Footsteps of Dr. Johnson (Scotland)

by George Birkbeck Norman Hill

Her visitors were in the right. The scene was too noble a one to be lightly deserted. There was no need to go five miles for trees and gardens. DR. JOHNSON’S PLANTATIONS. The Scotch for their carelessness in adorning their homes did not here fall on deaf ears. His host and his host’s son planted largely, and the fruit of his advice and of their judicious labours is seen in the beautiful woods and shrubberies which surround the Castle. Rorie More’s Cascade is almost hidden by trees. A Dutch garden has been formed, where, under the shelter of the thick beech hedge which encloses it, the roses bloom. Close to the ruins of an ancient chapel, with glimpses through the trees of the waters of the Loch, a conservatory has been built. Had Johnson seen the beautiful and rare flowers which grow in it, he would surely never have maintained that “a green-house is a childish thing.” What a change has come since the day when he wrote that “the country about Dunvegan is rough and barren. There are no trees except in the orchard, which is a low, sheltered spot, surrounded with a wall.” The rough old fellow passed over the land with his strong common sense and his vigorous reproofs, and the rudeness of nature has been tamed, and its barrenness changed into luxuriance. He deserved better of mankind even than he “who made two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before;”[648] for he made trees and flowers to grow where before there had been none. He did that which a king of Scotland had tried to do and failed. James the Fifth’s command that round every house plantations should be made had resulted, I was told, in the few trees which Johnson saw. But where the king’s could be almost counted on the fingers of the two hands, Johnson’s cover whole hill-sides. I was informed by Miss Macleod, of Macleod, for whose kindness I am most grateful, that she had no doubt that it was his reproaches which stirred up her grandfather to plant so widely. How luxuriantly nature can deck the ground when she is aided by art, was seen in the strange variety of flowers which we noticed in the grounds. Two seasons seemed to be mingled into one, for we found at the same time wild roses, the hawthorn, blue bells, cuckoo flowers, heather, lupins, laburnums, and rhododendrons.

In ancient days the only access to the castle, says Sir Walter Scott, was “from the sea by a subterranean staircase, partly arched, partly cut in the rock, which winding up through the cliff opened into the court.”[649] These steps Johnson oddly describes as “a pair of stairs,” just as if they were in an Oxford college or the Temple. When the tide was up access was cut off, so that a visitor who had arrived by land must at the very end of his journey have taken boat in order to gain the entrance. A little above the lower gate, on the side of the passage, there was an old well, with uncovered mouth. At the christening of the present laird, one of the guests who had drunk too freely, going down the steps to his boat, fell in and was drowned. The well was at once enclosed, and has never been used since. Even in Johnson’s time its water, though not brackish in spite of its being so near to the sea, was not much used. The stream which formed Rorie More’s Cascade was thought to afford a purer supply. It was not by this staircase that our travellers entered the castle, but by a long flight of steps which the last laird had made on the side of the land. They were not guarded by hand-rails. Many years ago a milkmaid coming up them with her pails on a stormy day, was carried over by a high wind, and much hurt. They have given place to the present approach by a carriage-road carried over the chasm which cut off the castle from the neighbouring land.

WATERGATE.

THE STATELY DINING-ROOM.

On the walls of the “stately dining-room” where our travellers were first received, I saw hanging some fine portraits by Raeburn, their host and his wife and their eldest son, a lad with a sweet honest face, who was lost with his ship, the Royal Charlotte, in the Bay of Naples. Near them hang “the wicked laird” and his two wives. There is a tradition that his first wife had fled from him on account of his cruelty, but had been enticed back by a friendly letter. When her husband had caught her, he starved her to death in the dungeon. It was no doubt the sight of these pictures which one day at table led the company to talk of portraits; when Johnson maintained that “their chief excellence is being like. One would like,” he added, “to see how Rorie More looked. Truth, Sir, is of the greatest value in these things.”

In the same room stands a handsome old sideboard, bearing the date of 1603. Though it goes back to the year of the union of the two Crowns, yet of all the festive gatherings which it has witnessed, perhaps there is none that was more striking than that evening when the Highland gentlemen listened to Johnson’s “full strain of eloquence. We were,” writes Boswell, “a jovial company at supper. The laird, surrounded by so many of his clan, was to me a pleasing sight. They listened with wonder and pleasure while Dr. Johnson harangued.” SIR WALTER SCOTT AT DUNVEGAN. It was very likely in this same room that Sir Walter Scott breakfasted that August morning forty-one years later, “when he woke under the castle of Dunvegan. I had,” he writes, “sent a card to the laird of Macleod, who came off before we were dressed, and carried us to his castle to breakfast.”[650]

DINING ROOM, DUNVEGAN CASTLE.

The noble drawing-room, with the deep recesses for the windows in walls nine feet thick, is not the one described by Boswell. The drawing-room which he saw “had formerly been,” he says, “the bed-chamber of Sir Roderick Macleod, and he chose it because behind it there was a cascade, the sound of which disposed him to sleep.” At the time of Sir Walter Scott’s visit it had again become a bed-room, for here he slept on a stormy night. THE HAUNTED ROOM. He had accepted, he says, “the courteous offer of the haunted apartment,” and this was the room which was given him. “An autumnal blast, sometimes clear, sometimes driving mist before it, swept along the troubled billows of the lake, which it occasionally concealed and by fits disclosed. The waves rushed in wild disorder on the shore, and covered with foam the steep pile of rocks, which rising from the sea in forms something resembling the human figure have obtained the name of Macleod’s Maidens. The voice of an angry cascade, termed the nurse of Rorie More, was heard from time to time mingling its notes with those of wind and wave. Such was the haunted room at Dunvegan; and as such it well deserved a less sleepy inhabitant.”[651] This account Sir Walter wrote many years later from memory. The rocks which he saw were not Macleod’s Maidens; from them he was separated by nearly ten miles of mountains and lochs.