Scenes and legends of the north of Scotland

by Hugh Miller

On blacken’d strand, and crimson’d main,

On floods of gore, and hills of slain;

But bright its cheering beams shall fall

Where mirth whoops in the Urquharts’ Hall.

***

There occurs in our narrative another wide chasm, which extends from the times of Wallace to the reign of James IV. Like the earlier gap, however, it might be filled up by a recital of events, which, though they belong properly to the history of the neighbouring districts, must have affected in no slight degree the interests and passions of the people of Cromarty. Among these we may reckon the descents on Ross by the Lords of the Isles, which terminated in the battles of Harlaw and Driemderfat, and that contest between the Macintoshes and Munros, which took place in the same century at the village of Clachnaherry. I might avail myself, too, on a similar principle, of the pilgrimage of James IV. to the neighbouring chapel of St. Dothus, near Tain. But as all these events have, like the story of Macbeth, been appropriated by the historians of the kingdom, they are already familiar to the general reader. In an after age, Cromarty, like Tain, was honoured by a visit from royalty. I find it stated by Calderwood, that in the year 1589, on the discovery of Huntly’s conspiracy, and the discomfiture of his followers at the Bridge of Dee, James VI. rode to Aberdeen, ostensibly with the intention of holding justice-courts on the delinquents; but that, deputing the business of trial to certain judges whom he instructed to act with a lenity which the historian condemns, he set out on a hunting expedition to Cromarty, from which he returned after an absence of about twenty days.

THE FORAY OF THE CLANS.

We find not a great deal less of the savage in the records of these later times than in those of the darker periods which went before. Life and property seem to have been hardly more secure, especially in those hapless districts which, bordering on the Highlands, may be regarded as constituting the battle-fields on which needy barbarism, and the imperfectly-formed vanguard of a slowly advancing civilisation, contended for the mastery. Early in the reign of James IV. the lands of Cromarty were wasted by a combination of the neighbouring clans, headed by Hucheon Rose of Kilravock, Macintosh of Macintosh, and Fraser of Lovat; and so complete was the spoliation, that the entire property of the inhabitants, to their very household furniture, was carried away. Restitution was afterwards enforced by the Lords of Council. We find it decreed in the Acta Dominorum Concilii for 1492, that Hucheon Rose of Kilravock do restore, content, and pay to Mr. Alexander Urquhart, sheriff of Cromarty, and his tenants, the various items carried off by him and his accomplices; viz., six hundred cows, one hundred horses, one thousand sheep, four hundred goats, two hundred swine, and four hundred bolls of victual. Kilravock is said to have conciliated the justice-general on this occasion by resigning into his hands his grand-daughter, the heiress of Calder, then a child; and her lands the wily magistrate secured to his family by marrying her to one of his sons.

PATERHEMON.

There lived in the succeeding reign a proprietor of Cromarty, who, from the number of his children, received, says the genealogist, the title, or agname, of Paterhemon. He had twenty-five sons who arrived at manhood, and eleven daughters who ripened into women, and were married. Seven of the sons lost their lives at the battle of Pinkie; and there were some of the survivors who, settling in England, became the founders of families which, in the days of the Commonwealth, were possessed of considerable property and influence in Devonshire and Cumberland. Tradition tells the story of Paterhemon somewhat differently. His children, whom it diminishes to twenty, are described as robust and very handsome men; and he is said to have lived in the reign of Mary. On the visit of that princess to Inverness, and when, according to Buchanan, the Frasers and Munros, two of the most warlike clans of the country, were raised by their respective chieftains to defend her against the designs of Huntly, the Urquhart is said also to have marched to her assistance with a strong body of his vassals, and accompanied by all his sons, mounted on white horses. At the moment of his arrival Mary was engaged in reviewing the clans, and surrounded by the chiefs and her officers. The venerable chieftain rode up to her, and, dismounting with all the ease of a galliard of five-and-twenty, presented to her, as his best gift, his little troup of children. There is yet a third edition of the story:—About the year 1652, one Richard Franck, a native of the sister kingdom, and as devoted an angler as Isaac Walton himself, made the tour of Scotland, and then published a book descriptive of what he had seen. His notice of Cromarty is mostly summed up in a curious little anecdote of the patriarch, which he probably derived from some tradition current at the time of his visit. Sir Thomas he describes as his eldest son; and the number of his children who arrived at maturity he has increased to forty. “He had thirty sons and ten daughters,” says the tourist, “standing at once before him, and not one natural child amongst them.” Having attained the extreme verge of human life, he began to consider himself as already dead; and in the exercise of an imagination, which the genealogist seems to have inherited with his lands, he derived comfort from the daily repetition of a kind of ceremony, ingenious enough to challenge comparison with any rite of the Romish Church. For every evening about sunset, being brought out in his couch to the base of a tower of the castle, he was raised by pulleys, slowly and gently, to the battlements; and the ascent he deemed emblematical of the resurrection. Or to employ the graphic language of the tourist—“The declining age of this venerable laird of Urquhart, for he had now reached the utmost limit of life, invited him to contemplate mortality, and to cruciate himself by fancying his cradle his sepulchre; therein, therefore, was he lodged night after night, and hauled up by pulleys to the roof of his house, approaching, as near as the summits of its higher pinnacles would let him, to the beautiful battlements and suburbs of heaven.”