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,
