WALLACE.
The first of his ancestors, whose story receives some shadow of confirmation from tradition, was a contemporary of Wallace and the Bruce. When ejected from his castle, he is said to have regained it from the English by a stratagem, and to have held it out with only forty men for about seven years. “During that time,” says Sir Thomas, “his lands were wasted and his woods burnt; and having nothing he could properly call his own but the moat-hill of Cromarty, which he maintained in defiance of all the efforts of the enemy, he was agnamed Gulielmus de monte alto. At length,” continues the genealogist, “he was relieved by Sir William Wallace, who raised the siege after defeating the English in a little den or hollow about two miles from the town.” Tradition, though silent respecting the siege, is more explicit than Sir Thomas in her details of the battle.
Somewhat more than four miles to the south of Cromarty, and about the middle of the mountainous ridge which, stretching from the Sutors to the village of Rosemarkie, overhangs at the one edge the shores of the Moray Firth, and sinks on the other into a broken moor, there is a little wooded eminence. Like the ridge which it overtops, it sweeps gradually towards the east until it terminates in an abrupt precipice that overhangs the sea, and slopes upon the west into a marshy hollow, known to the elderly people of the last age and a very few of the present as Wallace-slack—i.e., ravine. The direct line of communication with the southern districts, to travellers who cross the Firth at the narrow strait of Ardersier, passes within a few yards of the hollow. And when, some time during the wars of Edward, a strong body of English troops were marching by this route to join another strong body encamped in the peninsula of Easter Ross, this circumstance is said to have pointed it out to Wallace as a fit place for forming an ambuscade. From the eminence which overtops it, the spectator can look down on a wide tract of country, while the ravine itself is concealed by a flat tubercle of the moor, which to the traveller approaching from the south or west, seems the base of the eminence. The stratagem succeeded; the English, surprised and panic-struck, were defeated with much slaughter, six hundred being left dead in the scene of the attack; and the survivors, closely pursued and wholly unacquainted with the country, fled towards the north along the ridge of hill which terminates at the bay of Cromarty. From the top of the ridge the two Sutors seem piled the one over the other, and so shut up the opening, that the bay within assumes the appearance of a lake; and the English deeming it such, pressed onward, in the hope that a continued tract of land stretched between them and their countrymen on the opposite shore. They were only undeceived when, on climbing the southern Sutor, where it rises behind the town, they saw an arm of the sea more than a mile in width, and skirted by abrupt and dizzy precipices, opening before them. The spot is still pointed out where they made their final stand; and a few shapeless hillocks, that may still be seen among the trees, are said to have been raised above the bodies of those who fell; while the fugitives, for they were soon beaten from this position, were either driven over the neighbouring precipices, or perished amid the waves of the Firth. Wallace, on another occasion, is said to have fled for refuge to a cave of the Sutors; and his metrical historian, Blind Harry, after narrating his exploits at St. Johnstone’s, Dunotter, and Aberdeen, describes him as
“Raiding throw the North-land into playne,
Till at Crummade fell Inglismen he’d slayne.”
Hamilton, in his modernized edition of the “Achievements,” renders the Crummade here Cromarty; and as shown by an ancient custom-house seal or cocket (supposed to belong to the reign of Robert II.), now in the Inverness Museum, the place was certainly designated of old by a word of resembling sound—Chrombhte.
Of all the humbler poets of Scotland—and where is there a country with more?—there is hardly one who has not sung in praise of Wallace. His exploit, as recorded in the Jewel, connected with the tradition of the cave, has been narrated by the muse of a provincial poet, who published a volume of poems at Inverness about five years ago; and, in the lack of less questionable materials for this part of my history, I avail myself of his poem.
Thus ran the tale:—proud England’s host
Lay ’trench’d on Croma’s winding coast.
And rose the Urquhart’s towers beneath