e now speedily passed Drynoch, lying off to the left, on elevated land, the abode of Capt. Martin McLeod, formerly of the Isle of Skye. The family and domestic group systematized on a large scale at Drynoch here, was a Canadian reproduction of a chieftain's household.
Capt. McLeod was a Scot of the Norse vikinger type, of robust manly frame, of noble, frank, and tender spirit; an Ossianist too, and, in the Scandinavian direction, a philologist. Sir Walter Scott would have made a study of Capt. McLeod, and may have done so. He was one of eight brothers who all held commissions in the army. His own military life extended from 1808 to 1832. As an officer successively of the 27th, the 79th, and the 25th regiments, he saw much active service. He accompanied the force sent over to this continent in the War of 1812-13. It was then that he for the first time saw the land which was to be his final home. He was present, likewise, at the affair of Plattsburg; and also, we believe, at the attack on New Orleans. He afterwards took part in the so-called Peninsular war, and received a medal with four clasps for Toulouse, Orthes, Nive, and Nivelle. He missed Waterloo, "unfortunately," as he used to say; but he was present with the allied troops in Paris during the occupation of that city in 1815. Of the 25th regiment he was for many years adjutant, and then paymaster. Three of his uncles were general officers.
It is not inappropriate to add that the Major McLeod who received the honour of a Companionship in the Order of St. Michael and St. George for distinguished service in the Red River Expedition of 1870, was a son of Captain McLeod of Drynoch.
That in and about the Canadian Drynoch Gaelic should be familiarly heard was in keeping with the general character of the place. The ancient Celtic tongue was in fact a necessity, as among the dependents of the house there were always some who had never learned the English language. Drynoch was the name of the old home in Skye. The Skye Drynoch was an unfenced, hilly pasture farm, of about ten miles in extent, yielding nutriment to herds of wild cattle and some 8,000 sheep. Within its limits a lake, Loch Brockadale, is still the haunt of the otter, which is hunted by the aid of the famous terriers of the island; a mountain stream abounds with salmon and trout; while the heather and bracken of the slopes shelter grouse and other game.
Whittaker, in his History of Whalley, quoted by Hallam in his Middle Ages, describes the aspect which, as he supposes, a certain portion of England presented to the eye, as seen from the top of Pendle Hill, in Yorkshire, in the Saxon times. The picture which he draws we in Canada can realize with great perfectness. "Could a curious observer of the present day," he says, "carry himself nine or ten centuries back, and ranging the summit of Pendle, survey the forked vale of Calder on one side and the bolder margins of Ribble and Hodder on the other, instead of populous towns and villages, the castles, the old tower-built house, the elegant modern mansion, the artificial plantation, the enclosed park and pleasure-ground, instead of uninterrupted enclosures which have driven sterility almost to the summit of the fells, how great then must have been the contrast when, ranging either at a distance or immediately beneath, his eye must have caught vast tracts of forest-ground, stagnating with bog or darkened by native woods, where the wild ox, the roe, the stag and the wolf, had scarcely learned the supremacy of man, when, directing his view to the intermediate spaces, to the widening of the valleys, or expanse of plains beneath, he could only have distinguished a few insulated patches of culture, each encircling a village of wretched cabins, among which would still be remarked one rude mansion of wood, scarcely equal in comfort to a modern cottage, yet there rising proudly eminent above the rest, where the Saxon lord, surrounded by his faithful cotarii, enjoyed a rude and solitary independence, having no superior but his sovereign."
This writer asks us to carry ourselves nine or ten centuries back, to realize the picture which he has conceived. From the upland here in the vicinity of Drynoch, less than half a century ago, gazing southwards over the expanse thence to be commanded, we should have beheld a scene closely resembling that which, as he supposed, was seen from the summit of Pendle in the Saxon days; while at the present day we see everywhere, throughout the same expanse, an approximation to the old mother-lands, England, Ireland, and Scotland, in condition and appearance: in its style of agriculture, and the character of its towns, villages, hamlets, farm-houses, and country villas.
We now entered a region once occupied by a number of French military refugees. During the revolution in France, at the close of the last century, many of the devotees of the royalist cause passed over into England, where, as elsewhere, they were known and spoken of as émigrés. Amongst them were numerous officers of the regular army, all of them, of course, of the noblesse order, or else, as the inherited rule was, no commission in the King's service could have been theirs. When now the royal cause became desperate, and they had suffered the loss of all their worldly goods, the British Government of the day, in its sympathy for the monarchical cause in France, offered them grants of land in the newly organized province of Upper Canada.
Some of them availed themselves of the generosity of the British Crown. Having been comrades in arms they desired to occupy a block of contiguous lots. Whilst there was yet almost all western Canada to choose from, by some chance these Oak Ridges, especially difficult to bring under cultivation and somewhat sterile when subdued, were preferred, partly perhaps through the influence of sentiment; they may have discovered some resemblance to regions familiar to themselves in their native land. Or in a mood inspired and made fashionable by Rousseau they may have longed for a lodge in some vast wilderness, where the "mortal coil" which had descended upon the old society of Europe should no longer harass them. When twitted by the passing wayfarer who had selected land in a more propitious situation, they would point to the gigantic boles of the surrounding pines in proof of the intrinsic excellence of the soil below, which must be good, they said, to nourish such a vegetation.
After all, however, this particular locality may have been selected rather for them than by them. On the early map of 1798 a range of nine lots on each side of Yonge Street, just here in the Ridges, is bracketed and marked, "French Royalists: by order of his Honor," i.e., the President, Peter Russell. A postscript to the Gazetteer of 1799 gives the reader the information that "lands have been appropriated in the year of York as a refuge for some French Royalists, and their settlement has commenced."