Part 4
This family, long so powerful in Perthshire, claim to be descended from an Hungarian chief, settled in Scotland under the civilising patronage of Malcolm Canmore. So well did his line thrive here that a daughter of the house of Drummond sat to watch that North Inch combat as Robert III.’s queen, Anabella, mother of the unfortunate Duke of Rothesay, who comes to such a tragic end in Scott’s romance. A century later, when the family had moved their main seat to Drummond Castle, another connection with royalty again brought about a mysterious crime. James IV., all his life much misled by Cupid, took for his mistress or left-handed wife Bonnie Margaret Drummond; it is said that he proposed to marry her openly as soon as a dispensation from the Pope unloosed their bonds of kindred. Be that as it may, other Scottish nobles looked askance on the growth of the Drummonds, while politic statesmen may well have sought to clear the way to peace with England by the King’s marriage to Margaret Tudor; there is also a suspicion of jealousy on the part of another royal lady love. By unknown hands, Margaret Drummond and her two sisters were poisoned at Drummond Castle, and they lie beneath three slabs of blue marble in Dunblane Cathedral. A daughter of this doubtful union was married successively to the Earl of Huntly, the Duke of Albany, and to a kinsman of her own; then her infusion of Stuart blood has passed into at least a score of Scottish noble families.
The strain of royal descent was reinforced when the head of the Drummond house married a daughter of this lady by the Stuart Duke of Albany. By James VI. Lord Drummond was made Earl of Perth, a title augmented by the French dukedom of Melfort. The Perth earldom was blown out into an empty dukedom by the Pretender,
whose fortunes its holder followed into France, leaving his possessions to be confiscated, and his honours attainted. The peerage was restored to a Drummond under George III., but died out for want of heirs male; then through marriage of a daughter the property passed to Lord Gwydir of Wales, and through the Willoughby d’Eresbys to the English Earl of Ancaster. I fear to make the reader’s head ache in the labyrinth of Drummond genealogy. Enough to say that the earldom of Perth and Melfort was restored in Victoria’s reign to a Drummond who held a French title. Supported by a pension from a more fortunate kinsman, he lived latterly in seclusion at Kew, and was buried there a few years ago, his life shadowed by a painful tragedy that left his house without a direct heir to its pride and its poverty. His home was literally a cottage, a striking contrast to the glories of Drummond Castle; but to friendly neighbours, who respected his misfortunes, he could humorously boast of being by rights a duke in two countries.
A tragedy in humbler life has been commemorated in a Tayside ballad, _The Weary Coble of Cargill_. The hero, Davie Drummond, is described as a “brave page,” also as the “butler of Stobhall,” who, with the keys of the mansion hanging at his belt, undertook to cross the swollen Tay one night in a coble or ferry-boat: this local Leander seems to have had a Hero on each bank, and to have played the perilous part of not being off with one love before being on with another. The heroine, “the lass of Ballathie,” took strong measures in a fit of jealousy, when Davie would not stay the night on her side the river--
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.
Above Cargill, the river is spanned by the Caledonian railway; then on the left bank comes in the Isla leading up to Blairgowrie, behind which opens one of the great passes into the Highlands. Between Meikleour and Kinclaven Castle, taken and burned by Wallace, the Tay makes an extravagant circumvention of inches and haughs, flowing north for one reach, then turning south, as it comes round from its eastward course by Murthly. The Highland line cuts across this elbow bend to pass opposite Caputh, reached by a floating bridge that looks safer than that coble of Cargill. In _Bonnie Scotland_ I could not but speak of the grounds of Murthly, with their show of ambitious structures; but I am not sure if I did justice to the gardens and miles of magnificent avenues, that, like those of Meikleour and Ballathie lower down, and of Dunkeld above, might call a blush to the cheek of Dr. Johnson’s ghost, if it could visit this edge of the Highlands. From near Murthly station one may walk for two and a half straight miles on a grass ride bordered by coniferous trees, bringing us down to the Dunkeld road, beyond Bankfoot, a highway which has taken care not to follow the vagaries of the river.
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.
Beyond Bankfoot and its annexe Waterloo, the road comes to close quarters with the mountains, where it winds up to a rugged face of woods and grouse moors, then under Rohallion joins the river and the railway in the pass of Birnam, guarded by the village city of Dunkeld. Here we leave the valley of Strathmore to enter one of the famous Highland gates, at the mouth of which a watery hollow called the Stare-dam was long a place of dread to wild mountaineers, for whom its “Hanged Men’s Trees” made such a warning as did the “kind gallows” of Crieff.
Of Dunkeld, the Highland border town, I gave account in _Bonnie Scotland_, so that here I will rather repeat what has been said about it by others. The Rev. Prebendary Gilpin, that original of _Dr. Syntax in search of the Picturesque_, who had found Arthur’s Seat “odd, misshapen and uncouth,” unpleasing from every point of view, except that the streets of London had been paved out of its quarries, this severe critic is more gracious to Dunkeld, where “the wild unshapely desert begins to separate into parts, and form itself into hills, hung with wood and broken with rock.” He can find no fault with the Tay, here “broad, deep and silent,” nor with “the grand screen of mountains” encircling it; and our generation is not much concerned with his criticism that it will take a century for the woods to grow up so as “to give a proper degree of sylvan richness to the scene.” Since then the woods have had time to clothe this fine amphitheatre, some inaccessible crag faces having been planted by the device of firing canisters filled with seeds against them from a cannon. Mr. Gilpin goes so far as to applaud Nature’s efforts in the side ravine of the Braan, though he shakes his head over the duke’s “improvements,” such as often caused so much division of opinion among those pundits of the picturesque. He agrees with our taste in condemning the “Claud Lorraine glasses” and other optical devices with which the Hermitage at the Falls of Braan was furnished, being “apt to believe that Nature has given us a better apparatus for viewing objects in a picturesque light than any the optician can furnish.” Also he shows very proper disgust on coming, among the sights of this demesne, upon a hollow in the rock with an inscription recording the names of a set of gentlemen who, on such and such a date, had drunk it full of punch.
But when from Dunkeld he takes his way on up Strath Tay, this Aristarchus almost forgets to be critical of scenes that “call aloud for the pencil.” The poet Gray, one of the earliest appreciative visitors to the Highlands, was not less admiring, though he gives a more matter-of-fact account of a “road winding through beautiful woods, with the Tay almost always in full view to the right, being here from three to four hundred feet over. The Strath-Tay, from a mile to three miles or more wide, covered with corn and spotted with groups of people then in the midst of their harvest. On either hand a vast chain of rocky mountains, that changed their face and opened something new every hundred yards, as the way turned or the cloud passed: in short, altogether it was one of the most pleasing days I have passed these many years.” Then, before leaving Atholl, he would exclaim, “Since I saw the Alps, I have seen nothing sublime till now!” And of the Highlands in general this precursor of the next century exclaims: “A fig for your poets, painters, gardeners and clergymen that have not been among them; their imagination can be made up of nothing but bowling-greens, flowering shrubs, horse-ponds, Fleet ditches, shell-grottoes and Chinese rails!”
Many a visitor of our day, weather permitting, gets here from coach or rail a general impression of “nothing but sunshine and fresh breezes, and bleating lambs, and clean tartans.” To go behind this fair scenery, set as if for the joy of poets and painters, we might turn up some burn into the rough background, and look through Ruskin’s eyes at nooks easily coloured by his “pathetic fallacy”; he knew the Highlands as not all filled by tourists, sportsmen, and prosperous sheep-farmers.
A Highland scene is, beyond dispute, pleasant enough in its own way; but, looked close at, has its shadows. Here, for instance, is the very fact of one, as pretty as I can remember--having seen many. It is a little valley of soft turf, enclosed in its narrow oval by jutting rocks and broad flakes of nodding fern. From one side of it to the other winds, serpentine, a clear brown stream, dropping into quicker ripple as it reaches the end of the oval field, and then, first islanding a purple and white rock with an amber pool, it dashes away into a narrow fall of foam under a thicket of mountain-ash and alder. The autumn sun, low, but clear, shines on the scarlet ash-berries and on the golden birch-leaves, which, fallen here and there, when the breeze has not caught them, rest quiet in the crannies of the purple rock. Beside the rock, in the hollow under the thicket, the carcass of a ewe, drowned in the last flood, lies nearly bare to the bone, its white ribs protruding through the skin, raven-torn; and the rags of its wool still flickering from the branches that first stayed it as the stream swept it down. A little lower, the current plunges, roaring, into a circular chasm like a well, surrounded on three sides by a chimney-like hollowness of polished rock, down which the foam slips in detached snowflakes. Round the edges of the pool beneath, the water circles slowly, like black oil; a little butterfly lies on its back, its wings glued to one of the eddies, its limbs feebly quivering; a fish rises and it is gone. Lower down the stream, I can just see, over a knoll, the green and damp turf roofs of four or five hovels, built at the edge of a morass, which is trodden by the cattle into a black Slough of Despond at their doors, and traversed by a few ill-set stepping-stones, with here and there a flat slab on the tops, where they have sunk out of sight; and at the turn of the brook I see a man fishing, with a boy and a dog--a picturesque and pretty group enough certainly, if they had not been there all day starving.
From Dunkeld up to Logierait, the river runs south, when its eastward course has been joined by the full swollen Tummel, that, coming down straight from Pitlochrie, seems here to be the parent stream. At Logierait Wordsworth could still see the remains of the Duke of Atholl’s court-house and the prison--said to be now represented by an inn-stable--from which Rob Roy made one of his daring escapes. He did well to escape, when his ducal captor had not yet lost the power of pit and gallows, who about the same time wrote to the Provost of Perth for the loan of an executioner. There was no lack of gallows in those days, yet apparently a short supply of hangmen, for we find the Fair City, in turn, borrowing the Drummonds’ executioner, to be returned when required; then again Lord Breadalbane’s, on an undertaking by the magistrates “to give the Earl the use of him at all times.” Perth had then three gallows of its own, while each of the great noblemen about it could hang or imprison his vassals; and even the Baron of Bradwardine is recorded as having once exercised his hereditary privilege by putting “two poachers in the dungeon of the old tower of Tully Veolan, where they were sorely frightened by ghosts, and almost eaten by rats.”
On the other side of the confluence, Ballinluig railway junction marks the forking of two routes of travel. The main line leads up into Atholl by Pitlochrie and Killiecrankie, “the Caledonian Thermopylae.” From this, we turn for the present to follow Strath Tay, adorned with a succession of mansions and policies, chief of them the restored Castle of Grandtully, for which is claimed that it was the Tully Veolan of _Waverley_. Other candidates for the honour are Craig Hall, above Blairgowrie, and Traquair House, near Innerleithen. The contention between these mansions makes for the Scottish newspapers what the great gooseberry and the sea serpent used to be in the South; but of course the truth is, as Scott says, who ought to know, that he took a composite picture from several models, getting some features from old mansions about Edinburgh--Ravelston, Dean House, and Warrender House beside Bruntsfield Links--while he seems to point out Grandtully as the best prototype of the Baron’s seat. As for the geography of the tale, that baffles all inquiry, the only thing clear being that Waverley, at the farthest point of his wanderings, had got well behind the Pass of “Ballybrough,” which must be Killiecrankie.
The branch line up the Tay soon ends at Aberfeldy, famous for the Falls of Moness in a wooded glen, where arises a question as to whether its “Birks of Aberfeldy” were not a mere poetic ornament of a poet’s fancy, copied from older songs such as the “Birks of Endermay.” At all events, birches are not now prominent among the rich foliage; and, of course, Burns, no more than Scott, would “swear to the truth of a song.” Aberfeldy, thriving on a small manufacture of Highland tweed, has an historic note as the place where the Black Watch regiment was embodied out of its looser organisation as independent companies; this is recorded by a monument set up on a cairn where nature and art join hands for striking effect. It is also notable for the first bridge, above Perth, over the Tay, built by the road-making General Wade. Another name that has been connected with Aberfeldy is Andrea Ferrara’s, a foreigner of infuscated _habitat_, who made so many blades for Scotland that tradition has represented him as working a forge here. A rival legend places his workshop in Menteith, where Doune was a more authentic arsenal of firearms for the Highlanders, specially notable for the making of steel pistols.
Aberfeldy Bridge leads us across to Weem, said to be so called from Picts’ houses burrowed in the womb of earth; to Castle Menzies in its park of ancient trees; to Dull, with its memories of a monastery and a hermitage of St. Cuthbert. The whole district is full of moving traditions and traces of forgotten faith and history older than the saints who have left misty relics here, as, for instance, the stone circle at Croft Moraig, “field of Mary,” and the Cave of Weem that has a legend recalling that of Hamelin, as to a child being saved by slipping off a malignant water-horse when it carried away her companions to be drowned in the loch above, with which this cave was believed to communicate. And hereabouts, as elsewhere, there is a legend of hunted Macgregors taking refuge in a tree that was cut down to hurl them to destruction. As to the beauties of the valley, let the Rev. Hugh Macmillan speak, as a son of its soil:--
Westward of the old glacial barricade, to the neighbourhood of Aberfeldy, the Strath, with its numerous farms and small crofts, is a patch-work, a “quilted landscape,” with corn and potato fields and meadows stitched in squares, or rather, to use an image more appropriate to the locality, a continuous web of large-checked tartan laid along the bottom and slopes of the valley. Eastward, beyond Cluny, the Strath is a vast green cup filled to the brim with beauty. There the warm sun, in sheltered nooks, woos the primroses and violets out of the soil earlier than anywhere else. The hillsides are musical with freckled burns, alive with trout; and the copses that line their course are filled with hazel nuts and wild rasps and brambles, which would make a feast for Pan himself, while patriarchal trees linger on many an ancestral farm, and link the generations together, each of them a towering mass of verdant leafage, under whose cool shadow you can sit in the fervid noon with a sigh of relief, and gaze upwards as into the heights of an emerald heaven. On the wide uplands hangs nature’s own tapestry of bell-heather and broom, the purple of the one and the glowing gold of the other mixed in harmonious splendour; and here and there a little tarn--the largest, Loch Derculich, a lonely heron-haunted loch, held close to the heart of the moorland--lifts its blue eye to catch the smile of heaven.
If we are to visit every part of Perthshire, we must tear ourselves away from this characteristic antechamber of Highland scenery, to the sides of which open Atholl and Breadalbane. So let us take leave of the Tay, under its own name, by passing up the last reach of avenue-like road from Aberfeldy to the policies of Taymouth, where it breaks full-born from its lake reservoir. Should we have come from Logierait by road or rail on the south side, we may well be tempted to turn back by the north bank of the noble river, a way which leads us on the rough edges of Atholl.
III
ATHOLL
The Atholl monument at the confluence of the Tay and the Tummel reminds us how we are fairly in Atholl, which indeed comes down to Dunkeld. One can hardly fix the precise bounds of this old province, at one time of such importance that it became an estate of the Crown; its name, too, is said to come from a Pictish king. It may be roughly defined as the northern part of Highland Perthshire, the glen basins on the Tay’s left bank, lying below a stretch of the Grampians by which it is shut off from Braemar and Deeside. Its central valley is Glengarry, up which runs the Highland Railway, till, at the height of nearly 1500 feet, passing from Perth into Inverness, this main stream of traffic dips by the Boar of Badenoch and the Sow of Atholl down the basin of the Spey, where Badenoch was once as signalised a name as Atholl.
This maze of mountains, glens and waters, studded with spots of delight and scenes of fame, may be called the heart of the show Highlands, or at least one lobe of its heart, for tourist circulation, the other being the Trossachs and Loch Lomond neighbourhood, where also hotels and hydropathics are now more common than castles and clachans. Dunkeld is its city of old renown; Blair Atholl is the Versailles of its duke; but the present-day capital of the tourist domain seems to be Pitlochrie, a smart young town that was an offshoot of Moulin, whose Black Castle stands in ruin, haunted by dim memories as the Wolf of Badenoch’s lair, and by a more gloomy tradition that it once served as a plague-house, so that its infected stones escaped the fate of being used as a quarry. All the lions about Pitlochrie are so familiar to guide-books and their patrons, that I need hardly even name them: the pyramid of Ben Vrackie, with its grand and easily won prospects; the Pass of Killiecrankie, where in a few minutes of fierce onset the Protestant succession in Scotland had nearly been throttled; the wooded and parked sides of Glen Garry; the ducal demesne of Blair; the Falls of Bruar, glorified by Burns; the dark ravines of Glen Tilt leading up to the guarded wilds of the Great Atholl Deer Forest; with many a fall and spout and foaming chasm, more or less renowned, unless for the want of public access and of a sacred bard less discreet than he who kept the secrets of “picture-like beauty, seclusion sublime.”
There is a stream,--(I name not its name, lest inquisitive tourist Hunt it, and make it a lion, and get it at last into guide-books,) Springing far off from a loch unexplored in the folds of great mountains, Falling two miles through rowan and stunted alder, enveloped Then for four more in a forest of pine ... attaining a basin Ten feet wide and eighteen long, with whiteness and fury Occupied partly, but mostly pellucid, pure, a mirror; Beautiful there for the colour derived from green rocks under; Beautiful, most of all, where beads of foam uprising Mingle their clouds of white with the delicate hue of the stillness. Cliff over cliff for its sides, with rowan and pendent birch-boughs, Here it lies, unthought of above at the bridge and pathway, Still more concealed from below by wood and rocky projection, You are shut in, left alone with yourself and perfection of water, Hid on all sides, left alone with yourself and the goddess of bathing.
Clough, who sets his heroes to “verify Black,” leaves his own principal scene not clearly identified, which one guesses at as somewhere on the western edge of Atholl. The _Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich_ itself lay far in the Western Highlands; but was it not in Rannoch that Philip met his first charmer? Towards this region we turn on the other side of Pitlochrie, where open the softer scenes of the Tummel, its Falls that pour over almost the central boss of Scotland, its lovely swelling into a lake, the thinning and roughening of its valley below the head of Schiehallion, as it rises to Loch Rannoch, a long sheet of water darkening under fragments of the Black Wood, and reaching up to the barren moor of Rannoch, most desolate region in Britain. This was once shaded by that great Caledonian Forest, of gloomy renown in mediæval romance, where Ariosto brings one of his heroes, following tracks of Arthur, Lancelot and Gawaine--