Scenes and legends of the north of Scotland

by Hugh Miller

As it would thunder full into our streets.”

—Armstrong.

THE BAY OF CROMARTY

The Bay of Cromarty was deemed one of the finest in the world at a time when the world was very little known; and modern discovery has done nothing to lower its standing or character. We find it described by Buchanan in very elegant Latin as “formed by the waters of the German Ocean, opening a way through the stupendous cliffs of the most lofty precipices, and expanding within into a spacious basin, affording certain refuge against every tempest.” The old poet could scarce have described it better had he sat on the loftiest pinnacle of the southern Sutor during a winter storm from the north-east, and seen vessel after vessel pressing towards the opening through spray and tempest;—like the inhabitants of an invaded country hurrying to the gateway of some impregnable fortress, their speed quickened by the wild shouts of the enemy, and pursued by the smoke of burning villages.

Viewed from the Moray Firth in a clear morning of summer, the entrance of the bay presents one of the most pleasing scenes I have ever seen. The foreground is occupied by a gigantic wall of brown precipices, beetling for many miles over the edge of the Firth, and crested by dark thickets of furze and pine. A multitude of shapeless crags lie scattered along the base, and we hear the noise of the waves breaking against them, and see the reflected gleam of the foam flashing at intervals into the darker recesses of the rock. The waters of the bay find entrance, as described by the historian, through a natural postern scooped out of the middle of this immense wall. The huge projection of cliff on either hand, with their alternate masses of light and shadow, remind us of the out-jets and buttresses of an ancient fortress; and the two Sutors, towering over the opening, of turrets built to command a gateway. The scenery within is of a softer and more gentle character. We see hanging woods, sloping promontories, a little quiet town, and an undulating line of blue mountains, swelling as they retire into a bolder outline and a loftier altitude, until they terminate, some twenty miles away, in the snow-streaked, cloud-capped Ben Wevis. When I last gazed on this scene, and contrasted the wild sublimity of the foreground with the calm beauty of the interior, I was led to compare it, I scarcely knew how, to the exquisite masterpiece of his art which the Saxon sculptor Nahl placed over the grave of a lady who had died in the full bloom of youth and loveliness. It represents the ruins of a tomb shattered as if by the last trumpet; but the chisel has not been employed on it in merely imitating the uncouth ravages of accident and decay; for through the yawning rifts and fissures there is a beautiful female, as if starting into life, and rising in all the ecstasy of unmingled happiness to enjoy the beatitudes of heaven.

THE OLD COAST LINE.

There rises within the bay, to the height of nearly a hundred feet over the sea level, a green sloping bank, in some places covered with wood, in others laid out into gardens and fields. We may trace it at a glance all along the shores of the firth, from where it merges into the southern Sutor, till where it sinks at the upper extremity of the bay of Udoll; and, fronting it on the opposite side, we may see a similar escarpment, winding along the various curves and indentations of the coast—now retiring far into the country, along the edge of the bay of Nigg—now abutting into the firth, near the village of Invergordon. The Moray and Dornoch firths are commanded by resembling ramparts of bank of a nearly corresponding elevation, and a thorough identity of character; and, as in the Firth of Cromarty, the space between their bases and the shore is occupied by a strip of level country, which in some places encroaches on the sea in the form of long low promontories, and is hollowed out in others to nearly the base of the escarpment. Wherever we examine, we find data to conclude, that in some remote era this continuous bank formed the line of coast, and that the plain at its base was everywhere covered by the waters of the sea. We see headlands, rounded as if by the waves, advancing the one beyond the other, into the waving fields and richly-swarded meadows of this lower terrace; and receding bays with their grassy unbeaten shores comparatively abrupt at the entrance, and reclining in a flatter angle within. We may find, too, everywhere under the vegetable soil of the terrace, alternate layers of sand and water-worn pebbles, and occasionally, though of rarer occurrence, beds of shells of the existing species, and the bones of fish. In the valley of Munlochy, the remains of oyster-beds, which could not have been formed in less than two fathoms of water, have been discovered a full half mile from the sea; beds of cockles still more extensive, and the bones of a porpoise, have been dug up among the fields which border on the bay of Nigg; similar appearances occur in the vicinity of Tain; and in digging a well about thirty years ago, in the western part of the town of Cromarty, there was found in the gravel a large fir-tree, which, from the rounded appearance of the trunk and branches, seems to have been at one time exposed to the action of the waves. In a burying-ground of the town, which lies embosomed in an angle of the bank, the sexton sometimes finds the dilapidated spoils of our commoner shell-fish mingling with the ruins of a nobler animal; and in another inflection of the bank, which lies a short half mile to the east of the town, there is a vast accumulation of drift peat, many feet in thickness, and the remains of huge trees.

The era of this old coast line we find it impossible to fix; but there are grounds enough on which to conclude that it must have been remote—so remote, perhaps, as to lie beyond the beginnings of our more authentic histories. We see, in the vicinity of Tain, one of the oldest ruins of the province situated far below the base of the escarpment; and meet in the neighbourhood of Kessock, at a still lower level, with old Celtic cairns and tumuli. It is a well-established fact, too, that for at least the last three hundred years the sea, instead of receding, has been gradually encroaching on the shores of the Bay of Cromarty; and that the place formerly occupied by the old burgh, is now covered every tide by nearly two fathoms of water.

THE OLD TOWN.

The last vestige of this ancient town disappeared about eighteen years ago, when a row of large stones, which had evidently formed the foundation line of a fence, was carried away by some workmen employed in erecting a bulwark. But the few traditions connected with it are not yet entirely effaced. A fisherman of the last century is said to have found among the title-deeds of his cottage a very old piece of parchment, with a profusion of tufts of wool bristling on one of its sides, and bearing in rude antique characters on the other a detail of the measurement and boundaries of a garden which had occupied the identical spot on which he usually anchored his skiff. I am old enough to have conversed with men who remembered to have seen a piece of corn land, and a belt of planting below two properties in the eastern part of the town, that are now bounded by the sea. I reckon among my acquaintance an elderly person, who, when sailing along the shore about half a century ago in the company of a very old man, heard the latter remark, that he was now guiding the helm where, sixty years before, he had guided the plough. Of Elspat Hood, a native of Cromarty, who died in the year 1701, it is said that she attained to the extraordinary age of 120 years, and that in her recollection, which embraced the latter part of the sixteenth century, the Clach Malacha, a large stone covered with sea-weed, whose base only partially dries during the ebb of Spring and Lammas tides, and which lies a full quarter of a mile from the shore, was surrounded by corn fields and clumps of wood. And it is a not less curious circumstance than any of these, that about ninety years ago, after a violent night storm from the north-east, the beach below the town was found in the morning strewed over with human bones, which, with several blocks of hewn stone, had been washed by the surf out of what had been formerly a burying-place. The bones were carried to the churchyard, and buried beneath the eastern gable of the church; and one of the stones—the corner stone of a ponderous cornice—is still to be seen on the shore. In the firths of Beauly and Dornoch the sea seems to have encroached to fully as great an extent as in the bay of Cromarty. Below the town of Tain a strip of land, once frequented by the militia of the county for drill and parade, has been swept away within the recollection of some of the older inhabitants; and there may be traced at low water (says Carey in his notes to Craig Phadrig), on the range of shore that stretches from the ferry of Kessock to nearly Redcastle, the remains of sepulchral cairns, which must have been raised before the places they occupy were invaded by the sea, and which, when laid open, have been found to contain beams of wood, urns, and human bones.—But it is full time that man, the proper inhabitant of the country, should be more thoroughly introduced into this portion of its history. We feel comparatively little interest in the hurricane or the earthquake which ravages only a desert, where there is no intelligent mind to be moved by the majesty of power, or the sublimity of danger; while on the other hand, there is no event, however trivial in itself, which may not be deemed of importance if it operate influentially on human character and human passion.