Among all the provinces in Scotland, if an intelligent stranger were asked to describe the most varied and the most beautiful, it is probable he would name the county of Perth. 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.
Scott was an alien in Perthshire, his judgment of which, then, should be “neither partial nor impartial,” as the Provost of Portobello desired; while it is so much my native heath that I give it no place but that of first in all the counties of Britain. There can be small doubt of the verdict pronounced by visitors, who take the Scottish Highlands as the cream of our island’s scenery, and in most cases know little of the Highlands beyond this central maze of mountains and valleys, falling to the rich plain of Strathmore, spread out between the rugged Grampians and the green hills of Ochil and Sidlaw.
Here arose the ancient Alban, or realm of Alpin, the core of historic Scotland, a name that has been fondly identified with that of the Alps; but I am not going to entangle myself in the snares of philology. If the Perthshire Bens seem insignificant beside the Alps, for the former, at least, no boastful pretensions are made by their sons, who familiarly speak of them as the “hills” rather than the mountains. Hill, indeed, is used in the Highlands in a rougher sense, to denote the wild heathy land as distinct from the cultivated glen. I have heard an old-fashioned sportsman speak of going out on “the hill,” when he was actually descending to a lower level; and so R. L. Stevenson has it—
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
Alban appears to have extended above Perthshire, taking in at least the headwaters of the Spey and other streams flowing north. It certainly included the basin of the Tay and the upper waters of the Forth. And as Lowland and Highland scenery are finely mingled on these rivers, so here met and blended the confluent torrents of blood and language swelling into a steady stream of national life. What may be called a Scottish kingdom first took shape on the banks of Tay, where long was fixed its chief seat. Something like a pattern spun by the shuttle of war comes at last to light on a torn web of blood-dyed, mist-dimmed checks and stripes, hitherto a puzzling blur for the most erudite spectacles. The Muse of early history seems like that chameleon, whose fate was explained by a Highland soldier: “I put it on my bonnet and it went black; I put it on my coat and it turned red; but when I let it oot on my kilt, the tartan fairly bursted it.”
It is an old reproach against us that every Scot looks on himself as descended from “great and glorious but forgotten kings.” If, indeed, we calculate by geometrical progression how many millions of ancestors each of us can claim in the last thirty generations or so, the chances seem to be against any Briton not having some strain of quasi-royal blood in his veins. Scotland had, at least, many kings to be descended from, several apocryphal dozens of them, as named and numbered by George Buchanan, before he comes down to chronicles that can be verified. But to our critical age, the long row of early royal portraits exhibited at Holyrood, painted by a Dutchman at so much the square foot, seem worth still less as records than as works of art. The most ardent Scottish patriot no longer sets store by such fables as historians like Hector Boece wove into their volumes; nor is it necessary to examine so fond imaginations as that of descent from a Pharaoh’s daughter, Scota, or from a Ninus king of Nineveh. Finn and Fergus, Oscar and Ossian, we must leave in cloudland, looking downwards to pick our steps over slippery rock and boggy heather, among which there is no firm footing upon traces of an aboriginal pre-Celtic stratum of humanity.
When the Romans garrisoned rather than occupied southern Scotland, and made reconnoitring expeditions into the north, its fastnesses were stoutly defended by fierce Caledonians, woodland savages, and Picti, painted warriors, who may or may not have been the same people. If the same, they may well have split into hostile tribes, warring against each other like the kindred Mohawks and Hurons, sometimes amalgamated by conquest, sometimes uniting to make raids on richer Lowland clearings. After the false dawn of Roman annals ceases to throw a glimmer on those hardy barbarians, darkness again falls over mountain and forest, lit only by the twinkling lamp of adventurous missionaries. Then the twilight of middle-age history shows a Pictish kingdom seated in Charlemagne’s age on the Tay and its tributaries, but there presently overthrown by pushful invaders.
These were the Dalriad Scots from Ireland, who began their independent career by getting precarious foothold on the nearest coastland promontory of North Britain. Baffled, as it seems, in an attempt thence to master the country of their origin, then driven, perhaps, from their coast settlements by a stronger swarm of Scandinavian hornets, this stirring race shoved their way across the western Highlands to take a firmer stand in the heart of Scotland, when Kenneth MacAlpine overthrew the Pictish kingdom at Scone, its capital. Buchanan reports two successive battles, the scene of the former a few miles off, at Forteviot, where he makes Kenneth act on the motto of the Celtic Society, Olim Marte, nunc arte. His chiefs, we are told, not being very keen for the encounter, while they lay snoring off their drink, the king worked upon them by means of a young cousin of his, disguised as an angel in phosphorescent fish-skins, and equipped with a sort of primitive megaphone, through which he roused the sleepers by a promise of victory, then slipped off his celestial raiment to disappear in the darkness before these heavy-headed warriors were wide awake. It is not often we are taken so well behind the scenes of a miracle.
At Forteviot, a name whose prefix is held as one of the rare Pictish vocables left to build philological theories, Kenneth appears to have fixed his own seat. The capital of such a kingdom would be no more permanent than Abyssinia’s chief camp at Gondar or Abbis Abbeba. At all events it was hereabouts that currents of molten metal came together to mingle, cool and harden into the foundation of the Scottish nation. As yet it was the kingdom of Alban which spread around like a lava flood, to overrun a more or less imperfect amalgamation of Briton and Saxon to the south, of Norseman and Celt to the north and west, while, on all sides, it once and again had nearly been drowned by fresh waves of invasion from the Baltic. When, nearly two hundred years after Kenneth’s Perthshire victories, Malcolm II. had added Lothian and Strathclyde to his volcanic realm, the style of Scotia appears in history, by which the settlers now dominant in Caledonia seem to kick off their connection with Ireland, where their name dies out as it is born again in the growing Scotland, and Duns Scotus becomes no longer in danger of being confused with a Scotus Erigena.
There is early Scottish history boiled down to a page or two, on which one might work in other changes that had made less violent progress, while the tops of the Grampians were being weather-worn into silt for the Tay. Those Picts had been in part conquered by the Cross before they fell under the sword. The disciplined faith of Rome overlaid the wild Christianity implanted from Iona. The ecclesiastical metropolis was removed from the West to Dunkeld, then for a time to Abernethy, another old Pictish centre, and finally to St. Andrews. Intercourse with the world, and especially with the Norman conquerors of England, imported the feudal system with its dovetailing of power and ambition between kings who were in turn sovereign and vassal on different estates of their territories. The English tongue began to absorb that of the Gael, as the Celtic leaven seemed to be lost in the Saxon dough. 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.