Scenes and legends of the north of Scotland

by Hugh Miller

“All hail, Macbeth! thou shalt be king hereafter.”

—Shakspere.

OUR EARLIER DATA.

It is, perhaps, not quite unworthy of remark, that not only is Cromarty the sole district of the kingdom whose annals ascend into the obscure ages of fable, but that the first passage of even its real history derives its chief interest, not from its importance as a fact, but from what may be termed its chance union with a sublime fiction of poetry. Few, I daresay, have so much as dreamed of connecting either its name or scenery with the genius of Shakspere, and yet they are linked to one of the most powerful of his achievements as a poet, by the bonds of a natural association. The very first incident of its true history would have constituted, had the details been minutely preserved, the early biography of the celebrated Macbeth; who, according to our black-letter historians, makes his first appearance in public life as Thane of Cromarty, and Maormor, or great man of Ross. But I am aware I do not derive from the circumstance any right to become his biographer. For though his character was probably formed at a time when he may be regarded as the legitimate property of the provincial annalist, no sooner is it exhibited in action than he is consigned over to the chroniclers of the kingdom.

For the earlier facts of our history the evidence is rather circumstantial than direct. We see it stamped on the face of the country, or inscribed on our older obelisks, or sometimes disinterred from out of hillocks of sand, or accumulations of moss; but very rarely do we find it deposited in our archives. Let us examine it, however, wherever it presents itself, and strive, should it seem at all intelligible, to determine regarding its purport and amount. Not more than sixty years ago a bank of blown sand, directly under the northern Sutor, which had been heaped over the soil ages before, was laid open by the winds of a stormy winter, when it was discovered that the nucleus on which the hillock had originally formed, was composed of the bones of various animals of the chase, and the horns of deer. It is not much more than twelve years since there were dug up in the same sandy tract two earthen urns, the one filled with ashes and fragments of half-burned bones, the other with bits of a black bituminous-looking stone, somewhat resembling jet, which had been fashioned into beads, and little flat parallelograms, perforated edgewise, with four holes apiece. Nothing could be ruder than the workmanship: the urns were clumsily modelled by the hand, unassisted by a lathe; the ornaments, rough and unpolished, and still bearing the marks of the tool, resembled nothing of modern production, except, perhaps, the toys which herd-boys sometimes amuse their leisure in forming with the knife. We find remains such as these fraught with a more faithful evidence regarding the early state of our country than the black-letter pages of our chroniclers. They testify of a period when the chase formed, perhaps, the sole employment of the few scattered inhabitants; and of the practice, so prevalent among savages, of burying with their dead friends whatever they most loved when alive. It may be further remarked as a curious fact, and one from which we may infer that trinkets wrought in so uncouth a style could have belonged to only the first stage of society, that man’s inventive powers receive their earliest impulses rather from his admiration of the beautiful, than his sense of the useful. He displays a taste in ornament, and has learned to dye his skin, and to tatoo it with rude figures of the sun and moon, before he has become ingenious enough to discover that he stands in need of a covering.

THE FIONS OF KNOCK-FERRIL.

There is a tradition of this part of the country which seems not a great deal more modern than the urns or their ornaments, and which bears the character of the savage nearly as distinctly impressed on it. On the summit of Knock-Ferril, a steep hill which rises a few miles to the west of Dingwall, there are the remains of one of those vitrified forts which so puzzle and interest the antiquary; and which was originally constructed, says tradition, by a gigantic tribe of Fions, for the protection of their wives and children, when they themselves were engaged in hunting. It chanced in one of their excursions that a mean-spirited little fellow of the party, not much more than fifteen feet in height, was so distanced by his more active brethren, that, leaving them to follow out the chase, he returned home, and throwing himself down, much fatigued, on the side of the eminence, fell fast asleep. Garry, for so the unlucky hunter was called, was no favourite with the women of the tribe;—he was spiritless and diminutive, and ill-tempered; and as they could make little else of him that they cared for, they converted him into the butt of many a teasing little joke, and the sport of many a capricious humour. On seeing that he had fallen asleep, they stole out to where he lay, and after fastening his long hair with pegs to the grass, awakened him with their shouts and laughter. He strove to extricate himself, but in vain; until at length, infuriated by their gibes and the pain of his own exertions, he wrenched up his head, leaving half his locks behind him, and, hurrying after them, set fire to the stronghold into which they had rushed for shelter. The flames rose till they mounted over the roof, and broke out at every slit and opening; but Garry, unmoved by the shrieks and groans of the sufferers within, held fast the door until all was silent; when he fled into the remote Highlands, towards the west. The males of the tribe, who had, meanwhile, been engaged in hunting on that part of the northern Sutor which bears the name of the hill of Nigg, alarmed by the vast column of smoke which they saw ascending from their dwelling, came pressing on to the Firth of Cromarty, and leaping across on their hunting-spears, they hurried home. But they arrived to find only a huge pile of embers, fanned by the breeze, and amid which the very stones of the building were sputtering and bubbling with the intense heat, like the contents of a boiling caldron. Wild with rage and astonishment, and yet collected enough to conclude that none but Garry could be the author of a deed so barbarous, they tracked him into a nameless Highland glen, which has ever since been known as Glen-Garry, and there tore him to pieces. And as all the women of the tribe perished in the flames, there was an end, when this forlorn and widowed generation had passed away, to the whole race of the Fions. The next incident of our history bears no other connexion to this story, than that it belongs to a very early age, that of the Viking and Sea-King, and that we owe our data regarding it, not to written records, but to an interesting class of ancient remains, and to a doubtful and imperfect tradition.

THE KING’S SONS.

In this age, says the tradition, the Maormor of Ross was married to a daughter of the king of Denmark, and proved so barbarous a husband, that her father, to whom she at length found the means of escape, fitted out a fleet and army to avenge on him the cruelties inflicted on her. Three of her brothers accompanied the expedition; but, on nearing the Scottish coast, a terrible storm arose, in which almost all the vessels of the fleet either foundered or were driven ashore, and the three princes were drowned. The ledge of rock at which this latter disaster is said to have taken place, still bears the name of the King’s Sons; a magnificent cave which opens among the cliffs of the neighbouring shore is still known as the King’s Cave; and a path that winds to the summits of the precipices beside it, as the King’s Path. The bodies of the princes, says the tradition, were interred, one at Shandwick, one at Hilton, and one at Nigg; and the sculptured obelisks of these places, three very curious pieces of antiquity, are said to be monuments erected to their memory by their father. In no part of Scotland do stones of this class so abound as on the shores of the Moray Firth. And they have often attracted the notice and employed the ingenuity of the antiquary; but it still appears somewhat doubtful whether we are to regard them as of Celtic or of Scandinavian origin. It may be remarked, however, that though their style of sculpture resembles, in its general features, that exhibited in the ancient crosses of Wales, which are unquestionably British, and though they are described in a tradition current on the southern shore of the Moray Firth, as monuments raised by the inhabitants on the expulsion of the Danes, the amount of evidence seems to preponderate in the opposite direction; when we consider that they are invariably found bordering on the sea; that their design and workmanship display a degree of taste and mechanical ability which the Celtæ of North Britain seem never to have possessed; that the eastern shores of the German Ocean abound in similar monuments, which, to a complexity of ornament not more decidedly Runic, add the Runic inscription; and that the tradition just related—which, wild as it may appear, can hardly be deemed less authentic than the one opposed to it, seeing that it belongs to a district still peopled by the old inhabitants of the country, whereas the other seems restricted to the lowlands of Moray—assigns their erection not to the natives, but to their rapacious and unwelcome visitors, the Danes themselves. The reader may perhaps indulge me in a few descriptive notices of the three stones connected with the tradition; they all lie within six miles of Cromarty, and their weathered and mossy planes, roughened with complicated tracery and doubtful hieroglyphics, may be regarded as pages of provincial history—as pages, however, which we must copy rather than translate. May I not urge, besides, that men who have visited Egypt to examine monuments not much more curious, have written folios on their return?

THE OBELISKS OF EASTER ROSS.