THE RIVER SPEY NEAR FOCHABERS
Of his rival, Cluny Macpherson, it was told in my youth how he sternly rebuked an effeminate clansman who visited him under an umbrella. The Cluny of Culloden was the hardy chief who for years after lurked in a “cage” of sticks and turf, close to his own castle, where he occasionally ventured himself, and once had nearly been caught by the redcoats through the unheroic accident of his getting so drunk that his servants had to carry him out in a plaid and hide their unconscious bundle in the woods till the search was over. The most widely famed Macpherson in modern days was that author or editor of “Ossian.” If any of this clan desire more unquestioned renown, let him invent some defence of proof against the midges that are the most bloodthirsty swarms of the Highlands, now that the pibroch and the coronach die away in dance music.
For his services at Bannockburn the Lord of the Isles was rewarded by Bruce by a grant of Lochaber. So this region in part, with the Rough Bounds, came to be the country of the Macdonalds, in their various septs, distinguished by the name of their seat, or sometimes by a minor patronymic, as the MacIans of Ardnamurchan and of Glencoe, while some came to write themselves Macdonell, but all boasting to be of the great Somerled’s line, in which, indeed, the sons of Dougal seem entitled to the first birthright. The clan Donnachie, though disguised as Robertsons, claim also to be of the same stock. Other septs, now bearing separate names, were as proud to count themselves of Donald’s prolific race. The Macintyres, for instance, “sons of the carpenter,” tell about their ancestor, an illegitimate shoot of the Lord of the Isles, that when in a boat with his father, the peg coming out, the whole crew would have been drowned if this ready youngster had not chopped off his thumb with an axe to stop the hole, and the admiring chief exclaimed, “The thumb-carpenter!”—a nickname that stuck. A Lowland hero under the same circumstances would probably have been canny enough to use his thumb as a plug without cutting it off.
Wherever they came from, the Macintyres drifted inland into Lorne, and at Glenorchy gave birth to Duncan Ban, one of the most famous of unlettered Gaelic bards, who died in 1812 as a veteran of the Edinburgh City Guard, his muse more scrimply fostered than that of Burns, though now his memory is honoured by a stately monument at Dalmally. He fought in the ’45, perhaps not very heartily, as a private soldier of King George, while his contemporary rival, Alexander Macdonald, was out with Prince Charlie, in whose praise he made the very popular song of Morag. There would be few of his name on the other side; and Mr. Jenner, for his part, stoutly denies the story that Culloden was lost through the Macdonalds holding back in offended pride.
At Ardtornish, on the Morven coast, the Lords of the Isles held parliaments of their own, and once presumed to make a treaty with an English king, foe of their lightly regarded suzerain. Even when that quasi-regal state had crumbled, we find Macdonald chiefs proposing negotiations with Queen Elizabeth, sending out troops to fight in Ireland, and hiring mercenaries to serve in their own private wars. Their name, made famous abroad by the Duke of Tarentum who served Napoleon so well, became at home split into sub-clans not always on the most clannish terms. Heaven forbid that any peaceful scribbler should touch that bristling question, which of the sons of Donald represents the senior branch from John of the Isles? Between Clanranald and Glengarry has been in hot dispute a distinction which to the mere Sassenach might suggest that between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. I am instructed by an earnest genealogist that Clanranald, now a peaceful householder of London, is the true prince. The Glengarry family, on the other hand, has made more noise in the world. The heir of Glengarry, like his neighbour Lochiel, viceroy of an exiled chieftain, held his head gallantly in and after the ’45; but alas! his memory has lived to be branded as “Pickle the Spy” in two books by which Mr. Andrew Lang turns an accusing light on the “shabby romance” of later Jacobitism.
This blot of then invisible ink on his scutcheon would be unknown to the Glengarry of Scott’s day—“XVII. Mac-Mic-Alaister,” as he styles himself on a local monument—who posed so proudly, the last of the chiefs. His friend, Sir Walter, speaks of him as a Highland Quixote, and is understood to have taken him as model for Fergus M’Ivor. But the chief of Waverley showed more sense and more craft than Glengarry, who in town and country strutted about with his “tail,” including a bard, whose strains have been drowned by those of our Lowland last minstrel. Not to speak of his controversy with Clanranald, more than once this warm-hearted but hot-headed hero had to answer to the law for violent proceedings in the good old style. He killed a young grandson of Flora Macdonald in a duel, for which he was tried and acquitted, the code of honour being still received as testimony in courts. At the coronation of George IV. he appeared in full Highland costume, including showy pistols which set a lady screaming at him for a would-be regicide; and the indignant chief had to submit to disarmament, in vain protesting that his weapons made as much part of the character as his tartans. When the fat king came to Edinburgh in kilts, and poor Scott sat down on the glass out of which sacred majesty had drunk, Glengarry insisted on his swash-bucklers being adopted in the royal bodyguard. He appeared to most advantage as a Nimrod, lying out on the hills for a week together in his kilt and plaid. His excellent breed of deerhounds was celebrated, one of them as Scott’s Maida, named after a battle in which the chief’s brother fought for King George. Such a picturesque survival of the past died, 1828, in a prosaically modern accident, leaping from a steamboat that had struck the rocky shore, where Loch Linnhe narrows to the bent Loch Eil. A thousand guests came to his funeral feast and coronach.
It was quite in keeping with this chief’s personage to leave his estate so much encumbered that the heir had to seek new fortunes in Australia. Now, there is hardly a Macdonald in this country, once safe for no other name, while there are thousands thriving in one corner of Nova Scotia and in the Glengarry county of Ontario, where a jury has been known to be half Donald Macdonalds. Much of Glengarry’s property passed to Edward Ellice, a well-known Liberal statesman of the Bright and Cobden period, intimate with men of light and leading whom the old Glengarrys would have looked on as anathema. On Loch Quoich, the “cup” so well filled by rain, stands a luxurious shooting lodge, provided with electric light, motor-cars, and comforts undreamed of in the Saltmarket, its visitors’ book enshrining a generation of distinguished autographs. Glenquoich has been let on a long lease to a famous Sassenach brewer, who here entertains King Edward VII. in princely style among the wilds through which that poor Chevalier slunk ragged and hungry, scared from the camp fires of his pursuers, and glad to take refuge in a cave of robbers, scorning to betray him for more gold than was ever handled by Pickle the Spy. A royal visit called forth an article in the Scotsman, whence one may borrow a purple patch:
If there is in Scotland a grander view than can be seen from the shore of Lochquoich on an autumn evening, the writer does not know of it. The fairy land of the Celt was one of “seven bens and seven glens and seven mountain moors,” but the moors and the glens and the bens around Glenquoich fall to be numbered by the hundreds, and not by sevens. Sheer from the water edge rise the mountains, green at their base, flecked with heather along their sides, ridge upon ridge, peak upon peak, overwhelming the mind with a feeling of that Omnipotence which weigheth the mountains in scales and the hills in a balance, before whom men are altogether vanity. West from the lodge the loch bends slightly towards the south, and, narrowing as it recedes, it stretches out towards the setting sun, pushing a tapering finger among the roots of the giant hills; and the farther west it goes, the higher rise the enveloping mountains. And the wonderful autumn sunsets of the west flush them all—Sguir a’ Mhoraire, Sguir a’ Shlaidhemh, Sguir Gairoch, Meall a’ Choire Bhuidh—till their splintered peaks and pinnacled heads glow and glitter in amethyst and gold, while their sides gleam with a hundred polished silver shields, and the stray clouds, sailing inward from the western sea, glide high over their crests, swimming in glory. And the light, still radiant above, fails in the corries below, covering the slopes with a deep, deep blue, such a blue as one sees only in the west when a mountain comes athwart the setting sun. When the evening is still (and often the wind that rustles during the day sinks at eve into a calm), the face of the loch is as a sheet of glass, and deep in its translucent depths. The mountain crests and the transfigured clouds melt one into another, trembling with the ecstasy of their mingling, till the whole face of the loch is a veil through which there glows a kaleidoscope of radiant colours, darting hither and thither as if greeting and embracing one another.
INVERLOCHY CASTLE AND BEN NEVIS