Green was the favourite colour of the fairies, understood to be jealous of its being worn by men. In some parts this colour was held unlucky, while its use in so many tartans may have led the wearers “to mourn fifteen renewed in forty-five.”
Who may dare on wold to wear
The fairies’ fatal green?
Among the Grahams, who yet have adopted a chequer of green and blue, the former colour was avoided, since Dundee had on a green coat at Killiecrankie, and thus, as the Highlanders whispered, made himself target for a silver bullet. At the other end of the Highlands, the Sinclairs have not forgotten how in a green uniform they set out for the carnage of Flodden. The suit of Lincoln green worn by the Knight of Snowdon might be supposed to blame for the ill-luck of his chase; but as matter of fact it is on record how King James got a suit of tartan made for his Highland excursions.
An uglier and more perilous brood of spirits were the Urisks who haunted the misty mountains, with Ben Venue for their Brocken. Then every lake had its malignant kelpie, that in the Highlands usually takes the form of a water-bull, or horse, to be avoided like any loathly dragon. I have mentioned such a monster on the Tay; and Loch Vennachar has its own legend of the same kind, how on its banks a horse appeared among a band of children, so pretty, and to all seeming so gentle, that one of them ventured to mount it, then another and another, the creature drawing out its back like a telescope till the whole laughing party were astride, when it plunged into the water, carrying down all but the one who, in such stories, is bound to escape for telling the tale.
I fancy that kelpies, banshees, brownies, and the like uncanny creatures are not so well-known in Perthshire to-day as in the Western Highlands; but here, too, old folks, rather than young ones, may go warily by certain spots after dark. In the middle of last century a young lad whom a German tourist took as guide from Callander was able to cheer the way by eerie stories, one of a whisky smuggler accepting the invitation of an unearthly spirit to dance with her for an hour or so, as it seemed, then on reaching home he found his wife turned grey and his young children grown up. Even yet, upon the Highland line, you may find the Scottish character not all one grey shepherd’s plaid of stern theology and hard-headed shrewdness.
Ben Ledi, “the sacred mount,” was an ancient scene of pagan rites such as those which Roderick Dhu’s weird chaplain mingled with the ordinances of Christianity. I shall never forget a day I spent at its foot, that black Twelfth of August, through which a prolonged thunderstorm raged over Scotland, striking down members of more than one shooting party, on moors overcast by so awful darkness that Benjamin Franklin himself might have heard the voice of offended mountain spirits. Has the reader ever come in for a thunderstorm in the Highlands? Here is the late Mr. A. I. Shand’s account of such an experience as often gives a certain zest of danger to a sportsman’s beat.
You hear the muttering growl of distant thunder; you see the storm-clouds gathering ominously over the lowering head of the Boar of Badenoch or the Sow of Athol: the storm bursts, the rain comes down in torrents, and, before you have been well soaked to the skin, each stream and tiny burn is in foaming spate. Many a torrent has to be breasted waist-deep, or maybe shoulder-high, before you get into dry garments at the shooting-lodge. Still more perilous it is if you are belated and without a knowledgeable guide in the mist that envelops you in its fleecy folds, either thickening insensibly into palpable darkness, or coming down in a rush with appalling suddenness. Coming with a rush, I say, and I speak by book. I remember one bright afternoon, below the Tap o’ Noth, on an Aberdeenshire moor, and when walking up to a point, we had little time to look up at the phenomenon of a sudden sun-eclipse. What we did see was a dense wall of vapour descending on the dogs, who were drawing on a point, some twenty yards ahead. It was a race against time. I got forward to score a right and left. One of the birds we did pick up, the other was lost beyond groping for in a darkness that might be felt. Of course experiences like these are comparatively rare and I do not pretend there is real danger on the moors; I only say there is an inspiring suspicion of it. There is undeniable romance, more enjoyable in the recollection than in the reality, when you feel you are abroad as to the points of the compass; when you are “turned round,” like the lost sportsman on the American prairies; when the whistle of the curlew, the crow of the grouse, the bellowing of the amorous harts in the rutting season, sound strangely uncanny out of the watery cloud. You can understand how the fervid imagination of the Celt, nursed on superstitions in a savage solitude, peopled the gloomy wilderness with brownies and spectres, and heard the wings and weird shrieks of witches in the air, when the skein of wild geese was flying inland.
When Ben Ledi’s top be not veiled in clouds, one has hence a noble prospect over “the varied realms of fair Menteith,” another of those domain provinces whose names in Scotland are older than its shires. Dr. Graham defines this as the country between the Forth and the Teith, rising in the lakes of the Trossachs region, to unite a little above Stirling. Its old bounds appear to have been rather wider, taking in Perthshire up to Strathearn, and Stirlingshire down to the basin of the Clyde. It was, in fact, the upper part of Strathmore, enclosed between the Grampians to the north and the southern Campsie Fells or Lennox Hills, which, curving to the west beyond Stirling, continue the line of the Ochils and the Sidlaws. Through this finely broken valley of heights, meadows, and moors flow the streams of the Forth, that seem to have drained away the importance of the old heart of Scotland to Stirling and Edinburgh. In our day these abundant waters have been artificially led off to Glasgow, where Bailie Nicol Jarvie little thought how Loch Katrine would be laid on to make toddy in the Saltmarket. For centuries this half-Lowland strath has been a channel through which the civilisation of the South flowed up into the Highlands, long stemmed at the mountain gates of the Trossachs country.
The farmers who settled here under the shadow of the Grampians had to lay their account with being exposed to attacks from their mountain neighbours. On the west of Perthshire the clans were shut in by bens and glens as rugged as their own, defended by warriors of the same race; what feuds raged on that side have at all events left slighter marks in history. On the east, the walls of Perth and the castles of the Tay and Earn, each with its pit and gallows, would avail to keep raiders in check. On the north, it was a far cry to the rich plains of Moray, which yet suffered sorely from invasion through Badenoch. But, southwards, a day’s march brought Roderick Dhus and Rob Roys down to a tempting prospect of “Lowland field and fold,” opened from their “savage hills.”
Time was when the Lowlanders could better guard their own against frequent foes; but a day came in which they would be more at home in markets than on battlefields, while the mountaineer still kept the use and the habit of arms. That was the flourishing period of a man like Rob Roy, who had a head for business as well as a hand for violence upon occasion. Both he and his son, Robin Oig—probably confused with each other—left a dubious name in Menteith, over which the father is said to have pushed his creaghs so far as to come to encounter with Macgregor of Balhaldie, the Sheriffmuir laird who by some was recognised as chief of the clan. For the like of them, such raids were honourable occupation: a Highland gentleman, who would scorn to be the thief of a single cow, might be proud of playing the robber on a drove of cattle, yet also with a good conscience he could act as policeman, for a consideration.