CHAPTER IV
THE KINGDOM OF FIFE
LIKE Somerset, claiming to be something more than a mere shire, the county half fondly, half jestingly entitled a kingdom, lies islanded between two firths, cut off from the world by the sea and from the rest of Scotland by the Ochil ridges. The “Fifers” are thus supposed to be a race apart; but it would be more like the truth to take Fifeishness as the essence of Saxon Scotland. Fife is, in fact, an epitome of the Lowlands, showing great stretches of practically prosaic farming, others of grimy coal-field, with patches of moor, bog, and wind-blown firs, here and there swelling into hill features, that in the abrupt Lomonds attain almost mountain dignity in face of their Highland namesake, sixty miles away. Open to cold sea winds, it nurses the hardy frames of “buirdly chiels and clever hizzies”; and all the invigorating discipline of the northern climate is understood to be concentrated in the East Neuk of Fife, where a weakling like R. L. Stevenson might well sigh over the “flaws of fine weather that we call our northern summer.” It is in the late autumn that this eastern coast is at its best of halcyon days. As we have seen, the poet lived a little farther south who still laid himself open to Tom Hood’s reproach—
‘Come, gentle spring, ethereal mildness come!’
O Thomson, void of rhyme as well as reason,
How could’st thou thus poor human nature hum—
There’s no such season!
In the Antiquary’s period, we know how Fife was reached from Edinburgh by crossing the Firth at Queensferry, as old as Malcolm Canmore’s English consort, or by the longer sail from Leith to Kinghorn, where Alexander III. broke his neck to Scotland’s woe. A more roundabout land route was via Stirling, chosen by prudent souls like the old wife who, being advised to put her trust in Providence for the passage, replied, “Na, na, sae lang as there’s a brig at Stirling I’ll no fash Providence!” Lord Cockburn records how that conscientious divine, Dr John Erskine, feeling it his duty to vote in a Fife election, when too infirm to bear the motion of boat or carriage, arranged to walk all the way by Stirling, but was saved this fortnight’s pilgrimage by the contest being given up. Till the building of its Firth bridges, the North British Railway’s passengers had to tranship both in entering and leaving Fife, a mild taste of adventure for small schoolboys. Now, as all the world knows, the shores of Lothian are joined to Fife by that monumental Forth Bridge that humps itself into view miles away. Then all the world has heard of the unlucky Tay Bridge, graceful but treacherous serpent as it proved in its first form, when one stormy Sabbath night it let a train be blown into the sea. By these constructions the line has now a clear course on which to race its Caledonian rival, either for Perth or Aberdeen. But