Part 24

Though in 1759 the castle was described as ruinous, nevertheless it had been inhabited by the laird a few years earlier. Over the entrance of the house in which he received Johnson is inscribed: “Hæc domus [a word effaced] erat per Johannem M’Laine De Lochbuy Anno Dom. 1752.” It has, in its turn, given way to a more modern mansion, and has been converted into stables, coach-houses, and hay-lofts. The castle was built on the edge of the sea, “four-square to all the winds that blew.” The walls, nine or ten feet thick, “are probably as old as the fourteenth century, but the upper part seems to have been modified in the seventeenth.”[710] The ivy has climbed up to the top, nevertheless much of the stonework is still seen. It would be a pity if it were suffered to cover the walls on all sides. Hard by a little stream shaded with trees makes its way into the loch. To the north-west rises the steep hill of Dun Buy. “_Buy_ in Erse,” says Boswell, “signifies yellow. The hill being of a yellowish hue, has the epithet of _buy_.” This hue I altogether failed to discover; perhaps it is only seen in the autumn. On the bright summer’s day in which I saw the castle, it seemed to be almost unsurpassed in the pleasantness of its seat. Tall trees grew near it, their leaves rustling in the wind, and the lights and shadows dancing on the ground as the branches swayed to and fro, while in front lay the loch with its foaming waves. The old ruin looked as if it had been set there to add to the beauty of the scene, not for a place where lairds and their pipers should let down luckless folk into dismal pits. In the inside there was gloom enough. A few well-worn stone steps lead up to the entrance. The strong old door studded with iron nails which had withstood the storms of many a long year, has at length yielded to time, and been replaced. Behind it is an iron grate secured by bolts and by an oaken bar that is drawn forth from a hole in the wall. Passing on I went into a gloomy vault known as the store-room. Not a ray of light entered save by the open door. In the rocky floor there is a shallow well, which in the driest seasons is always full of water. The arched roof is built of huge boulders gathered from the beach, the spaces between being filled up with thin layers of stone after the fashion of Roman masonry. A dark staircase in the thickness of the wall leads up through another strong door to a second vaulted chamber, dimly lighted by narrow slits at the end of two slanting recesses, on each side of which are stone benches. This I was told was the court-room or judgment-hall. Opening out of it on one side is a very small chamber, in which was a kind of cupboard, a hiding-place perhaps for title-deeds and plate, for it could be so closed with stones as to look like solid wall. On the other side is the door to the dungeon, dismal enough, but not so dismal as the pit below, with its well in which women could be put to death with decency. On either side of the mouth of the well is a narrow ledge some eighteen inches wide, but not long enough to allow the prisoner to stretch himself at full length. On the floor above the court-room was the kitchen, with walls more than seven feet thick. It occupied the whole of the story. On the freestone joints of the great hearth can be seen the deep marks made by sharpening knives. Above the kitchen was the family sitting-room, which was entered from a gallery running all round it outside, and built in the overhanging part of the tower. Here at length I arrived at what may be called the front door. There was some attempt at ornament in the carving on the stones at the top and each side of the doorway. There was, moreover, light enough to see it clearly, for the gallery can boast of fair-sized windows. From one of them the laird could look out on the Hangman’s Hill, about a third of a mile off, now covered with fir-trees, but then bare. Some stones remain, in which the gallows were set up. The view from the castle, except when a hanging was going on, must on a fine day have been always beautiful, even when the country was bare of trees. To the north and east they looked over fields, once yellow every autumn with grain, but now pleasant meadow-land, shut in with hills and mountains down whose sides in rainy weather rivers stream and cascades leap. From one corner of the gallery a turret projects with two narrow windows, where the watchman could see anyone approaching from the side of the land. Not far from it was “the whispering hole,” where, by removing a stone which exactly fits into an opening, a suspicious laird could overhear the talk in the kitchen beneath. Above the sitting-room was another story divided into small rooms, the bed-chamber of the family. So solidly had the roof been built, that unrepaired it withstood all the blasts of heaven, till that terrible storm burst upon it and brought it down, which swept away the Tay Bridge.

In these two upper stories there were, no doubt, cheerful rooms, but they were reached through gloomy doors and iron grates, up dark staircases, with rough sides and well-worn steps, past the gloomy dungeon. Everything shows signs of danger and alarm. “It was sufficient for a Laird of the Hebrides,” as Johnson says, “if he had a strong house in which he could hide his wife and children from the next clan.” At the present day, as I was told by my guide, no one thinks of locking his door at night-time. My bag and great-coat and travelling rug were left in perfect safety for a couple of hours by the road-side while I wandered about. Of the modern mansion Johnson would never have said what he said of the second house, that “it was built with little regard to convenience, and with none to elegance or pleasure.” He would have been delighted not only with it, but with its large garden full of flowers and vegetables and fruits that testify to the mildness of the climate. The peaches ripen on the walls, though they do not attain to a large size. The hot-houses were full of choice plants, and clustering grapes. One bunch, I was told, had weighed nearly five pounds. But there are far greater changes than those worked by builders and gardeners. [Sidenote: THE OLD LAIRD AND THE NEW.] Here, where the rough old Laird in his out-of-the-way corner of the world used to rule his people with the help of gallows, pit and dungeon, I found a money-order office, a savings bank, a telegraph office, and a daily post. There is a good school, governed by a School Board, and a large reading room where the dulness of the long winter nights is relieved by various kinds of entertainments. There is besides an infirmary under the management of a qualified nurse, the daughter of a medical man, who has learnt her art by some years’ study in a hospital. She is provided with a chest of surgical instruments and a large stock of drugs. On her little pony she sometimes has to attend sick people at a distance of eight miles. Forty-three cases of measles had lately been under her care and none of them ended fatally. There is a salmon-hatching house, and a museum both of antiquities and natural curiosities. In it I saw a thumbscrew, with an iron ring at one end through which a thong could be passed. Used in this way it would have served much the same purpose as hand-cuffs. I looked with interest on an old Highland spinning-wheel, the gift of my intelligent and friendly guide, Mr. Angus Black. It had belonged to his grandmother. He had given it, he said, “to be kept there as a present for ages and generations to come.” When a little before I drank water from “the well by the river side,” such was the name of the spring in Gaelic, he told me that it was the spring “whence the Lairds had drunk for ages and generations past.” One thing I in vain looked for in the Museum. Boswell had been told much of a war-saddle, on which Lochbuy, “that reputed Don Quixote, used to be mounted; but we did not see it,” he adds, “for the young Laird had applied it to a less noble purpose, having taken it to Falkirk Fair _with a drove of black cattle_.” He took it much farther—to America, whither he went with his regiment. There he lost his life in a duel, and it was lost too. Perhaps it is preserved as a curiosity in some collection on the other side of the Atlantic.

[Sidenote: HIGHLAND FUNERALS.]

I was shown also at a short distance eastwards from the Castle, at the bottom of a crag by the roadside, a place known as the Cheese Cave. Here at every funeral the refreshments used to be placed for the mourners, who had often come twenty miles across the hills. In former days, when there were more men and fewer sheep some hundreds would assemble. “Two old respectable friends were left behind to take care of the food and drink. When the people came back from the grave-yard they refreshed themselves. I have seen them,” continued my guide, “sitting on these rocks by the cave having their luncheon.” Ramsay of Ochtertyre tells how “the women of each valley through which the funeral passed joined in the procession, but they attended but part of the way and then returned. The whole company seemed to be running; and wherever they rested small cairns or heaps of stones were raised to commemorate the corpse having halted on that spot.”[711] These heaps were pointed out to us on the side of Rattachan as we drove down to Glenelg. The silence of the Scotch funeral shocked Wesley, who recorded on May 20, 1774: “When I see in Scotland a coffin put into the earth and covered up without a word spoken, it reminds me of what was spoken concerning Jehoiakin, ‘He shall be buried with the burial of an ass.’”[712]

[Sidenote: THE OLD LAIRD AND THE NEW.]

It is not with accounts of funerals that I must take my leave of a place where I spent so pleasant a day, and had so hospitable a reception. Here I saw not only the dead past but a vigorous and hopeful present. Even the old Laird, we are told, “was a very hearty and hospitable landlord,” though with his belief in his rights of _furca et fossa_ he certainly was an antediluvian. His descendant does not yield to him in heartiness and hospitality, but has other ways of guiding his people than gallows, pit and dungeon. By his schools, his reading-room, his infirmary and his schemes for developing the fisheries he has won their affections. An old lady who had been allowed to visit the Castle, meeting him by chance as she came out, full of anger at what she had seen, exclaimed: “You ought, Sir, to be ashamed of your ancestors.” “No,” he replied, “I am not ashamed of them. They led their lives, and I lead mine.” They were at all events as good as the men of their time, perhaps better. Old Lochbuy does not seem to have been a bad fellow, though he was slow in learning that he had lost his right to imprison his tenants. “May not a man do what he likes with his own?” we can fancy him asking in the words used more than seventy years later by an English duke. Much as his descendant has done, there is one thing more which I would ask him to do. He dreads, no doubt, the throng of noisy tourists, but he might surely build a modest inn where the pensive wanderer could find lodging, and enjoy the scenery of Lochbuy.

“The guiltless eye Commits no wrong, nor wastes what it enjoys.”

OBAN AND INVERARY (OCTOBER 22-26).

[Sidenote: THE FERRY FROM MULL TO OBAN.]

On the morning of Friday, October 22, our travellers set out for the ferry by which they were to cross to Oban—a distance of about twelve miles. According to Dr. Garnett, travellers were conveyed first to Kerrera, an island lying off the mainland. Crossing this on foot or horseback they found awaiting them another boat to take them to Oban. At Auchnacraig in Mull there was an inn about half a mile from the ferry. Here he and his companion could procure, he says, neither oats for their horses nor straw for their litter. They wanted to give them a mess of oatmeal and water, but the woman, who acted as hostler, at first refused, “asking whether it was proper to give the food of Christians to horses.” After a long dispute she yielded. “In these islands,” he adds, “horses seldom taste oats.”[713] “The bottom of the ferry-boat,” says Boswell, “was strewed with branches of trees or bushes upon which we sat. We had a good day and a fine passage, and in the evening landed at Oban, where we found a tolerable inn.” This place, which I have seen recommended to cockney tourists in huge advertisements as The Charing Cross of the North, was then a little hamlet. In 1786 Knox found “about twenty families collected together with a view to the fisheries.”[714] It boasted of a custom-house and a post-office. In the islands no customs were paid, for there was no officer to demand them.[715] Faujas Saint-Fond gives a curious account of his stay in the inn, a few years after Johnson’s visit. He would have got on very well, for the food though simple was good, and his bed though hard was clean, had it not been for a performer on the bag-pipes—“un maudit joueur de cornemuse” who played “une musique d’un genre nouveau, mais bien terrible pour mon oreille.” The day of their arrival this man had strutted up and down before the inn with haughty and warlike looks, and had stunned them with his airs. “Nous crûmes d’abord que ce personnage était une espèce d’insensé qui gagnait sa vie à ce métier.” They were informed that he was an accomplished musician, “de l’école _highlandoise_,” and that in this display of his talents he was shewing the joy which he felt on seeing strangers in a place where they came so rarely. Touched by his friendly sentiments Saint-Fond had not only applauded him, but had even pressed on him “quelques shelings,” which he accepted, it almost seemed, merely out of complaisance. Taking pity on the stranger’s solitude he came and played under his bed-room window in the silence of the night. It was all in vain that Saint-Fond rose, went out of doors, took him by the hand and led him away. “Il revint au même moment, me donnant à entendre qu’il n’était point fatigué, et qu’il jouerait toute la nuit pour me plaire, et il tint parole.”[716]

[Sidenote: OBAN ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO.]

The bagpiper was surely the direct ancestor of those bands of musicians who at Oban distress the peaceful tourist. But there are things worse even than musicians. How melancholy is the change which has come over the whole scene in the last quarter of a century! A beautiful bay ruined by man! That it should become thronged was inevitable; it need not have been made vulgar. It was on no scene of overgrown hotels that Johnson looked, as, with the tear starting in his eye, he repeated those fine lines in which Goldsmith describes the character of the British nation:

“Stern o’er each bosom reason holds her state, With daring aims irregularly great, Pride in their port, defiance in their eye, I see the lords of humankind pass by, Intent on high designs, a thoughtful band, By forms unfashion’d, fresh from Nature’s hand; Fierce in their native hardiness of soul, True to imagin’d right, above control, While e’en the peasant boasts these rights to scan, And learns to venerate himself as man.”

[Sidenote: THE RIDE TO INVERARY.]

The _Traveller_ had formed the subject of their talk at breakfast, and it was while Boswell helped Johnson on with his great-coat that he recited these lines. They had a long ride before them through heavy rain to Inverary. Loch Awe they crossed by the ferry at Portsonachan—“a pretty wide lake,” as Boswell describes it, not knowing its name. Towards evening they came to a good road made by the soldiers, the first which they had seen since they left Fort Augustus more than seven weeks before. Unwearied by his long journey, Johnson that same night wrote a letter to Mrs. Thrale in which he thus describes both what he saw and what he felt.

“About ten miles of this day’s journey were uncommonly amusing. We travelled with very little light in a storm of wind and rain; we passed about fifty-five streams that crossed our way, and fell into a river that, for a very great part of our road foamed and roared beside us. All the rougher powers of nature, except thunder, were in motion, but there was no danger. I should have been sorry to have missed any of the inconveniences, to have had more light or less rain, for their co-operation crowded the scene and filled the mind.”

When an old man describes such a journey as “uncommonly amusing” it is clear that he uses the term in a sense which it does not bear at present. In his _Dictionary_ he defines _amuse_, “to entertain with tranquillity; to fill with thoughts that engage the mind without distracting it.” The thoughts which this stormy evening in late autumn engaged his mind amidst the wilds of Argyleshire he put forth in a fine passage when, in the quietness of his study, he came to write the account of his journey.

“The night came on while we had yet a great part of the way to go, though not so dark but that we could discern the cataracts which poured down the hills on one side, and fell into one general channel, that ran with great violence on the other. The wind was loud, 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 musick of nature than it had ever been my chance to hear before.”

[Sidenote: THE INN AT INVERARY.]

The man who wrote this noble passage had not surely that insensibility to nature which is so often laid to his charge. He was sixty-four years old; mounted on a pony scarcely strong enough to bear his weight, he had had a long and hard day’s ride through wind and rain; he had dined in his wet clothes in a hut warmed by a smoky turf fire, and yet at the end of the day he could say with the enthusiasm of a young poet that neither darkness nor storm would he willingly have had lessened. He was supported, no doubt, in his recollections by the comforts of the inn at Inverary which was, he said, “not only commodious, but magnificent.” Perhaps he was inspired also by the gill of whisky which he called for—“the first fermented liquor,” says Boswell, “that he tasted during his travels.” He forgets, however, the brandy which he was prevailed on to drink at Dunvegan when he was suffering from cold. “Come, (said Johnson) let me know what it is that makes a Scotchman happy.” He thought it preferable to any English malt brandy. “What was the process,” he writes, “I had no opportunity of enquiring, nor do I wish to improve the art of making poison pleasant.” To the excellence of the inn at Inverary, Pennant also bears testimony. Far otherwise does Burns speak of it, in his indignation at the incivility of the landlord, whose whole attention was occupied by the visitors of the Duke of Argyle.

“Whoe’er he be that sojourns here, I pity much his case, Unless he comes to wait upon The Lord their God his Grace.

“There’s naething here but Highland pride, And Highland scab and hunger; If Providence has sent me here, ’Twas surely in an anger.”

At Inverary our travellers rested from Saturday evening till Tuesday morning. This pleasant little town had a very different, look from that which it now bears. “This place,” wrote Pennant, “will in time be very magnificent; but at present the space between the front of the castle and the water is disgraced with the old town, composed of the most wretched hovels that can be imagined.”[717] These have long been cleared away, so that there is now an unbroken view over a finely wooded lawn of the loch and the hills beyond. It was in the beginning of September, 1769, that he visited the place. [Sidenote: SUNDAY ON LOCH FYNE.] “Every evening,” he says, “some hundreds of boats cover the surface of Loch Fyne. On the week-days the cheerful noise of the bag-pipe and dance echoes from on board; on the Sabbath each boat approaches the land, and psalmody and devotion divide the day.” Our travellers were perhaps too late in the year to witness this curious scene; at all events they make no mention of it. Had they heard the psalm-singing on the Sunday they would not have left it unnoticed. The forenoon of that day they “passed calmly and placidly.” Of all the Sundays which I passed in Scotland, nowhere did I find such an unbroken stillness as here. It was far quieter than the towns, for the people were as still as mice, and it was quieter than the country, for there was an absence of country noises. We were alone in our hotel. It was the last day of June, but there were scarcely any other strangers in the place to enjoy the beautiful scenery and the long summer days.

[Sidenote: THE DUKE AND DUCHESS OF ARGYLE.]