ELLON.
[Slains Castle and the Bullers of Buchan. (August 24-25).]
At Aberdeen Johnson had found awaiting him a letter from London which must have been six days on the road.[533] He did not receive another till he arrived at Glasgow, nearly ten weeks later. He was now going “to the world’s end extra anni solisque vias, where the post would be a long time in reaching him,” to apply to the Hebrides the words which four years later he used of Brighton.[534] It was only seven and twenty years before he drove out from Aberdeen that the Duke of Cumberland with six battalions of foot and Lord Mark Kerr’s dragoons had marched forth along the same road to seek the rebels. With a gentle breeze and a fair wind his transports at the same time moved along shore.[535] Though no military state waited upon our travellers yet their fame went before them. At Ellon, where they breakfasted, the landlady asked Boswell: “Is not this the great Doctor that is going about through the country? There’s something great in his appearance.” “They say,” said the landlord, “that he is the greatest man in England, except Lord Mansfield.” THE ROAD TO SLAINS CASTLE. They turned here out of their course to visit Slains Castle, the seat of the Earl of Errol. The country over which they drove this day was more desolate than any through which they had as yet passed. In one place, writes Johnson, “the sand of the shore had been raised by a tempest, and carried to such a distance that an estate was overwhelmed and lost.” Sir Walter Scott, who in the summer of 1814, sailed along the shore in a Lighthouse Yacht, says that northwards of Aberdeen “the coast changes from a bold and rocky to a low and sandy character. Along the Bay of Belhelvie a whole parish was swallowed up by the shifting sands, and is still a desolate waste. It belonged to the Earls of Errol, and was rented at £500 a year at the time. When these sands are past the land is all arable. Not a tree to be seen; nor a grazing cow, or sheep, or even a labour-horse at grass, though this be Sunday.”[536] The Earl who welcomed Johnson to Slains Castle had done what he could to overcome nature. “He had cultivated his fields so as to bear rich crops of every kind, and he had made an excellent kitchen-garden with a hot-house.” His successors have diligently followed in his steps, and taking advantage of a hollow in the ground have even raised an avenue of trees. They can only grow to the height of fifteen or twenty feet, for when the shoots rise high enough to catch the blasts from the North Sea they are cut down the following winter. SLAINS CASTLE. The situation of the Castle struck Johnson as the noblest he had ever seen.
“From the windows (he said) the eye wanders over the sea that separates Scotland from Norway, and when the winds beat with violence, must enjoy all the terrific grandeur of the tempestuous ocean. I would not for my amusement wish for a storm; but as storms, whether wished or not, will sometimes happen, I may say, without violation of humanity, that I should willingly look out upon them from Slains Castle.”
SLAINS CASTLE.
Boswell was also impressed with the position of this old house, set on the very verge of life. “The King of Denmark,” he says, “is Lord Errol’s nearest neighbour on the north-east.” The Castle was built on the edge of the granite cliffs, in one spot not leaving even a foothold for the daring climber. A foolhardy fellow who had tried to get round lost his life in the attempt. I was greatly disappointed at finding that “the excellent old house” which Boswell describes, with its outside galleries on the first and second story, no longer remains. I had looked forward to standing in the very bow-window of the drawing-room fronting the sea where Johnson repeated Horace’s Ode, Jam satis terris. In the new building, however, the bow-window has not been forgotten,—and there I looked out on the wild scene which met his view. I saw “the cut in the rock made by the influx of the sea,” into which the rash climber had fallen as he tried to go round the Castle. Below me there were short slopes of grass ending in a precipice. So near was the edge that a child could have tossed a ball over it from the window. Red granite rocks in sharp and precipitous headlands ran out into the sea. A fishing-boat with brown sails was passing close by, while in the distance in a long line lay a fleet of herring-smacks. The sea-birds were hovering about and perching on the rocks, mingling their melancholy cries with the dashing of the waves. The dark waters were surging through the narrow chasms formed by rocky islets and the steep sides of the cliffs. For the storm-tost sailor it is a dreadful coast. A SHIPWRECK OFF SLAINS CASTLE. On a wild night in winter not many years ago one of the maids, as she was letting down the blinds in the drawing-room, heard confused sounds which came, she thought, from the servants’ hall beneath. The butler in another part of the house had caught them too. Yet when they reproached their fellow-servants with their noisiness they were told that it was not from them that the sounds had come. They thought no more about it that night, but next morning when the day broke the masts were seen of a ship-wrecked vessel on the rocks below the Castle. The waves were breaking over it, and not a soul was left alive. Then they understood that it was the despairing cries of the unhappy sailors which had in vain reached their ears. The story, that was told me as I stood looking out on the sea, gave an air of sadness to a room which had already raised sad thoughts in my mind. THE EARL OF KILMARNOCK. For on the wall was hanging the portrait of an innocent and pretty boy who, before so many years were to pass over him, on the scaffold on Tower Hill was to pay the penalty of rebellion with his life.
“Pitied by gentle minds Kilmarnock died.”
On the table was lying a curious but gloomy collection of the prints of his trial and execution.[537] Boswell’s rest was troubled by the thoughts of this unhappy nobleman. He had been kept awake by the blazing of his fire, the roaring of the sea, and the smell of his pillows, which were made of the feathers of some sea-fowl. “I saw in imagination,” he writes, “Lord Errol’s father, Lord Kilmarnock, who was beheaded on Tower Hill in 1746, and I was somewhat dreary.”