CHAPTER IV.
THE GRAHAMS OF DUNDARGUE.
Who would have imagined that within a few yards of the elegant and stately modern drawing-room in which these three handsome women of the best style were chatting and sipping their tea, there still existed within the old walls of Dundargue a hideous oubliette or bottle dungeon, like those that were in the Castle of St. Andrews and ancient peel of Linlithgow—so named from the French word to 'forget.'
Shaped like a bottle, it was—and is—totally dark and of great depth, with no outlet but its narrow mouth, through which prisoners were precipitated and left to die. 'Dante,' says Victor Hugo, when describing that in the Bastille, 'could find nothing better for the construction of his hell. These dungeon-funnels usually terminated in a deep hole like a tub, in which Dante has placed his Satan, and in which society placed the criminal condemned to death. When once a miserable human being was interred there—farewell light, air, life, and hope! It never went out but to the gibbet or the stake. Sometimes it was left to rot there, and human justice called that forgetting. Between mankind and himself the condemned felt an accumulation of stones and jailers, and the whole prison was but one enormous and complicated lock that barred him out of the living world.'
From such places the shrieks and wails of despair and death—death from thirst and hunger—never reach the upper air.
When the oubliette of Dundargue was examined a few years ago there was found in it a mass of unctuous-looking mould that made those shudder who looked upon it. It was full of skulls and human bones. Of whom those beings had been even tradition was silent; but, as some coins of Edward I. of England were found among the ghastly remains, they were supposed to have been certain English prisoners or fugitives, who, when flying from the siege of Perth, had fallen into the hands of Sir Malise Graham of Dundargue, in the Carse of Gowrie, a relentless enemy of the invaders of his country, who said, grimly, 'A few Englishmen less in the world would make the world all the better,' and, dropping them successively into the oubliette, placed a huge stone over the mouth of it, and 'forgot' all about them.
From a short distance beyond Dundee, called 'The Beautiful' in the days of old, the lovely and fertile Carse of Gowrie, so famed in Scottish song, stretches far westward, bounded by the Firth of Tay on the south, and a line of undulating hills on the north, till it narrows to a vale among the rocky eminences that overlook the fair city of Perth.
The Carse is not quite a dead level, for here and there slope up wooded or cultivated elevations, named Inches, serving to show that in the ages they won their name the Carse had been a wide, open lake; but above one of these inches towers the abrupt, though not very lofty, rock crowned by the Castle of Dundargue, an edifice on which the surrounding hills have looked down for centuries.
Bronze or iron rings, to which the Romans are said to have moored their galleys, were lately to be seen in the rock of Dundargue, and cables have been found at the foot of the Sidlaw Hills, relics of the time when an inland sea rolled its waves against their now grassy slopes.
The original castle, or strong square tower, starts flush from the edge of the rock, out of which its oubliette and lower vaults are hollowed, standing clear and minute against the sky, and its machicolated battlements rise high above the more florid modern additions of the days of James VI. and Queen Anne.
From its stone bartizan can be seen the sweep of the broad, blue Firth of Tay, with its vessels, the varied surface of the beautiful Carse of Gowrie clothed with leafy timber, narrow stripes of sand-edged land, and long stretches of cultivated ground, studded with curious old orchards and ancient and hoary forests of dwarf oak; and on the north and west the glorious blue mountains, piled over each other in ranges, and capped, afar off, by the historic Grampians.