Scenes and legends of the north of Scotland

by Hugh Miller

“The old castle of Cromarty,” says the statistical account of the parish (Sir John Sinclair’s), “was pulled down in the year 1772. Several urns, composed of earthenware, were dug out of the bank immediately around the building, with several coffins of stone. The urns were placed in square recesses formed of flags, and when touched by the labourers instantly mouldered away, nor was it possible to get up one of them entire. They were filled with ashes mixed with fragments of half-burned bones. The coffins contained human skeletons, some of which wanted the head; while among the others which were entire, there was one of a very uncommon size, measuring seven feet in length.”

HEREDITARY SHERIFFSHIP.

The old proprietors of the castle, among the other privileges derived to them as the chiefs of a wide district of country, and the system of government which obtained during the ages in which they flourished, were hereditary Sheriffs of Cromarty, and vested with the power of pit and gallows. The highest knoll of the southern Sutor is still termed the Gallow-hill, from its having been a place of execution; and a low cairn nearly hidden by a thicket of furze, which still occupies its summit, retains the name of the gallows. It is said that the person last sentenced to die at this place was a poor Highlander who had insulted the Sheriff, and that when in the act of mounting the ladder, he was pardoned at the request of the Sheriff’s lady. At a remoter period the usual scene of execution was a little eminence in the western part of the town, directly above the harbour, where there is a small circular hollow still known to the children of the place as the Witch’s Hole; and in which, says tradition, a woman accused of witchcraft was burnt for her alleged crime some time in the reign of Charles II. The Court-hill, an artificial mound of earth, on which, at least in the earlier ages, the cases of the sheriffdom were tried and decided, was situated several hundred yards nearer the old town. Some of the sentences passed at this place are said to have been flagrantly unjust. There is one Sheriff in particular, whom tradition describes as a cruel, oppressive man, alike regardless of the rights and lives of his poor vassals; and there are two brief anecdotes of him which still survive. A man named Macculloch, a tenant on the Cromarty estate (probably the same person introduced to the reader in the foregoing chapter), was deprived of a cow through the injustice of one of the laird’s retainers, and going directly to the castle, disposed rather to be energetic than polite, he made his complaint more in the tone of one who had a right to demand, than in the usual style of submission. The laird, after hearing him patiently, called for the key of the dungeon, and going out, beckoned on Macculloch to follow. He did so; they descended a flight of stone steps together, and came to a massy oak door, which the laird opened; when suddenly, and without uttering a syllable, he laid hold of his tenant with the intention of thrusting him in. But he had mistaken his man; the grasp was returned by one of more than equal firmness, and a struggle ensued, in which Macculloch, a bold, powerful Highlander, had so decidedly the advantage, that he forced the laird into his own dungeon, and then locking the door, carried away the key in his pocket. The other anecdote is of a sterner cast:—A poor vassal had been condemned on the Court-hill under circumstances more than usually unjust; and the laird, after sentence had been executed on the eminence at the Witch’s Hole, was returning homewards through the town, surrounded by his retainers, when he was accosted in a tone of prophecy by an old man, one of the Hossacks of Cromarty, who, though bedridden for years before, had crawled to a seat by the wayside to wait his coming up. Tradition has preserved the words which follow as those in which he concluded his prediction; but they stand no less in need of a commentary than the obscurest prophecies of Merlin or Thomas the Rhymer:—“Laird, laird, what mayna skaith i’ the brock, maun skaith i’ the stock.” The seer is said to have meant that the injustice of the father would be visited on the children.

The recollection of these stories was curiously revived in Cromarty in the spring of 1829; when a labourer employed in digging a pit on the eminence above the harbour, and within a few yards of the Witch’s Hole, struck his mattock through a human skull, which immediately fell in pieces. A pair of shin-bones lay directly below it, and on digging a little further there were found the remains of two several skeletons and a second skull. From the manner in which the bones were blended together, it seemed evident that the bodies had been thrown into the same hole, with their heads turned in opposite directions, either out of carelessness or in studied contempt. And they had, apparently, lain undisturbed in this place for centuries. A child, by pressing its foot against the skull which had been raised entire, crushed it to pieces like the other; and the whole of the bones had become so light and porous, that when first seen by the writer, some of the smaller fragments were tumbling over the sward before a light breeze, like withered leaves, or pieces of fungous wood.

CHAPTER VII.

“He was a veray parfit, gentil knight.”

—Chaucer.

SIR THOMAS URQUHART.

Of Sir Thomas Urquhart very little is known but what is related by himself, and though as much an egotist as most men, he has related but little of a kind available to the biographer. But there are characters of so original a cast that their more prominent features may be hit off by a few strokes; and Sir Thomas’s is decidedly of this class. It is impossible to mistake the small dark profile which he has left us, small and dark though it be, for the profile of any mind except his own. He was born in 1613, the eldest son of Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty, and of Christian, daughter of Alexander Lord Elphinston. Of his earlier years there is not a single anecdote, nor is there anything known of either the manner or place in which he pursued his studies. Prior to the death of his father, and, as he himself expresses it, “before his brains were yet ripened for eminent undertakings,” he made the tour of Europe. In travelling through France, Spain, and Italy, he was repeatedly complimented on the fluency with which he spoke the languages of these countries, and advised by some of the people to pass himself for a native. But he was too true a patriot to relish the proposal. He had not less honour, he said, by his own poor country than could be derived from any country whatever; for, however much it might be surpassed in riches and fertility—in honesty, valour, and learning, it had no superior. And this assertion he maintained at the sword’s point, in single combat three several times, and at each time discomfited his antagonist. He boasts on another occasion, that not in all the fights in which he had ever been engaged, did he yield an inch-breadth to the enemy before the day of Worcester battle.

On the breaking out of the troubles in 1638, he took part with the King against the Covenanters, and was engaged in an obscure skirmish, in which he saw the first blood shed that flowed in the protracted quarrel, which it took half a century and two great revolutions to settle. In a subsequent skirmish, he succeeded, with eight hundred others, many of them “brave gentlemen,” in surprising a body of about twelve hundred strong, encamped at Turriff, and broke up their array. And then marching with his friends upon Aberdeen, which was held by the Covenanters, he assisted in ejecting them, and in taking possession of the place. Less gifted with conduct than courage, however, the cavaliers suffered their troops to disperse, and were cooped up within the town by the “Earl Marischal of Scotland,” who, hastily levying a few hundred men, came upon them, when, according to Spalding, they “were looking for nothing less;” and the “young laird of Cromartie,” with a few others, were compelled to take refuge “aboard of Andrew Finlay’s ship, then lying in the road,” and “hastily hoisted sail for England.” Urquhart had undertaken to be the bearer of despatches to Charles, containing the signatures of his associates and neighbours the leading anti-covenanters; and in the audience which he obtained of the monarch, he was very graciously received, and favoured with an answer, “which gave,” he says, “great contentment to all the gentlemen of the north that stood for the king.” In the spring of 1641 he was knighted by Charles at Whitehall, and his father dying soon after, he succeeded to the lands of Cromarty.