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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. 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. 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. On the other side of the confluence, Ballinluig railway junction marks the forking of two routes of travel. It is also notable for the first bridge, above Perth, over the Tay, built by the road-making General Wade.
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. 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: 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.
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. 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. Its central valley is Glengarry, up which runs the Highland Railway, till, at the height of nearly 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.
All the lions about Pitlochrie are so familiar to guide-books and their patrons, that I need hardly even name them: 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.
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—. 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 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! 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—. The poet makes no doubt of it. He had a thorough Caledonian respect for the Sabbath, and for. 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.
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 plain truth is that Wordsworth here was for confusing oil and vinegar. 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. 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. 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—.
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 Atholl men had been notably full of fight in older days: Not that even then all tartans, nor all fellow-clansmen, were under the same standard.
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. 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. Lord George Murray, making a raid into his own country, gathered another force by sending round the Fiery Cross, for the last time on record, according to Mr.
Walter Blaikie; but the heather thus set on fire soon smouldered out.
The tenant of a snug farm in Strath Tay or Strath Tummel, within reach of market towns, had been somewhat fattened out of the ancestral taste for bloodshed, and was more inclined to look on at a game now played by professionals. But in such a time of transition, would-be spectators could not yet look on at ease, like the newspaper audiences of our distant wars. Here is one specimen of the seamy side in that last romantic episode of our history.
Its prosaic hero was a Glenalmond farmer, one Gregor Macgregor, who, his own clan being proscribed, had taken the name of Murray on coming under the patronage of Atholl. Other Perthshire lairds had the same complaint to make of their tenants as wanting in chivalry at this time; and several legal depositions might be quoted to show what force was put upon such reluctant warriors. Civil war brought sufferings in high as well as in low life, when Lord George Murray besieged his own ancestral seat of Blair, garrisoned by English soldiers, and tried to set it on fire with red-hot balls, but had to make off towards Culloden.
He, who had taken part in all the Jacobite movements of the century, escaped to die in France; and his son eventually succeeded to the dukedom. Less fortunate was poor Duke William, the eldest brother, who bore the second title of the family, while the Pretender decked him with a vain dukedom of Rannoch. He died in the Tower, betrayed for a reward of a thousand pounds by a Scot who earned also the scorn of the English officers concerned. The presumed Murray ancestor is said to have been a Flemish knight, who, like other foreign adventurers, set up a Scottish house in the service of feudalising kings.
If he took his name from Moray, it was not in this region that his family struck deep root. The historical earls of Moray bore other names, while in the upsetting time of Bruce and Baliol, the Murrays are seen gaining charters on the Forth and the Clyde; then presently they have crept northwards into Strathearn, and under the James reigns came to be firmly seated in the Perthshire Highlands, overlaying there the royal name of Stewart, that also had spread from the south.
The Atholl earldom they got by marriage with a Stewart. Their dukedom dates from the beginning of the eighteenth century, when the Government sought to bind in strawberry leaves several of those Highland Samsons. At that time the Duke of Atholl seemed the most powerful of them all.
In he was reckoned as having claymores at his call, as many as the two great Campbell families put together; but the call behoved to be against the Government, for most of the clan followed his sons in intermittent service of the Pretender. Leases, as once charters, came to be a solvent for the old adhesiveness of clan life. One of those dukes is said to have planted trees by the million. At the same time they cultivated what may be called an ornamental Highland feeling; and if nowadays they are not so wealthy as British nobles enriched from City moneybags or American pork butcheries, they have a considerable holding in sentimental loyalty not wholly uprooted by sheriff courts and railways.
The most outstanding of the race in our times was that Duke of the Victoria and Albert days, of whom hard things were said in newspapers when he tried to shut up Glen Tilt. In Bonnie Scotland I echoed those revilings, so now, per contra , let me quote Dr. He was a living, a strenuous protest in perpetual kilt against the civilisation, the taming, the softening of mankind.
He was essentially wild. His virtues were those of human nature in the rough and unreclaimed, open and unsubdued as the Moor of Rannoch. He was a true autochthon, terrigena ,—a son of the soil,—as rich in local colour, as rough in the legs, and as hot at the heart, as prompt and hardy, as heathery as a gorcock. Courage, endurance, staunchness, fidelity and warmth of heart, simplicity, and downrightness were his staples; and with them he attained to a power in his own region and among his own people quite singular.
The secret of this was his truth and his pluck, his kindliness and his constancy.
A native, also, of any other district of Caledonia, though his partialities might lead him to prefer his native county in the first instance, would certainly class that of Perth in the second, and thus give its inhabitants a fair right to plead, that—prejudice apart—Perthshire forms the fairest portion of the northern kingdom. But when Malcolm Canmore and his Anglicising queen did so much to bring Scotland into touch with its more civilised neighbour, they moved their chief seat no nearer the new border than Dunfermline. To him is attributed that vaunt of the Macnabs having a boat of their own at the Flood, also the declaration that there were many Mr. The North Inch is best known to fame for the battle of the Clans in , when threescore Highlandmen let out most of their quarrelsome blood before an excited multitude, the king and court looking on from what served as a grand stand, the Gilten Arbour in the Dominican Gardens, a structure that probably stood near the present site of the Perth Academy in Rose Terrace. When he applied for ordination among the Seceders, I am sorry to say that my forefather would have barred him out on suspicion that his learning came from the devil; but this firm believer in witchcraft was overruled, and the self-taught scholar grew to be famed as Dr.
Other noblemen put on the kilt at the season, and do their best to embrown their smooth knees for six weeks, returning them to trousers and to town; he lived in his kilt all the year long, and often slept soundly in it and his plaid among the brackens; and not sparing himself, he spared none of his men or friends—it was the rigour of the game—it was Devil take the hindmost. It was this gameness and thoroughness in whatever he was about that charmed his people—charmed his very dogs; and so it should He lived at home, was himself a farmer, and knew all his farmers and all their men; had lain out at nights on the Badenoch heights with them, and sat in their bothies and smoked with them the familiar pipe.
But he also was, as we have said, a thorough breeder, especially of Ayrshire cattle. It was quite touching to see this fierce, restless, intense man— impiger, acer, iracundus —at the great Battersea show doating upon and doing everything for his meek-eyed, fine-limbed, sweet-breathed kine. Besides doing much to stock his domain with the best cattle honestly come by, this duke fell in with the fashion set by his royal mistress in keeping up its Highland character and sentiment.
They own to being sprung out of the MacDonalds, but from the chieftain of a vigorous offshoot they called themselves Clan Donnachie, sons of Duncan. This hero was a comrade and favourite of Robert Bruce, who no doubt stood godfather to his son, then the name came to be anglicised as Robertson. They were ignorant Parisians who, at a later date, mistook the chef of Clan Donnachie for a cook. Along with other clans, this one came into fresh favour with the Crown by lending a hand to apprehend the murderers of James I. Then by obscure defeats, mistakes, and turns of fortune, Clan Donnachie in turn lost its pre-eminence in Perthshire.
In it still counted some hundreds of claymores; and perhaps Scott had it in his eye as a prototype of the MacIvors, divided by a frequent contention as to headship. Now, while their name is as widely scattered over the world as that of any other Highland stock, most of them have half forgotten their Highland descent, and a melancholy burial-place at Dunalaister, near Loch Rannoch, is the monument of their old glory, in a country where Struan has become best known as a link of tourist travel, and another seat of their chief, at the farther end of the lake, is or was styled The Barracks, as having been built for the soldiers of King George.
His heir, indeed, had some of the woeful experiences of lurking out of the way of capture, as described in Waverley. He was a poet and a scholar as well as a warrior, who in his youth had run away from St. Andrews University to join Dundee. Much of his verse was not fit for publication, his Muse being evidently nursed more on brandy and claret than on the midnight oil.
A little volume published in his name a few years after his death, contains a good deal of Strephon, Damon, and such-like, with other hints of classical inspiration, but also religious pieces that read as if written in headachy morning hours. He appears a mixture of pedant, soldier, and sot, whose life, prolonged over fourscore years, makes no edifying example for teetotallers. That worthy would certainly not have stooped to serve under the Duke of Atholl, as did his descendant, of whom also Dr.
In my youth a rival chieftain gave himself bold advertisement, a fuliginous personage—I think he was a coal merchant by trade—who under the style of Dundonnachie, stalked about Perth in fiery tartans, and carried on raids upon the duke as to freeing the bridge of Dunkeld from toll, by which he got himself into duress vile, but was not otherwise taken very seriously. Several old clans, beside the Robertsons, have been submerged here beneath the flood of Murraydom.
The earldom of Atholl was long held by royal offshoots like that truculent Wolf of Badenoch, whose skeleton has lately been turned up in Dunkeld Cathedral; and their following went to dot the region with Stewart graves. Their most illustrious scion is perhaps the philosophic historian Adam Ferguson, born at Logierait, though, as being a son of the manse, his root in the soil may be questionable.
The Menzies appear as intruders from the South, like the Murrays; but very old inhabitants were the Mackintoshes of Glen Tilt, who exalt themselves against the Macphersons as heads of the Clan Chattan. The Macbeths are said, not by themselves, to have fallen to become helots under later lords of Atholl. Then, all over this district and far around, twinkle traditions of the Macgregors, that famous broken clan, of whom I have much to say farther on.
Murray itself is a name not so common as distinguished in Perthshire; and we saw above how a farmer who had taken it along with allegiance to Atholl, was by blood a Macgregor. In more than one foreign book one comes across a statement, the origin of which I cannot trace, that early in last century a census was made of Highland names, which brought out Macgregor at the head of the list with a numeration of 36, One knows not how such a count could be effectually made; and it would be surprising if this name, so long cut down by law, should have sprung up again with such dominant vitality.
Signor Piovanelli, an Italian writer who quotes that estimate, tells us how he whiled away one probably wet evening of Highland travel by counting names in an Inverness Directory. Some years later Mr. I have now had a census taken in the current Edinburgh Directory, the result being that Robertson still stands top with, roughly, entries. Smith, with , runs second, and might not be far behind if the Gows were counted in, who have kept the Gaelic form of their name. Stewarts or Stuarts stand highest among names that nowadays seem to fit tartans, then Campbells and Macdonalds are equal , both a little above Murrays and Frasers, so far from the Fraser country.
Most Macs make a poorer show, the Macgregors here amounting to only some , and other plaided names hardly deserving a place; while one is surprised to find Jamiesons not so numerous as might be expected from a long succession of royal godfathers. Here Brown heads the list , Smith a good second , and Stewart third , while Robertson has fallen to Campbell takes a rather higher place than in Edinburgh; Macdonalds and Macgregors , slightly increased here, bulk less in what is, of course, a much larger population, of more miscellaneous antecedents. All those estimates are made somewhat roughly, and serve only for comparison between the prevalence of different names.
On turning to a London Directory, one finds the Smiths in full pre-eminence, with a tale of nearly names, to which may be added a reinforcement of Smyths and Smythes.
Brown and Jones are each about half as strong. Robertsons here have shrunk to under a hundred, who indeed might call cousins with more than Robinsons and Roberts and smaller bodies of Robsons, Robins, and so forth. A slightly larger force of Stewarts and Campbells have sought fortune in the capital, where Macgregors stand at a bare two dozen. So much for the Commercial section; to more patient statisticians I leave the task of searching the Court, Professional, and Suburban Directories, and drawing a moral that may or may not appear from the number of Scottish names they find there.
It were, indeed, a labour of Hercules truly to measure Celtic nomenclature, which takes as many shapes as Proteus. MacRitchie, who has given much attention to such matters, tells me of his connection with the Mackintoshes, sons of a Tosh or chief, who in time came to be scattered under more aliases than a mere Sassenach can trace. A Davidson branch is also recognised in the Highlands, who claim for their McDhai forbears the honour of having brought on that quarrel fought out on the Inch of Perth.
Another got to be McTavish, from the Gaelic form of Thomas; but not to mention those who anglicised themselves outright as Thompson or Thoms, there are also MacThomases, and MacCombies, the latter from Hombie , which, it appears, is a corruption of Thomas. Let me show by an imaginary case how hard it may be to catch the chameleon tints of Highland blood.
There is a youth much at home in Perthshire, as carrying on there, and elsewhere, the highest form of sport, at which he seldom misses his aim, yet often puts his victims to a great deal of needless pain. He appears not to have worn the kilt, nor yet breeches, but he has as much right to a tartan and a pibroch as many Highland clans once strangers here.
Now if he had settled down and founded a family in Atholl, it might have come to be known as MacEros, or Vich Venus, or FitzZeus, if he chose to hark back to the fame of his grandfather. And those who suffer under the thunderbolts and vulture beaks of the present, have always looked fondly back to a golden age, when everything went well under the chieftainship of some Saturn whose origin is lost in distance along with any unlovely traits of conduct, such as dethroning his father or swallowing his own children.
By Loch Tay we pass into Breadalbane, that Broad Albin of hill and vale where many names have struggled for a mastery falling to the clan whose Highland mettle was best tempered by Lowland canniness. While the senior branch of the house of Campbell spread its tartans to the west and along the Clyde, cadets of the same stock pushed north-eastward from Kilchurn Castle into Perthshire, there to take firm root like the foreign trees it planted on the Tay. Among the names overshadowed or displaced was that of forbears of mine, on whose behalf, however, I have no blood feud against the Campbells, the dealings between them seeming to have been fair sale and purchase, as was not always the way in old Breadalbane.
It was pointed out, in The Highlands and Islands , how this politic clan throve in love as in war, by prudent marriages as well as by noting which way the wind of the time blew. A century after his death, another Sir Colin built himself a castle at the foot of Loch Tay, then called Balloch, the easternmost border of his property, with the view, it is said, of making this a new centre of extension.
Legend has it that the site was fixed where first the chief heard a mavis sing. His son Colin appears in the novel character of a Highland patron of art, employing George Jameson to execute family portraits still preserved. Twenty marks for a half-length was the charge of this artist, the first famous portrait-painter, not only of Scotland, but of Britain, who is believed to have studied under Rubens at Antwerp, with Vandyck as fellow-pupil.
This earl, like the contemporary Duke of Atholl, was the second son; the elder, Lord Ormelie, having been set aside from the succession, apparently as weak-minded. For an heir, the family had to cast back more than a century to one of the collateral branches. Campbell of Carwhin, who succeeded to the earldom in , at the age of twenty, had a long and prosperous tenure, swelling the family wealth by his marriage with a great Scottish heiress.
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This accession of wealth the earl used in carrying out improvements on his large property, adding to it, and building the modern Taymouth Castle. His son, the second marquis, could boast of being able to ride a hundred miles on his own land westward, for, after all, it was towards their native seas that the Campbells stretched out, getting no farther inland than Aberfeldy, beyond the St. Petersburg of their possessions.
He it was who in sumptuously entertained Queen Victoria at Taymouth, when she seems to have caught that love of the Highlands that went so far to set a fashion, delighted with the display of kilts, reels, and pipers, in a blaze of torchlight and a din of loyal salvos. The second marquis, who, while Lord Ormelie, had sat in the Reformed Parliament as a Whig, lived in esteem and prosperity till , but would perhaps have given up half his possessions for a son. At his death, the new marquisate became extinct; and once more the clan had to look back some generations for an heir to the estate and the earldom, this time with appeal to law in a trial not yet forgotten.
There were popularly said to be some fourscore competitors for the prize. One of them was a schoolfellow of mine, who invited me to Taymouth, when he should come into his kingdom, but that hospitality fell through. The real contest lay between Campbell of Glenfalloch and Campbell of Boreland, both descended from the nearest collateral, a Glenfalloch who died The question arose in the liberal view of Scots law as to proof of marriage. The elder son, while a subaltern in an English regiment, had eloped with the wife of one Christopher Ludlow, grocer and apothecary at Chipping Sodbury.
Her son, through whom the claim descended, was born after she became legally free to marry again; and the dispute mainly turned upon this delicate point: On these grounds, the Courts presumed that eloping couple to have taken themselves as husband and wife, so taken by the world in their lifetime: The successful claimant gained the old earldom, the marquisate becoming extinct, but it was revived in the person of his son, who married a daughter of the house of Montrose, hereditary enemy of his race.
He now has reigned for a generation at Taymouth Castle, one of the noblest Scottish seats, among finely planted grounds and gardens, where, but for the mountain background, one would hardly believe oneself in the Highlands. The neat model village of Kenmore also suggests anything but a Highland clachan. It is whispered that the lord of this lake does not trust himself on the water that, according to old prophecy, is to be fatal to a Breadalbane. From the lake this is easily ascended for what Macculloch extols as the most varied and far-reaching Highland prospect.
Beyond the lake the successive ridges of hills lead the eye over Strathearn, which is, however, invisible, to the Ochills and the Campsie, and hence, even to Edinburgh; the details of this quarter, from Perth, being unexpectedly perfect and minute, and at the same time well indicated by the marked characters of the Lowmont hills. The place of Dunkeld and the peculiar style of its scenery are also distinctly visible; and it is equally easy to make out the bright estuary of the Tay, the long ridge of the Sidlaw, and the plain of Strathmore.
Westward, we trace, without difficulty, the hills of Loch Lomond and Loch Cateran; and, in the same manner, every marked mountain, even to Oban, Cruachan and Buachaille Etive being particularly conspicuous. To the north, Glen Lyon is entirely excluded; the first objects, in this direction, being Schihallien and its accompanying mountains, leading us to the vale of the Tumel and Loch Rannoch, and even to Loch Laggan, seen as a bright narrow line: So great a range of view, with so many and such marked objects, is unexampled in any other spot in Scotland.
At the head of the lake, between the streams of the Dochart and the Lochay that unite to fill it, stands the pretty village of Killin, whose sojourners soon come upon names and relics of other clans overlaid by the intruding Campbells. Near the pier are the ruins of Finlarig Castle, for a time their chief seat, built by Black Duncan on the site of a ruder stronghold he had acquired from the Drummonds, whose name is preserved by Drummond Hill at the other end. In one case the legend is that a Macgregor, invited to a friendly conference, was ambushed by armed men, who dragged him to the block at Kenmore, having killed his aged father on the way.
Under ban be the nobles and friends who pained me so: Had there been twelve of his race and my Gregor at their head, my eyes would not be dim with tears, nor my child without its father. They laid his head upon an oaken block: Oh that my father had been sick, and Colin in the plague, and all the Campbells in Balloch wearing manacles! I went to the plains of Balloch, but rest found not there: I tore the hair from my head, the skin from my hands. Had I the wings of the lark, the strength of Gregor in my arms, the highest stone in the castle would have been the one next the ground.
Oh that Finlarig were wrapped in flames, proud Taymouth lying in ashes, and fair-haired Gregor of the white hands in my embrace! All others have apples: I have none, my sweet, lovely apple has the back of his head to the ground. Another tale of Loch Tay is told almost identically of more than one pair of hostile Highland families, but here with a picturesque opening and a rather lame conclusion. A Macgregor had been at feud with the head of the Breadalbane Campbells, who held out a deceitful olive branch by proposing a treaty of peace in his new-built castle at Taymouth.
Macgregor trustfully kept the rendezvous with an appointed number of friends. Deep the dungeon—sharp the axe—and short the shrift! The lord of the castle received him and his men with feigned kindness, and they sat down to meat, each Campbell having a Macgregor on his right hand. The other Macgregors were quick to follow this example so effectively that their false host allowed himself to be dragged out of his castle, across the loch, and to the top of Drummond Hill, where he was fain to subscribe an amnesty and promise of future friendship, that did not long hold good.
One would like to compare the Campbell version of such legends. A story of the next century may have suggested to Scott the Strathyre wedding interrupted by a messenger of the Fiery Cross, though in this case the incidents seem less romantic. Even at such a time Campbells were not to be kept from the throats of Macdonalds, whose offence, according to one account, was refusing to pay toll for passage through Breadalbane, such as explorers of our age have found exacted by African chiefs across whose territory lay their way.
Such were the scenes amid which the Breadalbane lairds sowed the seeds of more peaceful manners. On a wooded islet of the Dochart are the tombs of the Macnabs, older lairds of this district. He was huge of stature, imperious in manner, irascible, proud and impracticable to an ultra-Highland degree. To him is attributed that vaunt of the Macnabs having a boat of their own at the Flood, also the declaration that there were many Mr. Macnabs but only one Macnab, naturally the crown and chieftain of the human race.
Ill would it have fared with the Sassenach body who should thus have bearded the Macnab to his face. It occurred after dinner, the laird being a little mellow, for as to being drunk, oceans of liquor would have failed to produce that effect, at least to the length of prostration. The unhappy querist began: An estate as auld as the flude, sir; an infernal deal aulder, sir.
His eyes caught fire and he snorted like a mountain whirlwind. The most often told of these stories relates to a time when the spendthrift laird was at last falling into the toils of law, whose minions he looked on as very sons of the devil. The Perth men of business, it is said, showed indulgence to his shortcomings; but a bill of his having come into the hands of some less considerate creditor at Stirling, a clerk, accompanied by two messengers-at-arms, ventured to his house in Breadalbane on the perilous errand of taking the Macnab into custody.
Getting wind of their design, he kept out of the way, and left his housekeeper schooled to play a cunning part. She welcomed the visitors, let them understand that the laird was expected home next morning, and after hospitable entertainment, sent them to bed, the clerk at one end of the house and the legal myrmidons at the other.
When they awoke next morning, they were horrified to see dangling from a tree outside what seemed the body of their companion. Naturally such a personage did not thrive in his quarrel with the age; and when he died in , what was left of the Macnab property passed into the hands of his kinsman and creditor, Lord Breadalbane, to whom the laird had stooped his pride to become a sort of humoured hanger-on. His nephew, heir to a load of debt, was fain to emigrate to Canada with a following of the broken clan.
But all over Britain a sprinkling of Macnabs are found more or less flourishing, who have formed an association, two or three hundred strong, that takes on itself the pious duty of tending those ancestral graves at Killin, the chieftains buried in a central square, their humbler clansmen and connections lying round about them under the shade of funereal pine-trees.
Killin has also to show a lonely stone, taken to mark the tomb of Fingal, which is said to have given the original name, Kilfin. Disabling it will result in some disabled or missing features. You can still see all customer reviews for the product. Top-rated Most recent Top-rated. All reviewers Verified purchase only All reviewers All stars 5 star only 4 star only 3 star only 2 star only 1 star only All positive All critical All stars All formats Format: There was a problem filtering reviews right now.
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