermory has been compared to a damp Naples in respect
of looking its best from the sea. Professor Blackie, with his sanguine
optimism, proclaimed Mull “the most beautiful of the western isles”;
but that is not a generally received tenet. Its coast makes a fretwork
of rocky patterns that become monotonous, repeated in miniature upon
some of the adjacent islets and peninsulas. But striking scenes may
be too widely scattered among what at first sight seem featureless
stretches of sea, moor, and rock, that will not take every stranger’s
fancy in their common setting of mist and rain, out of which hasty
comers and goers at Oban often carry away the impression of nothing
more cheerful than its red-funnelled arks of escape from a hopeless
deluge.
[Illustration: TOBERMORY]
To have the coy charms of these landscapes picked out for us, we must
go to a fervent West Highland amateur like William Black, who himself,
in glorifying the prospects of Mull, is fain to hint how they may
strike another’s eye less winningly:
Where he, eager to please her and show her the beauties of the
Highlands, saw lovely white sands, and smiling plains of verdure, and
far views of the sunny sea, she only saw loneliness, and desolation,
and a constant threatening of death from the fierce Atlantic. Could
anything have been more beautiful? he said to himself—than this
magnificent scene that lay all around her, when they reached a far
point on the western shore, in face of them the wildly-rushing seas,
coming thundering on to the rocks, and springing so high into the air
that the snow-white foam showed black against the glare of the sky;
the nearer islands gleaming with a touch of brown on their sunward
side, the Dutchman’s Cap, with its long brim and conical centre, and
Lunga, also like a cap, but with a shorter brim and a high peak in
front becoming a trifle blue; then Coll and Tiree lying like a pale
stripe on the horizon; while far away the mountains of Rum and Skye
were faint and spectral in the haze of the sunlight. Then the
wild coast around them, with its splendid masses of granite, and its
spare grass a brown-green in the warm sun, and its bays of silver
sand, and its sea-birds whiter than the white clouds that came sailing
over the blue.... And could anything have been more magical than the
beauty of that evening, after the storm had altogether died away? The
red sunset sank behind the dark olive-green of the hills; a pale,
clear twilight took its place, and shone over those mystic ruins that
were the object of many a thought and many a pilgrimage in the far
past and forgotten years; and then the stars began to glimmer as the
distant shores and the sea grew dark; and then, still later on, a
wonderful radiance rose behind the low hills of Mull, and across the
waters of the Sound came a belt of quivering light as the white moon
sailed slowly up into the sky.
Montalembert, in his _Monks of the West_, is very positive as to the
austerity of scenes that, beheld by a wave-tossed scholar, might well
seem the antipodes of _La Belle France_:
Nothing less attractive, on first approach, than this harsh and stern
scenery. Its picturesque is without charm, and its grandeur without
grace. One sadly traverses an archipelago of desert naked islets,
like so many extinct volcanoes, scattered upon a dull leaden sea,
sometimes broken by rapid currents and whirling gulfs. Except on rare
days when the sun, that pale sun of the north, comes out to enliven
these coasts, one’s eye wanders over a vast surface of brackish water,
here and there streaked by whitening wave crests, or by a foamy line
of surf breaking now upon a long reef, then against huge cliffs
from which one hears afar the lugubrious roar. Through the fogs and
incessant rains of this rude climate, it is hard to catch the summits
of the mountain chains, whose steep, bare slopes fall down into these
cold waters, always kept astir by the shock of contrary currents and
of the squalls that burst from the lakes and narrow defiles inland.
Yet these Highland coasts, dull or forbidding as they may look from the
sea, warm into charmingness under loyal eyes like Norman Macleod’s,
that can never forget the wild play-place of a happy boyhood:
A castled promontory, a range of dark precipices supporting the
upland pastures, and streaked with white waterfalls, which are lost
in the copse at their base, form a picture not very imposing compared
with “what one sees everywhere.” A long ridge of hill rising some
two thousand feet above the sea, its brown sides, up to a certain
height, chequered with green stripes and patches of cultivation;
brown heather-thatched cottages, with white walls; here and there
a mansion, whose chimneys are seen above the trees which shelter
it—these are the chief features along its seaboard of many miles. But
how different is the whole scene when one lands! New beauties reveal
themselves, and every object seems to change its size, appearance, and
relative position. A rocky wall of wondrous beauty, the rampart of
the old upraised beach which girdles Scotland, runs along the shore;
the natural wild wood of ash, oak, and birch, with the hazel copse,
clothes the lower hills and shelters the herds of wandering cattle;
lonely sequestered bays are everywhere scooped out into beautiful
harbours; points and promontories seem to grow out of the land, and
huge dykes of whinstone fashion to themselves the most picturesque
outlines; clear streams everywhere hasten on to the sea; small glens,
perfect gems of beauty, open up entrances into deep dark pools, hemmed
in by steep banks hanging with ivy, honeysuckle, rowan-trees, and
ferns; while on the hillsides scattered cottages, small farms, and
shepherds’ huts, the signs of culture and industry, give life to the
whole scene.
Perhaps few of us can rightly learn to love West Highland scenery
who have not in youth grown familiar with every blush of heather,
every skin of copse or bracken, every brown rib bared amid the turf,
and all the moods of those stern features under changing lights and
shadows. One surpassing glory of this region is the evening skies
that may reward patient sufferers under rain, for which see William
Black’s cruises, _passim_. I have travelled in four continents without
elsewhere catching a more brilliant glow of summer sunset than on the
hills of Ardnamurchan or Appin, where short winter days will sometimes
die out in a rosy glory diffused all round the horizon. Waller
Paton’s Highland skyscapes were accused of being too Turneresque in
their gorgeous hues; but they make indeed no exaggeration of what a
Gaelic bard calls “the tartan of the sky.” The more lovely for their
uncertainty are the day-long or week-long spells of fine weather
that may come in the heart of a stormy summer, sometimes lasting for
a month or two while the plains of the south seem to draw away the
freakish mountain clouds. Then in late autumn the west has often a
truce of halcyon days brooding peacefully over horizons where Italian
blue, touched with native softness, melts into a glassy sea among the
openings of richly tinted hills. And at all times the clearing after
rain may produce effects which a city poet aptly compares to the
raising of the curtain on a pantomime transformation scene.
More often the face of this region shows overcast, in too true keeping
with its gloomy traditions. The Christianity spread among these
islanders seems long to have been but skin deep, where every ruin is
haunted by memories of cruelty and hatred from days when the cross
itself was dearest as a fiery summons to bloodshed. Between Lismore
and Mull rises the Lady’s Rock, on which Maclean of Duart let his
wife, Argyll’s daughter, be exposed to the mercy of the tide, by one
account for no worse crime than that of being a Campbell; but a more
elaborately romantic version brings in jealousy of a Spanish _señora_
which urged this dame to procure the historical blowing up of an Armada
ship, whose guns were recovered in the last century, and at our own day
fresh attempts are on foot to dredge out her long-buried treasures,
as to which has been suggested the knotty legal question whether they
should not be the property of the king of Spain, then at peace with
Scotland. The lady’s peril had a dramatic ending which made this an
oft-told tale: she was rescued by fishermen of her father’s clan, and
when the husband came to Inveraray clad in hypocritical woe, what
seemed her ghost confronted him at the funeral feast that proved his
own.
[Illustration: THE HILLS OF JURA]
It was the Macleans of Mull who slaughtered their MacIan guests at the
wedding feast of their chief’s daughter. On the same shore, Bloody Bay
is named from a fierce battle between father and son. On another side
of the island is shown the cliff over which a vindictively smarting
clansman leaped with the infant son of his chief, who had caused him
to be scourged. On Eigg may be visited the cave where the whole
population of Macdonalds were suffocated by the Macleods of Skye,
in revenge for their having set some Lotharios of the latter clan
adrift, bound and starving, in an open boat. Another atrocity of
the Macleods turned out less successful, when they sought to burn a
shipwrecked Macdonald crew in the barn that offered false hospitality;
but the intended victims got warning in time through one of those love
intrigues that so often laughed at hereditary feuds. Of different
castle dungeons the story is told how a prisoner here was fed on salt
beef, then left to agonising thirst, as many another captive has
starved to death, gnawing his own flesh in solitary despair. The annals
of more than one clan give it as exterminated in a day of slaughter,
but for posthumous sons borne by defenceless widows. Adamnan, the
ninth abbot after Columba, is credited with a humane law against women
being exposed to death in battle; but long after his time innocent
children were not spared by Highlander nor by Lowlander in the glut
of vengeance. The severance of creed at the Reformation seems to have
whetted those bloodthirsty lusts. The more famous massacre of Glencoe
is outdone by one of Covenanting times, when hundreds of Macdonald
prisoners, Cavalier partisans and “Amalekites,” were in cold blood
dashed from the rocks of Cantyre by Presbyterian soldiers of Argyll.
Tradition, be thou mute! Oblivion, throw
Thy veil, in mercy, o’er the records hung
Round strath and mountain, stamped by the ancient tongue
On rock and ruin darkening as we go—
Spots where a word, ghost-like, survives to show
What crimes from hate or desperate love have sprung;
From honour misconceived, or fancied wrong,
What feuds, not quenched, but fed by mutual woe.
[Illustration: BEN NEVIS]
So Wordsworth was moved to exclaim in the Sound of Mull; and we may
take his example to pass quickly over a catalogue of sickening deeds
that go to show how, with all their unenlightened devotion, the far
Highlands were half heathen up till the time of the Jacobite risings.
Then a vigorous enforcement of law was accompanied by a movement of
civilising evangelisation, that put the people on a higher level both
in Protestant and in Catholic districts. In some parts the Catholic
faith has never been ousted. In some its adherents have vanished only
by migration, as on the island of Canna, with its conspicuous tower
of a modern fane, erected as memorial of a Catholic peer. In some
cases the chief was able to lead over or to lead back his people in
a body, an easy process of conversion that does not speak much for
their principles. In the parish of the Small Isles, Pennant heard of
congregations “indifferently” attending the services of priest or
pastor, whichever happened to turn up. As a rule, the two communions
live more kindly together in the Highlands than do the Orangemen and
Papists of Ireland. In certain nooks the Episcopalianism of Stuart
days still obstinately survives, where in many cases the first
Presbyterian preachers had a rough induction, as that one who, on
his presenting himself a second time at Kinlochewe, was stripped naked,
tied to a tree, and left to be tortured by midges; or that Perthshire
presentee that could find no shelter but in the house of the charitable
divine whom he came to displace, who held his own for years after the
intruder had been marched, under escort of bagpipes and drawn swords,
to the bounds of the parish, and there dismissed unhurt only after
taking an oath never to return.
In most parts of the Highlands, however, the Kirk took its place with
more or less acceptation, the thinly-placed ministers helped by an
inferior order of “catechists” and by the schools promoted through
a Christian Knowledge Society. This church had the name of being on
closer terms with lairds, tacksmen, and factors than with the mass of
its flock. About a century ago began to pass over the Highlands waves
of evangelical revival, by which dissenting and other missionaries
stirred the souls of an excitable people. In the north especially great
influence was exerted by self-appointed censors of morals and doctrine
called the “Men,” of whom the ministers themselves often stood in
awe, and who, by their insistence on the sternest aspects of a stern
theology, preluded to that revolt against “moderate” religion that came
to a head in early Victorian days.
Since then the most active and most attractive body of faith in the
Highlands has been the Free Church of Scotland, whose ministers
succeeded to much of the loyalty lost by chiefs turned into unpopular
landlords. As the Free Church was the austerer wing of the Old Kirk,
so itself is lately split into two branches, of which the more rigid
has taken deeper root among the mountains and islands where the old
Calvinistic and Covenanting views, banished from city pulpits, now
find asylum. And when not even the more liberal section of their own
church seems pure in the sight of Gaelic zealots, it might be expected
that they would look on the Erastian Establishment as Moabite and
Philistine, albeit its nominal doctrines and ritual are the same
as their own. The struggle between these two has been marked by an
acrimony transferred from the former clan feuds, and in most cases the
Old Kirk went down like the Macdonalds before the Campbells. Where
means of grace are so hard to come by, the Free Church might be thought
to do well in garrisoning some neglected end of huge, wave-sundered
parishes; but often it has chosen rather to gather its congregations
beside the emptied parish church. In Iona, for instance, with its two
or three hundred inhabitants, there rose both an Established and a
Free Church in the face of the Cathedral, whose long-deserted stones
silently preached such a moving sermon for hearts open to “the still,
sad music of humanity.”
The communion, now so powerful in the Highlands, is accused by its
enemies of provoking more to “sound” faith than to good works, but
it appears to have raised the moral character of the clergy, perhaps
at the expense of their culture, while it too indiscriminately sets
its face against the joys of life fostered by divines like Norman
Macleod’s forebears. The Free Church has done its best to frown down
not only bogeys and fairies, but the bagpipes, fiddling, dancing, and
other alleviations of a hard lot, on which is imposed the burden of
the Mosaic or Babylonian Sabbath, so patiently taken up by Scotsmen in
exchange for the penances of the monkish dispensation. The Catholic
priests are more tolerant: in at least one island the bagpipe summons
the people to mass; but the orthodox Calvinist frowns at music unless
the pseudo-Biblical strains of the Jew’s harp, which, under the name
of the trump, has long been popular in the Highlands. Here lingers
the prejudice against instrumental music in church, not so long ago
strong over all Scotland, as was the childish objection to hymns, even
scriptural paraphrases, or any sacred songs but those believed to be
written by David. Thus the prevalent theology has become accomplice
with hard times and sad surroundings in deepening the cloud that lies
over Highlands and Islands.
CHAPTER V
PIBROCHS AND CORONACHS
Long before reaching Ben Nevis the delicate-eared Southron may shudder
at a far-heard strain, which some strangers, indeed, find “not so bad
as it sounds,” as the Frenchman said of Wagner’s music, while others
will indulgently admit—
It was wild, it was fitful, it died on the breeze,
It wandered about into various keys;
It was jerky, spasmodic, and harsh, I declare,
But still—it distinctly suggested an air.
The bagpipes need no apology in ears to the manner born. They are well
beloved in the Lowlands as in the Highlands; and even about a London
terminus one is hardly more safe from them than in the wilds of Lorne
or Lochaber. When the savant St. Fond came to Edinburgh, grave Adam
Smith, learning that he held music part of the wealth of nations,
took him to a bagpipe competition, which he describes as exciting
such enthusiasm among sober citizens as might be expected on what is
not the native heath of this instrument. It was once, indeed, no more
specially Scottish than it was English, Irish, Italian, or, for the
matter of that, European. What seems to have been added to it in the
Highlands is the great drone, helping the pipes to express a fierce
or melancholy music, whose strains, in turn exulting and wailing,
recommended themselves strongly to the keenly-set feelings of the Gael.
The chief’s piper was an hereditary official in several clans, often
one of no little dignity, having his acolytes and his pipe-bearer, and
not condescending to play for common revels. There was a college of
M’Crimmon pipers at Dunvegan in Skye, where the Macdonalds maintained a
rival school of MacCarters; and the names of other champion performers
are not forgotten. The piper held his head so high in the Celtic world
that still Highland pride seems typified in the swelling port and strut
of his degenerate descendants. His finer notes are in danger of being
lost, now that they will not be so much called on for occasions of
state or mourning; but as often as we relapse into the savagery of war,
there is found no screech like the bagpipe’s to heat men’s hearts to
slaughter point, as some of our modern Highland stocks may have known
to their cost when first they encountered the true children of mountain
mists. In older days, “the harp that once through Tara’s halls” is
claimed as the stately music of the Highlands also, and if we went far
enough back, we might find cows’ horns the only music known to rude
warriors, till some effeminate stranger introduced among them an art
nursed on sunny Mediterranean lochs and sounds. But the reader need not
fear to be let in for an antiquarian lecture. The bagpipes will serve
me like the blessed word Mesopotamia as text for a rambling discourse
on past and present in the country looked down on by Ben Nevis.
It seems typical of the new order that Ben Nevis, one of those
mountains said to be held on a snowball tenure, belongs in part to a
Southron whose very name denotes “England’s cruel red,” and in part
to a family which has blended the once hostile blood of Campbell and
of Cameron with that of Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote, the “Justice
Shallow” whose deer Shakespeare poached, according to Elizabethan
scandal. No contrast could be greater than between this property and
the Lucys’ lordly park in the flat Midlands. Rising to the heaven that
names it, from a base thirty miles in circumference, the highest crest
of Britain is not so much a towering peak as “a colossal bundle of the
hugest of Scotland’s mountains rolled into one mighty mass” of cloudy
ridges and stupendous precipices, whose magnitude grows on the beholder
from various aspects, most impressive perhaps that of the dark gulf
filled with rolling mists that opens on the north-east side. These
stern steeps that once echoed to pibrochs and coronachs, and gave their
fallen stones for the cairns of many a forgotten feud, were in our
generation crowned by a monument of the spirit of a new age. Monument
indeed, for as I write comes news that the Ben Nevis Observatory has
been deserted through an unromantic lack of funds, which in any other
civilised country would have been supplied from the public purse.
For years this cloudy post was garrisoned by a band of intrepid weather
watchers, bearing the brunt of the great Atlantic storms, in whose
teeth they snatched hints to build up scientific meteorology. Not
that their knowledge has as yet risen much beyond its foundations,
when Mr. Robert Omond, the first captain of that crow’s nest, truly
then to be called highest British authority on the subject, rebukes
more confident seers by the dictum that our weather’s “coming events
cast their shadows before” no farther than a day or two, and then not
for certain. More striking results were deserved by the devotion of
these hermits of science. With hares, foxes, and weasels for nearest
neighbours, their chief complaint seems to have been of only too many
visitors, in summer at least, when scores daily would toil up the
path made for constructing and provisioning their eyry, whereon the
weak-kneed Lowlander may stumble and murmur; yet had he seen this road
“before it was made,” he would rather bless the Scottish Meteorological
Society that has done so much for it under such arduous circumstances.
But again they would be weeks without seeing a human face, even on a
postage stamp, unless some adventurer made an Alpine ascent through
the snow to bring news from the outer world to their hermitage, built
strong and solid like a lighthouse. At the height of summer banks of
dirty snow may be found on the top, where John Leyden and his friends
had an August snowball fight. In winter the crew of observers were
often buried in snow-banks, through which they must dig themselves
out; or it would be all they could do, roped together, to struggle
against the wind to their instruments a few yards off. Sometimes it
was impossible to crawl to windward against such a gale as once for
fifteen hours kept them imprisoned in their cramped quarters, the only
exposed window broken by a bombardment of hard snow lumps torn up and
hurled by the wind. Rainbows proved rare so far up in the clouds, and
so did heavy thunderstorms, though the air has at times been found
alive with frizzlings and cracklings of invisible electricity that made
men’s hair stand on end; and once their telegraph apparatus was fused
by lightning. As often as not their mountain solitude was wrapped in
dark, dank, chilly fog, through which they durst not lightly trust
themselves by the edges of the perilous abysses around. In one day they
measured more than seven inches of rain. But again that ark of theirs
would stand up in glorious sunshine above the lower tops lying islanded
in a sea of mist, which had rolled back from the top to leave its high
tide-mark sparkling with feathery crystals. I once spent ten Christmas
days at Bournemouth without a glimpse of the sun, when a letter came
from the top of Ben Nevis reporting a fortnight of dry, clear weather,
lit through the short day by a wonderful play of colours in the sky.
And at all seasons, from their hundred-mile prospect point above the
clouds, the observers might catch wonderful optical phenomena, coronæ
of most vivid colouring painted on a film of scud-cloud, fog-bows,
both solar and lunar, and the weird adumbration called “glories,”
described by Mr. Omond:
In winter when the sun is low, even at noon, the shadow of a person
standing near the cliff that runs all along the northern side of Ben
Nevis is cast clear of the hill into the valley below. In bright
winter weather this deep gloomy gorge is often full of loose shifting
fog, and when the shadow falls upon it, the observer sees his head
surrounded by a series of coloured rings, from two to five in number,
varying in size from a mere blotch of light up to a well-defined arch
6 or 8 degrees in radius. This phenomenon does not present quite the
same appearance as the better-known Brocken Spectre, for here the
shadow of the observer, in consequence of the distance of the mist
from him, does not appear unnaturally large; in fact the image of
one’s head appears as a mere dark speck in the centre of the coloured
rings. These glories are less common in summer—though they have been
seen near sunrise and sunset.
[Illustration: PORT ASKAIG, ISLAY]
At the foot of Ben Nevis lies Fort-William, a town once dubbed
Gordonsburgh, and before that Maryburgh, in honour of Dutch William’s
consort; but its old name was Inverlochy, famed by Montrose’s dashing
victory over Argyll, as by a former battle between the forces of James
I. and his troublesome vassal, the Lord of the Isles. Cloudier history
would have it an ancient royal seat of Scotland, where King Achaius is
fondly believed to have made a treaty with Charlemagne, first seal of
that league between two kingdoms often united in enmity to England.
These are ticklish subjects: MacCulloch the geologist was hereabouts
turned away from even Highland hospitality because he could not
believe that Fingal made the parallel roads of Glenroy, in which Nature
seems so artfully to have copied the works of man.
Legendary chroniclers have placed at Inverlochy the site of a great
commercial city in the Highland golden age; but the only trace of such
antiquity is, not far off, one of those “vitrified forts,” puzzling
savants as to whether their ramparts were turned to slag by accident or
design. There is a painful suspicion that the old castle, at one time
held by the Comyns, may have been the work of an English king, three
centuries before James VI. tried to found a town about it as civilising
agent for the Highlands. It was certainly General Monk who began the
modern fort that in William’s time became strengthened to hold out
against ill-equipped besiegers. This work, impregnable in 1745, has now
yielded to the railway company, whose station takes its place. Before
the railway came here, Marshal Wade’s roads and Telford’s Canal had
bridled the wild Highlandman as effectually as that chain of military
posts hence reaching up to the Moray Firth by Kil-Comyn, the modern
Fort-Augustus, and by Castle Urquhart on the banks of Loch Ness. This
was another fortress of the Black Comyns, then of the Grants, taken
by Edward I.’s soldiers, and assailed by many a fierce foe, till it
gracefully surrendered to the shafts of time.
The Earth builds on the Earth
Castles and towers;
The Earth says to the Earth,
All shall be ours.
From Ben Nevis we look over that great cleft in which Loch Linnhe,
running up from the Firth of Lorne, is continued by the lakes of
Glenmore, a natural boundary-line for the Inner Highlands. The
so-called Highland line formed by the face of the Grampians running
obliquely from the Clyde across the Forth and Tay, then beside
Strathmore to Aberdeenshire, walls in the Outer Highlands, in the
main long mastered by stranger lords, who, indeed, soon fell under
the Celtic charm and brought themselves to be as Gaelic as the born
Gaels, not the less demonstratively as Saxon speech and Lowland customs
crept in by the mountain passes. It is across that central cleft we
must look for the _Bretagne bretonnante_ of Scotland, among secluded
lochs and glens where the people were longer sheltered from outside
influences. The noblest summits and the most famous scenes are to the
east of the Great Glen; perhaps the grandest mountain mass is the block
of the Cairngorms in the north-east, below which Balmoral basks in the
sunshine of royal favour; but to the west rather lingers the soul of
the Highlands. This is particularly true of the Inverness bens, glens,
and lochs between Ben Nevis and Skye, a region that has for its proper
name “The Rough Bounds” (_Garbh Crioch_), while it made part of old
Argyll, “coast of the Gael,” a name once extending as far up as Loch
Broom.
Glenmore is a highway of civilisation well trodden by tourist
generations. Of late years the extension of the West Highland line to
the coast has opened up further romantic wilds, thick set with ruined
strongholds and shrines, with crosses and cairns, and with monuments
of less-forgotten history. One column marks the spot where Charles
Edward raised his standard in Glenfinnan; another commemorates the
Lochiel Cameron who died at Quatre Bras, as loyal to King George as
his fathers to Charles and James. In those cloudy recesses, beyond the
forts of the Great Glen, gathered silently the storm of 1745 to whirl
far over Britain. Here Macdonalds and Camerons only half-welcomed their
rash prince, the old chiefs too prudent not to see the risks of his
enterprise, yet too proud to hold back from it when hot young heads
panted to meet the Lowlands in battle array. The first encounter was on
the Spean, by whose valley a branch line now holds up the Great Glen
to Fort-Augustus. The main line winds round the head of Loch Shiel,
and on to the deep fiords near Arisaig, where the adventurer reached
the mainland, and whence he made his perilous escape. From Arisaig,
looking out on the picturesque islands Eigg, Rum, and Muck, the railway
follows the coast to Mallaig, opposite the southern end of Skye, a
region hitherto almost beyond the waterproofed tourist’s ken, if not
the sportsman’s, now plying his expensive pastime among the lonely
graves of clans who, for all their pride and valour, went down before
the disciplined stranger because they could not keep their swords off
one another.
[Illustration: THE ISLAND OF RUM, FROM ARISAIG]
It was not by chance of weather that Charles Edward landed in these
parts, to start his Phaeton career from the Rough Bounds. Hence,
if we take in Badenoch to the east and Lochaber to the south-east, came
the strongest bodies of fighters in that lost cause, whose poet tells
us how “the fiery cross was sped” with news that the “Prince had come
again.” As a matter of prosaic fact, the fiery cross seems to have gone
out of fashion by 1745, when the only mention I can find of it is in
Perthshire, there used, not very successfully, as summons to arms both
for and against the Prince. On the Dee and the Tay he found followers,
not so numerous as his well-wishers; but within a day’s march from
Glenfinnan was the first and the best recruiting-ground of “the clans
of Culloden.” This second-hand phrase I have “lifted” from Mr. Henry
Jenner’s series of articles in the _Royalist_, organ of the “White
Rose League,” in which the subject is naturally treated with special
sympathy. There is no lack of sympathy for those slain and scattered
clansmen, their memory held in honour by that House that seems in
little danger of being bowed off its throne by the “White Rose” ladies
and gentlemen, when the top of Ben Nevis flared with bonfires to
hail Queen Victoria’s Jubilee and King Edward’s Coronation. We are
perhaps too ready to forget the coarse features of a life dressed in
blood-stained tartans, and what might have come of Prince Charlie’s
winning a kingdom whose liberties have thriven best under sovereigns
making neither picturesque nor lovable figures in history. But if we
wish to drop a tear for the last romance of Britain, it may well be
done under the rainy sky of the Rough Bounds, that sent out so many
champions to dye the White Rose in bootless blood.
It is not to be understood that all those bellicose clansmen were
born in the allegiance to which they might be soldered on by choice
or circumstances. As among the Red Indian tribes, there seems to have
been frequent adoption of “broken men,” or fugitives from another
name. We know how chieftains of the good old time were in the way of
gathering about them adventurous banditti, whose bond of union was
congenial bloodshed as well as kindred blood. The proudest Cameron of
our day can be less sure of not having Campbell blood in his own veins
than of its having stained his forefathers’ hands. The portion of a
Highland heiress would sometimes be part paid in “a set of stout men,”
who henceforth had to be loyal to the husband’s tartan. Another hint
of how clans, themselves no thoroughbred stock, might become mixed
together is found in that ugly story of two hundred Farquharson bairns,
made orphans by Gordon and Grant swords, scrambling in a half-naked
herd to be fed like pigs from a trough at Huntly Castle, till the
softer-hearted Grant chief adopted them into his own tartan. When the
“Stewarts of Appin” went out in 1745, more than half the dead and
wounded of their contingent appear bearing the names of miscellaneous
Macs, who, had they not gathered to this standard, might have been
swallowed up with others among the loyal Campbells.
Lochaber was the country of the Camerons, whose leader, the “gentle
Lochiel” of 1745, appears one of the noblest Highland nobles, as to
whom, when he died a colonel in the French service, a poet on the other
side of politics declared that he “is now a Whig in heaven.” He exerted
himself to put down _creagh_ raids among his clansmen; but the old
blood was stronger in another Cameron of the French army, who, after
Culloden, under the name of “Sergeant Mòr” became renowned as a Rob Roy
of Lochaber. Lochiel’s brother, Dr. Cameron, betrayed and hanged in
1753, made the last martyr of Jacobitism. Sir Alan, son of one of the
Camerons of Culloden, lived to raise three battalions for King George,
whose fame and name have been inherited by the Cameron regiment,
now perhaps enlisting no more Camerons than find their way into the
Cameronian corps of such different origin. The most celebrated Cameron
was the Lochiel of Cromwell’s time, Sir Ewen the Black, who came to the
chieftainship as a boy, and died under George I., a doughty champion of
the Stuarts through his long life. Argyll, his guardian, had sent him
to school to be brought up in sound Whig principles, but, like other
boys one knows of, he “preferred the sport of the field to the labours
of the school.” Among the exploits attributed to him is the killing of
the last wolf in Britain, an honour also claimed for a later Nimrod
farther north. In his teens he was already at the head of the clan, a
thorn in the side of Campbells, Covenanters, and English Roundheads;
and after being the last royalist to submit to General Monk, he lived
to fight beside Dundee at Killiecrankie, then to send his clansmen out
in 1715, when he himself, it is said, came to be rocked in a cradle
of second childhood; but another account describes him at ninety as
able to read the smallest print and keeping all the teeth with which
he had torn out the windpipe of one of Cromwell’s officers, as they
locked in a deadly struggle like FitzJames and Roderick Dhu.[2] In the
interval he had waged many private wars, notably with his neighbours
the Mackintoshes, which luckily ended in a treaty wiping out the feud
of centuries. The last clan battle in the Highlands appears to be that
between the Mackintoshes and the Macdonalds of Keppoch, fought in
Glenroy, 1688.[3]
[2] Mr. Drummond-Norie, in his _Loyal Lochaber_, records the amusing
legend “of an incident that occurred during Sir Ewen Cameron’s visit
to London many years later. He had occasion to go into a barber’s shop
to get his beard and hair dressed. The garrulous barber having fixed
him in position, and probably guessing from his accent that he was not
born south of the Tweed, remarked: ‘You are from the north, sir, I
believe?’—‘Yes,’ answered Lochiel, ‘I am; do you know people from the
north?’—‘No,’ shouted the angry barber, ‘nor do I wish to; they are
savages there. Would you believe it, one of them tore the throat out
of my father with his teeth; and I only wish I had the fellow’s throat
as near me as I have yours just now!’”—The end of the tale is that
Lochiel never again trusted himself in the hands of a barber.
[3] In _Bonnie Scotland_ I rather loosely spoke of the Campbell
invasion of Caithness as the last private war, meaning by this term to
exclude a collision between adjacent clans.
The Mackintoshes were a branch—with the fear of Cluny Macpherson
before us, we must not say the senior branch—of that Clan Chattan that
fought on the Inch of Perth, from which also appear to have sprung
the Camerons, the Shaws, the Macgillivrays, the Farquharsons, and
several other names. Their opponents, the Clan Kay, seem more shadowy.
Those Mackintoshes are said to have been once at home about Lochaber;
but the later world they bustled in was farther north, where they had
for neighbours the Red Comyns of Badenoch, as once the Black Comyns
of the Great Glen. The Comyns were a clan of Norman origin, at one
time masters in Lochaber, as again for a time were the Gordons, whose
head, Lord Huntly, vied with Argyll in playing chief policeman for the
Highlands. There is a grim story of the Mackintoshes and the Comyns:
the one clan bidden by the other to a feast at which, these cat-and-dog
_convives_ sitting alternately, the appearance of a boar’s head was
to be signal for the hosts to stab each man his guest; but the guests
had the very same idea, and carried it out with more prompt dexterity.
Chroniclers strangely differ as to which clan here played the active
and which the passive part; and the same story, with the same doubt,
is told of my Forbes forebears and their Gordon neighbours. It must be
feared that such treachery made part of Highland social amenities in
the good old days. A record more honourable to the Clan Chattan is of a
battle that left in the hands of the Murrays—mere Lowlanders disguised
in tartan—some two hundred Mackintosh prisoners, from not one of whom
could torture or shameful death wring the secret of their chief’s
hiding-place. Another Mackintosh chief was not so lucky, who stooped
to put himself in the hands of the Marchioness of Huntly, and as
humiliating condition of forgiveness for injuries, even laid his head
upon the kitchen block, when this dissembling dame had it struck off
by the cook’s hatchet—so much for trusting a Gordon! In the ’45 the
clan did not stand shoulder to shoulder, its chief, an officer in King
George’s militia, falling prisoner to his own wife, “Colonel Anne,” who
had taken the field on Prince Charlie’s side. In later times, after
the benignant fame of Sir James the Reformer, this name’s most shining
exploit has been the invention of an armour against rain, the enemy
most to be feared among those mountains, where the Mackintosh of our
degenerate days perhaps does not disdain to cover his gay tartan with a
waterproof.
[Illustration: THE RIVER SPEY NEAR FOCHABERS]
Of his rival, Cluny Macpherson, it was told in my youth how he sternly
rebuked an effeminate clansman who visited him under an umbrella.
The Cluny of Culloden was the hardy chief who for years after lurked
in a “cage” of sticks and turf, close to his own castle, where he
occasionally ventured himself, and once had nearly been caught by the
redcoats through the unheroic accident of his getting so drunk that his
servants had to carry him out in a plaid and hide their unconscious
bundle in the woods till the search was over. The most widely famed
Macpherson in modern days was that author or editor of “Ossian.” If
any of this clan desire more unquestioned renown, let him invent some
defence of proof against the midges that are the most bloodthirsty
swarms of the Highlands, now that the pibroch and the coronach die away
in dance music.
For his services at Bannockburn the Lord of the Isles was rewarded by
Bruce by a grant of Lochaber. So this region in part, with the Rough
Bounds, came to be the country of the Macdonalds, in their various
septs, distinguished by the name of their seat, or sometimes by a
minor patronymic, as the MacIans of Ardnamurchan and of Glencoe, while
some came to write themselves Macdonell, but all boasting to be of
the great Somerled’s line, in which, indeed, the sons of Dougal seem
entitled to the first birthright. The clan Donnachie, though disguised
as Robertsons, claim also to be of the same stock. Other septs, now
bearing separate names, were as proud to count themselves of Donald’s
prolific race. The Macintyres, for instance, “sons of the carpenter,”
tell about their ancestor, an illegitimate shoot of the Lord of the
Isles, that when in a boat with his father, the peg coming out, the
whole crew would have been drowned if this ready youngster had not
chopped off his thumb with an axe to stop the hole, and the admiring
chief exclaimed, “The thumb-carpenter!”—a nickname that stuck. A
Lowland hero under the same circumstances would probably have been
canny enough to use his thumb as a plug without cutting it off.
Wherever they came from, the Macintyres drifted inland into Lorne,
and at Glenorchy gave birth to Duncan Ban, one of the most famous
of unlettered Gaelic bards, who died in 1812 as a veteran of the
Edinburgh City Guard, his muse more scrimply fostered than that of
Burns, though now his memory is honoured by a stately monument at
Dalmally. He fought in the ’45, perhaps not very heartily, as a private
soldier of King George, while his contemporary rival, Alexander
Macdonald, was out with Prince Charlie, in whose praise he made the
very popular song of _Morag_. There would be few of his name on the
other side; and Mr. Jenner, for his part, stoutly denies the story that
Culloden was lost through the Macdonalds holding back in offended pride.
At Ardtornish, on the Morven coast, the Lords of the Isles held
parliaments of their own, and once presumed to make a treaty with an
English king, foe of their lightly regarded suzerain. Even when that
quasi-regal state had crumbled, we find Macdonald chiefs proposing
negotiations with Queen Elizabeth, sending out troops to fight in
Ireland, and hiring mercenaries to serve in their own private wars.
Their name, made famous abroad by the Duke of Tarentum who served
Napoleon so well, became at home split into sub-clans not always on
the most clannish terms. Heaven forbid that any peaceful scribbler
should touch that bristling question, which of the sons of Donald
represents the senior branch from John of the Isles? Between Clanranald
and Glengarry has been in hot dispute a distinction which to the mere
Sassenach might suggest that between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. I am
instructed by an earnest genealogist that Clanranald, now a peaceful
householder of London, is the true prince. The Glengarry family, on the
other hand, has made more noise in the world. The heir of Glengarry,
like his neighbour Lochiel, viceroy of an exiled chieftain, held his
head gallantly in and after the ’45; but alas! his memory has lived to
be branded as “Pickle the Spy” in two books by which Mr. Andrew Lang
turns an accusing light on the “shabby romance” of later Jacobitism.
This blot of then invisible ink on his scutcheon would be unknown to
the Glengarry of Scott’s day—“XVII. Mac-Mic-Alaister,” as he styles
himself on a local monument—who posed so proudly, the last of the
chiefs. His friend, Sir Walter, speaks of him as a Highland Quixote,
and is understood to have taken him as model for Fergus M’Ivor. But the
chief of _Waverley_ showed more sense and more craft than Glengarry,
who in town and country strutted about with his “tail,” including a
bard, whose strains have been drowned by those of our Lowland last
minstrel. Not to speak of his controversy with Clanranald, more than
once this warm-hearted but hot-headed hero had to answer to the law
for violent proceedings in the good old style. He killed a young
grandson of Flora Macdonald in a duel, for which he was tried and
acquitted, the code of honour being still received as testimony in
courts. At the coronation of George IV. he appeared in full Highland
costume, including showy pistols which set a lady screaming at him
for a would-be regicide; and the indignant chief had to submit to
disarmament, in vain protesting that his weapons made as much part of
the character as his tartans. When the fat king came to Edinburgh in
kilts, and poor Scott sat down on the glass out of which sacred majesty
had drunk, Glengarry insisted on his swash-bucklers being adopted
in the royal bodyguard. He appeared to most advantage as a Nimrod,
lying out on the hills for a week together in his kilt and plaid. His
excellent breed of deerhounds was celebrated, one of them as Scott’s
Maida, named after a battle in which the chief’s brother fought for
King George. Such a picturesque survival of the past died, 1828, in a
prosaically modern accident, leaping from a steamboat that had struck
the rocky shore, where Loch Linnhe narrows to the bent Loch Eil. A
thousand guests came to his funeral feast and coronach.
It was quite in keeping with this chief’s personage to leave his
estate so much encumbered that the heir had to seek new fortunes in
Australia. Now, there is hardly a Macdonald in this country, once safe
for no other name, while there are thousands thriving in one corner of
Nova Scotia and in the Glengarry county of Ontario, where a jury has
been known to be half Donald Macdonalds. Much of Glengarry’s property
passed to Edward Ellice, a well-known Liberal statesman of the Bright
and Cobden period, intimate with men of light and leading whom the old
Glengarrys would have looked on as anathema. On Loch Quoich, the “cup”
so well filled by rain, stands a luxurious shooting lodge, provided
with electric light, motor-cars, and comforts undreamed of in the
Saltmarket, its visitors’ book enshrining a generation of distinguished
autographs. Glenquoich has been let on a long lease to a famous
Sassenach brewer, who here entertains King Edward VII. in princely
style among the wilds through which that poor Chevalier slunk ragged
and hungry, scared from the camp fires of his pursuers, and glad to
take refuge in a cave of robbers, scorning to betray him for more gold
than was ever handled by Pickle the Spy. A royal visit called forth an
article in the _Scotsman_, whence one may borrow a purple patch:
If there is in Scotland a grander view than can be seen from the shore
of Lochquoich on an autumn evening, the writer does not know of it.
The fairy land of the Celt was one of “seven bens and seven glens and
seven mountain moors,” but the moors and the glens and the bens around
Glenquoich fall to be numbered by the hundreds, and not by sevens.
Sheer from the water edge rise the mountains, green at their base,
flecked with heather along their sides, ridge upon ridge, peak upon
peak, overwhelming the mind with a feeling of that Omnipotence which
weigheth the mountains in scales and the hills in a balance, before
whom men are altogether vanity. West from the lodge the loch bends
slightly towards the south, and, narrowing as it recedes, it stretches
out towards the setting sun, pushing a tapering finger among the roots
of the giant hills; and the farther west it goes, the higher rise the
enveloping mountains. And the wonderful autumn sunsets of the west
flush them all—Sguir a’ Mhoraire, Sguir a’ Shlaidhemh, Sguir Gairoch,
Meall a’ Choire Bhuidh—till their splintered peaks and pinnacled
heads glow and glitter in amethyst and gold, while their sides gleam
with a hundred polished silver shields, and the stray clouds, sailing
inward from the western sea, glide high over their crests, swimming
in glory. And the light, still radiant above, fails in the corries
below, covering the slopes with a deep, deep blue, such a blue as one
sees only in the west when a mountain comes athwart the setting sun.
When the evening is still (and often the wind that rustles during the
day sinks at eve into a calm), the face of the loch is as a sheet of
glass, and deep in its translucent depths. The mountain crests and the
transfigured clouds melt one into another, trembling with the ecstasy
of their mingling, till the whole face of the loch is a veil through
which there glows a kaleidoscope of radiant colours, darting hither
and thither as if greeting and embracing one another.
[Illustration: INVERLOCHY CASTLE AND BEN NEVIS]
The Rough Bounds include a dozen freshwater lochs that hitherto
have had too little note in guide-books, the most renowned of them
Loch Arkaig, where the Macdonalds and other clans tried to rally
after Culloden, and where Prince Charlie’s treasure was hidden to
be a Nibelungen hoard of contention among their leaders. One of his
hiding-places here, near Lochiel’s seat, Achnacarry, was a cave in the
“Dark Mile,” a scene not less deserving of fame than the Trossachs.
Then the shores of this region present “one continued succession of
picturesque and grand objects, in every variety that can be produced
by bays, promontories, rocks, straits, and islands,” their aspects
again varied by “silent calm succeeding to all the fury of a raging
ocean, by the dark tempest and gale, the bright blue of the cloudless
sky, and the evening and morning splendours of a lingering sun.” From
Ardnamurchan, the westernmost swell of the mainland, the coast is
almost equally divided between bare peninsular ridges and deeply
pierced fiords, often wooded to the water’s edge, or bordered by
meadows that glow greener below the savage rocks of their background,
where sometimes Nature would seem to have heaped up materials for some
abandoned design. The intricate inlets of Loch Moidart are succeeded by
those about Arisaig, then comes the freshwater trough of Loch Morar,
tumbling down to the sea under a bridge at its mouth. A narrow ridge
keeps this from mingling with the tide of Nevis, “Loch of Heaven,”
itself separated by the Knoidart Hills from Loch Hourn, “Loch of Hell,”
indeed a place of gloom, its approach pronounced by Lord Avebury “the
most desolate and savage scene” in Scotland; and it gave a congenial
home to Barrisdale, that ruthless tyrant of Jacobite days, whose
chivalrous varnish Mr. Andrew Lang has roughly scratched to show the
Tartar beneath. Thus we come to Glenelg with its Pictish doons and its
Hanoverian barracks of Bernera, for which, a quarter of a century after
Culloden, a corporal and six men were garrison enough. Beyond this Skye
almost touches the mainland.
The Rough Bounds are now broken in on by the line to Mallaig; but
should the _laudator temporis acti_ be scared away from that thread of
iron rail, he can turn his back on such intrusion, holding down Loch
Shiel or Loch Sunart to the mountainous promontory of Ardnamurchan;
or southwards on the peninsula of Morven; or into the Moidart country
northwards, fastnesses of the old customs, the old tongue, and the old
faith. But ah!—
Deserted is the Highland glen,
And mossy cairns are o’er the men
That fought and died for Charlie!
The scattering and displacing of the clans had begun before Culloden,
when the heads of the Camerons and the Macdonells were in exile with
their legitimate sovereign. On the edge of the Rough Bounds the
Government had settled strangers, some of whom proved but perverse
agents of their civilising mission. Soon after 1715, as we learn
from a story in Burt, Glengarry had already been invaded by a troop
of woodcutters under leadership of an English Quaker. An industrial
undertaking of a kind rare in the Highlands was the lead-mining at the
head of Loch Sunart, where Strontian, famed also for a rare variety
of spar, has given its name to the metal whose carbonate was first
found here. Iron-smelting was another promoted industry. What with
miners, woodcutters, English flunkeys, Lowland shepherds, transported
gillies, rich proprietors, and sporting tenants, the population is
much transmogrified since the days when each glen made a more or less
happy family, as often as not on unhappy terms with its neighbours.
Of all the strangers brought here upon Marshal Wade’s roads, the most
effectual missionaries of the new order have been the Presbyterian
clergy, ordained to scant sympathy with the line that tried in vain to
dragoon them into Prelatism. Norman Macleod tells the story that when
a Morven laird came to church with a pistol, threatening to shoot the
minister if he prayed for the king, that undaunted divine laid two
cocked pistols on the pulpit cushion, and kept both eyes wide open
while performing this ticklish part of his function.
But where the Church by law established has the stipends, there are
still nooks where Rome has the hearts of the people, elsewhere over the
Highlands much given to the Free Church, two generations old. The best
preserves of Catholicism lie here and there on this west coast, taking
in some of the opposite islands, and straggling across the centre of
the Highlands into Braemar. Of these oases of faith, as seen from one
point of view, from another it is said that, as in Switzerland and
in Baden, they can be distinguished at a glance from the Protestant
districts by their aspect of greater poverty, with concomitant
shortcomings. At least they have a chance to be richer in the spirit of
a people once more disposed to the principles of the _Royalist_ than
to those of the _Edinburgh Review_. The Free Church clergy have been
specially inquisitorial against old customs, fostered rather by the
priests, who, so long as mass be not neglected, smile indulgently at
the diversions and the memories of their flock, nor frown too sternly
even at superstitious traditions. There was a time, of course, when
this Church appeared as champion of the new against the old. It may
be that in future generations we shall find enthusiasts as earnestly
contending for “Sabbath blacks” as once for tartans, cherishing
magic-lantern lectures when such have replaced Highland reels, and
sighing over the beloved national strains of the hurdy-gurdy silenced
by the gramophone, the diabolophone, or whatever sweetness musical
invention have in store for us—so easily do new customs grow to old
ones, and so soon are conservative souls set firm on their high horse
of sentiment!
Yet as the bagpipes have had a long lease in the Highlands, they
may be good for many lives still, in spite of clerical and artistic
condemnation. Nature here sets keynotes for the fierce exultation of
the pibroch and the wail of the coronach, with which are in tune the
songs and stories of this people. I am not going to wake the ghost of
Fingal, nor to rouse echoes of controversy over Ossian, a poet said
to have been blind like Homer and Milton, if he were not of the same
shadowy stuff as Thomas the Rhymer: he has been guessed as identical
with the Welsh Taliesin. Fin MacCoul’s kingdom of Morven is unknown to
history; but at least, for the Gael both of Albin and of Erin, such a
hero lived in popular imagination as truly as Arthur and Achilles. It
seems pretty well settled that the poems first published under Ossian’s
name owed much to Macpherson, who thus showed truly unpoetic modesty in
standing back from renown that rang through Europe, though in England,
nowadays, Leslie Stephen is not the only critic to yawn over what once
enchanted Goethe and Napoleon; and Macaulay speaks with his cock-surest
scorn “of a story without evidence and of a book without merit.” It
is also agreed that Macpherson worked upon some documents, human or
written. When Dr. Johnson came hunting purblindly for evidence against
a real Ossian, there were bards alive in the Highlands who could
neither read nor write, yet whose poems passed as household words from
one unlettered fireside to another.
In the next century scores of collections of Gaelic poetry came to be
made; and still monotonous strains are murmured in the native tongue
of the mountains. There are also stirring marches and choruses, like
_Gabhaidh sinn an rathad mòr_, a tune known to Cockneys as their
degraded “Kafoozlem,” that from the mouths of Appin Stewarts pealed
defiance to the Macintyres, who had their own clan anthem in the
grand song of _Cruachan Beann_. But sadness is the main note of these
intricate and assonant metres, long drawn out round themes of love,
war, and misfortune, like the “old unhappy things” of Ossian. In later
times hymns as long as sermons have coloured the Celt’s less active
life. Angry satire is another mood of his muse, and riddles seem to
have had zest for his boyish mind; but he shows little taste for hearty
humour. In Scotland we have a vulgar saw that it takes a surgical
operation to force a joke into an Englishman’s head; and that reproach
might as truly be applied to a pure Highlandman, of whom it is well
said that his very language, in its weakness of a present tense, seems
always looking forward to a melancholy future or back to a melancholy
past.
Nor have schoolbooks and newspapers yet banished the homely tales and
traditions that linger about the smouldering light of peat fires. We
have seen how these legends often recall those of other lands, all
shaped as they may have been in some far-off nursery of the race. But
here they take on sombre colours and congenial shadows, flickering and
glooming in the alternation of long pale twilights and short dark days.
One interest they lack, that hinted at in the phrase “smoking-room
stories,” a spice better relished in Saxon palaces than in Gaelic
shieling or bothy. The character of these tales is well expressed by
Alexander Smith, who, if he did not know Gaelic, had a poet’s ear for
the universal language of human nature, and moreover seems to have
drawn at that fountain of Highland folk-lore, J. F. Campbell’s _Popular
Tales of the West Highlands_:
As the northern nations have a common flora, so they have a common
legendary literature. Supernaturalism belongs to their tales as the
aurora borealis belongs to their skies. Those stories I have heard
in Skye, and many others, springing from the same roots, I have had
related to me in the Lowlands and in Ireland. They are full of witches
and wizards; of great wild giants crying out, “Hiv! Haw Hoagraich!
It is a drink of thy blood that quenches my thirst this night”; of
wonderful castles with turrets and banqueting halls; of magic spells
and the souls of men and women dolefully imprisoned in shapes of
beast and bird. As tales few of them can be considered perfect; the
supernatural element is strong in many, but frequently it breaks
down under some prosaic or ludicrous circumstance: the spell exhales
somehow, and you care not to read further. Now and then a spiritual
and ghastly imagination passes into a revolting familiarity and
destroys itself. In these stories all times and conditions of life are
curiously mixed, and this mixture shows the passage of the story from
tongue to tongue through generations. If you discover on the bleak
Skye shore a log of wood with Indian carvings peeping through a crust
of native barnacles, it needs no prophet to see that it has crossed
the Atlantic.... Many of these stories, even when they are imperfect
in themselves, or resemble those told elsewhere, are curiously
coloured by Celtic scenery and pervaded by Celtic imagination. In
listening to them, one is specially impressed by a bare, desolate,
woodless country; and this impression is not produced by any formal
statement of fact, it arises partly from the paucity of actors in
the stories, and partly from the desert spaces over which the actors
travel, and partly from the number of carrion crows, and ravens, and
malign hill-foxes which they encounter in their journeyings. The
“hoody,” as the crow is called, hops and flits and croaks through
all the stories. His black wing is seen everywhere. And it is the
frequent appearance of these beasts and birds, never familiar, never
domesticated, always outside the dwelling, and of evil omen when they
fly or steal across the path, which gives to the stories much of their
weird and direful character. The Celt has not yet subdued nature. He
trembles before the unknown powers. He cannot be sportive for the fear
that is in his heart. In his legends there is no merry Puck, no Ariel,
no Robin Goodfellow, no half-benevolent, half-malignant Brownie even.
These creatures live in imaginations more emancipated from fear. The
mists blind the Celt on his perilous mountain-side, the sea is smitten
white on his rocks, the wind bends and dwarfs his pine wood, and as
Nature is cruel to him, and as his light and heat are gathered from
the moor, and his most plenteous food from the whirlpool and the foam,
we need not be surprised that few are the gracious shapes that haunt
his fancy.
Campbell of Isla was just in time to save from oblivion the Gaelic
shape of far-travelled tales which even a generation ago the Gael felt
half ashamed to repeat before unsympathetic strangers, and which now
linger only in secluded glens and islands, told in the native tongue
round peat fires by old folks too dim-eyed for newspapers. Superstition
dies harder than romance; but of his superstitions he still less
cares to speak, nor always to confess them to himself. They too are
catholic and human, shaped by the environment of his life from the same
materials as in fatter lands have dwindled to a horse-shoe nailed on a
stable door. The student of mankind needs little research to fashion
such shadowy images as come so ready to the mind’s eye, “where every
object of nature, even the unreasoning dreams of sleep, are mirrors
which flash back death”; and from the Highlander’s misty shrouds of
moor and sea, from the wraiths of his swollen waters, from ominous
lights burning on cruel waves, from ghostly stirrings and tappings
about his lone home, he may well have turned to the faith preached by
St. Columba, yet is slow of assured belief that—
God’s in His heaven,
All’s right with the world!
CHAPTER VI
TOURISTS
The moralist who loved a good hater has surely no right to complain of
not attracting affection; but I fear to shock many excellent persons
in professing that Dr. Johnson seems to me an overrated personality.
It is a commonplace that he shows much greater in Boswell than in his
own books; and to that infatuated worshipper we owe a rarely intimate
knowledge of one who appeals to John Bull as full of darling national
faults. No wonder that English writers should take a warm interest in
such a “character,” and that Cockneys should crown him as their king;
but when one finds Scotsmen of insight, like Macaulay and Carlyle,
joining the chorus of veneration, one hesitates to put forward one’s
own doubts to the contrary.
Still, at the risk of seeming to kick a dead lion, let me say what
an _advocatus diaboli_ might bring against the canonisation of Fleet
Street’s saint. For generations it has been dinned into our ears that
this man was wise, sturdy, manly, pious, and so forth, above his
fellows, while it is admitted that he was narrow-minded, ill-bred,
full of petty prejudices and credulities, much of a bully, as well as
on occasion a bit of a snob, as when he humbly deferred to the opinion
of a Hanoverian king, whose pension he had accepted after all he said
on that subject. He dealt much in moral maxims. So did Mr. Pecksniff.
He was generous and kindhearted to queer objects of charity: let that
stand to his credit. What was his vaunted sense of religion but an
erudite superstition, wide awake to the “folly and meanness of all
bigotry but his own,” and not saving him from craven dread of death? He
had such a lazy conscience that only when stung by Churchill’s satire
did he bring out the volumes on the subscription for which he had been
living for years. As to his love of truth, even Boswell confesses
the “robust sophistry” with which he would argue for the sake of
contradiction. As to his taste, let his criticisms on Shakespeare and
Milton speak. And why should we all be in a tale of reverence for the
wisdom whose deliverances have proved wrong on so many points, notably
in his opinion of Scotsmen. But for one Scot who was no great honour
to Scotland, this ponderous writer would surely have been long ago
“banished to that remote uncivil Pontus of the British poets,” instead
of being still welcome “within the cheery circle of the evening lamp
and fire.”
Even if one be moved to belittle this literary leviathan, one cannot
but respect the courage that took him as an inactive and infirm senior
into those ill-known isles, where indeed he shows to more advantage
than on some other scenes of his life, the Jacobite sentiments that
were his leaven of romance seeming to soften down such insolent
contempt of outlandish starvelings as counts with your stout John
Bull for virtue. He visited the Hebrides at an interesting time, when
their old life was undergoing a rapid transition under new conditions,
the commercial order, as R. L. Stevenson says, “succeeding at a bound
to an age of war abroad and patriarchal communism at home.” Some
account of his venturesome journey, then, may not be without interest
for a generation that does not much read that classical _Journey to
the Western Isles_, nor even Boswell’s own account of his bear-show,
which in truth is more readable, none the less so for embalming some
of the oracle’s raciest impromptus before they were cooked up into
“Johnsonese.”
At Inverness the tourists took to horseback, with two Highlanders
running beside them to bring back the horses. They travelled down
the east side of Loch Ness to Fort-Augustus, beyond which they found
soldiers at work upon the new military road by which they struck across
the Rough Bounds into Glenmoriston, and thence by Glenshiel to Glenelg.
Neither Boswell nor Johnson has much to say of the picturesqueness
that moves their successors; the devout biographer is more concerned
to record their fear of dirt and vermin, and the great lexicographer
emits such recondite observations as—“Mountainous countries are not
passed but with difficulty, not merely from the labour of climbing,
for to climb is not always necessary; but because that which is not
mountain is commonly bog, through which the way must be picked with
caution.” After the ascent of one trying steep the sage was so cross
that his Highland attendant cried out to him, “See such pretty goats!”
as to a naughty child. This familiarity amazed Boswell, who found it
quite natural that his tired mentor should fly into a passion with him
for riding on ahead. When they reached the inn at Glenelg there was
some excuse for being sulky, since, a dirty fellow bouncing out of the
bed where they were to sleep, they chose to lie rather on hay, and
got nothing to eat or drink but a bottle of rum and some sugar, sent
in by a gentleman as tribute to the philosopher, who now behaved more
philosophically, while it was the turn of his famulus to be fretful.
Had the tourist of to-day seen those inns before they were turned
into hotels, he might well bless the road-makers of the Highlands.
But in Glenmoriston our travellers had had the luck to find an inn of
which one room possessed a chimney and another a small glass window. A
generation later the Rev. James Hall has to tell of one of the havens
on this route, that after a hungry journey he confined his refreshment
to bottled porter, on observing the hands of both mistress and maid.
[Illustration: CASTLE URQUHART, LOCH NESS]
The more luminous and voluminous Pennant, who had preceded that pair of
tourists in the Highlands by a couple of years, exclaims over the fact
that for two hundred miles along the west coast, from Campbeltown to
Thurso, there was nothing that could be called a town. In Skye there
were only one or two inns, and not one shop, according to Johnson, who
gives the population of the island at some 15,000. The strangers
had to depend on private hospitality; and their first experience was
not cheering, as Sir Alexander Macdonald, who had come to a small house
on the shore to receive them, was liberal only in bagpipe music. There
were not even sugar-tongs on the table, Johnson noted with disgust,
where knives and forks had made their appearance not long before; while
indeed this fastidious citizen himself was in the way of eating fish
with his fingers, so that his _convives_ might have felt some need
for sugar-tongs. But “Sir Sawney’s,” as he nicknames the parsimonious
chief, was the one house at which he complains of mean entertainment.
Usually he was treated like a lion, all the society of the district
being gathered to hear him roar; and for the nonce he proved so little
pock-puddingish as to enunciate “that which is not best may be yet
very far from bad, and he that shall complain of his fare in the
Hebrides has improved his delicacy more than his manhood.” Boswell
was satisfied with the respectful recognition given to his great man;
and it was only towards the end of their trip that one ignorant laird
asked if he belonged to the Johnsons (_i.e._ the MacIans) of Glencoe or
of Ardnamurchan. Both travellers were edified by the books possessed
by their hosts, who on the whole proved more cultured than they had
expected, though their expectations were not pitched quite so low as
that of an English tourist party stated, a generation later, to have
equipped themselves with beads, red cloth, and such gewgaws for traffic
with the naked islanders.
[Illustration: SPINNING IN SKYE]
Skye was then mainly divided among three clans, Macdonald, Macleod,
and Mackinnon, whose hereditary feuds, at last kept down by the arm
of the law, began to be confused by the intrusion of strangers. The
clansmen, unplaided and disarmed, had turned their claymores into
such crooked spades as served them to dig up their rough soil; and
Boswell observed how their targets came in useful to cover buttermilk
barrels. The chiefs no longer went in semi-barbarous state with a
“tail” of swashbuckling henchmen, and had ceased to keep a petty court
of bards and sennachies, though a piper or two would not be wanting.
Deprived of their hereditary jurisdiction, as some of them were ready
to forget where the nearest magistrate might not be easily appealed
to, they still had such dignity and influence that it would be their
own fault if they did not attract the affectionate loyalty of which
our travellers record some notable signs. But this sentiment was being
uprooted by a disposition to raise the rents of their poor land, now
commonly paid in money instead of kind and service. A new spirit of
calculation was abroad since the days when faithful tenants had taxed
themselves to pay double dues, to the power in possession, and to the
exiled lord. Johnson shrewdly observed how the pastoral state began “to
be a little variegated with commerce,” how this Arcadia had been “a
muddy mixture of pride and ignorance,” and how the chiefs were disposed
to take out in profit what they lost in power, then “as they
gradually degenerate from patriarchal rulers to rapacious landlords,
they will divest themselves of the little that remains.” Pennant, who
takes more note of the misery and dejection of the people, puts their
numbers lower than Johnson, and states that the rental of the island,
£3500 in 1750, had in twenty years been doubled or trebled on some
farms.
The gentry of the island, lairds, “tacksmen,” _i.e._ the higher class
of tenants, and ministers, lived with more or less show of comfort in
decent houses of two storeys, where, indeed, the parlours had often to
do double duty as bedrooms, and the floors were not always clean or
dry. The gentlemen, Johnson asserts, were inclined to the Episcopal
Church; but could not afford any services beyond those of the parish
ministers, who might have to preach in a room, at intervals of two
or three weeks, beside the ruined chapels “which now stand faithful
witnesses of the triumph of the Reformation.” Of these pastors were
“found several with whom I could not converse, without wishing, as
my respect increased, that they had not been Presbyterians.” He
rather exaggerates in giving them the credit of having exterminated
the popular superstitions, that would still take a good deal of
extermination. He tells the story of Maclean caning the people of Rum
away from mass, a high-handed conversion that in the neighbouring
Catholic islands earned for Protestantism the nickname “religion of the
yellow stick.” He shows how schools were at work for enlightenment,
where a century would yet pass before the three R’s came within reach
of every bare-trotting Gael. In Skye he heard of two grammar schools,
at which boys boarded for three or four pounds a year, but only during
the summer months, “for in winter provision cannot be made for any
considerable number in one place.”
Even in the better-class houses wheaten bread was exceptional, oaten
and barley cakes being the staff of life, with meat, game, fish,
cheese, and preparations of milk. The cottars’ fare was chiefly some
kind of brose. Their poor crops went largely in making whisky, like
that “Talisker,” now renowned, which is said to owe its excellence to
the water coming over some dozens of falls; but an English distillery
has made in vain the expensive experiment of importing this charmed
water. Only in Iona did Johnson hear of beer being brewed. Though every
man took his “morning” as a matter of course, he did not see “much
intemperance,” convivial gentlemen being perhaps a little shy before
the philosopher, who tasted whisky only once out of curiosity (“Let
me know what it is that makes a Scotchman happy!”); but he cared not
to inquire as to the process of distilling, “nor do I wish to improve
the art of making poison pleasant.” He certainly saw one “drunken
dog” in the person of Boswell, who on a certain occasion sat up over
a punch-bowl till 5 A.M., to be satirically rebuked by his monitor:
“It is a poor thing for a fellow to get drunk at night, and skulk to
bed, and let his friends have no sport.” Boswell took special care to
have this teetotaler provided with water at dinner, who was also well
supplied with his beloved tea, and with the honey and preserves he
admired on a northern breakfast table, “polluted as it was with slices
of strong cheese.” The main deficiency was in fruit and vegetables,
chiefly represented by barley broth. Punch, made for dinner and supper,
which etymologically should have five ingredients, here wanted one,
for Sydney Smith was never so far from a lemon. “Under such skies
can be expected no great exuberance of vegetation,” indeed, and “few
vows are made to Flora in the Hebrides.” Some of the lairds were
trying to cultivate orchards about their houses. Others were zealously
introducing turnips and potatoes, that have made such a difference to
the Highlands but for years were banned by the stubborn conservatism of
their people, as in other parts of Europe. What late hay they gathered
“by most English farmers would be thrown away.”
Their stock consisted chiefly of the small cattle, in which a Highland
maiden’s dowry would formerly be paid, like the price of a Kaffir
bride. They had also ponies, an inferior breed of sheep, many goats,
with fowls and half-wild geese. The Highland prejudice against pigs
was still so strong that Johnson saw only one in the Hebrides;[4] and
a like _scunner_, older than their knowledge of the Bible, kept the
people from eating hares, eels, and scaleless fish such as turbot.
Hares and rabbits had no chance against the big foxes, on whose head
was set a guinea blood-money. Rats and mice were strangers to Skye, but
the Hanover rat now began to invade some of the islands. The place of
these vermin was taken by weasels, which infested even the houses.
[4] It is a question whether the Celtic aversion to pork had not its
origin in some such reverence as the cow bears among the Hindoos. The
Gaelic for pig, which to Saxon ears sounds so fitting, _Muck_, has
honour in place-names, as that of the great Ben Muich Dhu himself, not
to speak of the “Boar” of Badenoch, the “Sow” of Athole, and frequent
names of lochs and islands. In older days the Highlanders appear to
have abstained from eating all fish; so at least some antiquaries
assert.
In this land of “little sun and no shade,” so deeply fretted by
inlets that no part of it lies more than a few miles from the sea,
where “every step is on rock or mire,” Johnson missed villages and
enclosures. “The traveller,” he laments to Mrs. Thrale, “wanders
through a naked desert, gratified sometimes, but rarely, with the sight
of cows, and now and then finds a heap of loose stones and turf in a
cavity between rocks, where a being born with all those powers which
education expands, and all those sensations which culture refines,
is condemned to shelter itself from the wind and rain.” These “its”
were often half starved, so could not but excite a mixture of contempt
and pity in the well-fed English visitor. Pennant, with his practical
eye, speaks of the people as torpid from idleness, only bestirring
themselves at the pinch of famine; but he does not want sympathy
for them in the almost chronic famines due to improvidence under a
miserable climate, where hundreds “annually drag through the season a
wretched life; and numbers unknown, in all parts of the western isles,
fall beneath the pressure, some of hunger and some of the putrid fever,
the epidemic of the coasts, originating from unwholesome food.”
Leaving the comparatively green promontory of Sleat, Johnson’s party
rode over moors and bogs to Corriechatachin, near Broadford, where bad
weather kept them a couple of days till Macleod of Raasay sent his
“carriage” for them, and as conductor a gentleman of the clan who had
done the same service to Prince Charlie in his wanderings. The carriage
turned out to be an open boat, in which four half-naked men, chorusing
Gaelic songs, rowed them through the Sound of Scalpa, and across a
rough open sea to the island of Raasay, Dr. Johnson sitting high on
the stern “like a magnificent Triton.” In the new mansion-house, to
which the Laird had removed from his tumbledown castle, they found a
whole troop of Macleods, who every night danced and sang in honour of
their guests; but where they all slept was not so evident, some forty
persons in eleven rooms. Among the rest was the Macleod of Dunvegan, a
young man fresh from Oxford, who invited the strangers to his castle,
for which they set out, not without scruple, on a fine Sunday. Landed
at the harbour of Portree, then not even a village, where an emigrant
ship was lying as hint of new times for the Highlands, they went round
by Kingsburgh, that Johnson might have the satisfaction of making Flora
Macdonald’s acquaintance and of occupying the very bed in which the
Wanderer had slept; but the royal sheets had been devoted as shroud for
the hostess. “These are not Whigs.”
So little had they prospered on princely gratitude that Flora and her
husband were on the point of emigrating to America, from which she
eventually returned to be buried at Kilmuir in a grave left for our
time to honour. From the heroine’s own mouth, with ekings-out of
other information, Boswell compiled an account of Charles Edward’s
escape, which could now be safely published: even when she had been
brought a prisoner to London, the authorities seemed not very eager to
convict a fair traitor whose case excited much sympathy; and perhaps
the prince owed not more to her courage than to other half-loyal Macs
who, in command of the local militia, winked hard at the tricks of
their kinsfolk, and did not very keenly play the bloodhound upon the
fugitive’s doublings. Macdonalds, Macleods, and Mackinnons all were
willing to help him away, though not many of them had turned out to
take risks in his rash enterprise; and the poorest cottar despised that
price set on his head, while one of the men who would not earn £30,000
by betraying him came afterwards to be hanged for stealing a cow. The
most zealous agents of the Government in this matter seem to have been
Presbyterian ministers, Lord Macaulay’s grandfather for one: this might
be quoted as a case of ascending heredity.
[Illustration: GLEN SLIGACHAN, SKYE]
Dunvegan, to Boswell’s delight, was a real old castle, romantically
placed on a rock, and his companion rejoiced to find that its
_châtelaine_, having lived in London, “knew all the arts of southern
elegance and all the modes of English economy.” Pennant gives the
prosaic detail that there was a post-office here, in something like a
village, whence a packet sailed once a fortnight for the Long Island.
“We came in at the wrong end of the island!” Johnson exclaimed, in no
hurry to leave such good quarters. The old gentleman was suffering
from a cold, having “very strangely slept without a nightcap,” but
one of the ladies of this hospitable family made him a large flannel
one. As to that “strange” habit of sleeping bare-headed but for a
handkerchief, Boswell very ingenuously owns that if his oracle had
always worn a nightcap, and found the Highlanders not doing so, “he
would have wondered at their barbarity.” We may remember how in 1746
it was one of the royal fugitive’s hardships to part with his wig. Now
the well-nightcapped Doctor settled down in clover, dropping pearls of
gruff wisdom eagerly picked up by Boswell, who for his part chuckled to
be the keeper of such a treasure, comparing himself to “a dog who has
got hold of a large piece of meat, and runs away with it to a corner,
where he may devour it in peace.” But if he had no longer to share
Johnson’s talk with the members of the Club, he had a rival satellite
in the Rev. Donald Macqueen, minister of Snizort, who “adhered to”
them on most of their journeys in Skye, and so well pleased the great
man as only now and then to get a taste of his rough tongue, while his
book duly compliments this gentleman on account “of our intelligence
facilitated and our conversation enlarged.”
At Dunvegan they stayed a week, hearing the traditions of the castle,
and seeing its relics, for one that horn of Rorie More, to hold two
or three bottles of wine, which every Laird of Macleod must drink at
a draught in proof of his manhood; in our degenerate age, it appears,
this ceremony has to be performed by help of a false bottom. No doubt
they also saw, though neither of them mentions it, another more lordly
drinking-cup bearing the date 993, which seems to have been a chalice;
also the “fairy flag” of Dunvegan, a faded silk banner from the East,
probably a relic of crusading, which may be displayed thrice and thrice
only to save the house of Macleod from ruin—as it has done twice, and
may do once more. Though the young chief was deep in debt, he let wine
flow generously,—there being, indeed, no custom-house in Skye,—“and
venison came to the table every day in its various forms.”
Boswell could hardly get his unwieldy companion moved from this Capua;
but on September 21 they set out on their way back, travelling from the
west coast by Ullinish and Talisker, put up by one Macleod or other
as best he could; and it made part of Highland hospitality to convoy
the guests on to their next shelter. At Talisker, where their host
was a colonel in the Dutch service, they met young Maclean of Coll,
who henceforth became their cicerone for the southern isles. This
promising laird Johnson compared to Peter the Great. He had apprenticed
himself to practical farming in England as a school of improvement for
the barren islands, on which he was the first to plant turnips, an
innovation pronounced by Highland wise-acres “the idle project of an
idle head, heated by English fancies.” His father lived at Aberdeen for
education of the family, leaving such full power in the hands of the
son that he commonly bore the family title of “Coll,” like the young
Lochiel and Glengarry of ’45. To the veriest cit it is hardly needful
to explain that a northern laird was known by the name of his property,
or a farmer by that of his holding, where indeed certain surnames may
be so little distinguishing that in a hive of Campbells, Macleans, or
what not, one gets to speak of children as “Johnny Loch so-and-so” or
“Jessie Glen this-or-that.”
With young Coll they now travelled back to Sleat, looking out for a
chance of leaving Skye, which would not present itself every day in
any lull of the equinoctial gales. By this time the townsmen, who
had expected to slip from island to island as easily as ordering a
postchaise, found it was more a question of going where and when they
could. Boswell began to fidget about getting back to Edinburgh in time
for the legal session, while Johnson in his whimsical moods now talked
gaily of fresh adventures, then again grumbled at not being safe and
comfortable on the mainland. At Armadale they were entertained more
hospitably by his factor than they had been on landing by the now
absent Macdonald chieftain, and the people appeared in no haste to get
rid of that “honest man” who had done them the honour of coming so
far to lecture them. But the wind suddenly changing, on the morning
of Sunday, October 3, they were hurried on board a vessel bound for
Mull. Soon a storm came on; both the unseasoned voyagers were sea-sick;
Boswell was frightened to his prayers; neither of them had anything to
eat; and after being tossed about all day, even the skipper was glad
to run before the wind for Coll, where they cast anchor.
Safely landed, young Coll took them over the island to his own house, a
new one which was the best they had seen in the Hebrides, but Johnson’s
humour was to belittle it as “a tradesman’s box.” Not being occupied
by the old laird, it was hardly in a state to entertain distinguished
guests, for whose entertainment Coll collected from his kinsfolk such
books as Lucas _On Happiness_, More’s _Dialogues_, and Gregory’s
_Geometry_, that might pass for light reading beside the pocket volume
Johnson had laid in at Inverness—Cocker’s _Arithmetic_!—Boswell
having then equipped himself with Ovid’s _Epistles_ to “solace many a
weary hour.” Johnson took interest in the traditions of the family,
while his host was forward to show him signs of nascent civilisation,
about huts with gardens gathered into a clachan. Coll had a shop and
actually a mile of road, not to speak of a school kept in summer by
a young man who walked all the way to Aberdeen for the university
session. Here the visitors remained imprisoned for a week, then moved
down to the harbour to be ready for the sailing of a Campbeltown
kelp-ship on which they had engaged passage for Mull. On the morning of
the 14th the chance came by a fair breeze, and with Coll in attendance
they reached Tobermory at mid-day, just in time to escape the daily
gale that kept some dozen ships bound in this harbour.
At Tobermory they found rest in a “tolerable inn,” from which Boswell
hints how it was not easy to start his companion, while Johnson
admits that the eagerness to see Iona, as _bouquet_ of their tour, was
mainly on Boswell’s side. Taking horse, they rode through thick and
thin over the northern part of Mull, “a most dolorous country,” where
Johnson lost the oak stick which he declared to be a valuable piece
of timber in such a wilderness. “Your country consists of two things,
stone and water. There is indeed a little earth above the stone in
some places, but a very little; and the stone is always appearing. It
is like a man in rags; the naked skin is still peeping out.” Such were
the complimentary jests by which Boswell reports him earning from the
open-mouthed natives so admiring epithets as “a hogshead of sense”
and a “dungeon of wit,” where indeed any kind of stranger would be
as welcome as a peepshow, and two learned gentlemen from London and
Edinburgh made a whole circus.
At night the boat of an Irish vessel obligingly ferried them across
to put up with M’Quarrie, “chief of Ulva’s isle,” about to sell his
possessions for debt and to enter the army at the age of sixty-two,
with forty years of life still before him. A Campbell, of course, was
the purchaser. Next day they went on by boat to Inch Kenneth, where
in dwindled state lived Sir Allan Maclean, head of another clan whose
star paled before the risen sun of the Campbells. On this island
Johnson’s heart was cheered by the sight of a cart road, and Boswell’s
by a parcel of the _Caledonian Mercury_, the first newspaper he had
seen for many a day. A little later, on the mainland, they found in a
Glasgow paper a report that Dr. Johnson was still kept in Skye by bad
weather, on which the paragrapher of the period smartly remarked—“Such
a philosopher detained on an almost barren island resembles a whale
left upon the strand.” Could he have heard Goldsmith’s happy hit at the
stylist who “would make little fishes talk like whales”?
After a day’s rest, parting with Coll, they put themselves in charge
of his chief, who took them along the coast in an open boat to Iona,
till lately his own property, but now sold to the Duke of Argyll. None
the less was Maclean welcomed with humble affection by his transferred
clansmen, to one of whom, that had offended him by not sending some
rum, his bitterest reproach was, “I believe you are a Campbell!” These
men belonged to the generation over which their chief had once power of
life and death; and to Boswell the culprit protested, “Had he sent his
dog for the rum, I would have given it; I would cut my bones for him!”
The pilgrims from Fleet Street, who embraced each other on touching
this sacred shore, were in too exalted mood to grumble at having to
sleep in a barn. In the morning they examined the ruins that stirred
Johnson’s famous paragraph—“Far be from me and from my friends such
frigid philosophy as may conduct us indifferent and unmoved over any
ground which has been dignified by wisdom, bravery, or virtue.” At the
time Boswell showed himself the more deeply affected, who left his
breakfast to return to the cathedral for solitary meditation. “I hoped
that, ever after having been in this holy place, I should maintain an
exemplary conduct.” Johnson mischievously writes to Mrs. Thrale how at
Inch Kenneth his disciple had stolen into the ruins there to pray, but
was soon scared out by fear of spectres.
Landed again in Mull, they travelled round its south shore by Loch Buy,
and on October 22 were ferried across to Oban. Next day they rode on
to Inveraray, in bad weather, which almost for the first time moved
Johnson to what our generation finds a becoming sentiment. “The wind
was low, the rain was heavy, and the whistling of the blast, the fall
of the shower, the rush of the cataracts, and the roar of the torrent,
made a nobler chorus of the rough music of nature than it had ever
been my chance to hear before.” In ten miles they crossed fifty-five
streams. He was better pleased to come upon a good road that led them
to an inn “not only commodious but magnificent,” at Inveraray, where
“the difficulties of peregrination were now at an end.”
The distinguished chiels who had been taking such notes spent nearly
two months on a trip done by the live transatlantic tourist in as many
days. They had passed through and near some of the scenic wonders of
the kingdom, with as little notice as if these had been Primrose Hill
or Turnham Green. Wherever they stopped they made a point of civilly
visiting what ruins, antiquities, and such like were on show, but
it does not appear that they asked for beauty or sublimity, nor did
their guides suggest going out of the way for any prospect beyond that
of a bed and a dinner. Boswell was the less Cockneyish of the two,
who could cry out at sight of an “immense mountain” which Johnson
scornfully put in its place as an “immense protuberance”; and we know
how he thought one green field as like another as two straws. They
did turn aside to see the Falls of Foyers, as to Boswell seems not
worth mentioning, while the rough scramble made Johnson wish “that our
curiosity might have been gratified with less trouble and danger.”
All travellers of that century, till Gray, were much of the same
mind. Pennant has small space to waste on Highland scenery, though he
so far comes under the _genius loci_ as to put his very wide-awake
view of the people in the form of a fictitious dream. Burt frankly
found the mountains ugly, “most disagreeable when the heather is in
bloom”—prodigious! On Raasay Boswell was so frisky as to walk over
the island and dance at the top of Duncan, but he has not a word to
say about the view. For all their interest in Prince Charlie, nobody
took the Fleet Street gentlemen to see his cave near Portree; and
but for passing by Kingsburgh they left untouched the north-eastern
peninsula of Trotternish, tipped by the Macdonald castle of Duntulm
and edged by the long line of precipitous faces showing the giant’s
teeth of the Storr and such a “nightmare of nature” as the Quiraing.
The north-western headland, Vaternish, they skirted to gain the Macleod
castle, where Johnson “tasted lotus” at the young chief’s board, but
was less concerned about the mighty moor-mounds called “Macleod’s
Tables,” and never heard of “Macleod’s Maidens,” those graceful spires
rising sheer out of the sea, nor of that dizzy Waterstein cliff that
faces the Atlantic near Dunvegan, and is continued by precipitous walls
down to Talisker. He could not help hearing Rorie More’s cascade, to
which he one day took a toddle between the showers; but neither the
bear nor his monkey put himself much about unless to look owlishly
at some “Temple of Anaitis,” or some cave recalling that of Virgil’s
Sibyl. Boswell just mentions the Coolins, as reminding him of Corsica,
but nobody drew their attention to that wild sierra conspicuous from
nearly every part of Skye, an eerie chaos of wrinkled, rusted, ruined
tops that “resemble the other hills on the earth’s surface as Hindoo
deities resemble human beings”; nobody told them of the black lochs
and gloomy corries hidden in those storm-breeding recesses; nobody
advised them to make the rough tramp up Glen Sligachan or the perilous
ascent of Blaaven, or even to look at that highest point whose name
titles it Inachievable, as it is not to practised mountaineers of
our own time. Two well-to-do gentlemen had not come all the way from
London and Edinburgh to distress themselves by going near that “most
savage scene of desolation in Britain” —hardly accessible still
unless through Loch Scavaig’s brighter anteroom, and then shunned by
the Skyemen as goblin-haunted—the naked hollow of Loch Coruisk, whose
uncanny solitude a child then in the nursery would bring to fame as a
Highland Acheron:
Seems that primeval earthquake’s sway
Hath rent a strange and shatter’d way
Through the rude bosom of the hill,
And that each naked precipice,
Sable ravine, and dark abyss,
Tells of the outrage still.
The wildest glen, but this, can show
Some touch of Nature’s genial glow;
On high Benmore green mosses grow,
And heath-bells bud in deep Glencoe,
And copse on Cruchan-Ben;
But here,—above, around, below,
On mountain or in glen,
Nor tree, nor shrub, nor plant, nor flower,
Nor ought of vegetative power,
The weary eye may ken.
For all is rocks at random thrown,
Black waves, bare crags, and banks of stone,
As if were here denied
The summer sun, the spring’s sweet dew,
That clothe with many a varied hue
The bleakest mountain-side.
[Illustration: LOCH CORUISK, SKYE]
In coasting Skye, not indeed along the finest stretch, all our
ponderous Rambler observed was how the crags made landing difficult,
especially for an enemy; while Boswell cast a glance at “hills and
mountains in gradations of wildness.” The latter, even when not
perturbed by a rough sea-passage, owns that he finds “a difficulty in
describing visible objects,” such as those revealing themselves thus to
a ready writer of our time:
Here we beheld a sight which seemed the glorious fabric of a
vision:—a range of small heights sloping from the deep green sea,
every height crowned with a columnar cliff of basalt, and each rising
over each, higher and higher, till they ended in a cluster of towering
columns, minarets, and spires, over which hovered wreaths of
delicate mist, suffused with the pink light from the east. We were
looking on the spiral pillars of the Quiraing. In a few minutes
the vision had faded; for the yacht was flying faster and faster,
assisted a little too much by a savage puff from off the Quiraing’s
great cliffs; but other forms of beauty arose before us as we went.
The whole coast from Aird Point to Portree forms a panorama of
cliff scenery quite unmatched in Scotland. Layers of limestone dip
into the sea, which washes them into horizontal forms, resembling
gigantic slabs of white and grey masonry, rising sometimes stair
above stair, water-stained, and hung with many-coloured weed; and on
these slabs stand the dark cliffs and spiral columns: towering into
the air like the fretwork of some Gothic temple, roofless to the
sky; clustered sometimes together in black masses of eternal shadow;
torn open here and there to show glimpses of shining lawns sown in
the heart of the stone, or flashes of torrents rushing in silver
veins through the darkness; crowned in some places by a green patch,
on which the goats feed small as mice; and twisting frequently into
towers of most fantastical device, that lie dark and spectral against
the grey background of the air. To our left we could now behold the
island of Rona, and the northern end of Raasay. All our faculties,
however, were soon engaged in contemplating the Storr, the highest
part of the northern ridge of Skye, terminating in a mighty insulated
rock or monolith which points solitary to heaven, two thousand three
hundred feet above the sea, while at its base rock and crag have been
torn into the wildest forms by the teeth of earthquake, and a great
torrent leaps foaming into the Sound. As we shot past, a dense white
vapour enveloped the lower part of the Storr, and towers, pyramids,
turrets, monoliths were shooting out above it like a supernatural city
in the clouds.
From writers like Robert Buchanan one might quote dozens of such
enthusiastic descriptions, showing how a later generation has gone
back closer to the bosom of Mother Nature than lay that age of wigs
and nightcaps. Yet it is those whose play rather than their work takes
them into the wilds who are most prone to such new enthusiasm. Now
that Skye is somewhat thinly dotted with birch and larch clumps and
gardens, and belted with a high-road winding round her deep inlets
between groups of houses where church, schoolhouse, and hotel have
sprung up beneath cairns and ruins, her inhabitants are rather apt to
wonder why strangers give themselves so much trouble in seeking out the
most forbidding wilds of their island, that excite their own feelings
no more than Cobbett admired Hindhead when he found the roads rough
and the soil not suitable for turnips. Those weird scenes which the
well-fed Sassenach seeks, as Buchanan says, to “galvanise” his soul
with holiday emotion, overshadow the cottar’s daily life with poverty,
hunger, and dread. Some parts of Skye have now been made comparatively
trim and tame, beside others left hopelessly barren and dismal, with
peat and rushes for their best crop; but nowhere perhaps in Britain can
one better learn how “nature is not always gracious; that not always
does she outstretch herself in low-lying bounteous lands, over which
sober sunsets redden and heavy-uddered cattle low; but that she has
fierce hysterical moods in which she congeals into granite precipice
and peak, and draws around herself and her companions the winds that
moan and bluster, veils of livid rain.” This poor “island of cloud” is
indeed most rich in “frozen terror and superstition” for those who
have eyes to see.
[Illustration: SKYE CROFTER]
Between contemporary pilgrims of the picturesque and the dull observers
of older days, came to Skye an invasion of geologists and such like,
who did much towards proclaiming its grand points. One of the pioneers
of scientific invasion was the Frenchman Faujas de St. Fond, who does
not shine in the orthography of Scottish names. But of these explorers
one need not speak here, unless to distinguish that humorous and
hard-headed savant MacCulloch, whose hammer was brought to bear on
many time-weathered sentiments. His _Western Islands_ is more strictly
geological, but his _Highlands and Western Isles_ is full of rollicking
pages, though stuffed rather too much with learned facetiousness,
which would have tickled Mr. Shandy, while it may prove hard reading
“when, in after ages, the youths of Polynesia shall be flogged into
English and Gaelic as we have been into Greek and Latin” —a sentence
that appears rough sketch for a more celebrated Mac’s New Zealander.
Macaulay may also have lifted the formula, “every schoolboy knows,”
from this author, who varies that phrase by “the merest schoolboy”
or “the minutest Grecian,” and in more boldly laying down “all the
world knows what Callimachus says,” will not recommend himself to a
generation better acquainted with Macaulay’s dicta and dogmata than
with what song the Sirens sang, or what tartan Achilles wore when he
seems to have disguised himself in a kilt. Another famous saying, that
has become a _cliché_ in our day, as to the South Sea islanders’ trade
of taking in one another’s washing, seems adumbrated by MacCulloch’s
wonder how Highland shop-keepers contrive to keep open, “unless they
have agreed to live on gingerbread kings and carraway comfits, and to
buy all their pins and tape from each other.” And for a final sample of
this author’s shrewd wit, let us hear that “never have books been so
black, so thick, so large and so long, as when they have been written
about nothings.” This warning spurs me on from digressions that might
be extended to a folio—
Heavy and thick as a wall of brick,
But not so heavy and not so thick
As—
some volumes of travel one could mention.
One need not waste many words on the Cockney tourists who get the
length of Skye to stare at the children’s bare legs and to sniff at
the peat fires, such admiration as they are capable of being directed
by tourist tickets and guide-books. By Cockneyism I do not mean
citizenship of the world’s greatest city; indeed it is not for me to
file the international nest that has grown so big round the sound of
Bow Bells. To be a right Cockney is to be impotent of any outlook but
from our own Charing Cross or other restricted observatory, in which
moral sense we are all by nature Cockneys, some more, some less. There
are Cockneys of time as well as of place. The eighteenth was very much
of a Cockney century, hoodwinked by its own wigs, nightcaps, pews,
quartos, and other indispensable institutions. The nineteenth century
has taken pains to foster a more catholic spirit; but some of its sons
are slow to learn how poor is their little duck puddle or brackish
lochan beside the ocean that goes round the earth, itself a drop in
that inconceivable immensity of forces and phenomena against which the
brightest human life flies out to die like the tiniest peat spark.
To my mind some of the most offensive Cockneys are those who never
drop the _h_ of “Hail Columbia!” I am not specially dotting the _i_’s
of this remark for a certain couple that some years ago undertook to
make Johnson’s tour on foot, then, finding the weather chill and wet,
came back to publish an ill-humoured and well-illustrated book that
got them into critical hot water. Still less need one have anything
but a thousand welcomes for the American travellers who are travellers
indeed, who look through glasses of knowledge and sympathy rather
than through prejudiced goggles dulling every prospect, seen as from
the rush of a motor-car. But there is a kind of U.S.A. bookmaker,
who very much “fancies” his acuteness, bounded on one side by the
spelling-book and on the other by the sensational newspaper; and such a
smart descendant of ours has no shame in exposing his narrow-mindedness
while exulting over the nakedness of his grandfatherland. Boswell did
not write himself down an ass more plainly than some note-takers I
could quote, whose standard of measurement seems always the Capitol at
Washington, the water tower of Chicago, the Nob Hill of ’Frisco, or
some other universal hub of their self-satisfaction. What they always
cry out upon is the poverty, the shiftlessness, the backwardness of
Highland homes, for which they go on to blame the landlords as tyrants
unscrupulous as Tammany bosses, or Western evictors of Nez Percés
Indians. Their pity for the poor does them credit; but much of it is
wasted by complacent philanthropists unable to conceive how life may
be worth living without ice-cream, elevators, political “machines,”
hourly newspaper editions, endless Stock Exchange tapes, and the like
necessaries of high-toned civilisation. To this kind of transatlantic
tripper who comes hurriedly poking into lordly hall and smoky hovel,
peeping with such an uppish air on our manners and customs as if we
were Sandwich Islanders, one would say _Procul este profani_! but of
course one might as well try to scare a yellow-press reporter with a
notice to trespassers. And when the like of him has published his hasty
impressions, these may make wholesome study for us as showing how our
ancient idols strike a stranger from some exceedingly “up to date”
standpoint.
To find the western islands described with insight and sympathy one
can go to the writers above quoted, and to Miss Gordon Cumming’s
_Hebrides_, which I have not quoted on Skye, for fear of being tempted
to deck my grey page unduly in borrowed plumes as from some bird of
paradise. She was doubly a Highlander by blood, who could also inform
her survey with comparisons wide-drawn from other lands. Buchanan, I
fear, was born south of the Border, yet his forebears must have heard
the slogan of the wild Macfarlanes on Loch Lomond. As for Alexander
Smith, unless descended from some Highland Gow, such as that Hal
who fought on the Inch of Perth, he may frankly be set down for a
Sassenach, a Kilmarnock body “at that”; but this poet’s prose is thick
set with Highlands of fancy; and no book of the kind makes better
reading than his _Summer in Skye_. All these writers, by the way, have
a good word for Dr. Johnson, who so roughly abused their country; and
when I consider how that worthy did penance at Uttoxeter for a sin of
his youth, I am half-minded to humble myself on the cutty-stool as else
unable to look up to one whom so many better men have judged great and
wise.
CHAPTER VII
LOCHABER NO MORE!
For a century and a half claymore and dirk have rusted all over
the Highlands, where ben and glen echo the report of breechloading
guns, and the gaff gleams and the reel whirrs by loch or river. But
peace, too, has her cruelties; and some of the misery once brought
into mountain glens by fierce raiders came again through spectacled
and moralising economists, who with more or less good intentions
displaced, shuffled, and banished a population deeply rooted in love
of their Lochabers. Dr. Johnson foresaw in part what would result from
the change of patriarchal community to business relations between
dependants of whose inveterate troubles he was ignorant, and chiefs
whom he found on the point of degenerating into “rapacious landlords.”
Another tourist, a generation later, remarked that clan loyalty hung
much on the fact of the people being tenants-at-will, and that long
leases would put an end to the old dependence. Johnson was not so
shrewd in judging that the people would haste to expatriate themselves
as soon as they saw a way open to lands “less bleak and barren than
their own.” The Celt’s love for his home and his hatred for change made
the course of improvement to run rougher here than in the Lowlands.
And the Highland “improvements,” for which the ground was cleared
by bayonets, brought little good to many of the people. They found
it harder to pay rent in money than in blood and affection. Their
chiefs proved as often selfishly exacting as the clansmen ignorant and
obstinate. The white-faced sheep that nibbled away the romance of the
Highlands were more the charge or the profit of intruding Sassenachs.
Since the price of wool went down, sheep have much given way to deer,
that profit no one but the owners of high-rented shootings, and keep
cottars sitting up all night to guard their poor fields, preserved
for the sport of absentee lords or purse-proud strangers, whose worst
service to the country has been turning the free son of the mist into
a well-fed menial, broken in to touch his hat for the tips he levies
in lieu of blackmail. It is stated that the demoralescent Celt does
not so much object to deer forests, as barring out his old enemy the
sheep farmer, and as bringing into the country a class of men who spend
freely, sometimes in the way of bribes given to secure good sport among
herds that to a sportsman of Colquhoun’s stamp seemed almost as tame as
sheep.
The Highlander asked for bread, and his masters gave him sometimes
stones and sometimes sovereigns. Not that his old masters had done much
better for him, minus the sovereigns. If the Highlands had once a
golden age, that was, as in other quarters of the world, before the day
of facts and figures. I had gathered some thorny points to prick the
bubble of an ideal state of society before the coming of the Sassenach;
but the reader will find this better done in the last chapter of Mr.
Andrew Lang’s _Companions of Pickle_, showing what tyranny and savagery
held together in that good old time of romance. The late Duke of
Argyll’s work on the former condition of Scotland, though written with
a natural bias, is not to be sneered at by sentimentalists. And if
readers wish evidence at first hand they may take a tour with Pennant
or any of the early observers, who will show them what it was to be
counted among the live stock of a paternal chief.
[Illustration: THE FALLS OF SPEAN, INVERNESS-SHIRE]
The sentimental quarrel is with civilisation, which all along has
proceeded by ascertaining and enclosing rights of property. Socialism,
which to us sounds new, is of course old as the hills, that once,
after a manner, belonged to a whole clan in their different degrees of
advantage, till some other sept could effectually evict them by fire
and sword. There never was a time when the leader of the conquering
troop did not get the best of what was going. The land held in his
name he was in the way of giving out in large portions to his captains
and kinsfolk, the “tacksmen” of Highland farms, who in turn sublet
small holdings to the inferior clansmen, rent being paid in kind or
in service to superiors, often arbitrarily oppressive, as seemed
their right. The shortcomings of this economy were made up for by
plunderings of neighbours, a feature not usually put into the
foreground of Arcadian pictures, but so common and so perilous as
to keep a regular check on prolific population. There was a general
community of interests, of manners, of sympathy which smoothed down
social differences. The humblest clansman, born or adopted into the
guild, expected to be provided for somehow or other, while the chief’s
power and dignity depended on the number of “pretty men” he could keep
about him. When the resources of plunder and blackmail were cut off,
the mass of Highlanders had to live by cultivating small patches of
poor land, as they did wastefully, idly, and unprofitably, usually on
the old system of “runrig,” by which a joint farm was tilled in common,
but each ridge had its own occupier. As a rule they were practically
tenants-at-will, holding directly or indirectly from the head of the
clan.
Badly off as they were, the tenants obstinately withstood almost all
attempts towards a better state of things. The improvements that in
a century changed the face of Scotland and multiplied its wealth,
came from lairds won over to economic science; they could hardly
have been carried out but by men who had risen above prejudices and
were in a position to risk capital in experiments. In the Highlands,
more obstinately than in the Lowlands, there was a deadlock between
the ignorant conservatism of the lower class and the enlightened
self-interest of the upper, who were sometimes so imperfectly
enlightened as to show grasping haste to be rich, whatever became
of those born to dependence on their fathers. On the other hand,
unenlightened selfishness, good neither for man nor beast, came as
natural to crofter as to laird, among a race noted for what Matthew
Arnold calls its “passionate, turbulent, indomitable reaction against
the despotism of fact.”
These seem to be moral and historical facts. Then come the
considerations of a science in our day much decried for dismal.
I am not going to enter into vexed economical controversies. The
subject of the Highland clearances offers a good many considerations
on both sides. Sentimental arguments are nearly all on the side of
the evicted; but the evictors have much to say for themselves. The
slovenly agriculture of the clans had to be schooled sooner or later.
The pig-headed prejudices of those backward cultivators appears in
the fact that their now indispensable potato was almost forced upon
them. The sheep farming that ousted scanty and precarious crops paid
best on a large scale. There are mountain wildernesses fit not even
for sheep-walks, where deer-runs make as profitable employment as may
be. It proved often a kind cruelty that drove thousands from their
half-starved life to a more roomy lot in pastures new. But for this
movement the Highlands would have shared the full horrors of the Irish
famine, felt here also to some extent after the potato disease of 1846.
The landlord need not be blamed for taking in cash an equivalent of
the services and the personal loyalty lost to him through operation of
law. Small tenants often did him as little good as for themselves.
The gist of the whole question, indeed, is whether the land thrives
best in the hands of any one grade of occupier, or whether there is not
more room for all when large, middle-sized, and small proprietors or
tenants are mingled as in other walks of life. That question I leave to
those who have much to say on it. But this may be said by the weakest
statistician, that the changes introduced into the Highlands were often
carried out with a haste and harshness specially painful in the case
of a race so inapt at adapting itself to new circumstances, whose poor
household gods, like Charles Lamb’s, “plant a terrible fixed foot,” and
“do not willingly seek Lavinian shores.” So, as one can now indulge
Jacobite sentiment without practical treason to the House of Hanover,
the reader may be invited to join chorus in the wail of “Lochaber no
more!” so often raised in Highland glens.
That pathetic lament seems to date back to Dutch William’s days, when
it is suspected for the work of an English officer, though another
account gives it a becomingly native origin. Emigration from the
Highlands, voluntary or enforced, set in before Culloden. The Hudson’s
Bay Company had recruited its servants from hardy Orkneymen and
Hebridean islanders. Between 1715 and 1745, while the ill-used Scots of
Ulster were knitting a chain of British outposts along the Alleghanies,
philanthropic General Oglethorpe took out a number of Highlanders to
his Georgia colony; others settled in North Carolina and in New York;
and it is said that some of these exiles still kept up their Gaelic a
generation ago, though it does not appear that the Stars and Stripes
afford a pattern for tartans. When Aberdeen bailies connived at the
kidnapping of children for the “plantations,” arbitrary chiefs like old
Lovat did not stick at getting rid of troublesome vassals by selling
them into the same servitude, to which Covenanters and other rebels had
been transported in the previous century. Proscribed rebels naturally
sought refuge in the New World, where rebellion of another stamp would
soon be in fashion; then it is notable that these exiles were apt to
take the side of the king _de facto_.
[Illustration: CROFTERS’ COTTAGES, ONICH, INVERNESS-SHIRE]
The exodus was accelerated after the crushing of the Jacobite clans,
when travellers like David Balfour could often see an emigrant ship
freighting with heavy hearts in Highland harbours, else little
frequented. Pennant, who speaks of “epidemic migrations” in other
islands, states that a thousand people had left Skye before his visit.
Soldiers who had served in America spread through their native glens
report of a distant land of milk and honey. Large bodies were led into
hopeful exile by the tacksmen who had been their immediate landlords,
or by the priests of the Catholic clans. Emigrant agents used arts of
cajolery, and in some cases, it is said, carried off youngsters by
fraud or even force. The American Revolution checked this migration
for a time, then diverted its course to Canada. Towards the end of the
century the movement could be spoken of as a “rage” or an undesirable
“spirit” which deserved curbing by law. But till after that period
the chiefs were seldom concerned to get rid of the vassals whose
hereditary attachment still gave them consequence, and by whose hands
they hoped to reap more solid advantages. One of Johnson’s hosts spoke
of emigration as deserting, a view which the sage of Fleet Street found
quite reasonable. One of Burns’s bitterest pasquinades attacks the
Highland Society as concerting means (1786) to hinder some hundreds of
Glengarry men in an “audacious” design of escape to Canada “from their
lawful lords and masters.”
It was prosperous sheep farming that gave a main impetus to the
shifting of idle hands thrown out of employment; while the pacific
settling down of the Highlands would increase the mouths to be fed, as
in India, under the _pax Britannica_, humane war against natural checks
on population has multiplied a people always tending to press upon
their means of subsistence. The lamb was in Scotland not only an emblem
but a pledge of peace. The substitution of sheep for more easily driven
cattle had in half a century or so gone to quiet and scatter the Border
clans, once as keen for booty and bloodshed as those of the Highlands;
yet no minstrel bemoans the depopulation of Ettrick and Liddesdale. The
Highlanders in historical times had small hairy sheep as well as flocks
of goats; but their best stock used to be the small black cattle, whose
blood they would sometimes draw to mix with oatmeal in seasons of
scarcity, and might starve outright when those lean herds were raided
by as hungry neighbours.
All through the eighteenth century the keeping of an improved breed of
sheep in large flocks had been spreading northward from the Borders,
largely displacing cattle in upland districts where such enterprising
drovers as Rob Roy had not to be reckoned with. Into the Highlands this
change would often be introduced by strangers placed upon forfeited
estates, a fact not recommending it to the natives. Chiefs and lairds
who followed the new system were at first laughed at as wise-acres
like to lose their money; but the clansmen found it no laughing matter
when sheep were found to pay better than humble homes, and more and
more small tenants had rough notice that their room was needed rather
than their company. Scott tells us how his first acquaintance with the
Trossachs was in leading a party of soldiers to evict a family believed
unwilling to carry out a bargain made for their removal. Between the
local Cains and the intruding Abels ill-feeling, quarrels, outrages
could not but result, which in many cases went with little notice as
but too like the state of society just passed away. In 1792 a number
of hot-headed Ross and Sutherland men proclaimed at several parish
churches that on a certain day all the sheep were to be driven out
of these two counties beyond the Beauly River. Some two hundred men
undertook to carry out this clearance, and went on for days driving
off sheep in thousands till they were encountered by the sheriff with
a military force, when most of the raiders took to their heels. A few
prisoners, tried at Inverness, were sentenced to various punishments;
but public opinion was so strong on their side that they seem to have
been helped out of jail, no great zeal for their recapture being shown
by the authorities.
This is perhaps the most remarkable ebullition of a grudge hot all over
the Highlands then, and not quite cool in our own day. Sheep-stealing
on a small scale was common, the crofters and the shepherds retorting
the blame on each other. Another sore point was the small tenants’
cattle or ponies straying on to their old pastures and being impounded
or chased off to destruction on rocky ground. A brighter feature of the
revolution came through the placing of poor farmers on hitherto barren
mosses which they were helped and guided in transforming to fertile
land. But too many landlords, in their haste to be rich, acted with a
disastrous want of consideration for those who had hitherto looked on
them as an earthly providence, bound to make up for the deficiencies of
nature, and who were naturally slow to accept Lowland conceptions of
landed property.
To many a Gael his native land seemed no longer worth living in now
that the “law had reached Ross-shire” As yet the landlords did little
to help away their dependants to New World fields. One philanthropic
nobleman, Lord Selkirk, distinguished himself by his zeal in colonising
the wilds of Canada. He began by settling some hundreds of Highlanders
in the comparatively mild climate of the St. Lawrence mouth. His more
ambitious scheme was in the Red River valley. But his agents here
served him ill; his claims were disputed by the North-Western Fur
Company; and the clansmen whom he sent to this remote wilderness found
themselves in for a petty civil war, after half a century’s want of
practice. The colony was broken up by hostile force; but Selkirk,
like a true Douglas, would not own himself beaten. He raised a small
private army from soldiers thrown out of employment at the end of the
British-American war of 1812, retook his chief station, Fort Douglas,
and there laid the foundations of what is now the flourishing province
of Manitoba. About the time of his death in 1820 there entered the
field another Scottish recruiter, Gregor MacGregor, the Venezuelan
General, who proclaimed himself Cacique of Poyais in Central America,
raising a loan on that title, granting lordships, commissions, orders
of chivalry, issuing banknotes, and promising mounts and marvels to
his future subjects. But imagination and paper money were the main
assets of his enterprise; and the few hundreds he deluded, most of
them from Scotland, reached the Mosquito shore only to perish of fever
or starvation till rescued by the authorities of Honduras. The fate
of this ill-conducted attempt, reviving memories of the older Darien
disaster, must have gone to check emigration at a time when there was
sore need of such a remedy.
The most notorious and far-spread clearing off of the population was
that carried out in Sutherland in the second and third decades of
last century. Nearly the whole of this county belonged to an infant
Countess, who grew up to marry the rich English Marquis of Stafford,
eventually created Duke of Sutherland. They resolved to improve
their vast northern estate by giving up the interior to sheep, the
inhabitants moved to a fringe of small holdings on the sea-coast, where
a small farm could be eked out by fishery. The matter seems fairly
enough stated by Hugh Miller, though a hot advocate on the popular side:
Here is a vast tract of land, furnished with two distinct sources of
wealth. Its shores may be made the seats of extensive fisheries, and
the whole of its interior parcelled out into productive sheep farms.
All is waste in its present state; it has no fisheries, and two-thirds
of its internal produce is consumed by the inhabitants. It had
contributed, for the use of the community and the landlord, its large
herds of black cattle; but the English family saw, and, we believe,
saw truly, that for every one pound of beef which it produced, it
could be made to produce two pounds of mutton, and perhaps a pound of
fish in addition. And it was resolved, therefore, that the inhabitants
of the central districts, who, as they were mere Celts, could not
be transformed, it was held, into store farmers, should be marched
down to the seaside, there to convert themselves into fishermen, on
the shortest possible notice, and that a few farmers of capital, of
the industrious Lowland race, should be invited to occupy the new
subdivisions of the interior. And, pray, what objections can be urged
against so liberal and large-minded a scheme? The poor inhabitants of
the interior had very serious objections to urge against it. Their
humble dwellings were of their own rearing; it was they themselves
who had broken in their little fields from the waste; from time
immemorial, far beyond the reach of history, had they possessed their
mountain holdings,—they had defended them so well of old that the
soil was still virgin ground, in which the invader had found only a
grave; and their young men were now in foreign lands, fighting at the
command of their chieftainess the battles of their country, not in
the character of hired soldiers, but of men who regarded these very
holdings as their stake in the quarrel. To them, then, the scheme
seemed fraught with the most flagrant, the most monstrous injustice.
Were it to be suggested by some Chartist convention in a time of
revolution that Sutherland might be still further improved, that
it was really a piece of great waste to suffer the revenues of so
extensive a district to be squandered by one individual; that it would
be better to appropriate them to the use of the community in general;
that the community in general might be still further benefited by the
removal of the one said individual from Dunrobin to a roadside, where
he might be profitably employed in breaking stones; and that this new
arrangement could not be entered on too soon—the noble Duke would not
be a whit more astonished, or rendered a whit more indignant, by the
scheme, than were the Highlanders of Sutherland by the scheme of his
predecessor.
It is believed that the ducal couple were not fully aware of the
suffering caused by their innovations. The poor Highlanders could not
believe that it was intended to root them from their homes like weeds.
They took little notice of warnings and summonses, till in many cases
the agents of authority appeared to thrust them out by force, the most
effectual method being to pull down or set fire to their wretched
hovels, turning hundreds of families out to the mercy of the weather.
Their heath pastures had been first burned off; and they were not
always allowed time to save their small stock and crops. Violence
hastened the end of many infirm old people; and even strong men, it
is stated, lost their health through hardships that bred fever and
other diseases. Except in one or two instances there appears to have
been no attempt at forcible resistance, while the executors of such
rough policy, provoked by the passive obstinacy of the evicted, often
worked themselves up to a brutal temper of destruction. So violent
were their proceedings that one of the Sutherland factors, Mr. Sellar,
had in 1816 to stand his trial at Inverness on the charge of culpable
homicide and fire-raising. He was acquitted; and the work of eviction
went on unchecked under a new agent, Mr. Loch, who in print defended
this agrarian revolution, and gained the verdict of the voting class in
his election to Parliament. Another factor concerned in those notorious
evictions lived to tell in our time that he had received hundreds of
letters from the colonies thanking him for apparent harshness that
turned out a blessing in the end.
At the time the soreness was intense. Almost the only magistrates
in the county were those large stranger tenants, oppressors as they
seemed, who would take care to do themselves justice. The Established
Church ministers were also on the landlord’s side, as a rule, accused
by the opposite party as having been bribed through the favour of the
class to which they inclined to be subservient, and especially by
advantages given to their glebes in the redistribution of land. This
character of Erastian worldliness fastened upon the Old Kirk largely
accounted for the success of the Free Church in the Highlands, the
latter’s sympathy having commonly gone with the people, who found an
eloquent champion in Hugh Miller, ex-mason and Editor of the _Witness_.
The best-known contemporary account of the Sutherland evictions is
Donald Macleod’s _Gloomy Memories_, letters written to an Edinburgh
paper by another mason lad, who, like fellow-sympathisers, was
practically expelled from the district for denouncing the landlords’
agents. His book, reprinted at home and in Canada, and included in Mr.
Alexander Mackenzie’s _History of the Highland Clearances_, is very
angry in its tone; but impartial judgment can hardly be expected from
one who has witnessed such a sight as this:
Strong parties for each district, furnished with faggots and other
combustibles, rushed on the dwellings of this devoted people, and
immediately commenced setting fire to them, proceeding in their work
with the greatest rapidity till about three hundred houses were in
flames! The consternation and confusion were extreme; little or
no time was given for removal of persons or property—the people
striving to remove the sick or helpless before the fire should reach
them—next, struggling to save the most valuable of their effects.
The cries of the women and children—the roaring of the affrighted
cattle, hunted at the same time by the yelling dogs of the shepherds
amid the smoke and fire—altogether presented a scene that completely
baffles description: it required to be seen to be believed. A dense
cloud of smoke enveloped the whole country by day, and even extended
far on the sea; at night an awfully grand but terrific scene presented
itself—all the houses in an extensive district in flames at once!
I myself ascended a height about eleven o’clock in the evening, and
counted two hundred and fifty blazing houses, many of the owners of
which were my relations, and all of whom I personally knew, but whose
present condition, whether in or out of the flames, I could not tell.
The conflagration lasted six days, till the whole of the dwellings
were reduced to ashes or smoking ruins. During one of these days a
boat lost her way in the dense smoke as she approached the shore; but
at night she was enabled to reach a landing-place by the light of the
flames!
The clearances carried out, the people had a fresh tale of sufferings
to bear in addition to the want and sickness engendered by their
removal. The bewildered tenants had hastily to build houses on their
new allotments, often on unsuitable or unhealthy sites; and it was some
time before, on the whole, they began to find themselves unwillingly
more comfortable than in their moorland hovels. They might have to
shake down among new neighbours, all cramped for room on thin soil. On
a rough and stormy coast, most of them had to be apprenticed to the
trade of fishing, on which for the future they must partly depend; and
at first shell-fish picked from the rocks might be their best diet.
Even after they had learned to be bold and skilful fishermen, the
herring and the harvest might fail together, as they did in one black
season, bringing the bulk of the population to starvation but for
charitable aid. It was small comfort to them to see the prosperity of
the large Lowland sheep-farmers who had supplanted them. The Duchess of
Sutherland made some generous attempts at clarifying the misery she
had shaken up; but her occasional visits could not instruct her fully
as to the state of things, and she is said to have been hoodwinked and
misled by the factors whom the people, rightly or wrongly, looked on as
their real tyrants.
‘Tis not the distant Emperor they fear,
But the proud viceroy who is ever near!
These “doers,” indeed, were often to be pitied rather, who, perhaps
against their own sympathies, had to set hand to what seemed the dirty
work of absentee proprietors. The clansmen appear never to have quite
lost their hereditary feeling for their superior, even during these few
years when three thousand families were driven from 800,000 acres of
land to make room for sheep, which in turn have largely been displaced
by deer.[5]
[5] It ought to be remembered that in a later generation the Sutherland
family sank at least a quarter of a million pounds in trying to reclaim
thousands of acres that to a great extent ran back to their native
wildness.
[Illustration: REDDIN’ THE LINE]
Forty years ago the _Economist_ stated that the same change had been
worked on two millions of acres in Scotland, where fertile as well as
unfertile land has been artificially made a wilderness, as the New
Forest was by William the Conqueror. From Glentilt, from Lochaber,
from Strathglass, from Glenorchy, from Glenelg, from Rannoch, and
from many another beloved glen and strath, the people were pressed or
driven forth by the pastoral invasion of strangers. Lairds who held
out against the movement would often be impoverished, had perhaps
themselves to emigrate; then their properties passed into the
hands of new men, not so scrupulous in ridding the land of unprofitable
human stock. In the course of last century owners grew willing to
promote the emigration which they had formerly tried to check, and
found it a cheap charity to ship off to America at their own expense
the inconvenient dependants who now showed more reluctance to seek
sunnier climes, stiffly sticking in their mud under a rainfall that
on the coast is sometimes over 100 inches per annum. Visitors to
Strathpeffer may see how the crofter has a fairer chance on the east
side of the Grampians, that fence him against Atlantic clouds.
In the wet and windy Hebrides the same change has been pushed, but not
so thoroughly in some parts, while in others very forcible means of
eviction were used both by man and by nature. The people of the isles
and on secluded stretches of the opposite coast are less touched by
the spirit of the age, more like the Highlanders who fought for Prince
Charlie. They are sprinkled, indeed, with mainlanders settled here, and
with waifs of shipwreck and fishery. Interlopers and natives throve for
a time through the kelp industry, whose decline left too many mouths
with too little provision. Some islands have passed into the hands
of philanthropic strangers, who spend large sums on ameliorating the
condition of the inhabitants, often with the proverbial result of good
intentions. Liberality seems to breed new hydra-heads of poverty among
a people satisfied with a low standard of well-being, and bent on
clinging limpet-like to a soil that will not support their increase.
Family affection, close knitted, for Donald, “in the condensation
of his focal circle,” keeps sons trying to scrape a living from the
patch of ground on which their parents could barely rear them. Thus
each of the islands makes a petty Ireland, where periodic cries of
famine go to justify the policy of clearance. The blame is loudly laid
on landlords; but it remains to be seen whether the tinkering of the
Crofters’ Commission will effectually solder all the “ifs” and “ands”
that are offered to make a Highland Arcadia. The Commissioners have
used a free hand, cutting down rents “with a hatchet,” wiping off old
scores of arrears and compulsorily marking out holdings of arable and
pasture land, which should pay if Nature be a party to the arrangement,
especially as the subdivision of holdings is forbidden, which did so
much mischief by beating out the thin lot of semi-starvation. The
Congested Districts Board has recently bought 70,000 acres in Skye, on
which may be carried out such an experiment in State landlordism as
under more favourable circumstances has not yet given new heavens and a
new earth to less congested areas of the world.
The Crofters’ Holdings Act of 1886 was taken as a treaty of peace, that
seems not beyond danger of being broken between landlord and tenant.
Already in some cases where a clean sheet has been made, arrears
begin to gather again, so that we may soon hear fresh ugly stories of
eviction and riot. Unfortunately, of late years newspapers, political
agitators, and contact with more prosperous society have inflamed the
grievances of the people to a chronic sullenness, smouldering up from
time to time in inhuman outrages on cattle and futile resistance to
legal proceedings, which are only too much of a return towards the good
old times. The Celt, as wrong-headed as he is warm-hearted, much agrees
with that typical Saxon, Mr. Tulliver, in connecting lawyers with some
Ossianic variant of Old Harry. If Donald had more sense of humour he
would not make martyrs of men lightly punished for attacking sheriffs’
officers in the exercise of their duty in very trying circumstances. So
strong is clannishness still, that from all over Scotland, and beyond
the seas, come help and sympathy for the outbreaks of abuse, outrage,
and perverse stupidity, that seem the lees of the old devotion, refined
to such a noble spirit by poets. But the Highlander of our time has not
taken to Irish assassination, as at the date of a Campbell factor’s
murder by Alan Breck or James Stewart, or whom? and that remoter date
when those early “improvers,” the young Macdonalds of Keppoch, were
killed by their own kinsmen for the crime of being able to teach their
grandfathers.
Again, I have shirked all controversy as to land laws and systems
of agriculture. But, turning to facts, we can see the effect of the
evicting regime. Over the thoroughly cleared districts the people are
as well off as in other parts of Scotland, in material circumstances
at least far ahead of the dirty, starving, and quarrelling Highlanders
described by Burt, Pennant, and Johnson. What they have lost in
spirit, romance, loyalty, and other sentiments is not so easy to
estimate. Their well-being has certainly come at expense of their
numbers. While the population of Scotland has in a century nearly
tripled itself, that of the Highland counties has in several cases
remained almost stationary or even decreased, the people, too, as
elsewhere, being more concentrated in towns and villages. The question
is whether the landlords have not on the whole done no better for
themselves than for as many of the people as could here find welfare.
A further question, for the nation, relates to the fact that this
semi-civilised world of ours has not yet entered upon Herbert Spencer’s
golden age of mutual contract, since the most Christian and Catholic
potentates are still fain to settle their disputes at a game in
which Highlanders once took a willing hand. Should we not breed food
for powder rather than sheep and deer? The idea seems to be that
snug burgesses of the south might sit comfortably at home, thinking
imperially and sentimentally, while those hardy mountaineers went out
to fight for them with due applause from newspaper readers. Alas! the
Gael, whether thriving or starving, no longer shows his ancestral
readiness to go and be killed, at any king’s or chief’s bidding; and
his Free Church pastors do not recommend army life.
During the half-century or so after Culloden fifty battalions had been
raised in the Highlands to serve the Guelphs more effectively than
their fathers had served the Stuarts. Norman Macleod recalls that in
the wars of the French Revolution, besides thousands of soldiers and
scores of officers sent to the regular army, Argyll had three regiments
of Fencibles and a company of volunteers in every parish. Since the
beginning of those wars he counts up 21 generals, 48 colonels, 600
other commissioned officers, and 10,000 soldiers as sprung from the
poor island of Skye alone, where, a century ago, half the farms were
held by half-pay veterans. Another writer asserts that 1600 Skyemen
stood in the squares of Waterloo. But even some years before Waterloo
half a dozen kilted regiments had been reduced to trousers for want of
recruits; and in our day it is too seldom that the real Highlander has
heart or mind to enlist, now that—
The land, that once with groups of happy clansmen teemed,
Who with a kindly awe revered the clan’s protecting head,
Lies desolate, and stranger lords, by vagrant pleasure led,
Track the lone deer, and for the troops of stalwart men
One farmer and one forester people the joyless glen.
This poet of course rather shirks the fact that the clansmen, if
“happy,” “kindly,” and so forth, were like to be so at the expense of
other “revering” clansmen and their ineffectually “protecting head.” At
all events, they have little reverence left for “stranger lords.”
The resentful men who once made our plaided and plumed array have
passed rather into the ranks of labour in Glasgow, London, and other
large towns. Not a few of them indeed have gone into sea-service, as
shown by the Royal Naval Reserve at Stornoway. Many have sought better
fortunes in Australia, New Zealand, all over the world. I was at school
with a Highland laird’s sons, who for years went kenspeckle, like Lord
Brougham, in a succession of shepherd’s-plaid nether garments off the
same web, sent home from the plains of Otago by a loyal ex-tenant. But
for three or four generations the special promised land of Highlanders
has been Canada, a region of hills, woods, rivers, and lakes, in which
the Celt learns soon to feel at home; and when he comes in sight of
the Rocky Mountains he hails a new, a greater, a brighter Lochaber
rising up to the gates of heaven, where whole clans of angelic pipers,
tartan-winged, will welcome him at last with all their pibrochs played
in one celestial chorus.
Across the Atlantic, the sea-sick and home-sick emigrants’ troubles
were not always over at once. They had often to suffer sorely from
ill-laid plans, or from want of plans, throwing them on the charity
of a new country. The new lairds, who were glad to get rid of them,
thought they did enough in paying the passage of helpless glensmen
thrown among bewildering scenes. But every fresh Highlander landed was
a friend to those who followed his example; and in a country that has
room for half a dozen Scotlands it would be a hale and hearty man’s own
fault if he did not soon clear out for himself a home and livelihood
free from help or hindrance of chief as of factor. Their present
prosperity is attested by the fact that “Mac” seems almost a title
for Canadian statesmen, and by names of towns and counties scattered
over the Dominion—Macdonald, Mackenzie, Dundas, Lennox, Inverness,
Seaforth, Gareloch, Wallace, and of course Campbeltown. In travelling
by train through Ontario the Scottish wanderer’s heart may come into
his mouth at the familiar sound of station after station. Clans have
in some parts settled down together, the Catholic ones keeping their
priests and least forgetting the language in which they continue to
pray. Many of these exiles not only cherish their Gaelic but, it
appears, the particular dialect of their original district, handed down
to generations that never set foot on Scottish soil. To-day there is
perhaps more Gaelic spoken in Canada than in all Scotland. There is
also a clan of French-speaking Macs, descended from Highland soldiers
who married and settled among the daughters of Heth.
Those Canadians who have given in to the conquering Saxon tongue make
up for such defection by an earnest cult of bagpipes, kilts, and reels,
flaunting red knees in a clime of blue noses, and lustily singing
the songs of Caledonian Sion in what is now no strange land. The
Dominion rears battalions of kilted warriors, that skirl defiance to
the mosquitry of summer as to the snows of winter. Britain has lately
been visited by a Canadian “Kiltie” Band, three score strong, making
on Sassenach platforms such a revived show of tartan as is hardly to
be seen in all the Highlands. One of them, belonging to the MacAnak
clan, stood seven feet high, a hopeful sign of what the race may grow
to in its new home, when Old Scotland has been given up to American
millionaires, English tourists, and German waiters. Of such tuneful
transatlantic Scotians one need not inquire too curiously whether
“Annie Laurie” or “Robin Adair” would find themselves at home in kilts;
but they ought to know what a blot on their fame is the tartan of the
Gordons, my hereditary enemies, whose flagrant stripes brand them as
no better, in their beginning, than Lowland evictors. One thinks twice
about pursuing an ancestral feud against foemen seven feet high; but
I must say that if these minstrels were real Gordons, they might well
chant masses for the souls of many a Celt who never had the chance to
sing:
From the lone shieling on the misty island,
Mountains divide us and a waste of seas;
But still our hearts are true, our hearts are Highland,
And we in dreams behold the Hebrides.
CHAPTER VIII
THE OUTER HEBRIDES
Skye is now the “show island” of the west coast, easily invaded by its
ferries, at one being only a musket-shot’s distance from the mainland.
But comparatively few tourists trust themselves across the stormy
Minches, Great and Little, to visit the Long Island, more foreign to
thriving Scotland than Jersey to England. One used to be told that the
Minch was _La Manche_, the Highland Channel, as the _Kyles_ so frequent
here called cousins with straits of Calais; but a pundit of the Oxford
Dictionary shakes his head at these as at most popular interpretations
of place-names. The 120-mile chain of islands making a breakwater for
north-western Scotland, with the Sunday name of the Outer Hebrides,
is commonly spoken of as the Long Island, that once indeed formed one
stretch of land, and still at some parts is cut only by fords passable
at low tide. The name Long Island should perhaps be restricted to the
northern mass of Lewis and Harris, below which, across the Sound of
Harris, the smaller separate isles taper out southwards like the tail
of a kite, tipped by the lighthouse on Bernera shining thirty miles
across the Atlantic, the Beersheba of this archipelago whose Dan is the
Butt of Lewis.
[Illustration: THE STANDING STONES OF CALLERNISH, ISLAND OF LEWIS]
It is no wonder if tourists do not often get so far, when till our
own day the law had to make a long arm to reach the Hebrides, and
the Protestant Reformation only begins to set foot on some of those
remote strongholds of old ways and thoughts. Nine tourists out of ten,
indeed, would find little to repay them for the tossing of the Minch.
The archæologist may wander his difficult way among monuments of the
past, standing stones, “doons,” “tullochs,” “Picts’ houses,” crosses,
and shrines whose site is often marked only by a gathering of lonely
graves, for even of the chapels and hermitages recorded in print but
a small proportion can now be traced in the Western Islands. The rich
stranger encloses these poor islands for his deer, narrowing and
debasing the hard life of the people. Here and there snug inns invite
anglers to sport such as Izaak Walton never dreamt of. Some parts, as
Harris, show oases of real Highland scenery. But more often the Outer
Hebrides present a bleak and monotonous aspect of rock, water, sand,
and bog, where “the sea is all islands, and the land is all lakes.”
Their common features on half the days of the week are thus described
by Robert Buchanan, who was no bookworm to be afraid of a wet jacket.
“A dreary sky, a dreary fall of rain. Long low flats covered with
their own damp breath, through which the miserable cattle loomed like
shadows. Everywhere lakes and pools, as thickly sown among the land as
islands amid the Pacific waters. Huts wretched and chilly, scarcely
distinguishable from the rock-strewn marshes surrounding them. To the
east the Minch rolling dismal waters towards the far-off heads of Skye;
to the west the ocean, foaming at the lips and stretching barren and
desolate into the rain-charged clouds.”
The Long Island has cheerfuller prospects in its blinks of sunshine,
and moments of loveliness caught by William Black, who is its Turner
in words, while he seems to have a little distorted the human figures
he sets against such effective backgrounds. One who has his eye for
the scenery of sea and sky will not call these shores dismal. Another
Scottish novelist tells us of the barest southern heath:
Yet shall your ragged moor receive
The incomparable pomp of eve,
And the cold glories of the dawn
Behind your shivering trees be drawn.
But on windy Hebrides there is hardly a tree to shiver, where docken,
broom, or thistle may be the best substitute for a switch, and every
drifting log or plank of shipwreck washed up from the Atlantic is
treasured to make the rafters of a human nest. A woman brought to the
mainland had no conception for trees but giant cabbages; and when a
basket of tomatoes came on shore an old Highlander was excited to see
“apples” for once in his life. The wild carrot is the finest fruit
that grows here naturally among the scent of the heather. Spring
coming so “slowly up this way,” some writers have said in their haste
that flowers are rare in the Hebrides; but more patient observers
like Miss Gordon Cumming and Miss Goodrich Freer give a long list of
humble blooms spangling the ground in their season, among them the
sort of convolvulus found only on Eriskay, said to have been planted
by Charles Edward, who on that rocky islet made his first landing,
lodged in a house that stood till the other day. The damp hollows nurse
luxuriant ferns; the rushy lochans show often dappled with water-lilies
and fringed with gay weeds. The Western Isles are better off for
curling-ponds than for ice. The winter climate is chilly and damp
rather than cold; and the rainfall of course varies with the height of
the islands, the flat marshy moors being spared by overcast skies that
burst more freely on mountainous shores.
The cliffs and the waters—salt, fresh, and brackish—are haunts
of innumerable wild-fowl and sea-birds. The cheery solo of lark or
lapwing may be drowned by noisy concerts in which MacCulloch could
distinguish “the short shrill treble of the Puffins and Auks, the
melodious and varied notes of the different Gulls, the tenors of the
Divers and Guillemots, and the croaking basses of the Cormorants.” On
the west coast a frequent feature is dunes of white sand piled up by
the Atlantic waves, pleasing to the eye but destructive as those of the
Gascon Landes, for if not anchored down by bent grass or other hardy
vegetation they are apt to drift over the interior, devastating whole
districts like the Culbin sand fringe of fertile Moray, said to have
been let loose through the poor people stripping off such weak fetters
for fuel.
Passionately as the islanders love their homes, they owe little to a
thankless soil. The bulk of them are half croft-farmers, half fishers,
the petty agricultural labours falling chiefly to the women’s share,
while the men alternate between spells of nautical adventure and lazy
weather-watching. The wives and daughters have the worst of it, who in
their hard daily tasks soon grow haggard, their bright eyes bleared
by the smoke of the beehive huts in which they literally gather round
the fire, amid furniture and utensils that often would not seem fit
for a gipsy camp. In these hovels, hardly to be distinguished from the
peat-stacks that shelter them, may still be found the crooked spade,
the quern mill, the cruisie lamp, and other time-honoured implements;
and in some parts rough home-made pottery is but slowly displaced.
The condition of such dwellings is deplorable from a sanitarian’s
point of view. In spite of the fresh air in which alone they are rich,
whole families are often swept away by consumption. Their food is
mainly potatoes and oatmeal, fish and unfermented bread, with milk
and eggs as luxuries. Meat they know only in the windfall of “braxy,”
unless a sheep be killed for a rare treat at Christmas or New Year.
What did they do before potatoes were planted in the islands, much
against the people’s will; and what do they do in seasons when both
the potatoes and the fishing fail them, as happens now and then? No
wonder that they are pitied or abused as indolent, languid, listless,
shiftless, downcast. In other climes, when well fed, they may be found
working hard enough and speaking their minds only too hotly; but the
lotus-eating of these mild-eyed, melancholy islanders does not put much
heart into them. Peat is their only fuel, dug from the shallow mines
that chequer their moors; and even for that they may have to reckon
closely with the landlord.
In Tiree—which indeed does not belong to the Outer Hebrides, lying
close to Johnson’s Coll—peat fails as well as wood, so coal has to
be expensively imported; but there, as compensation, the flat ground
is less poor, and the people can take livelier joy in their toil.
This island makes a contrast with South Uist, described as the most
miserable of all by Miss Goodrich Freer, the latest and not the least
sympathetic explorer of the Isles, who on Tiree found hopefuller
colouring of life on a soil lying so low that it has been threatened
with inundation by the waves as well as by the sand:—
The very existence of the island of South Uist is itself a tragedy
which shames our civilisation. Nowhere in our proud Empire is there
a spot more desolate, grim, hopelessly poverty-stricken. It is a
wilderness of rocks and of standing water, on which, in the summer,
golden lichen and spreading water-lilies mock the ghastly secrets of
starvation and disease that they conceal. The water is constantly
utterly unfit for drinking purposes. There is not a tree on the
island, and one wonders how the miserable cattle and sheep contrive
to live on the scant grey herbage. The land of the poor is not
enclosed; and to preserve the tiny crops from the hungry wandering
cows and horses they have to be continually watched, and as half
an acre of bere may be distributed over five acres of bog and rock,
the waste of human labour is considerable. The potatoes often rot in
the wet ground, and I have seen the grain and hay lying out as late
as October from the impossibility of getting it dried. Excellent and
abundant freshwater trout there is, but that is not for the poor; nor
the rabbits, nor the game; and even the sea-wrack, formerly a means
of living, is now hardly worth the getting. Nevertheless, when the
“tangle” comes on the beach—provided the factor gives them leave to
get it at all, which by no means necessarily follows—men, women, and
children crowd down with earliest daylight, and work on by moonlight
or starlight, with the hideous intensity of starvation. The houses
of the poor, especially of the cottars, are inconceivably wretched.
They are of undressed stone, piled together without mortar, and
thatched with turf. Often they have no chimney, sometimes no window;
the floor is a bog, and a few boxes, with a plank supported by stones
for a seat, is all the furniture except the unwholesome shut-in beds.
Cleanliness is impossible, with soot coating the roof overhead, wet
mud for floor, and, except in the very rare fine days, chickens, and
perhaps a sick sheep or even a cow or horse, for fellow-occupants.
To the old Boisdale and Clanranald chiefs with all their faults
the people were ready to forgive much; but the Highlander, at best
conservative, exclusive, distrustful of strangers, becomes when
oppressed, starving, terror-stricken, unreasonable in prejudice,
intolerant of change, perverse it may be in refusing to do his part in
establishing mutual understanding. Only those who have sojourned among
them, not in the cosy fishing hotel at Loch Boisdale far away from the
villages, but who have established personal relations with the people
in their own homes, can even guess at the utter hopeless dreariness of
their lives. The chronic dyspepsia which accompanies the ever-present
teapot, the wan anæmic faces of women and children, the continual
absence from the island of all able-bodied men, make the human element
almost as depressing as the flat, grey, glimmering, wet landscape.
[Illustration: A HEBRIDEAN CROFTER’S HOUSE]
The seaweeds, that here make submarine gardens reminding Miss Gordon
Cumming of her wanderings among islands of coral and palm, count not a
little among the harvests of the Hebrides. Several kinds eke out the
people’s food, and are freely given as fodder or medicine to starveling
cattle, which have to be fed up on richer pastures before coming into
Lowland markets. This crop of the sea goes to manure the thin soil, for
which purpose also are used fish bones, and the smoke-soaked thatch
of the houses; and even the drifting sands in the long run, like
far-blighting lava, may help to fresh fertility through the lime of
powdered shells. Seaweed is the abundant raw material of an industry
that for a time brought money and population to the West Highlands,
the manufacture of kelp, chief supply of soda till Le Blanc’s chemical
process showed how it could be made out of salt; then Free Trade opened
our markets to a ruinous competition of barilla and other foreign
supplies, so that in the first generation of last century the price
of kelp had fallen from £22 to £2 a ton. Again its value was enhanced
through the making of iodine used in aniline dyes; but again chemistry
and foreign competition conspired to beat down the Highland product,
in spite of the gallant struggle of a Sassenach, Mr. E. C. Stanford,
who for a generation laboured to show what various benefits might
be won from the “flowers of the sea.” On Tiree and elsewhere another
attempt is being made to revive this once thriving industry, too often
represented by deserted kelp kilns along the shore, which future
antiquaries may associate with the worship of a pagan deity whose
mysterious symbols were £ _s._ _d._ I leave to such puzzled scholars
the excursus on the Fiscal Question suggested at this point.
Donald does not take kindly to handicrafts. The only manufacture of
the Hebrides now is the so-called Harris tweedings and stockings, made
all over these islands, both for home use and for a sale much fostered
of late by aristocratic patronage. The genuine article is imitated
by machine-woven cloth of inferior texture; and aniline dyes too
much come into use in place of those cunningly extracted from roots,
bark, heather, and seaweed. But in humble homes wool is still spun,
woven, and dressed with songs and ceremonies handed down through many
generations. Miss Goodrich Freer gives a pretty picture of a fulling
“bee,” where some ten women handle the web to the accelerated rhythm
of the same choruses as an older traveller heard rising in excitement
“till you would imagine a troop of female demoniacs to have been
assembled,” a scene that again has suggested the Fates weaving their
strands of human destiny. The house is crammed with spectators; and
in the reek of peat, paraffin, and tobacco smoke the cloth takes on
fresh odours to overcome the original perfume of fish oil, tallow, and
other dressings. But the London doctors who would frighten us with the
bogey of microbes from these distant homes might be glad to inoculate
their patients with the bloom of some ill-fed Highland lasses. The
composition of wedding cake, it is said, should not be examined into
too curiously; and perhaps we can wear the waterproof tweed of the
Isles more at ease for not having been present at its preparation.
The trade of the islanders is fishing, to which most of them are
bound from boyhood, many wandering into far seas like their Viking
forefathers; and the girls, too, make long excursions to serve as fish
gutters and curers for the season in eastern ports, even as far as
Norfolk Yarmouth. Ling, cod, and lobsters yield a valuable harvest;
mussels and cockles are sent to metropolitan markets as relishes,
on which the island folk will sometimes be reduced to live. Prince
Charlie’s first meal on Scottish ground was off such vulgar shell-fish.
He was to fare worse before all was done; and perhaps he might agree
with one of his chroniclers—“Give me nettles and shell-fish in the
North before fried fish (and too little of that) in the New Cut.”
[Illustration: SHELLING MUSSELS, CROMARTY]
The chief game of their seas is, of course, the herring, which
appear off the Hebridean coasts early in the season; and there may
be an aftermath in autumn, the more enterprising fishers in summer
following the shoals round to the east coast. I have played the amateur
herring-fisher on the warmer west side; then I no longer wondered why
these men armour themselves in such thick clothing that once overboard
they would have little chance of escaping Davy Jones, even had
they learned to swim. That, I fancy, is an art not much cultivated
in the Hebrides. Once a crony of mine and I got ourselves rowed off
an island shore for a dive into deep water; and over forty years I
remember how the boatman’s boy stared at our throwing off jackets and
kilts, and the excited cry with which he jumped up, exclaiming in
Gaelic, “They will be drowned!” To youngsters a night in a fishing-boat
makes a pleasing taste of adventure, if the waves leave them appetite
for coffee sweetened by treacle, and mackerel caught and cooked
off-hand to be eaten with the hard biscuits that serve also for
plates; but the close air of the “den” may be a trying experience for
unseasoned landlubbers. Then it is a fine sight in the chill dawn, when
the phosphorescent glow of floats and cordage pales before the sheen
of the fish hauled up in wave after wave of silver; and one can catch
the melancholy cheep of herrings as they flop out of the meshes of the
net to swell a glittering, wriggling pile among which the men move
like mermaids, their legs and arms encrusted with a gleam of scales.
MacCulloch noted the phosphorescence of summer nights in these seas,
offering splendid phenomena to eyes more often keen for their profits
than their wonders:—
A stream of fire ran off on each side from the bows, and the ripple
of the wake was spangled with the glow-worms of the deep. Every
oar dropped diamonds, every fishing line was a line of light, the
iron cable went down a torrent of flame, and the plunge of the
anchor resembled an explosion of lightning. When it blew a gale
the appearance was sometimes terrific, and the whole atmosphere was
illuminated, as if the moon had been at the full. In calms, nothing
could exceed the loveliness of the night, thus enlightened by
thousands of lamps, which, as they sailed slowly by, twinkled and were
again extinguished at intervals, on the glassy and silent surface of
the water.
Miss Goodrich Freer gives a picturesque scene of Roman Catholic
islanders gathering at their little chapel to consecrate the going
forth from which some of them may never return. Protestant fishermen
will be not less earnest in their prayers; but their services want
the sense of intimate relation between heaven and earth that adorns a
more childlike faith. Religion is with them too apt to take the form
of bitter bigotry on the score of the Sabbatarian observance which
they have turned into a sacrament, though on some coasts of Scotland
ministers have still to wink at the time-honoured notion that Sunday
is a lucky day for setting sail. Miss Gordon Cumming tells the story
of an angry gathering of West Highlanders at Strome Ferry to hinder
east coast fishermen from despatching a glut of herring by special
Sunday train, when a couple of hundred policemen had to be brought
from all parts of Scotland to protect the Sabbath-breaking railway
against the Sabbath-breaking rioters. But if she meant to point a moral
of Highland orthodoxy, I can remember a similar display of violence
at an east coast harbour about the same time. A profane boat having
broken the Sabbath by salting her Saturday catch within sacred hours,
she was assaulted and wrecked at the quay in the light of day, before
the eyes of half the town. The ringleaders being brought to trial,
the authorities were in some quandary as to what might follow their
punishment; but this anxiety proved quite superfluous, for on the
clearest evidence, the facts being of public fame and the criminals as
notable as the provost and bailies, a pious or prudent jury brought in
a verdict of not guilty.
Early summer is the busy time of the Long Island, when Stornoway, Loch
Boisdale, the Castle Bay of Barra, and other havens make rendezvous
for hundreds of boats of various rigs, and the population is increased
by dealers from foreign shores, with many thousands of fish curers and
gutters, who, encamped in huts and bothies, are the followers of this
fleet, attended also by mobs of greedy sea-gulls, where the waters
will for once be smoothed by a scum of oily fish refuse. The shoals
of herring are preyed on by hateful dog-fish and other shark-like
creatures; also by whales, which sometimes fall a fat prize to the
fishermen. Indeed, there has lately been an attempt to carry on a
regular whale fishery from Harris, causing a stench vigorously assailed
as a nuisance; and at a former time it appears that whales bulked
largely in Long Island fare.
The cream of the herring fishing goes to trawlers and other well-found
craft from richer shores of our islands. The fish-curing business, too,
like everything that needs capital, is much in the hands of strangers,
the export being largely to the Baltic. The Hebridean boatmen live
from hand to mouth, setting draughts of luck against blank days and
weeks for which their competitors are better provided. The worst of
it is, if all observers may be trusted, that being brought into touch
with these rivals has a demoralising effect on the Celt, even as the
trousers or houses of civilisation are apt to spread dirt and disease
among African savages. The native Highland virtues seem to flourish
best in spots secluded from contact with the prosperous Sassenach,
whose wholesale commercialism sets a copy for retail cheatery, when the
islander who would share his last crust with a neighbour learns to look
on gain won, _quocumque modo_, from the masterful intruder as nought
but “retribution due.”
Smaller satellites left out of account, the southernmost of the Outer
Isles is Barra, whose seven miles’ length of rocky shore opens into
the harbour of Castle Bay. Here, covering an islet, stand the sturdy
ruins of Kisimul Castle, pronounced by Miss Gordon Cumming the most
picturesque thing in the Hebrides, that recalls Chillon by the way it
rises out of the water against a hilly background. This was an old
fastness of the M’Neills, supplanted by other lords who have never been
able to wean the people from their clannishness, nor from their Roman
Catholic faith, though they have long ceased to play the pirate and the
wrecker. The spoil of wrecking, here once as welcome as in the Orkneys,
was lost when the Hebrides came to be studded with lighthouses, like
that on Barra Head, which is a separate islet, _alias_ Bernera,
and that upon the perilous reef of Skerryvore towards Tiree, the
masterpiece of Alan Stevenson, uncle to a writer whose name would
shine far out into the world.
The larger South Uist shares also the poverty and the faith of Barra,
its most prosperous spot being the fishing station of Loch Boisdale in
the south-east corner. The east coast is cut by other deep inlets, over
which Ben More and Hekla rise to a height of about 2000 feet, names
making monuments of the rival races of Gael and Norseman. Among these
wild Highlands, the early home of Flora Macdonald, Prince Charlie found
one of his cave refuges, still hard to seek out; and Miss Goodrich
Freer reports a lonely loch in Glen Uisnish as rivalling the now famous
Coruisk of Skye.
A link between North and South Uist, accessible from either at low
water, is the island of Benbecula, “Hill of the Ford,” divided between
Protestants and Catholics. North Uist is Protestant, and travellers who
lean to the picturesque view of religion have to admit that it looks
rather more prosperous than its Catholic neighbour. The chief place
here is Loch Maddy, a commodious harbour on which stands the hamlet
capital of the island. Its chief interest seems the extraordinary
reticulation of the inlets, Loch Maddy, a sheet of ten square miles,
being said to have a coastline of 300 miles; but its bens are only
benjies, no higher than some hills in sight of Plymouth Sound. Its
shores are much broken into peninsulas and satellite islets that might
be let out to would-be Robinson Crusoes.
Across the strait of Harris is reached the Long Island proper,
commonly conceived as two islands, Harris and Lewis—the Lews in
the vernacular—but the smaller southern projection is joined on to
the main mass by a narrow _Tarbert_. This isthmus does not quite
mark the bounds of Harris, which like the other islands belongs to
Inverness-shire, while Lewis makes part of Ross. Nature has set another
distinction, the south part being boldly and barely mountainous, a
forest of granite and gneiss peaks, amid which shy deer enjoy the
beauties of this Hebridean Switzerland, while the north rather shows
brown flats of moorland, rimmed with cliffs, streaked with green,
dotted with patches of struggling culture and pitted with lochans. All
round, the shores are deeply cut by fiords, the largest being Loch
Seaforth on the east side, and on the west island-choked Loch Roag,
home of that “Princess of Thule” whose begetter takes a more highly
coloured view of this scenery than is revealed to most observers. Mr.
John Sinclair is another writer who has an artistic good word to say
for the Lewis:—
The shores are everywhere rugged and rocky, save where, at wide
intervals, they are interrupted by broad bays or narrow sea lochs,
which terminate in green glens among the hills. The middle and
northern districts are for the most part great stretches of flat or
undulating moorland, dotted all over with hundreds of little lochs and
tarns, into which no burns tumble and out of which no rivers flow. Yet
how pretty these flat saucers of rain-water are—scores and scores of
them glistening in the sunshine like silver ornaments laid out to view
upon a russet ground. In the south and south-west the mountains are
thickly studded and lofty, but long twisting arms of the sea boldly
creep in between them and almost meet from opposite sides of the
island. Many of these inlets taper away to narrow points, which are
hidden in deep valleys eight or ten miles from the open sea. So many
are the freshwater lochs and the insinuating arms of the ocean, that
in bird’s-eye view the whole island must resemble a diamond window
with its countless raindrops darting one into another at the beginning
of a shower. The hill tops are singularly wild and bare, scarcely a
tinge of green relieving the yellow masses of rock and stone, but in
the valleys there are many choice spots of sweet verdure and beauty.
On the neck of an eastern peninsula of Lewis stands Stornoway, which to
the islanders appears a capital of dazzling luxury, and even strangers
are struck by the gardens nursed into exotic luxuriance about its
castle, home of a family who have sown a fortune in improving their
poor lordship without reaping much gratitude in return. In Harris the
most notable spot is Rodill at the south end, where the restoration
of a cruciform church best represents the many monastic and eremitic
shrines once dotting these isles “set far among the melancholy main.”
Still less can one enumerate the traces of more hoary antiquity, over
which Mr. David MacRitchie exclaims, “It is enough to break the heart
of an antiquary to wander about the Hebrides and see again and again
the site of what once were doons now represented by a tumbled heap of
stones, and sometimes not even by that.”
On the west side of Lewis, near the fishing inn of Garrynahine, stands
the most celebrated and the least destructible of ancient monuments,
the Stones of Callernish, which used to pass for a Druid temple, when
there was as much reason for entitling them a Druid theatre, town-hall,
or house of parliament, if not the tomb of some once towering hero
long gone to Valhalla. The figure of a cross has been traced in their
position, on which account they have been credited to St. Columba, the
truth being that their origin is as mysterious as that of Stonehenge.
Not far off are the ruins of the Doon of Carloway, one of the best
specimens of this kind of fortification, often dubbed a Pictish tower.
Then, towards the Butt of Lewis, in the wildest and most primitive part
of the island, the “Troosel Stone,” tallest monolith in Scotland, may
from its name be a record of obscene rites, though it also is claimed
as an heroic tombstone.
[Illustration: THE HERRING FLEET IN STORNOWAY BAY, ISLAND OF LEWIS]
At this north end the features of the people, Gaelic-speaking as they
are, most clearly betray the Norse settlement, indicated throughout
by many of the place-names, as the recurring Fladdas, Berneras, and
Scalpas. The Macleods, once predominant here, till the Mackenzies
overlaid them in the Lewis as the Macdonalds in Skye, are believed
to have been of this foreign origin. At the end of the sixteenth
century an attempt was made to introduce another stock, when a number
of Lowland gentlemen, chiefly from Fife, formed themselves into
a Chartered Company of the period, to which the savage Lewis was
granted by James VI. as area for such a “plantation” as Elizabeth
charily patronised in Virginia. These “Adventurers” or “Undertakers”
enlisted a little army, armed with tools as well as weapons; but
three attempts at settlement disastrously failed, and the work of
civilisation was left to be carried out by nearer neighbours.
Lewis and Harris have in our day been conquered by the Free Church,
that puts its ban on the old customs and revels and would weed out the
old superstitions, though still kirk-goers will fear to jest of the
water-horse mounted by mortal men to their swift destruction, or the
water-bull that haunts lonely lochs to snap at bathing boys, or swallow
up sheep whose owner brought back from market a head not clear for
counting. Such uncanny beasts can be shot only with silver: perhaps
the origin of “Bang went sixpence!” Of late years the bitterness of
controversy between the United Free and the “Wee Free” divisions of
their Church has set congregations by the ears, while the decision
of the Lords should breathe a new sentiment of imperial loyalty into
the triumphant party, hitherto disposed to Home Rule heresies. Out
of Stornoway, there is not a licensed public-house on the Lewis, a
fact that makes for peace. Crime is hardly known here, but for a
land league agitation that has prompted incendiary fires and brutal
mutilation of cattle as well as refusal to pay rent, along with a
general sore-headedness that was poulticed for a time by the Crofters’
Commission, but may show signs of breaking out again when freshly
recurring arrears come to be demanded.
Over the island can be traced broken fold-dykes and patches of rig
and furrow lost among the heather, which are taken as signs of a
once more extended cultivation of this poor soil, reported by Martin,
two centuries ago, as fruitful in corn up till a then recent period.
However this may be, a century ago the Rev. James Hall declared that
the “scallags” (labouring class) of the Hebrides were practically
slaves, treated by their masters worse than negroes. But at that time
they seem to have been more patient, not yet having found out how they
were ill off. They can hardly expect to be over well off, when, in
spite of emigration, a century has raised the population of Lewis from
about 9000 to 29,000, an increase unparalleled in the Highlands. Yet
what with one help and another, the people of this congested area seem
not so poverty-stricken as on islands that have been more depleted of
their natural increase.
Forty miles above the Butt of Lewis, on an ocean-washed rock one of the
old hermit saints built his chapel. Then far out to the west, beyond
the uninhabited Flannan Isles or Seven Hunters, lies—
Utmost Kilda’s shore, whose lonely race
Resign the setting sun to Indian worlds.
This remote isle, its celebrity depending on its insignificance, is
about three miles by two, a jagged mass of steep crags, which on one
side are said to present the loftiest sea-face in Britain, about 1300
feet. The climate is mild and damp, muggy and windy, the clouds of the
Atlantic being caught on those tall crags, less familiar with snow
than with a white coating of countless sea-fowl, which, with their
eggs, make the chief fare of the inhabitants. Before the days of steam
St. Kilda was cut off from intercourse with the world, except through
supply expeditions sent from Skye by its Macleod landlords, or through
chance visits, when the rare stranger would be warmly welcomed and
attended by all the male population, as MacCulloch was, like “a Jack
Pudding at a country fair followed by a mob of boys.” Nature, it is
said, serves them as a leisurely postman, when a letter sealed in a
bottle will drift on to the mainland in time; but the winds and waves
can seldom bring an answer by return. The story goes that the islanders
heard nothing of Prince Charlie’s enterprise till it was all over,
nor of Waterloo and the Hundred Days, and that William the Fourth was
prayed for three years after his death, as is by no means according
to Presbyterian orthodoxy. Even now, long dark winter months may pass
without news whether Scotland stands as it did. But Miss Goodrich Freer
laments that only too many tourists reach this remote isle in summer
to corrupt a primitive community which, with scant aid from books and
teachers, has evolved a high standard of morals and mutual helpfulness,
if not of that virtue that proverbially comes next to godliness.
Two centuries ago St. Kilda even came near to adopt a religion of
its own through the doctrine of an illiterate youth named Roderick,
who, professing to have received a revelation from John the Baptist,
imposed fasts, penances, sacrifices, and forms of prayer upon the
superstitious islanders, mixing “the laudable customs of the Church
with his own diabolical inventions.” For years he played his prophetic
part, till it became manifest that St. John’s oracle had a very human
side, when Cæsar, in the person of Macleod’s steward, persecuted him
into silence; and an orthodox minister came over to exorcise his
heresies. In those days the people seem to have been little better than
pagans with a varnish of Catholicism; but now they have a Free Church,
whose pastor was once the only inhabitant that could speak English, as
all the school children can do now.
The population numbers some few score, Gaelic speaking, though they
make no show of tartan, and, except in English pictures, kilts were
never adapted to their amphibious and crag-scrambling industries. The
oft-told tale of a severe cold breaking out among them on the arrival
of a stranger seems to relate to the sharp wind which brought a ship,
with its invisible freight of alien microbes, to their slippery
landing-place. Nature has placed them in quarantine from many ills
flesh is heir to on the mainland, yet once an infection of smallpox
had nearly exterminated the islanders; and if former statistics be
accurate, their numbers have decreased within a century or so. There is
a very high death-rate among newly born children; and the old people
are apt to be crippled by rheumatism; but in middle life they thrive
on what should be a dyspeptic diet of oily sea-birds; and consumption
is unknown in this natural Nordrach sanitorium. They have fields of
oats and potatoes, also cattle and sheep, from which they can clothe
themselves. Their landlord has provided them with a street of good
stone houses, far superior to the ordinary crofter’s home; and their
old haystack hovels are chiefly used as stores or outhouses; but their
zinc roofs cover true Highland untidiness. “Milk dishes, ropes, tarry
nets, wool, cooking pots, and fishing tackle are strewn haphazard
over the broken earthen floors; from the smoke-blackened rafters hang
a winter store of dried sea-fowl, fish, and bladders containing oil
for use in the long winter nights.” And everywhere are in evidence
the feathers that make St. Kilda’s best merchandise, as birds are its
chief stock, from the great northern diver to the so-called St. Kilda
wren, lately protected by law against extermination. “The air is full
of feathered animals, the sea is covered with them, the houses are
ornamented by them, the ground is speckled by them like a flowery
meadow in May. The town is paved with feathers; the very dunghills are
made of feathers; the ploughed land seems as if it had been sown with
feathers; and the inhabitants look as if they had been all tarred and
feathered, for their hair is full of feathers, and their clothes are
covered with feathers.”
A romance of St. Kilda is the mysterious story of Lady Grange,
imprisoned here under circumstances which have not been made very
clear. She was the daughter of a gentleman who shot the Lord President
for deciding a suit against him, so that she might seem to have
hereditarily forfeited a right to the protection of law. Married
to Erskine of Grange, a brother of the Jacobite Earl of Mar, after
a quarter of a century’s wedded life she became such a peril or a
nuisance to her husband that, himself a judge of the Court of Session,
he planned or abetted a scheme for keeping her in life-long confinement
as a madwoman. One story is that she knew of traitorous dealings on
his part with the king over the water. Kidnapped from her lodging in
Edinburgh by a party of Highlanders, she was violently dragged across
Scotland on byways and highways, apparently without any interference
at her successive places of detention, the journeys usually being
made by night, and the poor lady gagged when she would have cried out
for rescue. From Glengarry’s country she was shipped into the western
islands, and in time to St. Kilda, where she spent some eight years,
in vain trying to communicate with her friends, if she had any friends
disposed to serve her, as her own sons and her kinsfolk appear not
to have stirred in the matter. She is said to have been taken over
to Sutherland, then to Skye, where she died after years of illegal
durance. Her story seems almost incredible; but even in the nineteenth
century an ex-army officer, no doubt not very strong in his wits, was
kept imprisoned upon one of the Shetlands for twenty years or so, till
quite romantically rescued by the agency of a female missionary.
CHAPTER IX
THULE
William Black went about to dub the Hebrides our Thule; but that title
better belongs to the islands of fellow-countrymen—
Who dwell beyond the Pentland’s roar
And watch dim skerries white with drowning seas;
And hear Æolian moanings of the breeze
Wandering ever about a surf-strewn shore;
Beneath broad skies with billowy mist-wreaths hoar;
Through winter days that gloom but never freeze
Nor chill the Northern heart’s devotion.
The Orkney and Shetland Isles, whoever were their original inhabitants,
became restocked from the kingdom that figures in legendary history as
“Lochlin,” and still plainly keep much of the Scandinavian character,
on other coasts of Britain appearing only in patches and strains,
or, as in the Southern Hebrides, overlaid by Celtic features. These
“Nordereys” had early been known to Gothic pirates, crushing the
nascent Christianity believed to have been planted by Cormac and
other disciples of St. Columba, ghostly fathers whose memory seems to
survive in the _Papas_ of the archipelago. The Norwegian kingdom,
converted in turn, established its power more or less firmly all over
the Hebrides, with occasional assaults on Ireland and Scotland; and
for three centuries the Orkneys made a Jarldom dependent on Norway.
The Icelandic sagas throw a weird light on their confused history of
feuds, treacheries, fire and sword, bouts of drinking and devotion,
from which, as the kingdom of Scotland took shape, begins to emerge
a contention between relationships of kindred and of vicinity. The
quasi-independent Jarls of Orkney fitfully recognised a suzerain in
Scotland as well as in Norway. At one time we find this Norwegian
Nizam seated across the Pentland as Thane of Caithness; then again a
Scottish earl is imposed on the Orkneys. The position of Shetland is
more obscure at this period, but till well on in the middle ages all
the Hebrides belonged to the archiepiscopal diocese of Trondhjem.
[Illustration: CARTING PEAT, ORKNEY]
When the last Norwegian invasion of Scotland had been defeated on the
Clyde, Haco retired to Kirkwall, there dying in 1263. The winds warred
against that armada, whose failure was not so much a decisive blow as
one strain in a gradual loosening of Norse authority over the isles.
Soon afterwards, Haco’s son formally resigned to Alexander III. all
dominion of the Hebrides, except in the Orkneys and Shetlands, which
were specially reserved to the Norwegian crown, by and by absorbed in
that of Denmark. But two centuries later, when certain differences
between these thrones came to be adjusted by the marriage of James III.
to Margaret of Denmark, her father pledged the islands to Scotland
for the bulk of her stipulated dowry, 60,000 florins, that
have never been paid; and so we hold this part of our kingdom on a
pawnbroker’s title, as to which international lawyers might cover acres
of foolscap, if Denmark were disposed to clear off the mortgage.
Even earlier, Sinclairs and other lords from the mainland had pushed on
to the Orkneys, which afterwards became so oppressively exploited by
esurient Scots that theirs was no beloved name here; and the islanders,
even now that old resentments are forgot, decline to look on themselves
as Scotsmen. The mass of the population are of Norse stock, whose
language died out here as slowly as Cornish at the other end of the
kingdom; and still it colours the local dialect, that kept a quaint
Quakerism of _thee_ and _thou_, with a continental slurring of the _h_
in such words. The islands are reckoned as a Scottish county, but their
_particularismus_ considers itself rather as a boat towed in the wake
of Great Britain; and they speak of going to Scotland as Cornishmen of
crossing the Tamar into England. Another correspondence with Cornwall
is in the prevalence here of dissenting forms of Evangelical doctrine.
Then, like the Cornish moors and cliffs, those of Thule are dotted with
grey monuments of forgotten faith and bloodshed, long washed out of
memory.
Except by isolated incidents, the islands enter little into the
history of Scotland, since the days when it was alternately a refuge
and a raiding ground for their Viking chiefs. Kirkcaldy of Grange was
shipwrecked here in pursuit of Bothwell. Montrose pressed some of the
islanders into his service, else they took slight interest in the wars
of Whig and Tory. More than one stirring naval engagement came off at
this northern end of the kingdom, long exposed to raids from French and
Dutch cruisers, against which, indeed, most of the islands were well
defended by their perilous reefs and currents. Their latest appearance
in history was a hoax that deceived newspaper readers of 1866 into
believing the account of a Fenian raid on Unst, with such details as a
forced ransom, the taking of hostages, the minister hanged by his own
bell-rope, all set forth so seriously that a man-of-war is said to have
got as far as Aberdeen on its way to the rescue.
The two groups number some eight score islands and islets, not half
of them inhabited. Lying in the Gulf Stream, they have a wet and
windy climate, variable rather than severe, often cool in summer, raw
and rheumatic in winter, when a truly dark December affords little
chance for skating or curling. That many-weathered March of our
islands usually brings the sharpest cold to this end of them. The
whole archipelago is so broken into _holms_ and indented by _voes_,
that on the largest islands one will never be more than a few miles
from the sea; nor is it easy to take a mile’s walk without coming
on a reed-fringed, foam-edged basin of fresh water, over which salt
spray blows into one’s face across the rough cliff-bound flats that
swell up into waves of moor, but seldom into imposing hills. Except
in a few favoured spots, where thin clumps of stunted wood are nursed
like gardens, a telegraph post is the only kind of tree breaking
the bleak horizon above heath and bog, with a lonely farm-house, a
huddlement of cottages, a patch of fields now and then to remind us
that this is no wilderness. Seen under its too frequent shade of sullen
sky or drizzling showers, such a landscape strikes the lover of lush
nature as dismal, yet it has its bright moments, sometimes its halcyon
seasons in the long days of the far northern summers, and at all times
taking features of its own. “The scene, which on a sunless day seems
hard and cold, with occasional gleams of sunlight, becomes a perfect
kaleidoscope of varying colours.” So writes Mr. J. R. Tudor in his
excellent book on the islands, which also tells us of “vivid greens” in
early summer, of glorious shows of red clover to relieve the prevalent
dulness, and of a rich spangling of spring flowerets that here linger
into June and July. The little purplish _Primula Scotica_ has been
called the queen of Orkney blooms, among them some rare in the North,
and some that seem dying out in a hard struggle for existence. The
writer who thinly disguised himself as “Shirley,” thus sums up our
Thule’s finest features:—
For the artist there are vast spaces of sea and sky; the shining
sands; the glories of the sunset; and above and beyond all the
pageantry of the storm. For each day a fresh drama is transacted upon
the heavens. The morning hours are often brilliantly bright; but ere
mid-day the sun is suddenly obscured; the storm-cloud rises out of
the Atlantic; sometimes the wind and rain lash the panes for hours;
sometimes the cloud breaks upon the hills of Hoy, and passes away
like a dream. The _dénoûment_ of the drama is always obscure; you
cannot predict what the end will be, and so the interest never flags.
And among the land-locked bays and through the narrow channels there
is excellent boating for those who can circumvent the tides. Unless,
indeed, you know something of the obscure laws which govern the ebb
and flow of the ocean in this network of islands, you are pretty sure
to come to grief. For round many of them it runs like a mill-race.
Between Hoy and Stennis, for instance, the ebb is simply a foaming and
swirling torrent, against which sail and even steam are powerless.
That vast body of water pouring into the Atlantic is as irresistible
as a Canadian rapid. But if you study the tides, you can seek out
secluded nooks, where the seals are basking on the tangle, and the
wild duck are wheeling round the bay, and the blue rocks are darting
out of the caves, and the grouse are crowing among the heather, and
where for ten months out of the twelve the peace is absolute, and
silence unbroken save by the shepherd’s dog.
[Illustration: AN ORCADIAN FIREPLACE]
It has been remarked how the very superstitions of such a land run
naturally to fishiness, as indeed all over the Hebrides uncouth
leviathans haunt the fog banks, dragons lurk in the hollowed
cliffs, sea-serpents in the voes as water-bulls in the lochans, and
treacherously smiling mermaids, more to be shunned than all these
monsters, delude men to their doom among slippery reefs. The mermaid
legends may well have been suggested by half-human glimpses of seals.
Our critical age is also disposed to relate them to occasional visits
of Eskimo or Lapp adventurers, seen only to the waist in their skin
canoes. Not so long ago there were people in the islands who boasted
descent from “Finn” strangers, very possibly kinsmen of an
aboriginal pigmy race, Picts, “Pechts,” or what not, that may here have
left their memory in the “Trows” or “Trolls” of land mythology, and
their name in the Pentland (_Pechtland_) Firth.
Fishing and fowling, as well as antiquarian puzzles, have long
been attractions to these rocks and waters, that begin to be more
visited for their own sake, now that our generation develops a taste
in out-of-the-way aspects of nature. It was a lucky hit for the
archipelago when in 1814 Walter Scott accompanied the Northern Lights
Commissioners on their jovial tour of office, at Stromness picking up
from a toothless Norna that story of the pirate Gow which he so well
dressed up in the contents of his note-book. One admires his dexterity
in conducting the plot so as to bring in the lions of a trip, his
companions on which could have no doubt of the authorship. Gow was a
real character, whose name, to be translated Smith, pairs with Paul
Jones, another eighteenth-century corsair, of whom it is told that he
was scared away from Lerwick by the red flannel petticoats of women
marching to market, as the French invaders of Pembrokeshire were by
red-cloaked Welshwomen, mistaken for an army of soldiers. It seems
strange to remember how Scott’s fellow-tourists were kept on the alert
by the fear of American privateers.
From the Orkneys Byron also took an authentic hero for his _Island_
in George Stewart, midshipman of the _Bounty_, “tempest-born in body
and in mind,” whose Otaheitean child was living here in the middle of
last century. Then Orkney has poets of her own, such as John Malcolm,
the soldier; David Vedder, the sailor; and Mr. T. S. Omond, known as a
writer on as in metre, from whom I have quoted at the beginning of this
chapter. Professor Aytoun, whose lyre had such a range of strings, was
connected with the islands as their Sheriff, while one of his Christian
names hints at kindred with the Shetland Edmonstons distinguished in
natural history. Clouston is the name of another “family-pen” here;
and that of Moodie, husband and wife, was transplanted to Canadian
authorship. Rae the Arctic, and Baikie the African explorer set out
from so far north. From Orkney came a whole galaxy of Traill writers.
The three Laings, all notable in literature, were of an Orkney family.
So was Washington Irving, who indeed narrowly escaped being born on
Shapinshay, as our American cousins will be interested to know. J.
R. Lowell was of Orkney blood by the spindle side; he could remember
his maternal grandmother as dressing in black on Independence Day and
lamenting “His Majesty’s unhappy differences with his colonists.” By
the way, in _Bonnie Scotland_, while explaining how, spite of such
names as Munroe, Buchanan, Grant, Arthur, McKinley, no born Scotsman
has yet been President of the United States, I forgot to mention that
President Polk (_Pollock_) boasted lineal descent from John Knox. It
may be added that President Roosevelt is certainly of Scottish stock on
one side, even if his paternal line be not connected with some John o’
Groat or Dirk Hatteraick.
In Scott’s day the islands were backward in cultivation, though what
with fishing, wrecks, smuggling, and kelp-burning, the people seemed
uncommonly well supplied with luxuries. Poverty may have originally
prompted that strange superstition as to the danger of saving lives
from the sea, which lingered in Cornwall, too, almost up to our own
day. The islanders counted on what they could make out of “God-sends”
such as helped to furnish Magnus Troil’s house and the pack of Bryce
Snailsfoot; and it was a serious loss to them when the beaconing of
their stormy waters diminished the harvest of flotsam and jetsam. Scott
tells how an Orcadian answered Mr. Stevenson remarking on the bad sails
of his boat: “If it had been His will that you hadna built sae many
lighthouses hereabout, I would have had new sails last winter.”
The ground was much divided among small proprietors, as it still is
to a less degree, and small holdings are common, so that the islands
were, quite needlessly as regards the Orkneys, some think, put under
the Crofters Commission. The people of the southern group are more
thriftily prosperous than in the Hebrides. They had their fit of
standing out obstinately against “improvements”; then they suffered
from the set-back of the kelp industry, here very profitable for a
time, but its failure proved a blessing in disguise as turning their
attention to agriculture; and they seem too well off now to trouble
about kelp, on which the landlords would still set them working at
“orra” times. In the last half-century tenants and “peerie” lairds
showed the sense to follow enterprising landlords like Balfour of
Shapinshay, so that now many of the farms compare with those on the
mainland. There is a flourishing export of cattle, much improved by
the introduction of good stock. Along with their ponies and hairy
sheep, almost as wild as goats, the islands had a breed of small cows,
from whose milk was made their peculiar drink _bland_, resembling the
koumiss of the Tartars. Some quarter of a century ago an effort was
made to push this beverage in London, where, however, it seems not to
have “caught on.” Then living in Kensington lodgings, I patriotically
ordered a case of it, which, as the weather was hot and the liquor
“up,” I put under my bed, taking this for the coolest spot at my
command, but ignorant that it was over the kitchen fire. I had hardly
got into bed when, one by one, the bottles began to explode, till
the whole battery had fired itself away. Above me slept no less a
fellow-lodger than General Gordon, not yet of Khartoum; and I wondered
whether my bombardment might have brought China into his dreams.
The Shetlands, for their part, are grander, wilder, rougher, poorer,
colder, wetter, less “improved,” in general, more Norse and primitive.
Their industry is rather at sea than on land. Mr. Tudor quotes an apt
saying as to the difference between the people: “The Shetlander is
a fisherman who has a farm; the Orcadian a farmer who has a boat.”
Through the fisheries the Shetlanders were long in closer touch with
Holland and Scandinavia than with Scotland, which for centuries has
been spreading her tentacles over the adjacent Orkneys. A century ago
Dutch and Danish coins were more familiar at Lerwick than the head of
George III.; and up to a later time, Norwegian weights and measures
were used all over the islands. The Orkneys are, or were, well stocked
with grouse and snipe; sea-fowl are the game of the Shetlands, not that
they lack in the southern group, among which the great auk was killed
off three-quarters of a century ago. Straw-plaiting was once a resource
of the Orkneys. They are rich in cattle, the Shetlands rather in sheep,
where the chief home industry is the hosiery knitting that keeps
women’s fingers busy even when their backs are bowed under peat creels.
The Shetlands, in short, bear much the same relation to the Orkneys as
the Highlands to the Lowlands, though the old name _Hialtland_ seems
not so fitting as _Sea-land_, the former spelling of which is preserved
in the Earl of Zetland’s title. Till lately the Shetlands were less
visited by strangers; but now a tide of tourist-travel seems to be
setting strongly to the northern isles, that offer such a change of air
for southrons able to put up with somewhat scrimp accommodation, while
hospitable goodwill as yet must take the place of hotel luxury.
The tourist’s easiest goal is Kirkwall, capital of the Mainland,
_alias_ Pomona, central mass of the Orkneys. The old grey town,
cramped into narrow ways, stands at the head of its “Church Bay,”
about the towering Cathedral founded by Jarl Ronald in memory of his
uncle, murdered St. Magnus. This is one of the few noble Scottish fanes
that came almost unhurt through the Reformation, though mutilated
by tempest and by neglect, and only in part still used as a church.
It rivals Glasgow as the finest of northern Cathedrals, its special
character being a height and narrowness that give imposing effect, and
some of the architectural ornaments are of striking beauty, as the
east rose-window and the carved doorways in which different colours of
stone were well combined. By the will of a late eccentric Sheriff, a
considerable sum becomes available for the restoration or decoration of
this ancient fabric.
[Illustration: KIRKWALL CATHEDRAL, ORKNEY]
Beside the Cathedral stand the ruins of two palaces: the Bishop’s, in
which King Haco died, and the later Earl’s, built by Patrick Stewart,
tyrant of the Islands, as was his father before him, a left-handed
son of James V., set up in life with this misused dominion. Patrick’s
oppressions were so scandalous that he came to execution, as did his
son Robert Stewart, for rebellion, so, like the Dukedom of Orkney
conferred by Mary on Bothwell, who never got the length of admission
into Kirkwall, the Stewarts’ Earldom passed away, belying its boastful
motto, _Sic fuit, est, et erit_. These offshoots of royalty seem
unlucky in their intromissions with Latin, for one of the charges
against them was Earl Robert having described himself as “Filius
Jacobi Quinti _Rex_ Scotorum,” a slip in grammar that came to be judged
treasonable, as indeed did Wolsey’s good Latinity, “Ego et rex meus.”
The royal castle has disappeared, its site commemorated by the name of
an hotel; but Kirkwall has still several quaint and venerable mansions,
once inhabited by the island aristocracy, behind which are hidden
gardens that in this climate seem more precious than palaces. In short,
Kirkwall is quite a place to “delay the tourist,” whose visit will
probably not coincide with the New Year football Saturnalia, kept up
here as on Shrove Tuesday in some English towns; but he may come in for
the dwindled delights of the Lammas Fair, described by Scott in all its
glory.
The vicinity is full of antiquarian interest. From the hill above the
town, as Dr. John Kerr says, one can see “memorials of every form of
religion that has ever existed in Scotland.” A few miles off, towards
the other side of the island, is a region strewn with prehistoric
remains, like the moors of Karnac in Brittany. The most famous lion
here is the Stones of Stennis, a circle of sacrifice, sepulture, or
what not, second only to Stonehenge in our islands. On the opposite
side of the deep double inlet of Stennis, half fresh and half salt
water, stand or lie ruins of a similar circle, near which a modern
Vandal has demolished the “Stone of Odin,” where Minna Troil would have
pledged her faith to Cleveland by clasping hands through the opening
of a pierced obelisk, gentler rite than that carving a captive foe’s
back into “a red eagle,” for which one of these stones once made a
scaffold. Not far off is the famous Maeshowe tumulus, whose mysterious
runes have tried the ingenuity of many interpreters. Similar chambered
mounds, “fairy howes” to the people, are found nearer Kirkwall, as
in other islands, all over which may be encountered “grey, grim, and
solitary standing stones, bearded with moss, which are kith and kin
to the prehistoric obelisks of Stennis.” A sight of a very different
kind is Balfour Castle, on the island of Shapinshay, where a mansion
imitating Abbotsford has been decked out in exotic greenery, that seeks
to vie with the gardens of Lewis Castle.
At the north end of the island, Birsay is visited for the ruined
“palace” of the Jarls, and for the fishing of its lochs. The only other
town is Stromness on the west side, a snug little port, for which
the sea is “a domestic institution,” as Mr. Gorrie says. “It ripples
familiarly up the short lanes between rows of houses, and the bows of
vessels stretch across second-storey windows.” A ship’s cabin serves,
or used to serve, as smoking-room in the garden of the hotel. The shop
windows, besides sea stores, chiefly exhibit sweets and stockings,
but such hints of innocent tastes may be overlaid in early summer,
when thousands of herring-fishers come to make the place an unsavoury
rendezvous, as it once was for whalers and Hudson Bay traders.
Stromness should be noted in Scottish history for a law case in which
this champion of open markets broke down the trade monopoly hitherto
arrogated by royal burghs, like Kirkwall; and these competitors
love each other as Margate loves Ramsgate. Its museum contains an
interesting collection of fossils, among them that primæval monster
the _Asterolepis_, of which Hugh Miller made his celebrated discovery
hereabouts.
Off Stromness lies Hoy, an island containing the cream of Orkney
scenery. On the north-west side the cliffs are higher than any of our
mainland, and beside them rises the Old Man of Hoy, now on his last
leg, but he once had two to prop up “the grandest natural obelisk in
the British Isles.” The difficulty is to get a view of these giant
rocks by leave of the rushing tideways and the squally winds. I
have seen them only from their edge, yet might as well have been in
Cheapside, when such a heavy drifting mist came on that I was glad to
grope my way down, steering cautiously by half-obscured knolls, as
shown on the Ordnance Map. The clearest sight I saw was the abashment
of an English tourist, who suddenly emerged from the fog _sans
culotte_, with fluttering shirt tails, wearing his most indispensable
garment over his arm, perhaps from some mental confusion between
Arcadian and Orcadian customs, or he had reckoned on meeting no one
more modest than that Old Man of Hoy. Sights more safely visited are
the Dwarfie Stone, the glen of Berriedale, the Kaim of Hoy, whose rock
profile gratefully presents a silhouette of Sir Walter Scott, and the
Enchanted Carbuncle seen by faithful eyes sparkling on the side of the
Ward Hill. This is the highest point of the islands (1556 feet), from
whose top, on a fine day, one has them spread out on the sea like a
toy map, and can count their lower Ward Hills that once gave alarms of
the approach of a foe.
Even the short crossing to Hoy may turn out a little adventurous; and
the gentle tourist is not apt to make his way to less famous islands,
their funnelled and tunnelled cliffs cut off from each other by such
wild seas that this amphibious constituency has for its elections a
fortnight’s grace beyond the rest of Britain. Next to Hoy, Rousay is
the most Highland of the Orkneys, and North Ronaldshay is said to be
the most primitive, as South Ronaldshay the most fertile. Each sundered
portion cherishes a parish patriotism, once breeding hot feuds, but now
chiefly represented by nicknames interchanged between the islanders,
the _Hawks_ of Hoy, the _Crabs_ of Harray, the _Sheep_ of Shapinshay,
the _Limpets_ of Stronsay, the _Mares_ of Rousay, and so forth,
neighbourly pleasantries that in the Shetlands take more offensively
personal forms, as the _Thieves_ of Yell, and the “Honest Folk” of
Unst, so named with a note of interrogation. Some quaint Norse family
names abound here, such as Halcro, Harcus, Inkster, Bea, Cursiter,
Isbister; and, as one might expect, these are found so closely packed
together that, on one island, a school-inspector mentions a roll of
eighty children having among them only eight surnames. Scottish names
are commoner in the Orkneys, my own for one, a branch of which “louped”
so far north as Rapness in Westray, whence its thrivingest shoot came
back to Perthshire, buying from his impoverished chief the family
estate of that ilk with a fortune made apparently not in those wild
seas, but as a public official. The Orkneys more than the Shetlands
were overrun by Scottish lairds and their dependants who, like the
English settlers in Ireland, fell much into the popular sentiment and
grew to be more or less loyal sons of Thule.
As link between the Orkneys and the Shetlands, in the middle of
Sumburgh Roost, where the Gulf Stream rushes almost as violently as
through the Pentland Firth, stands the lonely little Fair Isle, a foul
one for ships, which, like the Faröe Isles, gets its name not from
beauty, but from the Norse _faar_, “sheep.” A botanist tells us how
its one meadow is almost dyed in the season by the blue flower of the
“sheep’s bit.” This cliff-walled island was once visited chiefly in
the way of shipwreck, and still strangers are rare birds here, warmly
welcomed, unless they turn out to be revenue officers or such like, the
sight of whom used to set the people scurrying like rabbits to their
burrows, while they opened their arms to preachers of any denomination.
In Scott’s time they had a pastoral visit only once a year, sometimes
not so often, where several couples might be ready for marriage in
a lump, and a dozen children for baptism, one of them old enough to
make an unedifying comment on the ceremony, as the novelist records.
The great event in Fair Isle history was the shipwreck of the Spanish
Armada’s _Admiral_, whose people quartered themselves here through the
winter in a high-handed manner, that seems not to have hindered kinder
relations with the fair islanders. A trace of their sojourn appears
in the hosiery made by possible descendants of Spanish sailors, still
showing the Moorish patterns brought to Andalusia, and thence to this
bleak spot. These people do not always get such good words from their
rare visitors as do the unsophisticated inhabitants of Foula, which,
lying out to the west of the Shetlands, remote like St. Kilda from the
Long Island, presents in its circuit of some nine miles what has been
judged the noblest cliff scenery in Britain, in summer so clamorously
alive with sea-fowl that “the air seemed as if filled with gigantic
snow-flakes.”
One might here fill pages by quoting from enthusiastic ornithologists,
and telling exploits of the daring cragsmen who have exterminated or
thinned out some of the nobler fowl; but I have so much to say about
man that I must leave beast and bird out of view. The Shetlanders
are born fishermen, a craft that calls for no small courage in these
latitudes. It is only at odd times they turn to their rugged and thin
soil, whose most outstanding production seems the small _Sheltie_
ponies, in great demand for use in southern collieries. Sir M. Grant
Duff tells of one brought to the mainland, that it had to learn what
oats were good for. As for the hungry sheep, a Midland squire I knew
once transported a flock of them to England, where they forthwith
fell to cropping their way through the hedges in which they found
unwontedly toothsome pasture. Even domestic animals may show a touch
of the sea, for seals are sometimes tamed as family pets. Otters are
the Shetlands’ amphibious beasts of prey. The great game here is the
“Ca’in’ whales,” now and then a sperm whale, that sometimes blunder
into narrow voes, to be assailed with a general hue-and-cry of every
soul that can get near them, as described in the _Pirate_, and in Mr.
D. Gorrie’s _Summers and Winters in the Orkneys_.
Rounding the point of Torness, and stretching across the mouth of
the bay, the fleet of small craft again hove into view, and pressed
upon the rear of the slowly-advancing and imprisoned whales. Among
the onlookers there was now intense excitement, the greatest anxiety
being manifested lest the detached wing should follow the previous
practice of the main army, and again break the line of the boats in a
victorious charge. The shoutings and noise of the boatmen recommenced,
and echoed from shore to shore of the beautiful and secluded bay. A
fresh alarm seized the monsters, but instead of wheeling about, and
rushing off to the open sea as before, they dashed rapidly forwards a
few yards, pursued by the boats, and were soon floundering helplessly
in the shallows. The scene that ensued was of the most exciting
description. Fast and furious the boatmen struck and stabbed to
right and left, while the people on the shore, forming an auxiliary
force, dashed down to assist in the massacre, wielding all sorts of
weapons, from roasting-spits to ware-forks. The poor wounded monsters
lashed about with their tails, imperilling life and limb, and the
ruddy hue of the water along the stretch of shore soon indicated
the extent of the carnage. The whales that had received their death
stroke emitted shrill cries, accompanied with a strange snorting and
humming noise, which has been not inaptly compared to the distant
sound of military drums pierced by the sharp piping of fifes. As
the blood of the dead and dying more deeply incarnadined the sea,
it gave a dreadful aspect of wholesale butchery to the murderous
close of the summer whale-chase. Some of the larger whales displayed
great tenacity of life, and survived repeated strokes and stabs, but
the unequal conflict closed at last, and no fewer than a hundred
and seventy carcases were dragged up the beach. One or two slight
accidents occurred, but to me it seemed marvellous that the boatmen
did not injure each other as much as the whales amid the confusion and
excitement of the scene.
[Illustration: SHETLANDERS]
The largest of the Shetlands also bears the name of Mainland, on the
east side of which nestles Lerwick, the only town in these islands.
Chiefly consisting of one long, narrow flagged street, with a modern
esplanade upon a crescent bay, some of the houses actually standing
in the water, for the convenience, it is said, of the smugglers who
were frequent visitors, Lerwick is taken to resemble a Dutch seaport,
a comparison carried out by the Dutch and other foreign fishermen
familiar here. A new town has in our time sprung up on higher ground
above. The place of Kirkwall’s Cathedral is taken by a very fine Town
Hall, to the decoration of which the magistrates of Amsterdam and
Hamburg contributed in recognition of old intercourse, as did several
Scottish municipalities. Fort Charlotte, now station of the Naval
Reserve, was originally built by Oliver Cromwell, who stretched his
heavy hand so far north. The harbour is locked by the precipitous
Bressay Island, outside of which lies the sundered Holm of Noss, once
reached from its neighbour by a dizzy cradle, swung from cliff to
cliff, which might well be revived as one of the “fearful joys” of
the Earl’s Court Exhibition.
Other sights of the Mainland are Scalloway, on the west coast, the
ancient capital, where the tyrant Earl Patrick built a castle; Fitful
Head, with its grand view from the end of the southern promontory; the
Broch of Mousa, most perfect example of such structures, on an islet
off the east coast of this promontory; and Papa Stour, an island on
the other side, riddled with creeks and caves, one of which MacCulloch
dubbed the finest in Britain. Then the main island is pitted with
countless lochs, “one for every day in the year,” in which, as in the
inlets, fishing can still be had free.
To speak of the other islands, Yell, Fetlar, Whalsay and their
satellites, would be merely repetition of similar characteristics as
summed up in _Black’s Guide_, their interior usually a dull stretch of
hills, bogs, and pools, but the coast, especially on the west side,
a wonderful show: “Mural precipices over 1000 feet high, the abode
of myriads of sea-fowl of all descriptions; solitary islets, feeding
on their flat green tops flocks of timid lambs; isolated ‘stacks,’
cleaving the skies; gloomy ‘hellyers,’ within whose sunless shades the
tide ebbs and flows; here a gravelly beach piled high with heaps of cod
and tusk and ling in process of curing; there a narrow _gio_, with a
herd of seals sunning themselves on its tangle-covered rocks,—such are
the varieties of the Shetland seascape and landscape.”
The northernmost island is Unst, which Mr. Tudor pronounces at once
the most grandly picturesque of them all, “bar Foula,” and also the
most thriving, for along with some remarkable mineral rarities, it
has oases of cultivation that have earned it the title, “Garden of
the Shetlands.” One of the stone circles here is believed to mark the
ancient meeting-place of the Shetland _Thing_, or popular assembly,
before its removal to Tingwall on the Mainland. In modern days Unst has
been famed as residence of the Edmonstons, that family of naturalists,
and as sojourn of Biot, the French savant, while carrying out his
delicate astronomical measurements. In Biot’s account of this task, he
praises the warm hearts and peaceful lives of the Shetland families, so
close knit in kindliness, but for which he could not imagine what kept
them in their poor and ungenial country.
Off the north end of Unst, seven hundred miles from the Bishop’s Rock
Lighthouse of Scilly, England’s most southerly point, our Ultima Thule
is the isolated crag of Muckle Flugga. Here towers a lighthouse,
the building of which, half a century ago, was itself a perilous
achievement, as with so many more of
Those ever-burning fires that smile
O’er night’s bleak ocean many a mile,
To welcome Albion’s truant child
From Indian shore or western wild.
Lighthouses have indeed been a boon to the navigators of these stormy
seas, as steamers to their inhabitants, though of one pious islander
it is recorded how his first acquaintance with such a fiery craft
fulfilled his vision of the Day of Judgment.
CHAPTER X
CHILDREN OF THE MIST
We have seen how the Orcadians are mainly Norse. Landing on Caithness,
once a shelf of wild _Catti_, or on its _Sutherland_, we find clans
like the Gunns, the Keiths, and the Mackays, plainly or possibly of
Viking stock, and a swarm of Sinclairs whose chiefs came from the south
as confessed Normans. The greatest of the Macaulays, who seems to set
little store by his Scottish descent, boasted his clan as sons of Olaf.
All along the north-west coasts and in the islands we must note how
common are Norse place-names, given by god-fathers who often brought
gifts of fire and sword to the christening, or again, as in more than
one authentic instance within historic records, might be shipwrecked
Danes settling down by accident in some no-man’s-corner. Who can say
what crews from other European lands may not have found or forced the
same hospitality? As soldiers rather, Scots went much abroad in early
days, and some of them came back again, not always leaving behind
women and children of uncouth speech. Cromwell’s men, by the way, did
not scunner to look upon Highland daughters of Heth. We catch modern
Saxons intruding here, who, after a generation or two,—so experience
shows in our own time,—may grow as ardent Gaels as ever chorused
“Auld Lang Syne” at Highland gatherings. If one desire some idea of
the cross-strains in this miscellany of population, let him read
Skene’s _Highlanders_ as corrected by his recent editor, Dr. Macbain,
and by the author himself in his more mature _Celtic Scotland_. It is
far from clear how much Pict and how much Scot went to the making of
a Gaelic-speaking race, which, the harder one looks at it, the more
puzzlingly suggests that hero described by a modern ballad-maker—
In a knot himself he ties,
With his grizzly head appearing in the centre of his thighs,
Till the petrified spectator asks in paralysed alarm,
Where may be the warrior’s body, which is leg and which is arm.
[Illustration: CAITHNESS COAST NEAR DUNNET HEAD]
To the hopeless question, Who were the Picts? there are two main
schools of answering guesswork: one holding them an older stock,
displaced or overlain by Gaels; the other taking them as a Celtic
people, reinforced from Ireland or elsewhere. As to the Celts,
ethnologists have a good deal to say and sing, but by no means in
chorus. Shall we trust the Milesian tale of their coming from Spain,
bringing their courteous manners and that watchword _mañana_, honoured
in the Hebrides as in Iberian lands—a consideration for Buckle’s
handling of Scottish and Spanish characteristics? Did their race
flourish in Etruria when the Romans were still kilted in wolf-skins?
Are we to look for their ancestors in Greece, as Professor Blackie
would have liked to believe? Were they not rather Phœnicians, a race
notoriously given to emigration? Did they start farther back in the
blessed Mesopotamia, perhaps walking straight out of the Garden of
Eden, since the purest Gaelic has been seriously defined as “that
spoken by Adam”?
I wonder that no more has been made of a kinship between Gaelic and
Arab customs—the proud independence of clans living in ancestral
feuds chequered by rules of scrupulous hospitality, the division of
work among men and women, the raids in which young swash-bucklers win
their spurs by booty of black cattle and camels; there are several such
points likening those _Bens_ to _Macs_ a little mummified by a dry
climate, who would soon learn to skip over bogs and to abuse factors
instead of pashas. The Wahabi sect of Arabia has some correspondence
with Scottish Presbyterianism as kept pure in the Highlands. The
Arab burnous could easily be tinted as a plaid; and in some parts
of Arabia, it appears, a kind of philabeg is worn. In the Highlands
there is a stunted love for a horse; and the seaside Arab can manage a
_dhow_ as well as our West Islanders. The matter of language of course
presents some difficulty, but ethnologists are skilled in getting over
difficulties.
Egypt and Scythia are other cradles suggested for the Celt, for whom
also has been claimed a filial interest in the mysterious traces of
the Hittites. Descent from Chaldean or Accadian sages had better
be reserved for the Lowland Scots, so prominent as law-givers or
instructors in the modern world. Speculators of past generations always
had the lost Ten Tribes to draw upon. Joseph, certainly, is recorded
as wearing tartan in his youth, and being carried off to market in
Egypt by Macgregors of the period. Higher criticism, on the other
hand, has quenched the pretensions of those chiefs who fondly looked
back on their ancestors as using a private boat at the flood, that
may well have affected this land of Ararats. A Highland tourist of a
century ago tells how his host entertained him with a boastful tale of
the antiquity and grandeur of the clan Donnachie, known to ignorant
Sassenachs as Robertson. The bored guest tried to change the subject
with, “I am of the clan Adam, which I believe is the oldest of them
all.” —“So are the Hottentots!” quoth the offended chieftain, and went
on with his long genealogy.
Turning in quite another direction for an ancestry, might one not make
out much in common between those bellicose clans and the Red Indian
tribes of America? But when it comes to facts and figures, one is not
sure that the Highlanders can boast any clearer title than that of
“Children of the Mist.” And if this seem an unworthy pedigree, let
them remember the proud Roman whose fabled ancestor brought little but
legends to cement a foundation of Latins, Sabines, and Etruscans, that
became built so high by materials from all the ends of the earth.
To travel through Scotland, it has been well said, is to travel through
the Waverley Novels. The north end of the kingdom, however, makes
an exception, which lay beyond Sir Walter’s ken, but for one swoop
he took round the islands. Perhaps because it was frame for none of
his stories, this region from Caithness to Kintail is less visited by
tourists, though it contains such grand scenes as the Cave of Smoo,
Loch Maree, and the worn-down mountains of Torridon. It is a smaller
edition of the rest of Scotland, its sea-bound lowlands facing to the
east, its highlands to the west, where their jutting promontories and
deep fiords seem made to dovetail into the opposite island shores, with
which this side was long closely connected in peace and war, bringing
about an interfusion of enterprisingly restless neighbours. On the
other side, landward, a remarkably sharp division marks the province of
the Gael from that of the ex-Goth.
Horace himself would be puzzled to find a lucid order for the history
of the North-Western Highlands, so obscurely entangled are its thickets
of legend and so dim often its clearings of chronicle. We catch vague
glimpses of a struggle between the mainland power of the Earl of Ross
and that of the Macdonald Lords of the Isles. More than once these
titles became fused, till their rival powers died out, and they were
both merged in the crown. The famous battle of Harlaw was not so much
a struggle between Highlander and Lowlander as an attempt on the part
of the Lord of the Isles to seize the Earldom that had invaded his
water-walled domains. When adventurous James V., sailing in person
to Stornoway, had been able to over-awe but hardly to master those
quarrelsome western Rodericks, Red and Black, the task of training or
exterminating them was offered in turn to Huntly, to Argyll, and to the
company of Fife gentlemen, who in the Lewis imitated the enterprise and
the failure of Elizabeth’s Virginia colonists. Then out of the welter
of anarchy arose one dominant name, to play over the northern islands
and mountains the same absorbing part as the Campbells in the south.
[Illustration: KYLE OF TONGUE AND BEN LOYAL]
Who were those Mackenzies of Kintail, that, passing over to Lewis,
grew to be better known by the title of Seaforth? Like the Campbells,
they were at one time fain to claim descent from a Norman family,
that of the Irish Fitzgerald. But this clan has had the fortune to
possess an historian on the premises, so to speak, in the person of the
late Alexander Mackenzie, one of the most zealous and industrious of
Highland antiquaries. He declares the Fitzgerald origin “impossible,”
and takes back the “sons of Kenneth” to one O’Beolan, or Gilleoin,
who married the daughter of Rollo, the pirate earl, before Norsemen
became Normans. This origin is admittedly nebulous; but when the epoch
gets into its teens, sons and daughters of the line appear as clearly
intermarrying with Bruces, Grahams, St. Clairs, and other Lowlanders,
some of whom were little better than English barons, the Plantagenet
blood of Normandy and the MacAlpine royalty being among their
infusions, which also filter down from kings of Norway, France, and the
Isle of Man. Through a shadowy ancestral Gillanders, “servant of St.
Andrew,” in the far background, the Clan Ross, _alias_ Andrias, is
made out a senior branch of the same stock; and there is a less famed
Clan Matheson that would have itself known as the original tree.
Not to give the reader a headache over genealogical tables more
involved than the story of the “Ring and the Book,” one may ask him
to consider if the youths and maidens of those names were alabaster
grandsires all through the centuries when Viking Jarls ruled the
islands and swept their raids over half Scotland. Such considerations
go to bear out the comparison of Highland purity of race to an old
knife well provided, in the course of time, with another handle and
more than one new blade. A fitter metaphor would be a faded and partly
re-dyed tartan, whose intricate pattern of crossing stripes is hardly
distinguishable without spectacles. Unless in metaphors, at long range,
I am not disposed to argue with Celtic historians, who, from Dr.
Johnson perhaps, have learned his trick of knocking you down with the
butt end of a pistol when it misses fire. But surely enough has been
said to show how these much-vexed questions of genealogy give footing
no firmer than the bogs of Gaeldom and Galldom.
The Mackenzies first come into note as seated at Kintail, in the
south-west corner of Ross. Here the “Five Sisters of Kintail” now look
frowningly down on a stranger’s deer forest, once held by Mackenneths
on somewhat doubtful terms from the Earls of Ross; and so long as the
Lordship of the Isles lasted, they were vassals also of that power.
Their stronghold was the castle on Eilean Donan, where Loch Duich
and Loch Long separate as inner recesses of Loch Alsh, a beautifully
winding sheet of blue water, “fringed with golden seaweed,” beneath the
shade of grassy cones that shut in one of the fairest Highland scenes.
Here they lived at hot feud with Glengarry and other neighbours,
exchanging tit for tat of raids and revenges till, in the beginning of
the seventeenth century, Kenneth Mackenzie took a rise in the world by
shifty arts to win royal favour, as well as by unscrupulous readiness
to do without it. When the Fife Undertakers failed to lay out the
turbulent Lewis, this chief, presently created Lord Kintail, got a
commission of fire and sword to play civilising agent there. The last
act of the Macleods’ defence was at the islet of Berrisay, when the
Mackenzies forced its garrison to surrender by exposing their wives and
children upon a rock overwhelmed by the tide.
Thus set astride on both sides of the Minch, the head of the victorious
clan took from the Lewis his higher title Earl of Seaforth, whose ups
and downs went mainly with those of the house of Stuart. As loyal
Cavaliers, though they began by withstanding Montrose, the Seaforths
suffered exile and forfeiture under Cromwell. Again they shared the
misfortunes of James II., rewarded by a paper Marquisate. The fifth
Earl was at Sheriffmuir, and made an attempt to prolong the struggle in
his own country. Four years later the banished chief returned to Lewis
to lead the rising of 1719, that, quickly stamped out, is not known to
every schoolboy, though a little prudence or luck might have made it as
formidable as that of 1745, and more famous, had not a cannon ball cut
short Charles XII. of Sweden’s design to join the enterprise.
With three hundred Spanish soldiers, the vanguard of an Armada some
thousands strong driven back to Spain by the winds that have more than
once favoured our Protestant throne, and with a few hundreds of his own
clan, Seaforth invaded the mainland by way of Glenshiel. He was joined
by some other Highlanders, including a party of Macgregors under Rob
Roy, while loyal clans like the Rosses and Munros rallied to support a
force of English and Dutch soldiers which marched against the rebels
from Inverness. The encounter was a drawn match; Scott seems to go
too far in saying that the Jacobites had the best of it; but Seaforth
being seriously wounded, and some of his followers not very keen in
the cause, the rebels dispersed at nightfall, the Spanish soldiers
surrendering next day. It was on this occasion that a wounded Munro
officer on the Whig side was saved by the devotion of his servant, as
mentioned by Burt, the poor fellow shielding his master’s body with
his own and receiving several balls before they were both rescued
by a sergeant, who had sworn on his dirk to rescue the chieftain at
all risks. Another trait of Highland manners appears in one body of
clansmen having been lent to Seaforth by an obliging neighbour, but
for a single day only. With such auxiliaries even victory could be of
little profit.
Seaforth, again driven into exile, was pardoned and allowed to end
his days in Scotland. His son had the gratitude to hold aloof from
Prince Charlie in 1745, and though some of the Mackenzies took part
in the rising, the mass of the clan was kept quiet by Lord President
Forbes of Culloden, who perhaps did more than any other man to check
the movement that had its checkmate at his home. The next chief, who
received an Irish peerage, presently advanced to the former title
of Earl of Seaford, showed his loyalty by raising and commanding a
famous regiment. With him the original line died out; but a collateral
heir was created Lord Seaford, and after being half-ruined by keeping
company with the Prince Regent, died without male issue in 1815. The
chiefship of this clan, as of others, fell into a chaos of dispute, as
to which the reader must be referred to its history above mentioned.
“Who will, may hear Sordello’s story told.” That authority pronounces
for the stock of Allangrange; but the most prosperous branch is now
grafted into the ducal house of Sutherland, which has succeeded
Seaforth as chief title in the Northern Highlands.
[Illustration: DUNROBIN CASTLE, SUTHERLANDSHIRE]
A terrible story this is, in its early chapters, of bloodshed, rapine,
and treachery, luridly illustrating those good old times of the poets.
Of the many Mackenzies who have made their mark on modern history, two
Sir Georges earned an uncanny renown as persecutors of the Covenanters,
one of them better famed as founder of the Advocates’ Library. To their
date belongs the “Doom of Kintail,” not less famous in the Highlands
than the “Curse of Cowdray” in Sussex. The Seer of Brahan, who left
other predictions said to have come true, was burned as a sorcerer
by Lady Seaforth, under Charles II., and while being led to the stake
he is recorded to have pronounced this “Doom”:—
I see a Chief, the last of his House, both deaf and dumb. He will be
the father of four fair sons, all of whom he shall follow to the tomb.
He shall live careworn, and die mourning, knowing that the honours
of his House are to be extinguished for ever, and that no future
Chief of the Mackenzies shall rule in Kintail. After lamenting over
the last and most promising of his sons, he himself shall sink into
the grave, and the remnant of his possessions shall be inherited by
a white-coifed lassie from the East, and she shall kill her sister.
As a sign by which it shall be known that these things are coming
to pass, there shall be four great lairds in the days of the last
Seaforth (Gairloch, Chisholm, Grant, and Raasay), one of whom shall be
buck-toothed, the second hare-lipped, the third half-witted, and the
fourth a stammerer. Seaforth, when he looks round and sees them, may
know that his sons are doomed to death, and that his broad lands shall
pass away to the stranger, and that his line shall come to an end.
The Psychical Society might examine this most circumstantial and
well-vouched case of the second sight. Mr. A. Mackenzie asserts that
the Doom had been handed down for generations; and he quotes several
witnesses, one of them Lord Lieutenant of the county, another Sir
Walter Scott, as testifying to knowledge of its provisions before they
came to pass in due time. The last Lord Seaford was partly deaf, and so
taciturn as to pass for dumb. He had reason not to be light of speech.
Four neighbouring lairds showed the infirmities mentioned by the seer.
His four sons died one by one before their broken-hearted father. He
was succeeded by his eldest daughter, widow of Admiral Hood, our naval
commander in the East, who might be taken for “white-coifed” in her
widow’s weeds. In a sense she did kill her sister, through a carriage
accident when the heiress was driving. Thus were almost literally
fulfilled the predictions that had so long hung over this family.
The “stranger” that became second husband to the daughter of Seaforth
and took her name, was a Galloway Stewart, whose ancestor came into
Scotland as a stranger indeed, a Norman adventurer, destined by
fortunes of love and war to breed more kings than those weird sisters
of Forres foresaw. As we go south from the Mackenzie country, we get
among Frasers, Gordons, Cummings, Murrays, Grahams and other clans of
Southron, Saxon, or Norman race, that pressed northwards to cut out
homes for themselves in the mountains, and soon fell under the charm of
misty religion, Gaelic, tartans, bare legs, bards, bagpipes and all,
even as the same sentiment may be mastering the intruders from Chicago,
or Capel Court, who to-day conquer the Highlands at the edge of the
dollar.
One of the most truly ancient clans is perhaps the “wild Macraes,” long
ill famed for their robber prowess and for deft archery that could not
stand against the Saxon long-bows. They seem, in some unexplained way,
to have been hereditary allies or dependants of the greater Mackenzie
name; and it may be that they represent a prehistoric stock enslaved
as Gibeonites by Celtic conquerors; but they declare themselves to
have served the Mackenzies in no less honourable rank than that of
bodyguard, and one story goes so far as to make the original Gilleoin
the son of an ancestral Macrath. Another account is that they were
kinsfolk adopted by the Mackenzie chiefs in a scarcity of heirs. About
a century ago, almost all the inhabitants of Kintail, the cradle of
the Mackenzie power, bore the name of Macrae, which had ousted that of
Macaulay and others once mixed with the dominant clan. When the Earl
of Seaforth raised his famous regiment, so many of the men belonged to
that subordinate sept, that it was spoken of as the “Macrae regiment”;
and its mutiny at Leith in 1778 was known as the “Macrae affair.” These
new soldiers had refused to leave the country till certain grievances
were redressed. With pipes playing and plaids on poles for colours,
they marched to Arthur’s Seat, and there held out for several days,
provisioned by sympathisers in Edinburgh. In this case, the authorities
had the good sense to conciliate them by satisfying their complaints;
then they marched down again, headed by their officers, and cheerfully
embarked, not a man being brought to punishment, a leniency justified
by their future conduct on many a battlefield.
The chief of the Macraes to-day has distinguished himself as Chairman
of the Edinburgh School Board, and as a worthy Writer to the Signet, a
hint how the wild Highlandman can enter into the conditions of modern
life. It is always a satisfaction for an amateur to correct a professed
genealogist, and I note that the Mackenzie historian above mentioned
errs in promoting a younger brother to the Macrae chieftainship. My
conscience pricks me that this wrong might have some relation to the
story I set going, “with a cocked hat and stick.” More years ago than
any of us will care to count, I was walking with those brothers, the
younger by chance in the silk hat and such like of professional life,
the elder more rustically arrayed. My story is that a client heaving
into sight—so far true—the chief borrowed his brother’s headgear
to make a becoming appearance, and for such accommodation sold his
birthright.
I can see Sir Colin Macrae and other Highland friends laying hands on
their dirks, or umbrellas, with a frown for one who makes light of
sacred things. But I would ask them whether the education of a race
does not lead to a shelving of childish toys, nursery fairy tales,
and schoolroom squabbles. On week days, at least, we may be content
with the sober trappings of city life, yet keep a show of tartan for
holiday wear. “Saxon, or Dane, or whatever we be,” the Celtic element
has a way of coming to the top as a smart feather in our cap, sometimes
indeed as a bee in our bonnet. The Gael, adapting himself to trousers
and pockets, need not forget his romance, his poetry, his picturesque
points, as he does choose to forget some uglier traits of his past.
If he call me a Sassenach reviler, I can tell him that I, too, have
kindly Highland blood in my veins; and let him tell me precisely what
is Highland blood, which is more than I can. Wherever it first sprang,
from China to Peru, I take it to be something like Orange Pekoe tea,
for which, unmixed, our age has not so much use, but which gives a
piquant flavour to that choice blend of humanity apparently destined to
become the salt of the world.
This view of the Highlander’s mission will not commend itself either
to Cockney caricaturists or to Pan-Celtic Congresses. But I find my
own sentiment well expressed by one of the most eloquent voices of
the Celtic Renascence, the author styled Fiona Macleod, long hidden
in mist—now alas! in silent darkness,—whose two names, perhaps
unwittingly chosen, seem to record the union of Norse and Gaelic blood
that makes the so-called Scottish Celt, incarnate pseudonym as he may
be. To these words the arrantest Saxon should heartily say _Amen_.
The Celtic element in our national life has a vital and great part to
play. We have a most noble idea if we will but accept it. And that is
not to perpetuate feuds, not to try to win back what is gone away upon
the wind, not to repay ignorance with scorn or dulness with contempt
or past wrongs with present hatred, but so to live, so to pray, so to
hope, so to work, so to achieve, that we, what is left of the Celtic
races, of the Celtic genius, may permeate the greater race of which we
are a vital part, so that with this emotion, Celtic love of duty, and
Celtic spirituality, a nation greater than any the world has seen may
issue, a nation refined and strengthened by the wise relinquishings
and steadfast ideals of Celt and Saxon, united in a common fatherland,
and in singleness of pride and faith.
Let me not be held guilty as trifling with certain matters which some
of my countrymen seem to take over seriously. Far, indeed, be it from
me and my friends to love Scotland better than truth; but not less far
would I hold aloof from the laughing hyænas who snarl or grin at that
native land and her people. I have tried to put good points and other
points in the fairest light, for the information of strangers, often
getting their notions of the country from misty reminiscences of poetry
and fiction. And as I have more than once illustrated this account by
verses quoted from two teachers of my youth, who wrote of the Highlands
both in jest and in earnest, so let me end in the warm words of an old
schoolfellow of mine:
While huge Ben Nevis rears his sovereign crown,
And dark Glencoe looks sternly wrathful down,
And Skye’s grim crests in savage blackness frown—
While many an isle, in summer bliss serene,
Floats on its limpid floor of lustred sheen,
And hangs the enchanted wave and sky between—
While braes are purple, glens are green, and blue
The sea that mirrors all with heavenly hue,
Scotland! to thee my heart shall still be true.
THE END
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