Here, on each side of the road, can still be made out the trenches where the dead were buried, according to their tartans it is said; and, while the rest of the moor is purple with heather, these sunken places alone are green. On the edge of the corn-field rises a stone, inscribed “Field of the English; they were buried here”; and at the end of each trench on the moor stands a rude slab bearing the name of its tribe. A singular pathos attends two of these stones, on which is written, not M’Intosh or Stewart or Fraser, but “Mixed Clans.”
Round the oval moorland of the battle rise thick fir-woods now, dark and mournful. Sometimes the winds of the equinox, as they roar through these, recall the deadly rolling musketry of long ago. But the air to-day scarcely whispers in the tree-tops, and sunshine and silence sleep upon the resting-place of the gallant dead. Only some fair, white-clad girls, who have come up from Inverness to read the battle inscription on the great boulder-cairn, are plucking a spray of heather from the Camerons’ grave.
TAM O’ SHANTER’S RIDE.
Never is a man more conscious of his manhood than when, with bridle in hand and a good horse under him, he takes the road at a gallop. As his steed stretches out and the hoof-beats quicken, as the milestones fly past and the cool air rushes in his face, he casts care to the winds, his pulse beats stronger, he rejoices to breathe and to live. The pride and the pleasure of this experience have ever appealed to the poets, and the ringing of horse-hoofs echoes through the verse of all ages—in the warrior chants of Israel; through the sounding Virgilian lines; to the reverberating rhythm of the “Ride from Ghent to Aix.” But the maddest, most riotous gallop of all is, perhaps, that of the grey mare Meg and her master from Ayr to the Shanter farm.
Burns was never more fortunate in his subject than when thus fulfilling his promise of providing a legend for “Alloway’s auld haunted kirk.” He did not, it is true, with the nice precision of the Augustan laureate, trim his verse to a mechanical imitation of sound; but the wild rush and deftness of the movement of the poem, the quick succession of humour on pathos, scene upon scene, the ludicrous, the startling, the horrible, carry away the breath, and suggest more vividly than any mere measuring rhythm the mad daring of that midnight ride.
There is a little, old-fashioned, deep-thatched inn still standing where the street leads southwards out of Ayr. Under its low, brown-raftered roof it is yet easy to imagine how the veritable hero, Tam, may have sat with his cronies “fast by the ingle, bleezing finely,” while “the night drave on wi’ sangs and clatter,” and the storm outside hurled itself fruitlessly against the little deep-set window. It would need all the liquor he had imbibed to fortify the carouser for that fourteen-mile ride into Carrick. A midnight hurricane of rain and wind would be no pleasant encounter on that lonely road, to say nothing of the eerie spots to be passed, and at least one point more than a trifle dangerous. But Tam o’ Shanter was a stout Ayrshire farmer, and, moreover, he was accustomed to face worse ragings than those of the elements; so it may be supposed that, when he had hiccupped a last goodbye to his friends, and, leaving the warm lights of the inn streaming into the street behind him, galloped off into the blackness of the night, it was with no stronger regret than that he must go so soon. Half a mile to his right, as he bucketed southward along the narrow road, he could hear the ocean thundering its diapason on the broad beach of sand, and at the places where he crossed the open country its spray would strike his cheek and fly inland with the foam from Maggie’s bit. Sometimes, when the way lay through belts of beech and oak woods, the branches would roar and shriek overhead as they strove with maniac arms against the tempest.
The old road to Maybole, and that which Tam o’ Shanter took, ran a little nearer the sea than the one which did duty in Burns’ time, and still serves its purpose; and about a mile out of Ayr it crosses the small stream at the ford where “in the snaw the chapman smoored.” Here, on the newer road, a curious adventure is said to have befallen the poet’s father. There was formerly no bridge across this stream; and the legend runs that William Burnes, a few hours before the birth of his son, in riding to Ayr for an attendant, found the water much swollen, and was requested by an old woman on the farther side to carry her across. Notwithstanding his haste he did this; and a little later, on returning home with the attendant, he was surprised to find the woman seated by his own fireside. It is said that when the child was born it was placed in the gipsy’s lap, and she, glancing into its palm, made a prophecy which the poet has turned in one of his verses:—
He’ll hae misfortunes great and sma’,
But aye a heart aboon them a’;
He’ll be a credit till us a’—
We’ll a’ be prood o’ Robin.