Chapter II: Part 2

I could tell other tales of the Perthshire Volunteers in their early days, but all I will say here is that if the Territorials who have taken our place are more smart and efficient, they cannot surpass us in good-will to serve our country. Some of us can remember an older and perhaps less serviceable force, the tottering Pensioners who turned out at least once a year upon the Inch to fire a _feu de joie_ for the Queen’s birthday. I rather think I knew that Peninsular lieutenant of whom Sir Evelyn Wood tells a touching tale--though here I am a little confused between two bearded veterans that gave kindly words to a boy--how he had lived obscurely at Perth, unnoted by two generations, till Major Wood took a public occasion of pointing him out to his fellow-citizens as one of the heroes of Albuera; then the old man in a back seat bowed his head in tears of pride and joy--“_Let me greet!_”--overcome to hear that fiery day not forgotten by soldiers of another age. To a veteran of a former generation quartered at Perth was born a son, afterwards well-known as Charles Mackay, editor and poet, and as stepfather of one of the most popular novelists of our day, whose modestly retiring disposition is so notorious that I do not mention her name.

In my youth the neighbourhood of Perth was strongly garrisoned by retired officers, some of whom belonged to the Sandemanian congregation here, an exclusive body that, like the Plymouth Brethren in England, had a curious attraction for old Indian soldiers. The sons usually went with their fathers, while in some cases the mothers and daughters attended the Episcopal “Chapel,” where my _Wenigkeit_, as son of an Englishwoman, escaped the long sermons and Shorter Catechism of Presbyterian boyhood. The Anglican form of worship has in the last generation made great way among townsmen, but it then was apt to mark either English associations or hereditary Toryism. Perth had a Cathedral, looked on askance in those days as “Puseyite,” so that even the bishop for a time held aloof from it; at all events he preached regularly in our smaller church, his lawn sleeves attracting youthful reverence beside the black-gowned pastor of those Protestant days. Now, so strongly has turned the tide of ecclesiastical fashion, it is the Cathedral at whose door a string of equipages may be seen standing of a Sunday morning, and three or four English prelates officiating at the altar in the shooting season. But half a century ago, and later, the “Chapel,” as we called it, as yet ignorant that we were “the Church in Scotland,” made the more genteel place of worship, with peers, baronets, and lairds as thick as blackberries in the congregation, their carriages breaking the Sabbath quiet of the street. The English soldiers were marched to it from the other end of the town, though that empty Cathedral stood neighbour to their barracks; and thereby hangs a tale to be caught at in my reminiscent mood.

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

example familiar to me from the pages of--was it not?--_Midshipman Easy._

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.

If all tales be true, this is not the most ignominious retreat forced upon our gallant soldiers at the hands of Scotswomen. In Penny’s _Traditions of Perth_ it is told how, in the old martinet days, half a dozen soldiers were flogged in public on the North Inch. Mobs of that century seem rather to have enjoyed such spectacles, as a rule; but pressed enlistments had made military discipline a sore point in Scotland; and now the poor fellows’ cries excited angry pity among the lookers-on. When it came to the turn of a married man, sentenced to five hundred lashes for stealing a few potatoes to feed his family, their feelings boiled over. His own wife was present, who, as he screamed under the lash, rushed in to hold the drummer’s arm; then other women began to pelt the executioners with stones. Led by these pitying Amazons, the crowd broke through the ranks to rescue the sufferer, and his fellow-soldiers apparently made no stout resistance. The officers were set to flight, the unfortunate adjutant being captured, whom the women are said to have stripped and whipped on the spot as a lesson in humanity. That made the last flogging on the North Inch.

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 depôt 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 depôt.

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.”

The example of that hero warns me not to linger on the Perth Inch, but to be off up the Tay, keeping as near it as one can for parks, and for the jealously guarded banks of valuable salmon fisheries. For the first two miles there is a public walk up the right bank to the Almond mouth. On the opposite side, hidden in lordly foliage, lies Scone Palace and the site of the old Pictish capital. The Scot is so notoriously modest that English example has often led him to mishandle his own names: before Scone gets corrupted, then, let me insist that it is pronounced _Scoon_, as the eatable _scone_, so mumbled in Cockney mouths, should rhyme with _on_, and not be treated as their _own_.

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 tropæolum, 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.

The whole country on both sides of the river is studded with Druidical stones, with camps and gravemounds, and with sites of old tradition, such as that ascribed to Macbeth’s castle, where the Sidlaw Hills swell up behind the left bank of the Tay, winding round them under the wooded cliffs of Kinnoull, making such a bend that a house I have reason to know stands equidistant between two reaches, which are nearly a score of miles apart by the bank. Should I be spared another score of years or so, I could tell some queer tales about more than one late laird in this nook, whose memory at present must rest in the truce _de mortuis_. As for Macbeth’s memory, I have already shown some hint of materials for whitewashing it. Why was not Shakespeare told of this Thane being an elder in the Wee Free Church, when King Duncan must needs send his loons south, one to Oxford and one to Cambridge, who came back dropping their _h_’s, whustling on the Sabbath, and such-like; then what for no should an outraged patriot but yoke with the sword of Gideon on the whole Erastian hypothec? As for Lady Macbeth, does not Shakespeare himself admit evidence to justify a soft-hearted verdict of temporary insanity?

Above the mills of Stanley we come to Campsie Linn, the first romantic scene of the Tay, on which is set the last tableau in _The Fair Maid of Perth_. Such a picturesque nook tempted the monks of Cupar to build a retreat on the precipitous rock above its cataract; and here was the country seat of the Mercers, that mediæval trading family of Perth, already mentioned as growing into nobility. But the great name hereabouts in the old days was the Drummonds, lords of Stobhall on the Tay, their principal residence till they built a more lordly one in Strathearn.

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--

In those woods he might be sure
Many and strange adventures would be found,
But deeds, there wrought, were, like the place, obscure,
And, for the greater part, not bruited round.

Here meet the borders of Perth, Argyll, and Inverness; and this wilderness must often have been wet by the blood of plaided warriors if not of mailed knight-errants. In our time, I am told, a lad fishing in one of the Rannoch lochs brought up a rusty sword to confirm the local legend of a meeting between Atholl and Lochiel to discuss a boundary dispute. Each chief was to come unattended; but each, like Roderick Dhu, had a force of clansmen hidden close at hand. When they got to hot words, Atholl first gave the signal, at which--

Instant from copse and heath, arose,
Bonnets and spears and bended bows.

“These are Atholl wethers!” was their proud chief’s explanation, to which Lochiel replied by whistling up a troop of Camerons, whom he introduced as “Lochaber dogs.” But before it went beyond showing teeth the rivals drew upon that Caledonian prudence often found mingled with hot Highland blood. They agreed to settle their difference peacefully, in token whereof their claymores were hurled together, like Excalibur, into the dark waters of the mere.

In my own youth, this region still seemed a hunting-ground for adventurous experience. It is nearly half a century ago that I started out to walk through Atholl with some vague idea of roaming farther. From morn to eve I tramped on from Stanley, and got the length of Blair, some ten leagues. But a boy’s will, one knows, is the wind’s will: I found a train due at Blair, and took it home, I no longer remember why, unless that the day was hot and dusty, as it may well be on this sunny side of the Grampians, where, as a local guide-book puts it, the rain-clouds are apt to “have the bottom knocked out of them by the mountain peaks” fencing Atholl towards the Atlantic. But that fiasco of a walking tour I turned to account by writing a description, which I had the temerity to send to a London magazine. Strange to say, it found favour with the editor, perhaps because--heaven forgive me!--it was spiced by an affectation of Cockney jocularity as the point of view; and so appeared my first magazine article, which now, after many years, strikes me with shame and confusion. How many sympathetic authors might tell the same tale of callow efforts that filled them with pride to appear in print, but the day came when they would gladly have repaid tenfold that once welcome cheque, could they but cancel those pages, which at least may have the luck to blush unseen in some cobwebbed volume!

Coming back to Atholl after many days, my pen hopes to be guided in writing its name consistently. In my spelling days, it would be rather _Athole_ and _Argyle_; but the ducal lords of these regions seem to have set a fashion for the double _ll_. Also, by the light of nature, I pronounce the first syllable long and broad, as _Aw_tholl, whereas those of more picked speech say _Ah_tholl, which is easier to say than to sing. As to the spelling, Wordsworth appears to follow an older form--

Among the hills of _Athol_ was he born.

Was he, though? The poet makes no doubt of it. “The Boy of whom I speak,” came from a “native glen” among “Garry’s hills,” where his parents, though “exceeding poor,” had a “small hereditary farm.” This son of an Atholl bonnet-laird had duly gone “equipped

with satchel to a school,” and so well improved his opportunities of elementary education that in old age he was able “with an eye of scorn” to turn over the leaves of Voltaire in the original. He had a thorough Caledonian respect for the Sabbath, and for

Those godly men
Who swept from Scotland, in a flame of zeal,
Shrine, altar, image.

He even refused “wine and stouter cheer,” when offered by a fellow Atholman, who must have unlearned the native teetotalism while serving abroad--

Chaplain to a military troop
Cheered by the Highland bagpipe, as they marched
In plaided vest.

It may be more by good luck than good guidance that the poet does not try for a stroke of local colour in letting his abstinent hero sit down to a supper of “Atholl Brose.” The above hints of character, which will be recognised by patient Excursionists, go to show how Daddy Wordsworth, though he had the advantage of a visit to the Atholl Highlands, made the common English mistake about their inhabitants. John Bull will not understand how Scotland is inhabited by two different stocks, whose differences were much less blended in that Wanderer’s youth. It could then be said that the Sabbath had not yet got above the Pass of Killiecrankie; and it will be remembered how the Captain of Knockdunder proposed to deal with any “sincere professor” who scrupled to join in a unanimous call to whatever pastor pleased the duke and his deputy. Even in the poet’s day nobody seems to have rebuked him when he drove his poor beast along Highland roads on Sunday. An Atholl man’s clearest memory of Covenanters would be the check given to the victors of Killiecrankie when Cleland’s Cameronians held Dunkeld against those ex-oppressors of “godly” Whigs. The most “moderate” Presbyterian ministers had sometimes to be inducted by force in the Highlands, where still many of the people cling to the old faith. The Sandemanians sent missionaries into Atholl, who were received with indifference or ridicule; it was only two generations later that such evangelical gospellers as J. A. Haldane and Rowland Hill succeeded in blowing up, through the far North, a new flame of Calvinist enthusiasm, which in our time has turned this end of Scotland into a sanctuary for strict Sabbatarianism, much relaxed among city folk and even among the descendants of westland Whigs.

The Highlanders of the old dispensation had virtues of their own, but the poet was much left to himself when he conceived Glengarry as cradle for his idealised Scot, brought up among such a good Presbyterian family as would be more at home in the _Cottar’s Saturday Night_ upon the Carrick border--a picture quoted in full by Gilpin as an illustration of Highland manners!

Pure livers were they all, austere and grave,
And fearing God, the very children taught
Stern self-respect, a reverence for God’s word,
And an habitual piety, maintained
With strictness scarcely known on English ground.

The plain truth is that Wordsworth here was for confusing oil and vinegar. He had heard at school of a Drummond Jacobite exile who took asylum among the Lakes; and there he must often have met Scottish pedlars; then he indiscriminately “combined his information,” perhaps led astray by Walter Scott’s glorification of the Highlands. Behind the Highland line, where a tourist with a knapsack has in our time been hailed as a pedlar, there went about of old such itinerant dealers, who seem to have borne a quasi-sacred character when some such safe-conduct was much needed; but they, like Bryce Snailsfoot, were more apt to be canny Lowlanders, and so little of teetotallers that, as Scott tells us, “the chapman’s drouth” was a sly proverb in Scotland, where a colporteur of tracts could praise the “continual mercy” of a dram at every farm. In England the pedlar’s trade was so much in the hands of Scots--at one time counted by thousands across the Border--that these two titles to somewhat qualified respect appear to have become almost synonymous at the time when Wordsworth’s pedlar was laying up his little fortune. Instances of this may be found in that curious novel, _The Spiritual Quixote_, showing how a young gentleman who took to Methodist preaching passed among Derbyshire countryfolk as a “Scotch pedlar,” or simply as “a travelling Scotchman”; while in chapbooks of the period a “rider” is the term for that more exalted emissary of commerce who came to be a “traveller” _par excellence_, or a “drummer” in the figurative language of America. “Traveller” would hardly suit such an one in Scotland, where to “travel” implies specially the use of Shanks’ Naigie. Both in England and Scotland those packmen were sometimes looked on with suspicion by the authorities, accused of being political agitators as well as newsmongers, and, later on, of diffusing irreligious publications. On the Continent, also, Scots sought their fortune as pedlars, when no longer in such demand as soldiers.

Every one does not know how the Scottish pedlar has left heirs of direct succession in our day of stores and bargain sales. Quiet houses in certain streets of London that look down on open shops, would be found to have their back rooms full of drapery goods for hawking about at area doors or to working-men’s wives, cajolable into making purchases on credit which may ruin domestic peace. These tempters of humble Eves are likely to be Scots of the baser sort, and I venture to guess them as Lowlanders; they are said to be chiefly recruited in Galloway. Their dubious business is popularly known as the Scotch trade; and this seems to be responsible for keeping asmoulder among the lower classes such prejudices against the Scot as were fanned by Wilkes and Johnson, unequally yoked together in one antipathy. In Scotland, where the law is less hard-hearted and customers are more hard-headed, the “Scotch trade” does not now flourish; it is one thing Scottish which we need not be proud of bringing into England. Of course, there was a time when the northern pedlar played a useful and grateful part, as he tramped about out-of-the-way countrysides with his burden of wares and gossip--

A lone pedestrian with a scanty freight,
Wished-for, or welcome, wheresoe’er he came
Among the tenantry of thorpe and vill.

But I would bet all Whiteley’s stock against the poet laureate’s butt of sherry, that Wordsworth’s Wanderer spake not with the accent of Atholl but of Paisley or Kirkcudbright.

Having thus criticised an English poet, I venture to raise some doubt as to whether a native school of minstrels had gone deep into the matter, when they made lads with the philibeg come down from Atholl, chanting such ditties as--

The crown was half on Charlie’s head,
Ae gladsome day, ae gladsome day;
The lads that shouted joy to him,
Are in the clay, are in the clay.

The Atholl men had been notably full of fight in older days: when Mackay’s bayonets were swept away at Killiecrankie, they no doubt took keen part in the chase; and in the ’15 they gave their quota of slippery recruits to Mar’s army at Perth. Not that even then all tartans, nor all fellow-clansmen, were under the same standard. At Killiecrankie a chasm bears the name of the Soldier’s Leap, the tradition about it being that a Highlander of Mackay’s army, flying before his own brother’s claymore, sprang nearly a dozen feet from rock to rock, and, when thus put in safety, jeeringly flung back his snuff-mull to the pursuer as a fraternal farewell. In the upper ranks of clandom such oppositions were more marked. When Dundee marched to Killiecrankie, Blair Castle was defended against the Revolution by a Jacobite factor, while the shifty Marquis of Atholl took the Bath waters as excuse for being out of the way. The first duke intrigued with the Jacobites, but proclaimed King George; then his heir having been attainted for loyalty to the Old Pretender, a younger son, James, held the dukedom, who in the ’45 could not but stand by the House of Hanover, or at least kept himself snug in London, while three of his brothers were out for Prince Charlie. There were notable instances at that time of father and son, husband and wife, taking opposite sides; sometimes, it is understood, by politic arrangement through which, in any case, the estate might be kept in the family. There would also be the case of rival claimants to chieftainship, like that one who provoked Fergus MacIvor’s ambition.