These were the days when most of the early “kings” of Scotland met with violent deaths. Near the village is a cairn of stones, surrounding a boulder, which is called “Malcolm’s gravestone,” and is supposed to mark the place where the King Malcolm II, after being slain by assassins, was buried. His father, Malcolm I, who reigned from 943 to 954, had been killed at Stonehaven. Malcolm II, his son, held the sceptre from 1005 to 1034.
It is well to stop awhile at Glamis Castle, not that it was the scene of the murder of Duncan, but it has plenty of fascinating lore of its own, besides having Macbeth as a tenant.
It was at Glamis Castle, in 1745, that Bonnie Prince Charlie slept on one night, to be succeeded on the next by the Duke of Cumberland, who occupied the very same room. The housekeeper conducts the visitor over the historic and antique portion of the castle, and the place is well worth seeing, for it makes the past seem very real. Moreover, though such sight-seeing does not supply facts, in place of Shakespeare’s creation, it helps to the enjoyment of the truth personified. We may delight in facts, for they are necessary; but truth is more. Whatever the facts concerning the historical Macbeth, they were long ago “stranded on the shore of the oblivious years.” They were, but the truth was, and is, and is to come. Human nature is the one thing that changes not, and that eternal element Shakespeare pictured.
We were visiting Dunkeld, in company with a party of pretty maidens and rosy-cheeked Scottish youth from Dundee, seeing its cathedral, ruins, waterfalls, and modern products, when we first realized that we were in the land of Macbeth. Immediately, all the useful and statistical data, gathered up on that August day, and even the fact that Dunkeld, now having fewer than a thousand people, was once a bishopric, seemed to fade into insignificance compared with the value and importance of the imaginary—the world outside of history and of science. We looked southward to see Birnam wood, whose trees and branches were to move to Dunsinane in the Scotland hills and fulfil the sinister prophecy of the witches.
Later on, we found comrades for a walk to Dunsinane Hill, which is only twelve miles northwest of Dundee. All who have read Shakespeare know that this was the scene of the closing tragedy in the play of “Macbeth.” We pass red-roofed cottages, and the ruins of an old feudal stronghold. It is a square tower, having walls of immense thickness, with the deep, well-like dungeon, cut into the rock, down which the keeper lowers for you a lighted candle. In place of the old arched floors, which added strength and solidity to the tower walls, there are platforms reached by stairways. Ascending to the top of the tower and emerging by a doorway to the bartizan on the outside, we have a most magnificent view of the wide-spreading valley of the Tay, with its manifold tokens of a rich civilization, lying like a panorama at our feet. One of these is Kinaird Castle, which belonged to a family which, having taken the wrong side in the uprising of 1715, had their lands forfeited.
Leaving this mass of stone behind us, we pass on to the upland moors, and after three or four miles see the two bold hills, the King’s Seat and Dunsinane. As we proceed, we find several old stones which, not being rolling, have gathered on their faces a rich crop of the moss of legend. The southern face of Dunsinane Hill is sheer and steep, but the view from the top is magnificent. Here on the summit we can barely trace the foundations of the second castle of Macbeth, which he built after leaving Glamis and to which he retired. Here he lived in the hope of finding security, the witches having predicted that he would never be conquered until “Birnam wood came to Dunsinane.” Thinking to make assurance doubly sure, he compelled the nobles and their retainers to build new fortifications for him. Men and oxen were so roughly impressed in the work that he made enemies of old friends and rupture soon occurred between him and Macduff.
After his father’s murder, Malcolm fled to England, whence a powerful army was sent to invade Scotland. The Scots joined the standard of the young prince and the army marched northward unopposed and encamped twelve miles away, at Birnam, under the shelter of a forest, which then covered the hill, but is now no more. The soldiers, each one having cut down a branch of a tree,—probably not with any knowledge of the witch’s prophecy, but to conceal their numbers,—made a moving mass of green. Macbeth, looking out from the battlements of his castle, beheld what seemed to him a vast forest in motion across the plain to overwhelm him with destruction.
Whatever was really true in the matter, tradition has adopted the element of poetical justice so often illustrated by the great Shakespeare, though some reports are that Macbeth escaped from two battles with his life and kept up a guerilla warfare in the north, until killed in a conflict in Aberdeenshire. In another Scottish town, we were shown a school which stands on the site of the old castle of the Macduffs, the Thanes or Earls of Fife.
A TYPICAL SCOTTISH STREET: HIGH STREET, DUMFRIES