The rock is rent by a cavern running clean through. It's quite a terrific place, and seven acres of benty grass must have seemed small refuge for the Covenanters who were lodged here numerously in Killing Time.
On the mainshore, the Lothian, rises Tantallon Castle, where Marmion dared to beard Angus Bell-the-Cat. It still looks pretty tremendous, and still stands, like the Coliseum. "Ding doon Tantallon? Build a brig to the Bass!" runs the proud proverb.
But we are on our way across the Firth. There was a certain magic about it on my day of pilgrimage. The north shore lay sparkling in the late afternoon sun, blue shimmering land against a clear blue sky, the thin rim of the continent playing here and there with opalescent colour where man had builded village or castle, or where man had not destroyed the ancient green. The south shore lay vague and gray, and growing darker, against the falling afternoon, while the Lammermuirs stood up in paler dusk in the background, and the sun blazed behind them. And all about the Firth glittered like an inland lake, a Great Lake. I thought of how the Roman galleys and Norse fleets had come this way, and looked and departed. And how kings had brought their armies here, and looked, perhaps besieged, and departed. And how time and time and time again, French fleets had sailed in here to help their continuing ally, Scotland. And how kings had sailed out from here to France, and how Scots knights had sailed out from here for France, the Crusades, anywhere that promised adventure. And here Saxon Margaret had sailed in to be Scotland's queen. And here Scottish Mary had sailed in to be Scotland's queen, and not to be. Far out in the offing the sun shone golden upon the brown sails of a single fishing boat, tacking to catch a homing wind, a ghost where once had sailed the war and merchant fleets of nations.
At Burntisland I did not pause to visit Rossend Castle where Mary is supposed to have had her affair with Chastelard; certainly not. Nor at Kinghorn, where Alexander III, within a few months after he had married in haunted Kelso, and within a few hours perhaps after he had drunk the blude red wine in Dunfermline, came galloping by this way, the horse stumbled, the king fell, and
"Quhen Alysandyr oure King was dede
That Scotland led in luve and le ...
Succoure Scotland and remede
That stands in perplexite."
Kirkcaldy
If Kirkcaldy was a "lang toun" in the olden days, it is longer to-day, stretching from Linktown to Dysart, and broadening inland to Gallatown, where they make the famous Wemyss pottery. To-day Kirkcaldy makes linoleum and jute and engineering works, and it is the center of a string of fishing villages, a "metropolitan borough system," hundreds of boats fishing the North Sea with KY marked as their home port, when their sailor men make home in any of these picturesque and smelling villages, St. Monan, Pittenweem, Cellardyke, Crail where Mary of Lorraine landed, Largo where Sir Andrew Wood the admiral lived, and where Alexander Selkirk lived what time he did not live as Crusoe in Juan Fernandez, and Anstruther—
"Wha wad na be in love
Wi' bonny Maggie Lauder,
A piper met her gaen to Fife
And speired what wast they ca'd her....
I've lived in Fife
Baith maid and wife
These ten years and a quarter,
Gin ye should come to Anster Fair
Speir ye for Maggie Lauder."
There is also some castellated splendour, Ravenscraig, and Wemyss on the site of the castle of MacDuff, then of Fife, this Wemyss being the ill-fated place where Mary first met Darnley.
Abbotshall kirkyard is at the right of the railway station as the train pulls in to Kirkcaldy. In his book of Scotch pilgrimages when William Winter was on his way to St. Andrews, past Kirkcaldy, he wrote "gazing as I pass at its quaint church among the graves." I suppose he did not know what grave.