THE GHOST OF HOWDYCRAIGS.
"They gather round, and wonder at the tale
Of horrid apparition, tall and ghastly."—Blair.
After all that has been written, printed, and circulated, in the way of "Statistical Accounts," "Topographical Descriptions," "Guides to Picturesque Scenery," &c., there are still large tracts of country in Scotland of which comparatively little is known. While certain districts have risen, all at once, into notoriety, and occupied for a time the efforts of the press and the attention of the public, there are others, perhaps little inferior to them in point of scenery, through which no traveller has passed, no writer drawn his pen, and upon which no printer has inked his types. Among other neglected regions, the Ochil Hills may be mentioned—at least the eastern part of them. These, so far as we know, have not been fruitful of battles, and consequently the historian has had nothing to say concerning them. They are traversed by few roads; the few that do exist are nearly impassable, except to pedestrians of a daring disposition; and the novelist, never having seen them, has not thought of making them the home of his imaginary heroes. They have given birth to no poet of eminence—none such has condescended to celebrate them in his songs; and, except to the few scattered inhabitants who nestle in their hollows, they are nearly unknown.
This, however, is not the fault of the hills themselves, but of the circumstances just alluded to; for here heroes might have found a field on which to spill whole seas of blood; novelists might have found all the variation of hill, valley, rock, and stream, with which they usually ornament their pages; and Ossian himself, had it been his fortune to travel in the district, might have found "grey mist" and "brown heath" to his heart's content, and, in the proper season, as much snow as would have served to deck out at least half-a-dozen "Morvens" in their winter coat. These hills, on the east and south, rise from the adjoining country by a gradual slope, surmounted, in some instances, by thriving plantations, while, in others, the plough and harrow have reached what appears to be their summit. On the north, they are terminated by a rocky front, which runs nearly parallel to the river Tay, and afterwards to the Earn, thus forming the southern boundary of Strathearn, which is perhaps one of the most fertile districts in Scotland. The elevation on this side is partly composed of the rocky front just mentioned; partly of a cultivated slope at its base; and partly of a green acclivity above, which, when seen from the plain below, seems to crown the whole, while it conceals from the eye those barren altitudes and dreary regions which lie behind. But, after having surmounted this barrier, the prospect which then opens may be regarded as a miniature picture of those more lofty mountain-ranges which are to be found in other parts of the island. Here the ground again declines a little, forming a sort of shoulder upon the ascent, as if the Great Architect of nature had intended thereby to secure the foundation of the superstructure which he was about to rear above. It then rises into frowning eminences, on which nothing seems to vegetate except coarse heath, a few stunted whin-bushes, and, here and there, an astrogalus, a lotus carniculatus; or a white orchus. Those, however, with the exception of the first, are too scanty to produce any effect upon the colouring of the landscape; and the whole looks withered, brown, and, in some instances, even black, in the distance. But, on passing these barren altitudes, or on penetrating one of the gorges by which the central district communicates with the country around, and of which there are several, the eye is saluted with extensive tracts of plantation—some composed of the light-green larch, others of the sombre-looking Scottish pine; and, where the soil is more favourable to the growth of corn, portions of cultivated land, interspersed with streams, giving a fresher green to their banks, clumps of trees standing in sheltered positions, and the isolated habitations of men.
The last of these may be said to constitute a sort of little world, enclosed by a mountain rampart of its own—holding little or no communication with the great world without; and consequently escaping all the contamination which such intercourse is supposed to imply. But, if its inhabitants had escaped the contamination, it were reasonable to infer that they had missed that stimulus which mind derives from mind, when brought into close contact; and also many of those improvements and more correct modes of thinking which almost every passing year brings forth. In such a region, children must travel far for education; and men, not unfrequently, live and die in the prejudices in which they were nursed. To conclude this imperfect sketch, it may be observed that the scenery of these hills is bleak, rather than bold; barren, rather than wild; and though some parts of them possess a sort of dreary interest, in general they can lay no claim to that quality which has been denominated the sublime.
The particular district of Fifeshire in which the following incidents occurred lies between the villages of Strathmiglo and Auchtermuchty on the south, and those of Newburgh and Abernethy on the north. From the last of these places, which is still known as the metropolis of the ancient Pictish empire, a deep and narrow gorge, called Abernethy Glen, stretches southward amongst the Ochils for more than a mile. On leaving the open fertile country below, and getting into this pass, the contrast is striking. In some places the footpath winds along the face of a bank so steep, that, but for the circumstance of its being composed of earth, it might have almost been termed a precipice; and here, if the passenger should miss his footing, it would be nearly impossible for him to stop himself till he reached the bottom, in which a turbulent stream brawls and foams over rocks and stones, disturbing the silence and the solitude of the place with sounds which have a tendency to inspire feelings of superstitious fears. The scene, from its nature and situation, appears to be well suited for those transactions which, according to popular brief, "surpass Nature's law;" and it has been regarded as the favourite haunt of witches, fairies, ghosts, and other mysterious beings, from time immemorial. Numbers of the inhabitants of the village below had been scared, in their nocturnal rambles, by the orgies of these uncouth neighbours; many a belated traveller had seen strange sights, and heard stranger sounds, in this haunted dell; many a luckless lad, in journeying through it, to see the mistress of his heart, had met such adventures as to drive love nearly out of his head for whole weeks to come; and even maids, upon whom the sun went down in the dangerous pass, had seen things at the mention of which they shook their heads, and seemed unable to speak. Nor were there awanting instances of individuals who, in returning at the "witching time of night" from a delightful interview, in the course of which the marriage-day was settled, had been so terrified that they forgot every word of what had been said; and, when the minister and the marriage-guests arrived, behold they were found in the barn or in the field, or, what was worse, they had gone upon a journey, and were not to be found at all. Those of the villagers who had not seen and heard of these unearthly doings for themselves, had been told of them by their mothers and grandmothers; and thus one generation after another went forth into the world completely armed against sceptics and unbelievers of all sorts. If any one ventured to doubt the veracity of these statements, or to call in question the cogency of the arguments by which they supported them, they had only to appeal to the testimony of their fathers and grandfathers, their mothers and grandmothers, and the most sceptical were convinced at once. No man durst venture to cast the shadow of a doubt upon such incontrovertible evidence, because to have done so would have been to implicate their relations in the charge of speaking beside the truth, and these, they said, "were decent, respectable folk, and never kenned for lee'rs in their lives."
In this metropolis, and near the scene of these memorable events, Nelly Kilgour was born—the exact date of her birth we do not pretend to determine, though it must have been some time in the eighteenth century—and had lived, running about, going to school, and serving sundry of the lieges who were indwellers thereof, till she had arrived at years of discretion—in other words, till she had seen three-and-thirty "summers," as a poet would say, and nearly the same number of winters, as our reader may guess. It has been said that there are three distinct questions which a woman naturally puts to herself at three different periods of her life. The first is—"Who will I take?"—a most important question, no doubt; and we may reasonably suppose that it occurs about the time when the attentions of the other sex first awaken her to a sense of her own charms, and she is thus ready to look upon every one who smiles on her as a lover, and every young fellow who contemplates her face while talking to her as anxious to become her husband. The second question, which is scarcely less important, is—"Who will I get?" and this, we may again suppose, begins to be repeated seriously, after she has seen the same individual smile upon half-a-dozen damsels on the same day, and after she has learned that it is possible for an unmarried man to contemplate her own fair face with the deepest interest, and converse with her on the most interesting subjects on Monday morning, and then go and do the same to another on Tuesday evening. But the last, and perhaps the most important, as it certainly is the most perplexing of these questions, is—"Will I get onybody ava?" and this, there can be little doubt, begins to force itself upon her attention, after the smiles of her admirers have become so faint that they are no longer able to climb over the nose; when, instead of talking of love, they begin to yawn, and speak about the weather; in short, after she becomes conscious that her charms are at a discount, and that those who are coming up behind her are every day stealing away her sweethearts.
Through the whole of the previous stages Nelly Kilgour had passed; and she had now arrived at this important question, which, as has been just said, is the last a woman can put to herself. She had seen her admirers, one after another, come and look in her face, and continue their visits, their smiles, and their conversation for a season, and then go away and leave her, as if they had got nothing else to do. She had spent a considerable portion of her life, as has been already observed, in serving the lieges in and about the place of her nativity—to no purpose, as it appeared; at least, in so far as the getting of the husband was concerned, nothing had been effected. The proper season for securing this desideratum of the female world was fast wearing away; something, she saw, must of necessity be done; and, thinking that women, like some other commodities, might sell better at a distance than at home, she engaged herself as a servant on the little farm of Howdycraigs—a place situated among that portion of the Ochils already noticed.