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THE HEART OF SCOTLAND

PERTHSHIRE

Among all the provinces in Scotland, if an intelligent stranger were asked to describe the most varied and the most beautiful, it is probable he would name the county of Perth. A native, also, of any other district of Caledonia, though his partialities might lead him to prefer his native county in the first instance, would certainly class that of Perth in the second, and thus give its inhabitants a fair right to plead, that--prejudice apart--Perthshire forms the fairest portion of the northern kingdom.

Scott was an alien in Perthshire, his judgment of which, then, should be "neither partial nor impartial," as the Provost of Portobello desired; while it is so much my native heath that I give it no place but that of first in all the counties of Britain. There can be small doubt of the verdict pronounced by visitors, who take the Scottish Highlands as the cream of our island's scenery, and in most cases know little of the Highlands beyond this central maze of mountains and valleys, falling to the rich plain of Strathmore, spread out between the rugged Grampians and the green hills of Ochil and Sidlaw.

Home is the sailor, home from the sea, And the hunter home from the hill.

Alban appears to have extended above Perthshire, taking in at least the headwaters of the Spey and other streams flowing north. It certainly included the basin of the Tay and the upper waters of the Forth. And as Lowland and Highland scenery are finely mingled on these rivers, so here met and blended the confluent torrents of blood and language swelling into a steady stream of national life. What may be called a Scottish kingdom first took shape on the banks of Tay, where long was fixed its chief seat. Something like a pattern spun by the shuttle of war comes at last to light on a torn web of blood-dyed, mist-dimmed checks and stripes, hitherto a puzzling blur for the most erudite spectacles. The Muse of early history seems like that chameleon, whose fate was explained by a Highland soldier: "I put it on my bonnet and it went black; I put it on my coat and it turned red; but when I let it oot on my kilt, the tartan fairly bursted it."

It is an old reproach against us that every Scot looks on himself as descended from "great and glorious but forgotten kings." If, indeed, we calculate by geometrical progression how many millions of ancestors each of us can claim in the last thirty generations or so, the chances seem to be against any Briton not having some strain of quasi-royal blood in his veins. Scotland had, at least, many kings to be descended from, several apocryphal dozens of them, as named and numbered by George Buchanan, before he comes down to chronicles that can be verified. But to our critical age, the long row of early royal portraits exhibited at Holyrood, painted by a Dutchman at so much the square foot, seem worth still less as records than as works of art. The most ardent Scottish patriot no longer sets store by such fables as historians like Hector Boece wove into their volumes; nor is it necessary to examine so fond imaginations as that of descent from a Pharaoh's daughter, Scota, or from a Ninus king of Nineveh. Finn and Fergus, Oscar and Ossian, we must leave in cloudland, looking downwards to pick our steps over slippery rock and boggy heather, among which there is no firm footing upon traces of an aboriginal pre-Celtic stratum of humanity.

When the Romans garrisoned rather than occupied southern Scotland, and made reconnoitring expeditions into the north, its fastnesses were stoutly defended by fierce Caledonians, woodland savages, and Picti, painted warriors, who may or may not have been the same people. If the same, they may well have split into hostile tribes, warring against each other like the kindred Mohawks and Hurons, sometimes amalgamated by conquest, sometimes uniting to make raids on richer Lowland clearings. After the false dawn of Roman annals ceases to throw a glimmer on those hardy barbarians, darkness again falls over mountain and forest, lit only by the twinkling lamp of adventurous missionaries. Then the twilight of middle-age history shows a Pictish kingdom seated in Charlemagne's age on the Tay and its tributaries, but there presently overthrown by pushful invaders.

There is early Scottish history boiled down to a page or two, on which one might work in other changes that had made less violent progress, while the tops of the Grampians were being weather-worn into silt for the Tay. Those Picts had been in part conquered by the Cross before they fell under the sword. The disciplined faith of Rome overlaid the wild Christianity implanted from Iona. The ecclesiastical metropolis was removed from the West to Dunkeld, then for a time to Abernethy, another old Pictish centre, and finally to St. Andrews. Intercourse with the world, and especially with the Norman conquerors of England, imported the feudal system with its dovetailing of power and ambition between kings who were in turn sovereign and vassal on different estates of their territories. The English tongue began to absorb that of the Gael, as the Celtic leaven seemed to be lost in the Saxon dough. But when Malcolm Canmore and his Anglicising queen did so much to bring Scotland into touch with its more civilised neighbour, they moved their chief seat no nearer the new border than Dunfermline.

Wynd, the sons of the plain in old times had claws as sharp as the mountain cats'; it was only when cultivators and craftsmen had ceased to handle arms, unless for holiday sport, that a spate of Highland war could burst through the passes, even then soon to scatter and spend itself in the face of disciplined resistance.

But while those strangers rose to power and wealth upon the heather, they fell captive to its spirit, taking on the manners, sentiments, and dress of the dispossessed clans. The Stewarts from England, the Campbells from Ireland, was it? the Drummonds from Hungary or where? among other names of chivalrous antecedents, bloomed out as clans, with new tartans, feuds, and legends, to complicate the native pattern of flesh and blood; and in no long time they became more Highland than the Highlanders themselves. Most remarkable is the adoption of what has come to be called the Scottish national dress, which, according to some modern critics, ought rather to be the mackintosh. There was a time when Stewart or Murray looked on the plaid as badge of a savage foeman; there would be a time when the imported Highlanders grew as proud of kilt and bagpipes as if these had come down to them straight from Adam. All over the world have gone those badges of a race that gave them to its conquerors in exchange for its proudest blood. The cult of the tartan, revived in our own age by romantic literature and royal patronage, is an old story. One of the early emigrants to the Southern States of America is said to have rigged out all his negroes in kilts and such-like, teaching them also to speak Gaelic and to pipe and reel among cotton fields and cane swamps. But when one of those blackamoor retainers, liveried in a kilt, was sent to meet a practically-minded countryman landing from Scotland, the effect of so transmogrified a figure proved appalling. "Hae ye been long oot?" stammered the newcomer, and took his passage back by the next ship.

Away from Scotland, all true Scots carry over the world an outfit of which the colours, the trimmings, and the gewgaws come from the Highlands, while the hard-wearing qualities of the stuff are rather of Lowland manufacture. Both spinning and dyeing, I maintain, have best been done in Perthshire, a county of varied aspects, which set me the example of passing to a change of metaphor. It is in this central region that a right proportion of the Saxon dough and the Celtic yeast, baked for centuries by fires of love and war, have risen into the most crusty loaf of Scottish character. In the damp western Highlands and the cold north the baking may have been less effectual, producing a more spongy mass, not so full of nutriment, but more relished by some as a change from the stodginess of modern life. In some parts of the Lowlands, again, the dough turns out more dour and sour, not enough leavened by fermentations that leave it too leathery for all teeth. While all over Scotland there has been going on a more or less thorough interaction and coalescence of once repellent bodies, in Perthshire, I assert, the amalgamation has been most complete. "Hae ye been happy in yer jeels?" is a civil question I have heard one old wife ask of another. Here nature seems to have been happy in a due mixture of sweet and acid, shredded and stirred, boiled and moulded, with the success of Dundee marmalade.

Such is a consummation devoutly to be wished. But there are centrifugal as well as centripetal forces at work. When the fear of a foreign foe no longer hangs over us, we fall into wars of interests, of classes, of sexes; and piping times of peace breed likewise artificial injuries, useless martyrdoms, unpractical patriotisms, by which we would fain set our teeth on edge from the real sufferings of our fathers. Idly retrospective persons find nothing better to do than to rub up old sores into an imitation of plague spots, instead of leaving them to heal and vanish in the way of nature. Some discontented spirits among my countrymen have lately been agitating for the protection of Scottish rights and sentiments: it would appear more to the purpose if Englishmen got up a league to bar out northern aggrandisement. While the sovereign of the United Kingdom is bound to be of Scottish descent, and while custom fills the English archbishoprics with an apostolic succession of sons of the Covenant, there still, indeed, remains such a scandal as the Prime Ministership being occasionally open to mere Englishmen. This apart, however, most of our grievances may be comfortably digested by chewing the cud of the Union in John Bull's own spirit of easy good-nature.

Laurel crowns cleave to deserts, And power to him who power exerts: Hast not thy share? On wing?d feet, Lo! it rushes thee to meet. And all that Nature made thine own, Floating in air, or pent in stone, Shall rend the hills and cleave the sea, And like thy shadow follow thee.

The sorest gall of Scotland seems to be that her name has been like to merge in England's greater one, to which smart a plaster must be applied in the revived title of Britain. No school-book would sell north of the Tweed in this generation that let an English army serve a king of England. Yet we cannot play the censor on the speech of our Continental neighbours, who denounce as England the power that has ruled the waves to their loss; and it is England which so many sons and dependents, in so wide regions of the world, speak of as "home." In the London Library some vague hint of dirks and claymores has availed to keep Scottish History a separate department; but one notes with concern how works on the Topography of Scotland are scattered under the head of England, while London is set up with a heading to itself. But what is this slight to the carelessness of foreign authors quoting Scott and Burns among the English poets!

I confess to having lukewarm sympathy with the perfervid patriotism that is too ready to find quarrel in straws. Scotland has got quite her share of practical benefit from the "sad and sorrowful Union," and need not grudge to England the nominal advantages of size and wealth, which the latter sometimes appears to occupy as caretaker for her neighbour. So long as Scottish enterprise, thrift, and industry are allowed fair play on both sides of the Border, it seems childish to lament over lost titles and ensigns, toys of history, that only in a museum may escape being broken, and sooner or later will be swept into time's dustbin. When one sees how we have peacefully imbued our fellow subjects with our best blood, I for one am not too sorry that our dark record of feuds and slaughter and bigotry falls into its place in the background of a grander scene, and that instead of cherishing thistly independence as a romantic Norway or an austere Portugal, we merge our national life into the greater kingdom's, which, by good luck or good guidance, has come to stand so high in the world for freedom, enlightenment, and solidity. In this kingdom we take much the same place as the Manchus in China. All over the world we go forth to prosper like that Chosen People of the old dispensation, with this difference, that we have our Sion in our own hands, to which come pilgrims from all nations. The comparison would fit better if it allowed me to call Perthshire the Scottish land of Judah.

True Scots should have more philosophy than to imitate unenlightened patriotisms that would interrupt a natural process defined by Herbert Spencer as change from an incoherent homogeneity to a coherent heterogeneity accompanied by the dissipation of motion and the integration of matter. So Penelope peoples, in their darkness, undo the work of civilising daylight. Let Bohemia rage and the states of the Balkans imagine vain things. But why should Scotland waste time and electric light on looking back too fondly to the things that are behind, while she cannot help pressing forward to the inevitable destiny before her? With the warning of Ireland at hand, some of us cry out for Home Rule and such-like retrogressions that might go to giving back, at one end of the United Kingdom, the shadow of its cloudy dignity along with the substance of its old discords.

many-havened coast was the nursery of the Scottish navy and commerce. The most famous national product, next to flesh and blood and whisky, is golf, whose headquarters are in the East Neuk of this choice shire. When we consider the many towns of Fife, its wealth in horn and corn, and coal and fish, its output of textile fabrics, and remember its past history, should we not allow that this and not Perthshire is truly the heart of Scotland? It has even a Wales in Kinross, whose craving for separate status might one day raise a troublesome question. Nor does it want a classic bard to invoke for it the trumpet of fame:

For Perthshire, I make no such pretensions to isolated dignity, only for having set a pattern to all Scotland, and thus exhibiting some title to be taken as hub of the universe. But in rambling over its hills and glens, I hope to let it show for itself the truth of Scott's estimate, justified by his reference to other writers, such as might be quoted by the hundred, all in the same tale of due admiration.

It is long since Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, with that excellent taste which characterises her writings, expressed her opinion that the most interesting district of every country, and that which exhibits the varied beauties of natural scenery in greatest perfection, is that where the mountains sink down upon the champaign, or more level land. The most picturesque, if not the highest hills, are also to be found in the county of Perth. The rivers find their way out of the mountainous region by the wildest leaps, and through the most romantic passes connecting the Highlands with the Lowlands. Above, the vegetation of a happier climate and soil is mingled with the magnificent characteristics of mountain-scenery; and woods, groves, and thickets in profusion, clothe the base of the hills, ascend up the ravines, and mingle with the precipices. It is in such favoured regions that the traveller finds what the poet Gray, or some one else, has termed, Beauty lying in the lap of Terror.

TAYSIDE

I see that certain critics accuse me of being flippant, discursive, garrulous, gossiping, everything that your gravely plodding writers are not, and they no doubt find readers to their mind. It must be confessed that as a model of style I have an eye rather on the upper waters of the Tay, with its swirls and eddies and ripples, than on its broad and placid flow by the fat Carse of Gowrie. All I can say for myself is that I keep my course amid windings and tumblings, and that my foaming shallows may sweep along the same silt as loads drumlier currents lower down. Yet one loves to please all tastes, within reason, so for once let me try to be as steady and slow as the mill-lead at Perth, which, if all traditions be true, began as a Roman aqueduct, and so may give itself airs of classical authority.

"Behold the Tiber!" the vain Roman cried, Viewing the ample Tay from Baiglie's side; But where's the Scot that would the vaunt repay And hail the puny Tiber for the Tay?

Scots are not in the way of belittling their own advantages; but a certain Italian writer gravely comments on this statement by giving an estimate as to the depth of the Tiber at Rome, whereas he himself has seen a bare-legged boy wading the Tay above Perth bridge to pick up pebbles. Being unable to refute his main contention, I would have him know that this laddie was probably risking wet breeks at low tide, not in search of pebbles, but of pearls, sometimes picked up here; that a bridge would naturally be built near a ford; and that a mile higher up, beyond the tide-flow, the Tay is deep enough to drown boys in its treacherous pools, and might make Julius Caesar himself call for help if he tried swimming across it in spate. If classic poets are to be trusted, yellow is the best epithet of the Tiber, while Ruskin admiringly tells us how the pools of the Tay glint brown and blue among black swirls and rippling shallows. In the matter of climate, at all events, we are not going to let any foreigner over-brag us, for as the local poet, Alexander Glas, exclaims beside the Tay:

In scorching sun, the Italian cries in vain: O, happy, happy Caledonian swain! Whose groves are ever cool, and mild the skies, Where breezes from the ocean ever rise.

This bard, perhaps, was not aware that the snow lies longer on Soracte than on Kinnoull Hill; nor does he confess that for two or three months in the year the happy Caledonian swain may now and then welcome Italian ice-cream merchants; and in fair prose he ought to own his ocean breezes for east winds on this side of the country. The city of Perth, indeed, stands hardly a score of miles back from the sea, and made a thriving port in days when it was an advantage to unload goods up-country, well out of the way of attack. Its mariners carried on not only a coasting trade, but sailed to the Hanse ports, and took a turn at fighting with their English rivals when competition would sometimes be pushed to the point of piracy. It appears that trading craft plied as far up as Scone, below which a row-boat is now apt to stick in shallow rapids.

Through the international war-time flourished at Perth a notable line of Mercers, who appear as wealthy traders, magistrates, and benefactors of their native city, sometimes rising to higher posts in the state, coming to make noble alliances through which their head branch is now engrafted in the Lansdowne title. The old staple trade of the Fair City was glove-making; its skinners became an important corporation, and tanning held out to our day, but has been overlaid by dyeing, trades that might all merge into each other. Perhaps as a branch of dyeing sprang Todd's Perth Office Ink, which I note to be now glorified as Moncrieff's Ink, and long may it flow under that auspicious name! Another industry of Perth used to be shipbuilding, where, up to the end of the eighteenth century, vessels came and went by the hundred, and a smack sailed for London every few days. Perth was in the way of improving her port and deepening its approaches, when railways brought about a permanent low tide in the Tay traffic.

Higher up the river, in its great bend to the south, another flat bears the suggestive name of "Bloody Inches"; and the Perth Inches too have been arena for many a fray. The chief martial memory of the South Inch is as site of Cromwell's citadel, in the construction of which were used the walls of the Greyfriars, with hundreds of its tombstones, besides other monuments of the city. The North Inch is best known to fame for the battle of the Clans in 1396, when threescore Highlandmen let out most of their quarrelsome blood before an excited multitude, the king and court looking on from what served as a grand stand, the Gilten Arbour in the Dominican Gardens, a structure that probably stood near the present site of the Perth Academy in Rose Terrace.

A writer, wearing both the names of Shaw and Macintosh, who has given piously profound study to

The early historians differ as to details. Eachin MacIan, the young chief who loses heart, owes a good deal to Scott's dramatic instinct; but Goethe was not well posted in the facts, when to Eckermann he extolled the novelist's "art" in "contriving" to make one man fail on the day of combat that his place may be taken by the hero, Smith: "there is finish! there is a hand!" One story makes the fugitive escape by swimming before the fight. Several mention a man as missing from the Clan Quhele ranks, to fill whose place a sturdy Perth craftsman volunteered on promise of reward. More than one Perthshire family has been proud to claim descent from this bandy-legged champion. If it be true, as somewhere stated, that his posterity, the Gows, were recognised as a shoot of Clan Chattan, it may be that Harry Smith was the real Conachar, apprenticed at Perth to a trade which Highland chiefs might well see cause to patronise. Scott, however, seems romancing in putting the combatants into shirts of mail. All the accounts agree as to two bands of next to naked Highlandmen hacking and hewing each other with swords, axes, and dirks, till of one side only ten or eleven were left sorely wounded, and of the other, one escaped or was taken prisoner, his fate being variously stated as pardon and hanging. No doubt the show furnished as much satisfaction to its public as when, sixty years ago, the German traveller, J. G. Kohl, found the Inch again covered with people eager to see a circus clown give bold advertisement to his company by crossing the Tay in a washing-tub drawn by four geese. It has been supposed, by the way, that the combat of Highlanders may have been arranged partly for the amusement of a body of French knights then visiting the Scottish court, and no doubt finding it dull as well as rude.

Another disgrace had nearly stained my company's name, when we served as guard of honour for Queen Victoria, on the inauguration of Prince Albert's statue at the foot of the North Inch. For once Her Majesty came late--I forget through what delay--and we had to stand expectant for hours under a hot sun, kept on the alert by a constant passing of dignitaries, and pressed upon by a crowd that tried to break through our ranks as often as a stately equipage drove up to excite the cry, "That's her, that's her!" In vain I demanded the experienced help of police; on us raw warriors fell the whole work of keeping the way clear, a very fidgety task for a short-sighted young officer, who had not seen his sovereign since he was young enough to be disappointed that she wore a straw bonnet instead of a golden crown. When at last she came, it was without observation, the crowd having given her up; then I shall always be thankful that my lucky star showed me a carriage filled with ladies in black, to which I was able to present arms just in the nick of time--a moment more and the Queen would have been let go by in silence without any salutation even from her heedless guard!

And already I had made a blunder of etiquette. A considerable force of regulars were present, while we, as a local body, held the place of honour. During the hours of uncertainty officers of rank kept galloping to and fro, to whom I was uncertain whether or no I should pay military compliments. I asked my colonel, who was as much at a loss as myself. Then I consulted the staff-sergeant on whom I depended as my coach, and his advice struck me as full of wisdom: "I don't know what the practice is, sir, but it would be safer to do it too much than too little." So I began presenting arms to every cocked hat that came by, and as I could never be quite sure whether this or that one had been already saluted, our rifles were going up and down all morning like the keys of a piano. Afterwards I learned that the Sovereign's guard should ignore any other personage.

One warm summer forenoon, some of the congregation may have been finding the sermon too long, when it was broken on by a stirring incident. A whispered message came to the officer of the military party. The men abruptly rose to clatter out, heedless of the pulpit. Presently the captain sent back for his sword, and his wife turned pale before the surmising eyes of the congregation. What could be the matter? Had the French landed? Neither preacher nor people could give all their minds to the conclusion of the service. As we streamed forth, all agog with curiosity, the street showed the unusual Sabbath sight of cabs full of policemen dashing up towards what was then the General Prison for Scotland, beyond the South Inch. Report soon spread that the inmates of this Penitentiary, hundreds strong, had broken out and might be expected to scatter over the country like ravening wolves, after an alarming

The excitement that followed seemed a godsend to youngsters, and perhaps to older captives of the dull Sabbath. But, as usual, rumour exaggerated. There had been a conspiracy to break prison, which, in the case of the men, proved a fiasco; while the women, after throwing their Bibles at the chaplain as signal of revolt, got loose into a yard, but failed either to make their escape from the walls or to release the men, as had been plotted. These incidents I state with reserve, after the example of the Father of History in dealing with facts beyond his own observation. The story that passed current was that our gallant centurion reached the scene of action in hot haste, but on beholding the enemy he marched off in high dudgeon, flatly refusing to lead his company against a mob of women. In the end, we understood, those Bacchanals were quelled by the artillery of the Fire Brigade.

Perth has had the soldiers of many armies quartered upon it, including Cromwell's troopers, and the Hessians encamped for long on the Inch after the Rebellion of '45. At that time barracks were so deficient that Cumberland's men had to be lodged in the parish church and meetinghouses, turned into dormitories by deal boards laid across the pews. Later on, soldiers would be billeted upon the townsfolk, as the militiamen were in my recollection; and their pay was so poor that, like that culprit already mentioned, they did not always prove honest guests. Gowrie House, presented by the loyal townsfolk to the victor of Culloden, was made into an Artillery Barrack, but afterwards given back to the town to serve as its jail and county buildings in exchange for ground above the South Inch, where the General Prison came to be built. This was originally a dep?t for French prisoners of war, the first batch of whom, confined in a church on their way from Dundee, stole all the brass nails, green baize, and other fittings they could lay hands on. The prisoners became increased to thousands, who on the whole must have behaved better, for they are said to have been missed at the peace, having, indeed, spent in the city a good deal of money which they earned in part by ingenious industries. These foreigners appear as the unexpected means of importing cricket into Scotland, first played on the Inches of Perth by the English regiments sent to guard the dep?t.

English soldiers, one supposes, are not now needed to guard Perth, its ordinary garrison a small body of the Black Watch or other local regiment. Gone, too, are the militia whom I once came upon drawn up at the top of the "Whins" without a stitch of uniform on, stripped to bathe by word of command. Military displays on the Inch will be less common than games of golf, cricket, and football, the last in its more unsophisticated forms, since this public space does not lend itself to the collection of gate-money; but the barefoot laddies who here kick about the "leather" for their own divert, are the buds of those professionals that bloom out to such applause in English enclosures. And the rules of football have changed even since my youth, when a band of youngsters from various public schools, gathered on the Inch for a Christmas game, found themselves all at loggerheads in an anarchy not yet divided into the kingdoms of "Rugger" and "Soccer." Still more has the game been refined since a day when country folk coming down to market, about two miles out of Perth, met a man charging along the Crieff road, chased by a party of the Forty-Second with their kilts streaming in the wind; at first sight the fugitive was taken for a deserter, and the farmers drew aside to give him a fair chance, but it was only a Methven lad carrying off the ball from a match on the North Inch, nor could he be tackled till it was goaled in his house, half a dozen miles from the field. Scone had once a name for rough matches, at which limbs were often broken, but, as the proverb went, "A's fair at the ba' of Scone."

To modern Scone we could come on that side by a tramway which is turning this goodly village into a suburb of Perth. Even when we get into the Highlands we shall find how the squalid "Tullyveolans" and "Glenburnies" have been improved away generations ago. At the gates of great proprietors, at all events, a Scottish village usually compares well with an English one in point of comfort if not of picturesqueness. The former commonly wears an air of stiff neatness and coldness toned by its grey stone walls and slated roofs; the hand of the laird and factor is seen over it all, and only here and there are left such wigwam makeshifts as might still move Waverley's disgust in the poverty-stricken Hebrides. The Southern village, even if a model one, is apt to be more taking to the eye, with its show of warm brick scattered among the green, its unstudied variety of thatched and lichened roofs, of gabled, plastered, and half-timbered walls, where paddocks and gardens divide an age-mellowed block of farm buildings from a row of picturesquely decayed hovels; and over all rises the tower or spire of some much-patched church, neighboured by a smug chapel that throws the ancient fane into striking relief. The churches of Scotland make no such points of dignity, as a rule; but their old austerity now often becomes relaxed by more ambitious architecture of Anglican-aping days; and here and there has been spared some stout hull that weathered the Reformation storms.

One feature of a northern parish seems past praying for. The churchyard, if not miserably neglected, is apt to look grim, dismal, forbidding, in contrast with those flowery God's acres of a less stern faith, that sometimes tempt poor human nature to be half in love with death. As a child I remember my nurse, and she was an Englishwoman, pointing out to me for reprobation what seemed the Popish sacrilege of a wreath laid upon a grave. Such Protestant superstition has been broken down in the last half-century. Large towns, even so long ago, had more or less ornamentally laid-out cemeteries, which were allowed to be the goal of a Sabbath walk. But still, in out-of-the-way parts, the disposition is not to mantle the king of terrors in any sentimental disguise; and weeds may be more common than flowers about tombstones that give lessons of warning rather than of consolation. The memorials of the dead are oftenest plain and practical, like the homes of the living, whose very gardens run rather to kail and berries than to flowers. Yet where a Scotsman's time is less taken up by wringing a bare subsistence from his poor soil, he can treat himself to the luxury of bloom; his grey walls are more and more lit by hardy creepers; and on heathery slopes you may see cottages covered with gay tropaeolum, which I cannot coax to flourish on a London balcony.

But Scone, in its semi-urbanity, is no fair specimen of a Scottish village, nor are we yet in the Highlands, though hints of them peep to view as we pass up towards the blue Grampian barrier. We soon come, indeed, to a manufacturing nook, a "white country" of Perthshire, where the river, swollen by several streams uniting as the Luncarty Burn, washes the bleach-fields of that ilk and the cotton mills of Stanley. But these meads of Luncarty were once dyed red rather than white, when the Danes had almost overcome a Scottish king, till a peasant named Hay, with his two sons, held a narrow pass so well with his ploughshare that the Vikings in turn were put to flight by those rustic champions, claimed as ancestors for the House of Errol. Be this a fable or no, when the bleach-field came to be laid out, several tumuli were opened containing skeletons and weapons.

His bed was made in Ballathie town, Of the clean sheets and of the strae; But I wat it was far better made Into the bottom o' bonnie Tay.

She bored the coble in seven pairts, I wat her heart might hae been sair, For there she got the bonnie lad lost, Wi' the curly locks and the yellow hair.

He put his foot into the boat, He little thocht o' ony ill, But before that he was mid-waters, The weary coble began to fill....

I wat they had mair love than this When they were young and at the schule; But for his sake she wauked late And bored the coble o' bonny Cargill.

The poor youth was taken out a corpse; then too late came lifelong repentance to his resentful sweetheart--

There's ne'er a clean sark gae on my back, Nor yet a kame gae in my hair, There's neither coal nor candle light Shall shine in my bower for ever mair.

At kirk or market I'se ne'er be at, Nor yet a blythe blink in my e'e, There's ne'er a ane shall say to anither, That's the lassie garr'd the young man dee.

It is only fourteen miles to Dunkeld from Perth, whence houses on the Grampian slope may be made out on a clear day. Strangers here who would take the very shortest way for a peep at the Highlands may now from Strathord station reach Bankfoot on a light railway up the Ordie Burn, and over the native heath of Robert Nicoll, who, but for an early death and his consuming zeal for reforming politics, might have been better known as a Perthshire Burns.

Sae weel I lo'ed a' things of earth-- The trees, the buds, the flowers, The sun, the moon, the lochs and glens, The Spring's and Summer's hours,-- A wither'd woodland twig would bring The tears into my eye, Laugh on! but there are souls of love In laddies herding kye.

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