Illustrations of the Author of Waverley / Being Notices and Anecdotes of Real Characters, Scenes, and Incidents Supposed to Be Described in His Works

by Robert Chambers

DESERTED BURYING-GROUND.

here exists, in the neighbourhood of Edinburgh, a scene nearly resembling that described in the beautiful preliminary to this Tale, as the burying-ground of the Covenanters. It is commonly called St. Catherine’s Kirkyard, and is all that remains of the chapel and cemetery of the once celebrated St. Catherine’s in the Hopes.[21] The situation is particularly pastoral, beautiful, and interesting. It is placed where the narrow ravine, down which Glencorse burn descends, opens up into an expanse considerably wider. Rullion Green, where the Covenanters were defeated by the troops of Charles II. in 1665, was in the immediate vicinity; and tradition still points out in St. Catherine’s the graves of several of the insurgents, who were killed either in the battle or near this spot in the pursuit. If the latter be the most probable fact, no other circumstance would be required to establish the identity of the two scenes.

St. Catherine’s Churchyard, lying among the wildest solitudes of the Pentland Hills, is an object of beautiful and interesting desolation, almost equal to the scene of Peter Pattieson’s meeting with Old Mortality. There does not now remain the least trace of a place of worship within its precincts; and it seems to have been long disused as a place of interment. A slight mark of an inclosure, nearly level with the sward, and one overgrown gravestone, itself almost in the grave, are all that point out the spot.

The ground in which St. Catherine’s is situated agrees in certain general circumstances with the author’s Vale of Gandercleugh. The horrific “dry-stane dike” projected by “his honour the Laird of Gusedub,” does not, it is true, appear to have ever substituted its rectilinear deformity for the graceful winding of the natural boundary, as the too-poetical Peter Pattieson apprehended. But a circumstance has taken place by which the romantic has been sacrificed to the useful as completely as if “his honour” had fulfilled his intention. The ravine, at the head of which St. Catherine’s is situated, has lately been embanked, and laid completely under water, as a compensation-pond for the mills upon the Crawley Burn, of which the more legitimate supplies were cut off, and turned towards a different direction and very different purpose, by being carried to Edinburgh for the use of the inhabitants.

Besides being possibly the original scene of the Deserted Burying-Ground, this spot is not otherwise destitute of the qualification of classic. At no great distance stands Logan House, the supposed mansion of Sir William Worthy of the “Gentle Shepherd”; and at the head of the glen lies what has generally been considered the “Habbie’s How” of that drama.

In the leading article of the Scotsman, September 3, 1823, the writer endeavours to trace a similarity between the Vale of Glencorse and the description of Glendearg in the Monastery.