Though in 1759 the castle was described as ruinous, nevertheless it had been inhabited by the laird a few years earlier. Over the entrance of the house in which he received Johnson is inscribed: “Hæc domus [710] The ivy has climbed up to the top, nevertheless much of the stonework is still seen. It would be a pity if it were suffered to cover the walls on all sides. Hard by a little stream shaded with trees makes its way into the loch. To the north-west rises the steep hill of Dun Buy. “Buy in Erse,” says Boswell, “signifies yellow. The hill being of a yellowish hue, has the epithet of buy.” This hue I altogether failed to discover; perhaps it is only seen in the autumn. On the bright summer’s day in which I saw the castle, it seemed to be almost unsurpassed in the pleasantness of its seat. Tall trees grew near it, their leaves rustling in the wind, and the lights and shadows dancing on the ground as the branches swayed to and fro, while in front lay the loch with its foaming waves. The old ruin looked as if it had been set there to add to the beauty of the scene, not for a place where lairds and their pipers should let down luckless folk into dismal pits. In the inside there was gloom enough. A few well-worn stone steps lead up to the entrance. The strong old door studded with iron nails which had withstood the storms of many a long year, has at length yielded to time, and been replaced. Behind it is an iron grate secured by bolts and by an oaken bar that is drawn forth from a hole in the wall. Passing on I went into a gloomy vault known as the store-room. Not a ray of light entered save by the open door. In the rocky floor there is a shallow well, which in the driest seasons is always full of water. The arched roof is built of huge boulders gathered from the beach, the spaces between being filled up with thin layers of stone after the fashion of Roman masonry. A dark staircase in the thickness of the wall leads up through another strong door to a second vaulted chamber, dimly lighted by narrow slits at the end of two slanting recesses, on each side of which are stone benches. This I was told was the court-room or judgment-hall. Opening out of it on one side is a very small chamber, in which was a kind of cupboard, a hiding-place perhaps for title-deeds and plate, for it could be so closed with stones as to look like solid wall. On the other side is the door to the dungeon, dismal enough, but not so dismal as the pit below, with its well in which women could be put to death with decency. On either side of the mouth of the well is a narrow ledge some eighteen inches wide, but not long enough to allow the prisoner to stretch himself at full length. On the floor above the court-room was the kitchen, with walls more than seven feet thick. It occupied the whole of the story. On the freestone joints of the great hearth can be seen the deep marks made by sharpening knives. Above the kitchen was the family sitting-room, which was entered from a gallery running all round it outside, and built in the overhanging part of the tower. Here at length I arrived at what may be called the front door. There was some attempt at ornament in the carving on the stones at the top and each side of the doorway. There was, moreover, light enough to see it clearly, for the gallery can boast of fair-sized windows. From one of them the laird could look out on the Hangman’s Hill, about a third of a mile off, now covered with fir-trees, but then bare. Some stones remain, in which the gallows were set up. The view from the castle, except when a hanging was going on, must on a fine day have been always beautiful, even when the country was bare of trees. To the north and east they looked over fields, once yellow every autumn with grain, but now pleasant meadow-land, shut in with hills and mountains down whose sides in rainy weather rivers stream and cascades leap. From one corner of the gallery a turret projects with two narrow windows, where the watchman could see anyone approaching from the side of the land. Not far from it was “the whispering hole,” where, by removing a stone which exactly fits into an opening, a suspicious laird could overhear the talk in the kitchen beneath. Above the sitting-room was another story divided into small rooms, the bed-chamber of the family. So solidly had the roof been built, that unrepaired it withstood all the blasts of heaven, till that terrible storm burst upon it and brought it down, which swept away the Tay Bridge.
THE OLD LAIRD AND THE NEW.
In these two upper stories there were, no doubt, cheerful rooms, but they were reached through gloomy doors and iron grates, up dark staircases, with rough sides and well-worn steps, past the gloomy dungeon. Everything shows signs of danger and alarm. “It was sufficient for a Laird of the Hebrides,” as Johnson says, “if he had a strong house in which he could hide his wife and children from the next clan.” At the present day, as I was told by my guide, no one thinks of locking his door at night-time. My bag and great-coat and travelling rug were left in perfect safety for a couple of hours by the road-side while I wandered about. Of the modern mansion Johnson would never have said what he said of the second house, that “it was built with little regard to convenience, and with none to elegance or pleasure.” He would have been delighted not only with it, but with its large garden full of flowers and vegetables and fruits that testify to the mildness of the climate. The peaches ripen on the walls, though they do not attain to a large size. The hot-houses were full of choice plants, and clustering grapes. One bunch, I was told, had weighed nearly five pounds. But there are far greater changes than those worked by builders and gardeners. Here, where the rough old Laird in his out-of-the-way corner of the world used to rule his people with the help of gallows, pit and dungeon, I found a money-order office, a savings bank, a telegraph office, and a daily post. There is a good school, governed by a School Board, and a large reading room where the dulness of the long winter nights is relieved by various kinds of entertainments. There is besides an infirmary under the management of a qualified nurse, the daughter of a medical man, who has learnt her art by some years’ study in a hospital. She is provided with a chest of surgical instruments and a large stock of drugs. On her little pony she sometimes has to attend sick people at a distance of eight miles. Forty-three cases of measles had lately been under her care and none of them ended fatally. There is a salmon-hatching house, and a museum both of antiquities and natural curiosities. In it I saw a thumbscrew, with an iron ring at one end through which a thong could be passed. Used in this way it would have served much the same purpose as hand-cuffs. I looked with interest on an old Highland spinning-wheel, the gift of my intelligent and friendly guide, Mr. Angus Black. It had belonged to his grandmother. He had given it, he said, “to be kept there as a present for ages and generations to come.” When a little before I drank water from “the well by the river side,” such was the name of the spring in Gaelic, he told me that it was the spring “whence the Lairds had drunk for ages and generations past.” One thing I in vain looked for in the Museum. Boswell had been told much of a war-saddle, on which Lochbuy, “that reputed Don Quixote, used to be mounted; but we did not see it,” he adds, “for the young Laird had applied it to a less noble purpose, having taken it to Falkirk Fair with a drove of black cattle.” He took it much farther—to America, whither he went with his regiment. There he lost his life in a duel, and it was lost too. Perhaps it is preserved as a curiosity in some collection on the other side of the Atlantic.
HIGHLAND FUNERALS.
I was shown also at a short distance eastwards from the Castle, at the bottom of a crag by the roadside, a place known as the Cheese Cave. Here at every funeral the refreshments used to be placed for the mourners, who had often come twenty miles across the hills. In former days, when there were more men and fewer sheep some hundreds would assemble. “Two old respectable friends were left behind to take care of the food and drink. When the people came back from the grave-yard they refreshed themselves. I have seen them,” continued my guide, “sitting on these rocks by the cave having their luncheon.” Ramsay of Ochtertyre tells how “the women of each valley through which the funeral passed joined in the procession, but they attended but part of the way and then returned. The whole company seemed to be running; and wherever they rested small cairns or heaps of stones were raised to commemorate the corpse having halted on that spot.”[711] These heaps were pointed out to us on the side of Rattachan as we drove down to Glenelg. The silence of the Scotch funeral shocked Wesley, who recorded on May 20, 1774: “When I see in Scotland a coffin put into the earth and covered up without a word spoken, it reminds me of what was spoken concerning Jehoiakin, ‘He shall be buried with the burial of an ass.’”[712]
THE OLD LAIRD AND THE NEW.
It is not with accounts of funerals that I must take my leave of a place where I spent so pleasant a day, and had so hospitable a reception. Here I saw not only the dead past but a vigorous and hopeful present. Even the old Laird, we are told, “was a very hearty and hospitable landlord,” though with his belief in his rights of furca et fossa he certainly was an antediluvian. His descendant does not yield to him in heartiness and hospitality, but has other ways of guiding his people than gallows, pit and dungeon. By his schools, his reading-room, his infirmary and his schemes for developing the fisheries he has won their affections. An old lady who had been allowed to visit the Castle, meeting him by chance as she came out, full of anger at what she had seen, exclaimed: “You ought, Sir, to be ashamed of your ancestors.” “No,” he replied, “I am not ashamed of them. They led their lives, and I lead mine.” They were at all events as good as the men of their time, perhaps better. Old Lochbuy does not seem to have been a bad fellow, though he was slow in learning that he had lost his right to imprison his tenants. “May not a man do what he likes with his own?” we can fancy him asking in the words used more than seventy years later by an English duke. Much as his descendant has done, there is one thing more which I would ask him to do. He dreads, no doubt, the throng of noisy tourists, but he might surely build a modest inn where the pensive wanderer could find lodging, and enjoy the scenery of Lochbuy.
“The guiltless eye
Commits no wrong, nor wastes what it enjoys.”