I dare not say that now our blood
Kept on its wont and tempered flood
But the “dangerous chief,” seeing nothing in our Arcadian innocence to chafe his mood or cloud his brow, turned off with a courteous salutation—“Doubt not aught from mine array!”—and the sun’s next glance shone “on bracken green and cold grey stone.”
Across the Tay from Dunkeld, in the old duke’s time, reigned an eccentric laird, to whose taste for building are due the baronial Birnam Hotel and other costly structures in the neighbourhood. Mrs. Oliphant hangs the scenes of a novel about his own empty and unfinished mansion; and the chief building among the woods of Murthly is now an Asylum. As for Birnam Wood, that has long marched off the face of the earth, to bear out the truth of Shakespeare’s legend; but one or two ancient trees are pointed out as stragglers. Birnam was a favourite haunt of Millais, a keen sportsman as well as lover of the scenery which forms oases in the later stage of his art, when he seemed too much concerned to boil that large pot in Palace Gate.
From Dunkeld it is easy to reach the heart of the Highlands. A dozen miles of the high road takes us up to hill-girdled Pitlochrie, and through that pass where Dundee was shot, as pious souls whispered, with a silver bullet, while his claymores sheared down the Lowland soldiers, whose prudent leader, himself from the farthest north, gained in defeat the lesson to invent a more adaptable
bayonet. So terrifying seemed long this Pass of Killiecrankie that a body of Hessian soldiers, brought over in the ’45, are said to have flatly refused to march through it. But as usual, the victorious onrush at Killiecrankie did not carry the tartans far. They were checked at Dunkeld, dourly defended against them by troops of sternest temper, that Cameronian regiment raised among the most stubborn Whigs, who here had their baptism of fire and their chance of wreaking vengeance for bitter memories of Claverhouse. Their colonel, Cleland, fell in this fight with the barelegged foes he had satirised in verse bristling with scornful hatred of the “Highland host” brought down as a scourge for the west-country Covenanters. “They need not strip them when they whip them!” the Presbyterian poet exclaims like any ribald Cockney, and goes on to hint how the upper garments of such gallows-birds would not be worth the hangman’s fees. So little love was lost between kindly Scots of those days, on opposite sides of the Highland line!