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I Meet a Road-mender from
the Fraser Country - The Oliphants of Gask - The "Auld Hoose" - "The Land
o' the Leal" - The Girl in the Motor-car - Down Strathearn and Past
Carsbreck - "Jessie, the Flower o' Dunblane" - I Obey an Impulse and Make
for Doune.
SOON after I had swung my
pack upon my back at the door of the Salutation Hotel, I saw against the
sky the huge red-brick building of Dewar's distillery. In the hotel the
evening before, I had been told that the old man who had started the
business used to hand out a religious tract with every "greybeard" of
whiskey he sold. Little did he dream that his grandson would one day
become a peer of the realm and would die leaving behind him, not a further
litter of tracts, but several hundred yards of newspaper columns recording
the most daringly witty after-dinner speeches of the Georgian epoch. I
passed out of Perth through the suburb that rejoiced in the name
Cherrybank, and followed the road to Crossgates; there I came to a low
cottage with arched windows that gives it the look of a chapel. At this
cottage, the main road goes to the left, but I branched off to the north
of Dupplin Loch past a Roman camp, and before I drew level with the House
of Gask I halted to talk to a tall fair-haired road-mender, a Shaw from
the Fraser country near Beaufort. He had come south many years ago to
Strathearn, he said, and it was a fine countryside ; he liked the people,
but he missed the Gaelic. He brightened up when I told him I had travelled
from the Great Glen and had been on the fringes of the Fraser land ; and
when I switched round our talk to the 'Forty-five, he spoke about it
intelligently.
"Some of my folk were out
with Prince Charlie," he said, "though the 'chief stayed at home. You
should have a look at the Auld House of Gask-the Laird's a fine man, he'll
be pleased to show ye round." Thereupon I told him the story of how the
Prince on his march from Perth had seen the ripe corn uncut in the fields
of the Gask estate, and asked one of his attendants for an explanation.
Laurence Oliphant of Gask had ordered his tenants to come out in support
of their rightful king, but some of them had refused, and in his anger
Oliphant had declared that no sickle should touch the corn until they came
to their senses, nor must they feed their cattle upon it, although the
beasts were now starving. The Prince's unexpected reply became the talk of
Strathearn. Dismounting, he pulled a handful of the corn and gave it to
his horse, saying that since he himself had broken the Laird's orders, the
farmers could now begin to harvest their crops.
The road-mender laughed.
"Fine do I ken the story," he said. "Ay, and it's true, and it wasna far
from here it happened. Prince Charlie made himself a weel-liked young man.
But I'm thinking it's no' many of the Gask tenants that hung back-for
there was- no better lairds in Scotland than the Oliphants. Long after the
trouble was past, and some landlords were clearing folk off their estates
to make big farms, the wee men on Gask were permitted to bide on. They
tell me some paid but three pounds a year in rent-ay, and when a woman was
left a widow, she was given a cottage for the rest of her days. That's
something like a laird!"
He scrambled hastily to his
feet as a Rolls Royce swept up the long straight road between the trees,
and he touched his hat. "That was the lady of Gask," he said; "ye'll find
the Laird alone - he'll be glad to see ye." Since it was time to eat, I
had my lunch on the grass beside him, and when we parted we shook hands;
and I thanked him for the hint that I might venture to ask a stranger to
let me see the ruins which had been the home of the Oliphants.
As I made my way towards
the house, the skyline on the north was cut like a saw-edge by the tops of
thousands of Scots pines, while on my left were old woods of larch and
oak. Now and then, in a clearing of the trees, I could see the hills above
Glen Almond, with Ben Lawers and Schiehallion in the north. Bracken and
heather were thick by the roadside where I turned in to the avenue and
went down to the mansion-house of Gask, a big square grey downright place
with none of the decorative gewgaws that make hideous so many houses of
the early nineteenth century. The manservant took my message, and the
Laird himself approached, a youngish man in tweeds with a charming
frankness of manner. He was not an Oliphant, he told me at once, but it
was evident that he regarded the name with veneration, and he led me to
the ruins of the Auld Hoose less than a hundred yards from the modern
mansion. There is not much more left of it now than a crumbled wall with a
turret room thatched with reeds from the Carse of Gowrie. The old road in
front of it has disappeared, and the place is paved with stone slabs green
with moss. Beyond a pool into which a burn tinkles there is an old
brew-house with tall narrow windows, and some of the holly bushes and yew
trees were there when the Prince himself paused to eat a late breakfast
with Laurence Oliphant on Wednesday 11th September 1745. The Laird pointed
out some of the larch trees that had grown from seeds sent to Gask by
John, the "planting Duke" of Atholl. A little way through the woods stands
a chapel and the old burial-ground of the Oliphants. Here the " auld laird
" of the 'Forty-five was buried, and his famous grand-daughter, Lady
Nairne, who wrote The Land o' the Leal and Caller Herrin', The Rowan Tree
and The Hundred Pipers, as well as Jacobite songs like Charlie is my
Darling and Will Ye no' Come Back Again? and Wha'll be King but Charlie,
which begins with the line, " The news frae Moidart cam' yestreen." Below
the chapel is the placid strath with the river Earn winding among green
fields, and beyond are the Ochil Hills where the Water of May tumbles down
from the heights-the May from which the sweetest trout in Scotland are
taken, or so they said when I was a boy in the Ochils, and they always
added with pride that Queen Victoria's first breakfast at Balmoral each
year was an ashet of May trout.
Over a glass of port, I
talked with my host about the auld laird, his son, and his grand-daughter.
Laurence Oliphant was one of those who suffered deeply for his loyalty to
the Stuarts; and nearly half a century after the 'Forty-five, when Charles
himself was dead, the younger Oliphant in his old age still hoped that
Prince Henry might one day become king. In the prayer book he gave his
daughter Caroline, he followed the example of Lord Wemyss and many other
Jacobites in pasting over the names of the reigning family with tiny slips
of paper upon which were written the names of the Stuarts ; and when
George III came to the throne, and many Scots Jacobites gave him their
allegiance, Oliphant dismissed his Episcopalian chaplain for taking the
oath. When his sight at last failed, he liked to have the newspaper read
aloud to him, and if any reference was made to King George or his queen
the reader was ordered always to use the initial letters K and Q.
All this was reported to
George, who sent a message to the sturdy Jacobite: "Give my compliments -
not the compliments of the king of England but those of the Elector of
Hanover - to Mr. Oliphant, and tell him how much I respect him for the
steadiness of his principles."
It was in this atmosphere
that Caroline was brought up. She became the mistress of Gask, a tall
dignified woman with dark eyes and aquiline features. At a ball in the
South a Royal Duke fell in love with her, but she waited loyally until the
day when Captain Nairne (a son of Lord Nairne of the 'Forty-five) would be
able to marry her. That day was long in coming ; she was forty-one before
her wedding, and had waited nearly twenty years; and since her husband had
been appointed Assistant Inspector-General of Barracks in Scotland, the
bride of forty-one and the bridegroom of fifty took up their residence in
the state apartments at Holyroodhouse. When George IV paid his visit to
Edinburgh, they moved out so that he could live there, and went to
Caroline Cottage in Duddingston. It was during this visit of George IV
that Sir Walter Scott drew up a memento pleading for a restoration of the
honours forfeited in the 'Forty-five. The general pardon to those who had
taken part in the Rising had been given in the Act of Indemnity nine
months after the Prince left Scotland, but there had been an enormous list
of exceptions : as well as those attainted, over eighty lairds had been
named. Sir Walter induced the king to sponge clean the slate, and so
Caroline Oliphant's husband became at last known by his father's title of
Lord Nairne. By this time she was fifty-seven. A strange reserved woman,
she kept her poems a secret even from her husband, and it was not until
long after her songs had been sung in Scotland that the name of the author
became known. When they were printed by an Edinburgh music-dealer, she
signed them with false initials, and on her personal visits to him she
dressed up as an old country lady. That was an age of anonymity in Scots
literature : Sir Walter himself was denying the authorship of the Waverley
novels ; Blackwood's Magazine was publishing articles and squibs that
evoked many a wild guess at the dinner-tables of Edinburgh ; and Lady Anne
Barnard was guarding the secret of " Auld Robin Gray." After Lord Nairne
died, Caroline spent many weary years of travelling abroad for the health
of her son, but returned in the end to Gask. Often she had sat in the room
where I was talking with the Laird ; often she had looked down from these
windows through the trees to Strathearn ; and on an autumn day, one
hundred years after Prince Charles was the guest of her grandfather at
Gask, she died and was buried at the chapel near the house.
I declare that port is not
a good wine to walk on, and the heat of the afternoon helped to make me
drowsy. By the time I was a couple of miles from Gask I surrendered and
lay down beneath an oak tree for half an hour's sleep. By the time I
awoke, it was nearly four o'clock, and I decided it would be well to think
of the place where I was to spend the night. I saw from my map that after
I had crossed the Earn at Kinkell Bridge, there were several hamlets where
I might possibly get a lodging; and then as my eye roved a little further,
I noticed a name that made me blink-Gleneagles Hotel. Gleneagles, with its
two hundred and fifty bedrooms, its garage for a hundred Rolls Royces and
Bentleys, its American cocktail bar, its orchestra, its dining-room and
its grill-room, its lifts and all the other expensive gewgaws and
whig-maleeries that used to dazzle the eyes of Arnold Bennett. But I was
just as dazzled as Arnold Bennett had been at the idea of lying for a
night in the softest lap of luxury. So far as I could gather, the hotel
was but a few hundred yards away from the route Prince Charles followed on
his way to dine at Lord George Murray's house at Tullibardine. My only
doubt was whether the hotel people would take in a dusty tramp like me;
but I told myself that a dusty tramp was not much worse than an oily
company-promoter, and his money just as good. It was worth having a shot
at, anyhow. They could turn me away by swearing upon the beards of their
board of directors that the hotel was full; but at least they could not
refuse to serve me with a drink, and they could not prevent me from slowly
sipping it in the depths of an armchair until the hour when the bars were
closed. After that, if I refused to leave, they could certainly sling me
down the front-door steps, and indeed would probably do so with vigour.
But the whole enterprise had a romantic flavour; it had a then-and-now
touch about it : the Prince sleeping in the heather among his
shaggy-headed clansmen, as he did twice on his march to Edinburgh, and I
sleeping among the scented darlings of a decadent plutocracy and all that
sort of thing. But my whimsey was snatched from me, and in as romantic a
manner as an entry into the Gleneagles Hotel or exit there from. For the
first (and last) time in my journey, I was offered a lift by the owner of
a private motor-car.
It was an extraordinarily
attractive-looking young woman of about twenty who pulled up and spoke to
me. She was in fact beautiful, with eyes of forget-me-not-blue, fair hair,
and a complexion that Ouida and Bulwer Lytton used to call
peaches-and-cream. She had a pleasant Scots voice, with nothing of a
gurgling brogue about it; and if she had been educated in England-which I
half suspected-she had certainly not been at one of those detestable
English boardingschools where girls pick up ugly tricks of clipped
pronunciation that turns a word like " same " into " sem." There was two
guineas' worth of crest painted on the cream-coloured door of the car.
" Poor devil," she said,
smiling. "You look all in."
Now, I call that a good way
for a stranger to begin a conversation. I slung my pack into the back
beside a black Labrador pup with pathetic amber-coloured eyes, and got
into the front seat with my hat on my knees. The girl cast puzzled glances
at the hat; it was a black Trilby, and, like myself, very dusty. I confess
I detest black hats, except perhaps upon the heads of statesmen,
barristers, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, one or two of my
friends, and certain publishers. In particular I detest a black hat when
it is sported by thrusting young careerists, of whom London is the chief
ant-hill. I had bought this funereal hat of mine only because it was the
lightest thing I could find in any shop : it weighed exactly three ounces,
and could be sent through the post for two-pence; it was airy upon the
head; it could be rolled into a ball and carried in the pocket ; and
although you danced upon the thing, it would come up smiling. But there
was no getting away from its colour. "Are you a parson on holiday?" asked
the girl, with another glance at the hat.
I felt like embracing her;
for she agreed with me about black hats. And I presently found that this
can be as powerful a bond between two human beings as a common aversion to
black cats, and a love of black dogs, like the one that was now licking
the back of my neck and whimpering. "He wants to come in the front," said
my charioteer, "and he knows he isn't allowed." But the Labrador pup
decided to take the risk; with a sudden leap, he floundered over my
shoulder and landed on my knees, obliterating the hat and obscuring most
of my view. The girl frowned. "Well, just this once," she said, melting,
and added firmly: "Never again!" We talked of the training of Labradors,
and from Labradors we veered to sheepdogs which will round up sheep at the
age of a few months because the herding of sheep is in their blood ; and
all the time we were skimming up out of Strathearn, so that before I
realised it we had passed the place where the old house of Tullibardine
used to stand. This had been the seat of the Murrays who became Dukes of
Atholl; and in the sixteenth century, if any stranger doubted the size of
James IV's Great Michael, the largest ship afloat, he had only to go to
Tullibardine and look, for there one of the Michael's shipwrights had
planted a hawthorn hedge to record its dimensions.
We swept past the grounds
of the Gleneagles Hotel, leaving behind my resolution to wallow in luxury,
and came to the main road that runs down Strathallan. Past Blackford we
went, a long village of small houses huddled together on both sides of the
street, and over a hump-backed bridge. "Carsbreck," said my companion,
pointing to the bleak wide hollow and the grey sheet of water where men
congregate in frosty weather with their curling stones, their brooms, and
their whiskey, and call the spree a Bonspiel. My companion looked at me
with respect when I remembered to tell her that Bonspiel was a word used
for a meeting of archers in the days when a Scots king was so worried
about the popularity of football within his realm that he barred the game
and ordered every boy at the age of thirteen to practise archery instead.
In his youth, Prince Charles was expert with the cross-bow, and I am sorry
to say he amused himself killing blackbirds and thrushes at the Villa
Borghese at Rome; and I regret that he also played "Goff because it was a
Scotch game," but I doubt if he had the patience to excel in that dull
method of frittering away eternity which I wish had died with his ancestor
James I.
There is a story about
Carsbreck which I believe still lingers in local tradition. From Blackford
there was a loch that filled the strath as far as the bridge of Kinbuck,
and since it had the finest trout in the country
it was preserved for the use of the king. His queen, the "Fair Queen
Helen," was drowned when the royal fishing boat was upset. She was the
most popular lady in the land, and for many days the king mourned for her.
One evening he was standing at Kinbuck near the foot of the loch when he
cried out to his attendants that he knew how he could recover the body of
the queen. He collected a great army of workers, and drained off the
water, so that only the deep hollow at Carsbreck remained to mark the
loch. Near Blackford they found the queen's body, and over it they raised
a mound. This mound, they say, is to be seen by the riverside two miles
below Blackford, and the river Allan was called after the Fair Queen
Helen. I was in a romantic mood that afternoon, and I told the story to my
companion as if it were gospel truth ; and I hope she took my word for it.
At Greenloaning, a pleasant
hamlet, the traveller is vigorously reminded by advertisements that the
Gleneagles Hotel exists, and indeed on this road one is not permitted to
forget it. Many a motorist, I am sure, on his journey northward must turn
in to the hotel in spite of himself, so strong is the steam-hammer of
suggestion. Past Balhaldie we went, in the 'Forty-five the home of William
Drummond, a Jacobite of the 'Fifteen who spent the remainder of his days
hanging near the coat-tails of the Old Chevalier in Rome. He was a
worthless fellow, this Drummond, whose real name was Macgregor, and he was
never happier than when he was in the middle of some stupid intrigue. If
he was not a traitor to the cause, he did a lot of harm, and seemed to be
incapable of telling the truth when a childish lie would give him vent for
his spleen against better men who despised him. The road from Balhaldie to
Dunblane is grey and desolate, with lonely groups of Scots pines near the
battlefield of Sheriff muir; and one wonders what was in the Prince's
thoughts as he passed near the tragic hillside in the evening of Wednesday
11th September 1745.
As we came down the strath,
clouds had concealed the sun. The barren-looking countryside had taken on
a black look which accentuated the steely gleam in the sky above the Touch
Hills ten miles to the south. Soon we were below the high building of the
school for the sons of sailors, soldiers, and airmen ; and then down we
went past low white-washed cottages into the town of Dunblane.
In Dunblane, the place I
wanted most of all to see was Balhaldie Close where Charles remained for
two nights as the guest of Alexander Drummond, and I asked my companion if
she would like to see it before she continued her journey to Stirling. I
believe I made an excellent guide that afternoon in a town I had never
seen before. Without difficulty we found Balhaldie Close, an old Scots
house with its walls washed in pink "caum" and a high crow-stepped gable
facing the street. It was not until then that I ventured to confess the
object of my walk across Scotland, and I tried to describe my journey
while we drank tea at the inn which was once the home of Jessie Tennant, a
young woman whose memory is preserved in that saccharine song, "Jessie,
the Flower o' Dunblane."
After my companion had said
good-bye, I strolled alone through the streets of the town. In the
seventeenth century, a facetious Englishman called Richard Franck rode
through Scotland with his nose in the air and wrote scathingly about the "pittiful
pedling corporation of dirty Dumblane." He said there was little trade in
this place, "except now and then a truck with a brandy-man, a
tobacco-merchant or a brewsterwife ; for ale, tobacco, and strong waters
are the staple of the town." As for the women, he declared, they even
pawned their petticoats-one of them pawned her husband's breeches-to pay
their reckoning in the innumerable ale-houses. I think Franck must have
been badly snubbed by one of the "Cummers of Dunblane"; anyhow, I found it
a clean and attractive little place, with a gem of a cathedral that looks
down over the housetops in the valley of the Allan Water. When Archbishop
Laud came here and looked at the ruins of this cathedral, a bystander
remarked that it had been a brave kirk before the Reformation.
"Reformation?" cried Laud, as his eye travelled over the roofless nave and
broken masonry. "No-Deformation!" Within recent years it has been lovingly
restored. I had looked forward to seeing in one of the aisles a Celtic
cross which is at least a thousand years old ; but the place was closed,
and I wandered back to the inn where I had left my pack. It occurred to me
to halt in Dunblane for the night. I was feeling depressed, at a loose
end; I wondered how I would spend the hours until bedtime, for I felt too
restless to read. I knew what was wrong with me; I was missing my cheerful
companion. I did not even know her name, where she had come from, or her
destination; I only knew that she had driven off in the direction of
Stirling; and had left me to kick about Dunblane alone. With a sudden
impulse, I slung my pack on my back and headed along a street called
Springfield Terrace which took me to a road that went rolling westward
among green hillocks.
The country opened out as I
strode towards the sun that hung above the horizon. On either hand were
woods, with low hills on the south shutting off the valley of the Teith
and Forth, and in the north I could see the mountains above Glen Artney.
One hour and ten minutes later, I stood in the twilight below the
battlements of Doune Castle, listening to two rivers swishing and
muttering among the stones as their waters joined in the darkness of the
dell below. |
