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With the Road-engineer -
Anne Grant of Laggan - The Man at the Churchyard Gate - I Visit the
Minister and Leave for Dalwhinnie - The Pass of Drumochter - The Solitary
Woman - On to Blair Atholl.
WHY an engineer should have
been more good-natured about his personal belongings than, say, an
architect or a chartered accountant, I did not understand, but I took the
word of my hostess for it. To my satisfaction, I found that the spare
shirt and flannel trousers in my pack were dry; and stripping off my wet
clothes, which were to hang for the night before the kitchen fire, I
shuffled downstairs to the sitting-room in the engineer's dressing-gown
and slippers.
He was a young man with a
lean pleasant face, and he was filling a huge briar pipe from a tin of
"Country Life " tobacco. When I began to thank him for the use of his
things, and to apologise for thus breaking in upon his privacy, he laughed
and pushed an armchair towards the fire for me. "So you've been over the
Corrieyairack?" he said.
Presently, I learned that
my companion was a road-engineer, and his name was Melville.
"You were on Wade's road
all the way," he explained, "except that new bit from the Catholic chapel
at the Dun. I'm on a rather interesting job here, - for I'm re-making
Wade's roads, and some of them haven't been touched-except for the
potholes-since the old boy made them two hundred years ago . . . Are you
interested in General Wade?"
If the gods had been unkind
to me during the day, they could not have made more generous reparation in
the evening. I had been led, as it were, blindfold to a man who knew every
contour of that countryside -and who was eager to talk about General Wade!
There was no place in all Badenoch where I would rather have spent the
night.
"Wade knew his job," said
Melville, lighting his big pipe. "Whenever he could, he laid his roads so
that an army couldn't be ambushed on them. He would often build a road a
little way up the hillside when it would have been easier to put it right
down in the valley. A shrewd old chap. When he came to a marsh he didn't
try to dig foundations-that would have been a hopeless job-he floated his
road on hundreds of bundles of wood-faggots. Come to think of it,"
Melville continued, "that's just about what we're doing to-day. We float
the roads over marshy ground on rafts of concrete. History repeating
itself! I don't say Wade was as great an engineer as Thomas Telford - the
Caledonian Canal man. Telford knew a lot more about bridges than Wade, but
he was a great old fellow all the same." And then he laughed. "Queer to
think that General Wade built these roads so that the Government could
keep a closer eye on the clans - and it was these very roads that helped
Prince Charlie to get to Edinburgh before Johnnie Cope !"
Melville was interested to
know that I was walking in the footsteps of the Prince, and was determined
to cover all the country through which he passed both in Scotland and
England and as a fugitive in the Isles. My present destination was
Edinburgh, I told him, and later I would go to Derby, then turn and walk
north to Culloden, and finally follow his tracks through the heather.
The idea fired Melville to
sudden enthusiasm. "You know the song called 'The Road to the Isles'?" he
said, and began to hum it: "` By Tummel and by Rannoch and Lochaber I will
go, by heather tracks I'll foot it in the wild . . .' Well, last year I
did that walk to the Isles-but it's the Prince Charlie road for me next
time! I dare say the Corrieyairack's the worst bit . . ."
We were interrupted by
supper, and afterwards we talked until the hour of one chimed on the
mantelpiece clock-a clock which, an inscription told me, had been a prize
at a sheepdog trial - and I went upstairs to my bedroom, where huge
sheep-skin rugs lay upon' the floor ; and I fell at once into a sound
sleep.
I was awakened next morning
by the sun glittering on the window at my bedside. Whether the rain had
gone for good, I could not tell, and after breakfast both Melville and the
farmer thought there was more of it yet to come. I was tempted to stop in
Laggan for a day or two, but a full week had passed since I had left
Moidart, and I had still more than a hundred and fifty miles to cover
before I reached Edinburgh, so I decided to push on that morning. Melville
said he was going to Laggan Bridge, three quarters of a mile away, and he
offered me a lift on the back of his motor-cycle, which I accepted ; and
while I straddled his pillion seat, like a witch on a broomstick, he took
me at a terrific pace across that wide green hollow among the mountains
that has given the place its name. Clumps of trees were on the hillsides
around us, and to the west I could see the conical hill called the Dun,
clothed to the summit with firs and pines. A few cottages were scattered
about, but there were more ruins than habitations, and it was a little
saddening to think that a hundred years ago the population of this parish
was over twelve hundred. Leaning his motor-cycle against a dyke, Melville
went to attend to some business in a cottage where he had a temporary
office, and I strolled into the kirkyard.
This church was a more
recent building than the one which the Rev. James Grant built towards the
end of the eighteenth century, and to-day the Rev. James is remembered
only as the husband of the famous Anne Grant of Laggan. On the previous
forenoon, as I had climbed up the north slope of the Corrieyairack, I had
looked into the green glen where their courtship had taken place. What an
extraordinary life that woman had. She had been brought up beside the
lonely Hudson River in America, where her father settled before returning
to Scotland broken in health to become Barrack-master at Fort Augustus. In
New England she had learned to speak Dutch, and in Laggan she acquired
Gaelic so that she could talk to her husband's parishioners. The manse was
a place of hospitality, the stipend was small, and when her husband died
she found herself without a penny and eight children to look after. She
took a farm, but this failed, and soon she was worse off than before. In
1803 she published her first literary work, a volume of poems, which
provided food and shelter for a time, and in 1806 her friends persuaded
her to publish three volumes of the letters she had written from the
Laggan manse. These Letters from the Mountains brought her both money and
fame, and can be read with even greater interest to-day than at the time
when they were written. One of the wisest of the many wise remarks you may
read in these delightful pages is that the Highlanders resemble the French
in being poor with a better grace than other people.
Later, she published a
volume of essays on the superstitions of the Highlands, and there she told
a grim story of a Laggan glen that was haunted. A chieftain discovered
that his daughter was in love with one of the cottagers, and in his wrath
he seized the man and bound him naked on an ant's nest. The lover died in
agony and the girl went mad. She roamed up and down the glen until her
death, and her phantom remained to haunt the place. The Laggan people, in
terror of the Red Woman, refused to go near the sinister glen until Mrs.
Grant's husband laid the ghost by holding a religious service at the place
where it had been so often seen.
Towards the end of Mrs.
Grant's life, Sir Walter Scott had to soothe her feelings, which were hurt
by the smallness of the civil pension allowed her by George IV. In his
Journal, Scott calls her "proud as a Highland woman, vain as a poetess,
and absurd as a bluestocking." But he added: "Catching a pension in these
times is like hunting a pig with a soaped tail. Monstrous apt to slip
through your fingers." Much sorrow came to her; all her children died
except her youngest son; an accident crippled her, so that $he was
confined to the house for the last twenty years of her life. But she had
many friends; her talk was brilliant; and in the end, several legacies
dropped into her lap, making her a comparatively wealthy woman. To-day she
would be called a reactionary and a romantic, and she even hated the idea
of roads being built through the Highlands. These roads, she said, would
afford access to strangers who despise the Highlander ; and luxuries would
be brought into the glens that the people could not afford to pay for, and
would be happier without. She knew how little her Red Indian friends by
the Hudson River in America had gained by being civilised; and she had the
same fears for the Highlander. She foresaw that the ancient culture of the
Gael would be destroyed instead of being allowed to grow and sweeten under
the influence of an appropriate education; and the many Scottish
institutions that are to-day trying to pick up the lost threads, and
reanimate the old culture, show how wise were the words of Anne Grant.
There is little of the fine
old tradition in Laggan to-day. At least, so I gathered from a stranger
with whom I fell into talk at the kirkyard gate. He lived at Kingussie or
Newtonmore - I forget which-and he seemed to know the district well.
"There's still a lot of bitter Calvinism in the Highlands," he said, when
our talk turned to the old and better days. "When the Gael becomes `unco
guid,' he isn't a very pleasant specimen. You see, he's instinctively an
artist, he lives emotionally, the old songs and stories are in his blood.
But repress him, deprive him of his emotional life, and he's a dry stick,
suspicious and self-righteous. I'm not a Catholic myself," he went on,
"but Calvinism in the Highlands did a lot of harm to the spirit of the
Highlander."
I wondered who the stranger
was. His voice suggested that he was a Gaelic speaker; he talked with a
quiet intensity; and I liked his thoughtful eyes. "If you're interested in
the Highlands," he said presently, "there's a man living up there who can
tell you more about them than anybody I know. He's one of the finest men
in Scotland-the minister of Laggan." And he mentioned a name that is known
and reverenced in every corner of the country. " I'm going up to the
minister now," added the stranger. "Come and meet him."
I gladly accepted, and
leaving my pack in Melville's little office, with word that I would be
back in about twenty minutes, I went up the drive with the stranger to the
manse of Laggan.
The minister greeted us at
the front door. He was an unforgettable figure of a man, with a lock of
iron-grey hair across his forehead, the deep eyes of a poet, and a
resonant musical voice. He took us in to a pleasant sitting-room, where a
bagpipe with a Ross tartan lay on the piano. He smiled when my eye kept
straying to it, and we began to talk about bagpipe music. I remarked upon
how vile it used to sound in the officers' mess on guest nights, and the
minister nodded.
"Of course it would," he
agreed. "It's an openair instrument. The Clarsach - the harp-and the
fiddle can be played in the house, but the bagpipe needs God's out of
doors. At least it does for the Caol Mor - that's the Pibroch, the
classical music of the bagpipe. It's being revived, I'm thankful to say,
the Caol Mor. Music and song and the love of all beauty-this is the
heritage of the Gael. But many insidious forces have helped to cut us off
from that heritage. For example, the Disarming Act after the 'Forty-five;
it was a wonder that the classical music of the bagpipe survived, but it
did."
I spoke about the age of
the bagpipe, how Dr. MacBain the Celtic scholar declared that it appeared
first in the Lowlands of Scotland, and was not introduced to the Highlands
until the sixteenth century.
"I know," nodded the
minister, "MacBain believed that the bagpipe wasn't of Gaelic origin at
all, and he's a difficult man to contradict. But this much is certain. It
was the Scottish Highlanders, and particularly the Macrimmons of Skye, who
made the bagpipe what it is to-day. Possibly the big drone was added in
their time. But, ah, so much of the lovely Macrimmon music has been
forgotten. They were the masters of the Pibroch."
I begged him to dispel a
little of my ignorance about the Pibroch, and I learned that there are
four kinds, the Lament, the Salute, the Battle-piece, and the Pastoral
Meditation. "The Pibroch had been perfected centuries before it had ever
been written down on paper," said the minister. "The master taught his
pupil
orally. There was a special notation, a sequence of letters that formed
words, and by learning these words the pupil got the actual form of each
Pibroch into his head. That was the method of the Macrimmons."
The minister went on to
tell me about this great family. "Seven hundred years ago they owned land
in the island of Harris. They were conquered by Paul Balkison, and he is
said to have bequeathed his territory to the ancestor of the MacLeods, so
the MacLeods became the overlords of the Macrimmons. It was the eighth
MacLeod chief, Alasdair Crotach, who endowed the college of pipe music at
Boreraig, a few miles from the castle of Dunvegan. That was four hundred
and fifty years ago, and the college continued until after the
'Forty-five. No music except Caol Mor was allowed to be played at the
college of the Macrimmons; they prohibited small music like marches,
strathspeys, reels, and the melodies of songs.
"When a piper was composing
a Pibroch," went on the minister, "he fasted for two days beforehand, and
would neither eat nor sleep until the tune was completed. This custom
probably dates back to the time of the Druids. You'll find the Pibroch
only in the West. I know of but one Pibroch that belongs to the eastern
Highlands . . . Of course there were other schools of pipers, such as that
of the Mackays, the MacArthurs, and the Rankines, but they were only
offshoots from the Macrimmon college. You know the old story of Patrick
Mor Macrimmon and Charles II -how a group of pipers were brought into the
presence of His Majesty, and the king asked why one of them had not
uncovered his head. A courtier replied that this was Macrimmon, the king
of pipers. 'Bring forward the king of pipers,' said Charles, with a laugh,
extending his hand to be kissed, and in honour of the great occasion
Patrick composed that loud bombastic piece, ` I have Kissed the King's
Hand.' But it shows that the Macrimmons did regard themselves as
extraordinary men, which of course they were ...
"I've often told the story
of the blind piper Ian Dall Mackay," the minister continued. "He was a
pupil of the Macrimmons, and had heard how other musicians had interpreted
in their music the beauty of the sunset. Well, the greatest ambition of
Ian's life was to compose a Pibroch describing the colours of the rainbow.
One fine summer evening he was told there was a rainbow in the sky, and he
raised his face in reverence to the beauty his blind eyes could not see.
When a lark started singing he cried in sudden exaltation, `That's the
tune of the rainbow !' The same evening he composed his Pibroch . . . It's
obvious that in many of their battle-pieces the Macrimmons went to nature
for their themes-you can hear the voice of thunder in their music, and the
sound of a mountain torrent, the cry of an eagle, and sometimes the roar
of the Atlantic breakers on the rocks at Skye . . ."
Of the four kinds of
Pibroch which the minister had described, I wondered which could be
regarded as the finest.
"The Lament," he said
quietly. "In the Lament, the spirit of the Gael touches the highest point
of beauty. It springs from the deep sadness in his heart. As a Pibroch,
'The Lament for the Children' stands alone . . . No, I would rather not
play it now-look at the sunshine out of doors. It needs the hour of
twilight and the appropriate mood for that great sad music."
It was nearly eleven
o'clock before I left Laggan Bridge, and I hoped to reach Blair Atholl by
nightfall. This was optimistic I knew; but since I was now heading for the
south on the main road down through the Central Highlands, I had little
fear of being stranded for the night. There was bound to be traffic on
that road, I concluded, and at the worst I would probably be able to beg a
lift for the last few miles into Blair Atholl.
On the back of his motor-cycle, my civil engineer swept me up over the
hill by Catlodge (which used to be called Cattleack), and past the little
lonely grey schoolhouse near the summit. On the fence at the roadside I
saw that bunches of heather had been tied to prevent grouse from killing
themselves against the wire in flight, and we came down to a few scattered
cottages in the middle of a flat plain. I watched Melville on his machine
until he was out of sight, and then turned my face to the south country.
I knew nothing about the
land that was now before me; and the road that joins Perth with the North
had all the freshness of a new countryside. But the very fact that I was
on a main road depressed me; I was illogical enough to resent the
thousands of other eyes that had stared at those hillsides since the month
of June; and as I strode forward, I thought of the fairy-haunted land of
the West I had left behind me a week before.
But a surprise awaited me.
Far from finding myself in a countryside littered with ugly little
teashops, I found myself tramping into the mouth of a strath as desolate
as that great hollow glen between Glenfinnan and Loch Eil. At Dalwhinnie,
which lies in a saucer among the hills, the Prince halted for the night on
Thursday 29th August 1745. Tradition has it that he slept beside his men
in the heather, although near at hand there was the inn that Sir John Cope
had occupied three nights before. Why did he not sleep at the inn ? No
doubt he preferred the heather to a bed that Cope had occupied. This inn
had been built by General Wade, and- the old building now forms part of
the present hotel near the road. But before the Prince reached Dalwhinnie
that Thursday night, a prisoner was brought to him, a man of importance in
the Highlands, and his name was Evan Macpherson of Cluny.
He held a Captain's
commission in Lord Loudoun's regiment, which was part of Cope's army. His
wife, a daughter of Lord Lovat, was at heart a Jacobite, but she did all
she could to prevent Cluny from joining the Prince. She said that his oath
to King George could not be broken without dishonour, and Cluny had
reported himself to Sir John Cope at Dalwhinnie on the Monday night, when
he had received a surly order to gather his clan and be ready to march on
the following day, but Cluny had done nothing except nurse his resentment
at being treated like a junior subaltern. His home was only a few miles
away ; and when Cope's army marched past Cluny Castle in the morning the
Chief had been ordered to follow, but Cope had gone on to Inverness
without him.
The Prince got an inkling
of what had happened, sent off a hundred Camerons from Garvamore to take
Cluny prisoner. One is tempted to conjecture that there was a twinkle in
Cluny's eye that evening. Writing about him afterwards to the Secretary of
State, Duncan Forbes of Culloden said: "He was seiz'd by the Rebels that
Night in his house, whether with or without his consent did not then
appear, nor does it now." But the fact remains that, after having been
kept a prisoner for about a week, Cluny returned' to Badenoch and raised
three hundred of his clan for the Prince, and there was no more loyal
officer in the Highland army-and for his loyalty few men paid more dearly.
At noon the next day, when
the Prince was about to continue his march to the South, a company of
Camerons arrived with long faces. On the day before, they had left the
main body to capture the Ruthven Redoubt under the impression that it
contained a great store of meal. The only garrison that Cope had left
behind to defend the place was a corporal and twelve men under Sergeant
Terence Mulloy; but as Dr. Archibald Cameron soon discovered, Mulloy was a
bonny fighter. The Doctor sent him a message advising him to throw up the
sponge, but Mulloy made answer that he was "too old a soldier to surrender
a garrison without first seeing some bloody noses." In Mulloy's own words,
"the Grandee went off with a vast deal of threats." The Camerons attacked
at night, but were compelled to draw off with one man dead and a few
others wounded. When the Prince heard of the outcome of the affair he was
more distressed at the loss of the dead Cameron than at the failure to
capture the Redoubt, for he had disapproved of the attempt from the start.
Indeed, the one man who stands out strongly in the affair of the Ruthven
Redoubt is Sergeant Mulloy himself, and when Cope heard of his dogged
resistance he recommended him for a commission, which was granted. Shortly
after noon on Friday, the Highland army marched south.
I bought some food at a
tiny shop; soon the pagodalike tower on the top of the big distillery was
out of sight ; and passing the end of Loch Ericht, one of the highest
lochs in Scotland, I found myself in a great strath with two mountains on
my right called the Boar of Badenoch and the Atholl Sow. Their slopes were
scarred by gullies in which the morning sun cast black shadows; and beyond
them I saw Loch Garry (not to be confused with the Garry north of the
Caledonian Canal), with its river racing southward beside the
railway-line. Wade's stone stands in that lonely pass. The rough piece of
rock, eight feet high, was erected by the General in 1729 when he finished
the road. He was an unusually tall man, and they say that when the stone
was set up he placed a guinea upon it, to return a year later and find his
coin still there. If this yarn about Wade's guinea is true, then the Pass
of Drumochter in the eighteenth century was as desolate as it is to-day,
for if any boy had lived within a league of this stone, could he have
refrained from climbing to the top of it? As I tramped onward, I noticed
that the modern highway here and there takes a short cut, leaving the old
military road to wind its solitary way among rocks and heather, soon to be
overgrown and to disappear from the eyes of man.
I had expected to meet a
lot of traffic, but I was surprised at how little there was. One or two
private motor-cars raced north, and there was a long spell when I saw not
a living creature except some goats grazing near the road, and a woman
pushing a baby in a perambulator. She was young and well-dressed, and I
felt an almost irresistible impulse to stop her arid ask where in the
world she had come from and where she was going to. She looked as if she
had stepped straight from among the nursemaids in Princes Street Gardens,
yet there she was, with a sleeping infant, miles from any village or any
living thing except the goats. At a burn a little distance from
Dalnacardoch I halted for ten minutes to eat the food I had bought. The
hard smooth road made walking unpleasant, and the blazing sun added to my
discomfort; I thought of the mist and rain on the Corrieyairack the day
before, and the storm through which I had trudged by the river Spey ; and
by the time I reached Dalnacardoch, I would have welcomed a thunder-cloud
with a shout of joy.
But my depression, I think,
was more than physical. That pass, which lies between Badenoch and the
Forest of Atholl, is a savage place. Even in bright sunlight, there is
something inimical about it. You feel that nothing could grow on those
barren mountainsides; you feel that no human being could live there long
without becoming hostile to his fellow men. The place does not strike the
mind with awe like some of the majestic parts of the Highlands-like Glen
Lyon, for example-and it does not stir the fancy like the land in the West
through which I had travelled the week before. This central pass through
the Grampians was once the home of robbers and outlaws, and they could not
have found a more suitable lurking-place. It was late in the afternoon by
the time I reached Calvine, where I drank some tea, and was told that the
Falls of Bruar were half a mile away - the Bruar that Burns visited, and
then wrote to the Duke of Atholl begging him to plant the sides of the
stream with trees. The petition was in verse, and ended with the toast to
"Atholl's honest men, and Atholl's bonny lassies" which Burns had proposed
at the Duke's table during his visit to Blair Atholl - the two happiest
days of his life. Twenty-five years later William Wordsworth and his
sister Dorothy came to see the Bruar Water, and in her journal Dorothy
described how the Duke had granted the poet's petition and had planted the
glen with firs and larches - "children of poor Burns's song." If the
stranger at Calvine who reminded me about Burns's poem had told me about
Dorothy Wordsworth's visit, I might have been tempted to go to the Falls
of Bruar for her sake, as she had gone for the sake of Rab; and after
drinking my tea within sight of Struan - once the home of the chiefs of
Clan Donnachie - I set out for Blair Atholl, four miles distant.
The hills on either hand
were now low and smooth and green. The hand of man was apparent
everywhere-or rather the hand of the landscape-gardener. The sun was low
on my right, and I fancied I could see a smug smile on the face of the
countryside. I remembered how my first glimpse of the green slopes around
Loch Moidart had reminded me of Surrey, and I realised how absurd that
comparison had been. Loch Moidart could no more be compared with Surrey
than Surrey could be likened to the parade-ground of Edinburgh Castle. But
here at Blair Atholl was a bit of Surrey, suave and fat and
self-satisfied, ripe for redroofed bungalows and the pseudo-Elizabethan
horrors of retired City men. I felt that I was coming to the fringes of
some new garden-city, a trim and finicking place where people wore no hats
and lived the artificially simple life in rows of little villas . . . So
my thoughts ran until I pulled myself up. There was nothing wrong with
this place, I said: I was dogtired - so tired indeed that everything
seemed detestable except a clean bed and the promise of twelve hours of
uninterrupted sleep.. A lorry came trundling along behind me, and I acted
on a sudden impulse and put up my hand to the driver. "Ay, hop in, sonny,"
he said, removing the stub of the cigarette that was glued to his lower
lip, and lighting another. He glanced at the pack on my back, "A hicker ?
Ye're fond! " He laughed. "Chaps me no' for the hickin' - I'd rather hae
ma lorry."
"There's a lot to be said
for a lorry," I agreed fervently, loosening the laces of my shoes and
lying back on the jolting seat. A lift in Jove's chariot could not have
been more welcome. We rattled forward on a long straight road under a
canopy of trees, and around the shelter of a hill I saw the peaked top of
Ben Vrackie. Below us, the river Garry crept southward over its bed of
pebbles. Not a soul did we meet on that road, not a motor-car. "Aweel,"
said the driver, drawing up, "here's Blair Atholl for ye. Ay, ye'll get a
bed here." He waved his hand, the lorry rumbled on its way, and I found
myself in the shadow of a gorgeous hedge of purple-leafed plum that
surmounted the top of a high stone wall, with the village ahead of me. |
