VAULT.
It is surprising that he should have thought that there could ever have been a moat on a rock high above the river. Johnson nevertheless also mentions it. What they mistook for a moat is the excavation made in quarrying the stone for the castle. In clearing it out some while ago, the workmen came to a place where the masons had left some stones half dressed. Mr. Irving, who visited Cawdor, has had the fine entrance copied, I am told, in his scenery for Macbeth, adding, however, a portcullis, of which no traces remain. I was shown in a kind of vault the trunk of the old hawthorn which Boswell mentions. There is a tradition that “a wise man counselled a certain thane to load an ass with a chest full of gold, and to build his castle with the money at the third hawthorn-tree at which the animal should stop.” The ass stopped where Cawdor Castle is built, and the tree was enclosed. The thane’s only child, a little girl, was carried off by Campbell of Inverliver, on Loch Awe. In his flight he was overtaken by the Cawdors. Being hard pressed, “he cried out in Gaelic, ‘It is a far cry to Loch Awe, and a distant help to the Campbells,’ a saying which became proverbial in the north to express imminent danger and distant relief.”[561] He won the day, however, and the child when she grew up married a son of the Earl of Argyle. From them is descended that “prosperous gentleman,” the present Thane or Earl of Cawdor.
TAPESTRY CHAMBER.
I passed through the great iron door which Boswell mentions, and other strong doors too, and climbed up the staircase which is built in the thickness of the wall. I was shown the place in the roof where Lord Lovat, when fleeing from justice early in his bad career, had lain in hiding for some weeks. I saw, moreover, more than one chamber hung with old tapestry. In one of them stands the state bed of Sir Hugh Campbell, who in 1672 married Lady Henrietta Stewart. Their initials, with the date, are carved on the outside wall of the court. At one end of the hall runs a gallery which bears the name of the Fiddler’s Walk. There the musicians used to play, keeping time with their steps to their tune.
[Inverness (August 28-30).]
From Cawdor Johnson and Boswell drove to Fort George, “the most regular fortification in the island,” according to Johnson; “where,” he continues, “they were entertained by Sir Eyre Coote, the Governor, with such elegance of conversation, as left us no attention to the delicacies of his table.” Wolfe, who saw it in 1751, when it was partly made, writes: “I believe there is still work for six or seven years to do. When it is finished one may venture to say (without saying much) that it will be the most considerable fortress, and the best situated in Great Britain.”[562] In the evening our travellers continued their journey to Inverness—a distance of twelve miles. CULLODEN. The reviewer of Johnson’s narrative in the Scots Magazine expresses his wonder that as “he must have passed near the Field of Culloden he studiously avoided to mention that battle.”[563] Boswell is equally reticent. The explanation is perhaps merely due to the dusk of evening, in which they passed by the spot. It is not unlikely, on the other hand, that the silence was intentional. Johnson shows a curious reticence in a passage in which he refers to the Rebellion of 1745. In his description of Rasay he writes: “Not many years ago the late laird led out one hundred men upon a military expedition.” THE BUTCHER DUKE. Had he visited Culloden or described the campaign, his indignation must have flamed forth at the cruelties of the butcher duke. Boswell, Lowlander though he was, said “that they would never be forgotten.” With Smollett, in his Tears of Scotland, they might well have exclaimed:—
“Yet when the rage of battle ceased,
The victor’s soul was not appeased: