Scenes and legends of the north of Scotland

by Hugh Miller

“Mop.—Is it true, think you?

Aut.—Very true;—why should I carry lies abroad?”

Winter’s Tale.

THE DROPPING-CAVE.

In perusing in some of our older Gazetteers the half page devoted to Cromarty, we find that, among the natural curiosities of the place, there is a small cavern termed the Dropping-Cave, famous for its stalactites and its petrifying springs. And though the progress of modern discovery has done much to lower the wonder, by rendering it merely one of thousands of the same class—for even among the cliffs of the hill in which the cavern is perforated, there is scarcely a spring that has not its border of coral-like petrifactions, and its moss and grass and nettle-stalks of marble—the Dropping-Cave may well be regarded as a curiosity still. It is hollowed, a few feet over the beach, in the face of one of the low precipices which skirt the entrance of the bay. From a crag which overhangs the opening there falls a perpetual drizzle, which, settling on the moss and lichens beneath, converts them into stone; and on entering the long narrow apartment within, there may be seen by the dim light of the entrance a series of springs, which filter through the solid rock above, descending in so continual a shower, that even in the sultriest days of midsummer, when the earth is parched and the grass has become brown and withered, we may hear the eternal drop pattering against the rough stones of the bottom, or tinkling in the recess within, like the string of a harp struck to ascertain its tone. A stone flung into the interior, after rebounding from side to side of the rock, falls with a deep hollow plunge, as if thrown into the sea. Had the Dropping-Cave been a cavern of Greece or Sicily, the classical mythology of these countries would have tenanted it with the goddess of rains and vapour.

The walk to the cave is one of the most agreeable in the vicinity of the town, especially in a fine morning of midsummer, an hour or so after the sun has risen out of the Firth. The path to it has been hollowed out of the hill-side by the feet of men and animals, and goes winding over rocks and stones—now in a hollow, now on a height, anon lost in the beach. In one of the recesses which open into the hill, a clump of forest-trees has sprung up, and, lifting their boughs to the edge of the precipice above, cover its rough iron features as if with a veil; while, from the shade below, a fine spring, dedicated in some remote age to “Our Ladye,” comes bubbling to the light with as pure and copious a stream as in the days of the priest and the pilgrim. We see the beach covered over with sea-shells and weeds, the cork buoys of the fishermen, and fragments of wrecks. The air is full of fragrance. Only look at yonder white patch in the hollow of the hill; ’tis a little city of flowers, a whole community of one species—the meadow-sweet. The fisherman scents it over the water, as he rows homeward in the cool of the evening, a full half-mile from the shore. And see how the hill rises above us, roughened with heath and fern and foxglove, and crested a-top with a dark wood of fir. See how the beeches which have sprung up on the declivity recline in nearly the angle of the hill, so that their upper branches are only a few feet from the soil; reminding us, in the midst of warmth and beauty, of the rough winds of winter and the blasting influence of the spray. The insect denizens of the heath and the wood are all on wing; see, there is the red bee, and there the blue butterfly, and yonder the burnet-moth with its wings of vermilion, and the large birdlike dragon-fly, and a thousand others besides, all beautiful and all happy. And then the birds;—But why attempt a description? The materials of thought and imagination are scattered profusely around us; the wood the cliffs and the spring—the flowers the insects and the birds—the shells the broken fragments of wreck and the distant sail—the sea the sky and the opposite land—are all tones of the great instrument Nature, which need only to be awakened by the mind to yield its sweet music. And now we have reached the cave.

The Dropping-Cave ninety years ago was a place of considerable interest; but the continuous shower which converted into stone the plants and mosses on which it fell, and the dark recess which no one had attempted to penetrate, and of whose extent imagination had formed a thousand surmises, constituted some of merely the minor circumstances that had rendered it such. Superstition had busied herself for ages before in making it a scene of wonders. Boatmen, when sailing along the shore in the night-time, had been startled by the apparition of a faint blue light, which seemed glimmering from its entrance: on other occasions than the one referred to in a former chapter, the mermaid had been seen sitting on a rock a few yards before it, singing a low melancholy song, and combing her long yellow hair with her fingers; and a man who had been engaged in fishing crabs among the rocks, and was returning late in the evening by the way of the cave, almost shared the fate of its moss and lichens, when, on looking up, he saw an old greyheaded man, with a beard that descended to his girdle, sitting in the opening, and gazing wistfully on the sea.

I find some of these circumstances of terror embodied in verse by the provincial poet whom I have quoted in an early chapter as an authority regarding the Cromarty tradition of Wallace; and now, as then, I will avail myself of his description:—

——“When round the lonely shore

The vex’d waves toil’d with deaf’ning roar,