This moor, which formed a few years ago an unappropriated common, but which was lately divided among the proprietors whose lands border on it, has evidently at some remote period been a field of battle. It is sprinkled over with tumuli and little heathy ridges resembling the graves of a churchyard. The southern shore of the Cromarty Firth runs almost parallel to it for nearly fourteen miles; and upon a hill in the parish of Resolis, which rises between it and the firth, and which is separated from it by a deep valley, there are the vestiges of Danish encampments. And there is perhaps scarcely an eminence in Scotland on which in the early ages an invading army could have encamped with more advantage than on this hill, or a moor upon which the invaders could have been met with on more equal terms than on the moor adjacent. The eminence is detached on the one side from the other rising grounds of the country by a valley, the bottom of which is occupied by a bog, and it commands on the other an extensive bay, in which whole fleets may ride with safety; while the neighbouring moor is of great extent, and has few inequalities of surface. Towards its eastern boundary, about six miles from the town of Cromarty, there is a huge heap of stones, which from time immemorial has been known to the people of the place as The Grey Cairn, a name equally descriptive of other lesser cairns in its vicinity, but which with the aid of the definite article serves to distinguish it. Not more than thirty years ago the stones of a similar cairn of the moor were carried away for building by a farmer of the parish. There were found on their removal human bones of a gigantic size, among the rest a skull sufficiently capacious, according to the description of a labourer employed by the farmer, to contain “two lippies of beer.”
THE SPECTRE SHIPS.
About fifteen years ago, a Cromarty fisherman was returning from Inverness by a road which for several miles skirts the upper edge of the moor, and passes within a few yards of the cairn. Night overtook him ere he had half completed his journey; but, after an interval of darkness, the moon, nearly at full, rose over the eminence on his right, and restored to him the face of the country—the hills which he had passed before evening, but which, faint and distant, were sinking as he advanced, the wood which, bordering his road on the one hand, almost reached him with its shadow, and the bleak, unvaried, interminable waste, which, stretching away on the other, seemed lost in the horizon. After he had entered on the moor, the stillness which, at an earlier stage of his journey, had occasionally been broken by the distant lowing of cattle, or the bark of a shepherd’s dog, was interrupted by only his own footsteps, which, from the nature of the soil, sounded hollow as if he trod over a range of vaults, and by the low monotonous murmur of the neighbouring wood. As he approached the cairn, however, a noise of a different kind began to mingle with the other two; it was one with which his profession had made him well acquainted—that of waves breaking against a rock. The nearest shore was fully three miles distant, the nearest cliff more than five, and yet he could hear wave after wave striking as if against a precipice, then dashing upwards, and anon descending, as distinctly as he had ever done when passing in his boat beneath the promontories of Cromarty. On coming up to the cairn, his astonishment was converted into terror.—Instead of the brown heath, with here and there a fir seedling springing out of it he saw a wide tempestuous sea stretching before him, with the large pile of stones frowning over it, like one of the Hebrides during the gales of the Equinox. The pile appeared as if half enveloped in cloud and spray, and two large vessels, with all their sheets spread to the wind, were sailing round it.
The writer of these chapters had the good fortune to witness at this cairn a scene which, without owing anything to the supernatural, almost equalled the one described. He was, like the fisherman, returning from Inverness to Cromarty in a clear frosty night in December. There was no moon, but the whole sky towards the north was glowing with the Aurora Borealis, which, shooting from the horizon to the central heavens, in flames tinged with all the hues of the rainbow, threw so strong a light, that he could have counted every tree of the wood, and every tumulus of the moor. There is a long hollow morass which runs parallel to the road for nearly a mile;—it was covered this evening by a dense fleece of vapour raised by the frost, and which, without ascending, was rolling over the moor before a light breeze. It had reached the cairn, and the detached clump of seedlings which springs up at its base.—The seedlings rising out of the vapour appeared like a fleet of ships, with their sails dropping against their masts, on a sea where there were neither tides nor winds;—the cairn, grey with the moss and lichens of forgotten ages, towered over it like an island of that sea.
But I daresay I have imparted to the reader more of the fabulous history of Cromarty than he will well know how to be grateful for. One other remark, however, in better language, and a more vigorous style of thinking than my own, and I shall have done;—it may show that Sir Thomas, however unique as a man, forms, as a historian, only one of a class.
OLAUS RUDBECK.
“The last century,” says the philosophic Gibbon, “abounded with antiquarians of profound learning and easy faith, who, by the dim light of legends and traditions, of conjectures and etymologies, conducted the great-grandchildren of Noah from the tower of Babel to the extremities of the globe. Of these judicious critics,” continues the historian, “one of the most entertaining was Olaus Rudbeck, professor in the university of Upsal. Whatever is celebrated either in history or fable, this zealous patriot ascribes to his country. From Sweden, the Greeks themselves derived their alphabetical characters, their astronomy, and their religion. Of that delightful region (for so it appeared to the eyes of a native), the Atlantis of Plato, the country of the Hyperboreans, the Garden of the Hesperides, the Fortunate Islands, and even the Elysian fields, were all but faint and imperfect transcripts. A clime so profusely favoured by nature could not long remain desert after the flood. The learned Rudbeck allows the family of Noah a few years to multiply from eight to about twenty thousand persons. He then disperses them into small colonies to replenish the earth and to propagate the human species. The Swedish detachment (which marched, if I am not mistaken, under the command of Askenos, the son of Gomer, the son of Japhet), distinguished itself by more than common diligence in the prosecution of this great work. The northern hive cast its swarms over the greater part of Europe, Africa, and Asia; and (to use the author’s metaphor), the blood circulated from the extremities to the heart.”
CHAPTER III.
“The wild sea, baited by the fierce north-east,
So roar’d, so madly raged, so proudly swell’d,