Scenes and legends of the north of Scotland

by Hugh Miller

It was late that night before he returned from the cottage to which, after leaving the kiln, he had gone. Next day he saw his mistress. She by no means exhibited her most amiable phase of character, for she was cold and distant, and not a little cross. In short, it was evident she had a quarrel with destiny. This mood, however, soon changed for the one natural to her; years passed away, and suitor after suitor was rejected by the maiden, until, in her twenty-fourth year, Alaster Macculloch paid her his addresses. He was not then a little herd-boy, but a tall, handsome, young man of nineteen, who, active and faithful, was intrusted by his master with the sole management of his farm. A belief in destiny often becomes a destiny of itself; and it became such to Alaster’s mistress. How could the predestined husband be other than a successful lover? In a few weeks they were married; and when the old man was gathered to his fathers, his son-in-law succeeded to his well-stocked farm.

There are a few other traditions of this northern part of the country—some of them so greatly dilapidated by the waste of years, that they exist as mere fragments—which bear the palpable impress of a pagan or semi-pagan origin. I have heard imperfectly-preserved stories of a lady dressed in green, and bearing a goblin child in her arms, who used to wander in the night-time from cottage to cottage, when all the inhabitants were asleep. She would raise the latch, it is said, take up her place by the fire, fan the embers into a flame, and then wash her child in the blood of the youngest inmate of the cottage, who would be found dead next morning. There was another wandering green lady, her contemporary, of exquisite beauty and a majestic carriage, who was regarded as the Genius of the smallpox, and who, when the disease was to terminate fatally, would be seen in the grey of the morning, or as the evening was passing into night, sitting by the bedside of her victim. I have heard wild stories, too, of an unearthly, squalid-looking thing, somewhat in the form of a woman, that used to enter farmhouses during the day, when all the inmates, except perhaps a solitary female, were engaged in the fields. More than a century ago, it is said to have entered, in the time of harvest, the house of a farmer of Navity, who had lost nearly all his cattle by disease a few weeks before. The farmer’s wife, the only inmate at the time, was engaged at the fireside in cooking for the reapers; the goblin squatted itself beside her, and shivering, as if with cold, raised its dingy, dirty-looking vestments over its knees. “Why, ye nasty thing,” said the woman, “hae ye killed a’ our cattle?”—“An’ why,” inquired the goblin in turn, “did the gudeman, when he last roosed them, forget to gie them his blessing?”

LEGEND OF MORIAL’S DEN.

Immediately over the sea, the tract of table-land, which forms the greater part of the parish of Cromarty, terminates, as has been already said, in a green sloping bank, that for several miles sweeps along the edge of the bay. In the vicinity of the town, a short half mile to the west, we find it traversed by a deep valley, which runs a few hundred yards into the interior; ’tis a secluded, solitary place, the sides sprinkled over with the sea-hip, the sloe, and the bramble—the bottom occupied by a blind pathway, that, winding through the long grass like a snake, leads to the fields above. It has borne, from the earliest recollections of tradition, the name of Morial’s Den, a name which some, on the hint of Sir Thomas Urquhart, ingeniously derive from the Greek, and others, still more ingeniously, from the Hebrew; and it has, for at least the last six generations, been a scene of bird-nesting and truant-playing during the day, and of witch and fairy meetings, it is said, during the night. Rather more than a century ago, it was the locale, says tradition, of an interesting rencounter with one of the unknown class of spectres. On a Sabbath noon a farmer of the parish was herding a flock of sheep in a secluded corner of the den. He was an old greyhaired man, who for many years had been affected by a deafness, which grew upon him as the seasons passed, shutting out one variety of sounds after another, until at length he lived in a world of unbroken silence. Though secluded, however, from all converse with his brother men, he kept better company than ever, and became more thoroughly acquainted with his Bible, and the fathers of the Reformation, than he would have been had he retained his hearing, or than almost any other person in the parish. He had just despatched his herd-boy to church, for he himself could no longer profit by his attendance there; his flock was scattered over the sides of the hollow; and with his Bible spread out before him on a hillock of thyme and moss, which served him for a desk, and sheltered on either hand from the sun and wind by a thicket of sweetbriar and sloethorn, he was engaged in reading, when he was startled by a low rushing sound, the first he had heard for many months. He raised his eyes from the book; a strong breeze was eddying within the hollow, waving the ferns and the bushes; and the portion of sea which appeared through the opening was speckled with white;—but to the old man the waves broke and the shrubs waved in silence. He again turned to the book—the sound was again repeated; and on looking up a second time, he saw a beautiful, sylph-looking female standing before him. She was attired in a long flowing mantle of green, which concealed her feet, but her breast and arms, which were of exquisite beauty, were uncovered. The old man laid his hand on the book, and raising himself from his elbow, fixed his eyes on the face of the lady. “Old man,” said she, addressing him in a low sweet voice, which found prompt entrance at the ears that had so long been shut up to every other sound, “you are reading the book; tell me if there be any offer of salvation in it to us.”—“The gospel of this book,” said the man, “is addressed to the lost children of Adam, but to the creatures of no other race.” The lady shrieked as he spoke, and gliding away with the rapidity of a swallow on the wing, disappeared amid the recesses of the hollow.

About a mile further to the west, in an inflection of the bank, there is the scene of a story, which, belonging to a still earlier period than the one related, and wholly unlike it in its details, may yet be deemed to resemble it in its mysterious, and, if I may use the term, unclassified character.

THE GUARDIAN COCK.

A shipmaster, who had moored his vessel in the upper roadstead of the bay, some time in the latter days of the first Charles, was one fine evening sitting alone on deck, awaiting the return of some of his seamen who had gone ashore, and amusing himself in watching the lights that twinkled from the scattered farmhouses, and in listening in the extreme stillness of the calm to the distant lowing of cattle, or the abrupt bark of the watch-dog. As the hour wore later, the sounds ceased, and the lights disappeared—all but one solitary taper, that twinkled from the window of a cottage situated about two miles west of the town. At length, however, it also disappeared, and all was dark around the shores of the bay as a belt of black velvet. Suddenly a hissing noise was heard overhead; the shipmaster looked up, and saw one of those meteors that are known as falling stars, slanting athwart the heavens in the direction of the cottage, and increasing in size and brilliancy as it neared the earth, until the wooded ridge and the shore could be seen as distinctly from the ship-deck as by day. A dog howled piteously from one of the out-houses, an owl whooped from the wood. The meteor descended until it almost touched the roof, when a cock crew from within. Its progress seemed instantly arrested; it stood still; rose about the height of a ship’s mast, and then began again to descend. The cock crew a second time. It rose as before, and after mounting much higher, sunk yet again in the line of the cottage. It almost touched the roof, when a faint clap of wings was heard, as if whispered over the water, followed by a still louder note of defiance from the cock. The meteor rose with a bound, and continuing to ascend until it seemed lost among the stars, did not again appear. Next night, however, at the same hour, the same scene was repeated in all its circumstances—the meteor descended, the dog howled, the owl whooped, the cock crew. On the following morning the shipmaster visited the cottage, and, curious to ascertain how it would fare when the cock was away, he purchased the bird; and sailing from the bay before nightfall, did not return until about a month after.

On his voyage inwards he had no sooner doubled an intervening headland, than he stepped forward to the bows to take a peep at the cottage: it had vanished. As he approached the anchoring ground, he could discern a heap of blackened stones occupying the place where it had stood; and he was informed, on going ashore, that it had been burnt to the ground, no one knew how, on the very night he had quitted the bay. He had it rebuilt and furnished, says the story, deeming himself, what one of the old schoolmen would have perhaps termed, the occasional cause of the disaster. About fifteen years ago there was dug up, near the site of the cottage, a human skeleton, with the skull and the bones of the feet lying together, as if the body had been huddled up twofold into a hole; and this discovery led to that of the story, which, though at one time often repeated and extensively believed, had been suffered to sleep in the memories of a few elderly people for nearly sixty years.

CHAPTER VI.

“Subtill muldrie wrocht mony day agone.”