At Dunkeld, the Tay takes a long sweep eastward, until at the meeting with the Isla at Meikleour it forms a great elbow and resumes its southward flow. The Murthly estate, which belongs to the owner of Grandtully, occupies the south bank of the river along this portion of its course. From the earliest times royalty, like romance and poetry, has had the good taste to frequent these scenes. The wraiths of Neil Gow, the famous fiddler, and of the Highland caterans hanged in the “eerie hollow” of the Stare Dam, dispute with the ghost of Macbeth the honour of being the familiar spirits of Birnam Hill, once again magnificently clothed with wood. In Auchtergaven is the birthplace of Robert Nicol, the “Peasant Poet;” and here also stood the “Auld House of Nairne,” which recalls the name of Caroline Oliphant, Baroness Nairne, the laureate of Jacobite song, and which, like her ancestral home in Strathearn—the “Auld House of Gask”—gave shelter to Prince Charlie. At the Royal Castle of Kinclaven, now a neglected ruin, many a Scottish Sovereign, from the time of Malcolm Ceanmohr and Queen Margaret, had solaced themselves after the chase or battle, before it was captured and recaptured, rebuilt and demolished, in the days of Wallace and Bruce.
The northern bank of the Tay is equally rich in scenic beauty and historical associations. Between the grounds of Delvine and Meikleour, and opposite the “Bloody Inches”—believed to preserve the memory of the spot where Redner Lodbrog, the Norse viking and skald, was beaten back to his ships—the important Roman station of Tulina, now Invertuthil, is supposed to have stood. Meikleour the Marchioness of Lansdowne has inherited from her ancestors the Mercers, descendants of a warlike Provost of Perth in the fourteenth century. The village is one of the quaintest and most charming of Scottish hamlets; and the great “beech hedge,” ninety feet high, is among the many arboricultural marvels in the valley of the Tay. Hidden from sight among hills and woods, like many other lakes and famous sites of this district, is the Loch of Clunie, with its island castle, the hunting seat of kings and place of rest and retirement of bishops in the old days. The Lunan drains from it into the Isla; but to trace the Isla would be to write pages of description and history concerning Glenardle and Glenshee, Stormont and Strathmore, the slopes of the Sidlaws and the passes through the Grampians into Braemar. We should have to give some idea of the beauties collected about Bridge of Cally, Craighall, and Blairgowrie on the Ericht; to visit the “Reekie Linn,” the “Slugs of Auchrannie,” and Lintrathen on the Isla; to seek the sites, mythical or otherwise, of Agricola’s victory over Galgacus and of Macbeth’s defeat by Macduff near Dunsinane Hill; and to speak of what makes Glamis and Airlie and Inverqueich, Alyth and Meigle and Coupar, and the rest of the country lying along the borders of Perth and Angus, memorable and attractive. It would even lead us as far as Forfar and its loch and castles, and the rival little burgh of Kirriemuir—the “Thrums” of recent delightful sketches of old-world Scottish “wabster” and kirk life in Angus—and detain us to the end of the chapter.
We resume, instead, the line of the Tay below Meikleour and Kinclaven, and beyond the “Coble o’ Cargill,” replaced by the more prosaic bridge carrying the railway line from Perth to Aberdeen. This is the heart of Strathmore—the “great valley.” Ballathy, Stobhall, Muckersy, and Stanley maintain the repute of the Tay for noble prospects of hill, wood, and stream. Stobhall was the seat of the Drummond family—still a power in Perthshire—before they removed to Drummond Castle on the Earn; and near by, at the Campsie Linn, beside an ancient cell of the monks of Coupar-Angus Abbey, is the waterfall over which—teste the author of the “Fair Maid of Perth”—Conacher, the refugee from the battle on the North Inch, flung himself to hide his shame. Macbeth’s Castle, on Dunsinane Hill, and the field of Luncarty—where, nine centuries ago, the peasant ancestor of the Hays of Tweeddale, Errol, and Kinnoull is said to have turned the battle for the Scots against the Danes with his plough-yoke—might detain us. But now, close ahead, the explorer of Tayside views, fringing the right bank of the river for miles opposite the mouth of the Almond, and extending to the environs of the Royal City of Perth, the woods of Scone—
“Towers and battlements he sees,
Bosomed high on tufted trees.”
This is Scone Palace, the magnificent mansion of the Earls of Mansfield, standing almost on the site of the ancient Abbey and royal residence of Scone. Modern Scone and all its surroundings are stately and spacious, but the relics of its early grandeur have disappeared from the landscape, and almost the only memorials of the days when it was the meeting-place of parliaments and councils, the crowning-place of kings, “the Windsor of Scotland,” are the mound of the “Motehill,” the sycamore tree planted by Queen Mary, and the cross which marks the place where stood the old “City of Scone.” In its neighbourhood was fought the last battle that decided the supremacy of the Scots over the Picts and the amalgamation of the two nations in one. On the Motehill, Kenneth Macalpine proclaimed the “Macalpine Laws.” Hither, according to tradition, the “Stone of Destiny” was brought, more than a thousand years ago, from the old capital of the Dalriadic Scots in the west—from Dunstaffnage or Beregonium—and the Sovereigns of Scotland continued to be crowned on it until it was carried off to England, as the trophy of conquest, by Edward I. It forms part of the Coronation Chair at Westminster; and patriotic Scots declare that the prophecy bound up in the fateful stone is still being fulfilled, and that where it is, the Sovereigns of a Scottish house rule the land. Though the Coronation Stone was taken away, kings continued to be crowned here. Robert the Bruce was enthroned, and received the homage of his vassals, at Scone; and—to make a wide leap in history—Charles II. was crowned King of Scotland at the spot where his ancestors had been anointed and installed, before he set out on the unlucky expedition which ended at Worcester. Similar preparations were made for the coronation of the Old Pretender; but on the very eve of the event dissensions among his followers, and the approach of Argyll’s army, caused him to take flight back to the Continent, leaving his adherents to their fate—an inglorious end to “an auld sang!”
PERTH, FROM THE WEST.
Before Kenneth Macalpine’s day, Scone was a place where councils of the Early Church met; and nearly eight centuries ago a monastery was founded there, and richly endowed by Alexander I., in gratitude for his escape from an attempt made by insurgent “men of Moray and the Mearns” to capture him at Invergowrie Castle, or “Hurley Hawkin,” where two burns meet near the Church of Liff. The Abbots and the Abbey of Scone played a prominent part in the civil and ecclesiastical affairs of Scotland; and we find the patronage and lands of the High Church of St. Giles, in Edinburgh, bestowed upon it, on account of the expenses incurred by the monks at the funeral of Robert II. and coronation of Robert III., when the prelates and nobles encamped on the fields between the Abbey and the Tay trampled down the standing corn, besides eating and drinking their victuals, and also, as the deed of gift runs, “because, at similar times of unction and coronation, through the many and frequent great gatherings of the people, the monastery has sustained great damage in their buildings, and been burdened with heavy expenses.” All cares and burdens came to an end in 1559, when the Reforming mob, having destroyed the Blackfriars’ and other religious houses in the “City of St. Johnstoun,” stormed out of Perth, and burned the Abbey of Scone. Its lands, after remaining a brief time in the hands of the unfortunate House of Gowrie, fell to the branch of the Murrays that became illustrious in law, statecraft, and literature, in the person of William, first Earl of Mansfield. The Abbey site is a clump of trees; and the “Royal City of Scone,” expelled outside the park gates, has nothing to represent it but the prosaic village of New Scone.
