With uncontrolled meanderings.”
CLUNIE.
Passing through Glen Clunie, which now boasts of a little inn where the traveller can find clean, if homely lodgings, they reached Glen Shiel. It is worth notice that though the word Glen is in Johnson’s Dictionary, so unfamiliar was it at this time to English ears, that using it in the letter in which he describes this day’s journey, he adds, “so they call a valley.” In Glen Shiel, writes Boswell, they saw “where the battle was fought in 1719.” It was in the second and last of the Spanish invasions of our island that this fight took place. An armament of ten ships of war and transports, having on board 6,000 regular troops with arms for 12,000 men, had sailed from Cadiz under the command of the Duke of Ormond, in the hope of restoring the Stuarts to that throne which they had forfeited by their tyranny and their folly. The winds and waves fought for us, as they had fought long before in the time of the Great Armada. Two ships only succeeded in reaching the coast of Scotland. EILAN DONAN CASTLE. They landed their troops near Eilan Donan Castle on Loch Duich, the seat of the chief of the Mackenzies. Four years earlier the fighting men of this clan had gone off to join the forces of the Earl of Mar, and had taken part in the battle of Sheriffmuir. The grandfather of the present minister of the parish in which Eilan Donan stands, had known an aged parishioner, who had seen the clansmen dance on the leads of the castle the evening before they started on their expedition. There were among them four chieftains, each bearing the name of John, and known as “the four Johns of Scotland.” They all danced at Eilan Donan, and all fell at Sheriffmuir. BATTLE OF GLEN SHIEL.I was told also of a tradition which still exists among the people, that at Glen Shiel the clansmen had sent their women and children to wave flags on the hills as if they were a fresh body of men. Deceived by this appearance, the regular troops had at first retreated. The battle with the Spaniards was fought at a spot, where on both sides the mountains draw close, and the valley narrows to a ravine through which the river when swollen by the rains rushes foaming along in fine cascades. Along the right bank the rocks were so steep that till the present road was cut no passage was possible; on the left bank there was a narrow opening beneath a precipitous crag. A little above the uppermost of the waterfalls the country folks still point out “the black colonel’s grave”—some swarthy Spaniard, perhaps, who fell that day far from the cork-groves of Southern Spain. They tell too how the Spanish soldiers who surrendered themselves as prisoners of war first cast their arms into the deep pool below. A dreadful story has been recorded by an Englishman who lived for many years at Inverness. “He had been assured,” he writes, “by several officers who were in the battle, that some of the English soldiers who were dangerously wounded were left behind for three or four hours. When parties were sent to them with hurdles made to serve as litters, they were all found stabbed with dirks in twenty places.”[603] The story may not be true. If it is, the clansmen were as savage after Glen Shiel, as were the regular troops twenty-seven years later after Culloden.
EILAN DONAN.
GLEN SHIEL BATTLE-FIELD.
THE MOUNTAIN LIKE A CONE.