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ABOUT sixteen miles south of
Aberdeen, the wild rockbound shore of the Mearns, lashed by the German
Ocean, is indented by a spacious bay, into which flow two small streams, the
Cowie and the Carron. Like the Don and the Dee, these rivers once entered
the sea at separate points, though now they unite their waters just before
mingling with the ocean. The secure harbour here formed, which has often
been talked of as a port of refuge for the east coast, and the wide and
fertile double valley beyond drew human habitation at an early period; and
two villages, whose origin is hid in antiquity, grew at the mouths of these
streams. The village to the north was named after the river on which it
stood, the Cowie, and still exists beside the picturesque ruins of St.
Mary's Chapel, amidst its crowded and weed-waving graveyard. The hamlet at
the mouth of the Carron took its descriptive title from a mass of sandstone
that once blocked the entrance to the harbour, called Craig ma-cair, [Either
from cathiar (th being mute), a chair or scat, or car, a bend or turn. The
same word also occurs in the name of a rock south of the town, Dunnacair,
Dun signifying a hill or fort.] the rock of the seat or of
the turn, meaning either in Gaelic, to which the word belongs. Hence the
striking name Stonehaven, originally, in old Scotch, Stanehyve, the Haven or
Harbour with the Stone in its throat, though this obstruction has been long
since removed.
Like the granite city, the
present Stonehaven consists of two towns, the old and the new, but, unlike
the northern capital, the old is to the south, and the new to the north,
both mainly standing within the peninsula between the rivers. The new town
is spacious, well-planned, and inodorous; but the old is crowded, low-lying
and pervaded by that "ancient fishy smell," that clings to all our fishing
villages; for it is chiefly inhabited by those picturesque and peaceful
descendants of the old piratical Danes, who gain their livelihood off that
dangerous shore.
But when our story begins, at
the close of last century, the site of the new town was covered with bent,
and formed the links of Arduthie, the healthy recreation ground of the good
folks of the old town. This was not then the fishing quarter it is now, for
the fishers at that time were confined to the village of Cowie.
As the county town of
Kincardine for two hundred years, created such by our wise James in 1607,
and inhabited by the elite of the shire, it was comparatively clean and
healthy for that period, and its inhabitants had the usual caste and
consequence characteristic of all seats of local government. It was, and
still is, mal-odour and its causes notwithstanding, a picturesque place,
recalling Old Edinburgh in many respects, with its crowded streets, narrow
lanes and wide pends, revealing pretty peeps for the painter, and its old
houses, with the family crests of the once titled inmates above the
doorways. The old pier was then sufficient for the growing trade; the new
harbour not being formed till 1812. The present great Flemish-looking
steeple had only been built ten years when the century closed. Before its
erection, there was no public clock for the regulation of the business of
the quiet-going burgh. The march of time was indicated, to the eye, by a
quaint old dial, that had stood for eighty years near the quay, and, to the
ear, by a bell, simply hung in sight of the lieges at the top of three tall
posts near the cross, and rung at stated intervals, and on occasions of
public moment.
Into this quiet, pleasant,
old town, in the mid-winter of 1794, there walked, with sad countenance and
heavy step, a good-looking young woman, named Ann Caird. She had travelled
that day eight weary miles, from the upland village of Drumlithie, where her
parents dwelt; and she carried a burden which should only be borne under the
happy sunshine of wedded love. The want of this accounted for the slow pace
and dejected air of what should have been a happy maiden of twenty-one. She
took refuge in a house not far from the Old Tolbooth, at the end of the
pier; and soon after, on the 19th of December, gave birth to a son. This
boy, who was named John Duncan, after his father, a weaver in his mother's
village, and who was thus ushered into the world under a ban always hard,
but at those stricter times almost cruel, is the subject of this history.
His mother, as he used to
tell with pride, was "a strong, pretty woman." Bred up in the healthy
country, she could even lift with ease "a boll of barley over a riddle."
[The sieve used for corn by farmers.] She came of a robust, long-lived race,
her father surviving to the great age of 105 years. Why his parents never
married it is now impossible to say. His father, characterized by the son as
a pretty clever man and good weaver, afterwards became a soldier, perhaps on
account of this youthful folly, and he seldom saw the lad, though he took
some interest in him. The place of both parents, however, was, in most
respects, more than filled by the devoted mother, who cherished the child
with no common care The poor woman, deserted by her lover, took up house in
Stonehaven, not far from the old pier where her son had been born. She
supported herself and her boy by taking harvest in the country, at which she
was a superior hand, but chiefly, during the rest of the year, by weaving
stockings, then a staple trade with the continent, for which houses existed
in all the larger towns of the north, and gave out the worsted to be worked
at home.
Throughout life, John Duncan
had the highest respect and affection for his mother, and to her memory he
always recurred with peculiar pleasure amidst trying experiences. One of her
sons, still living, born after John had left his home, speaks of her in the
same terms of loving regard, as an unusually hardworking, honest,
affectionate woman, and economical housewife. Their combined testimony
proves her to have been a good, clever woman, strong in mind and body,
rearing her children well, and supporting her eldest son single-handed and
alone. On his death-bed, when his nurse was kindly tucking the blankets
round the old man, his heart went back once more to his mother's house in
Stonehaven, across the varied experiences of more than eighty long years;
and, in tones which showed that the fountain of tears had been opened, lie
said, "So my mother used to do to me!" His mother was always his ideal of a
tender, kindly woman.
But Stonehaven was no
unworthy place in which to be born, and possessed unusual elements to mould
her children for good. These certainly had the deepest influence on the life
of her lowly son, physically, religiously, and scientifically. Her streets
furnished a varied and interesting playground and numerous well-conditioned
playmates for the lad, when he was old enough to run about. The harbour was
there with its exciting and ever-attractive life to boys. A curious stone
dial near the edge of the pier, bearing circles and figures and points of
the compass, drew his youthful fancy, and, no doubt, silently impressed
him—for who can limit the educative force of such early associations?—with a
desire to pursue the study of dialling and produce copies of this
chronometer, as he did in after years. The old granary of the Marischalls,
which stood near it on the quay, and which, as being used for court-house
and prison, was known as the Old Tolbooth, would be regarded by even the
wildest boy with solemn awe. Its window facing the sea was gazed at with
wondering eyes, for from it, after the '45, the imprisoned Jacobite
Episcopal clergy used by stealth to baptize the infants of their flock. The
newly-finished tower of the steeple, with its great clock, erected three
years after his birth, was not far off; and the town cross that stood by its
walls, was the centre of many youthful pranks; while; a curious round
boulder half-way down the High Street, on the side path, near a heckling
shop, was the special rendezvous of the town lads.
At that time, "Bony," as
Napoleon was familiarly known amongst the people, was the terror of Europe;
and our continental wars were then in full rage, with all their heavy drain
on the national manhood and the national purse. War was the daily sigh of
our homes, the talk of our streets, and even the cry of our children in
their games. In Stonehaven, in Duncan's youth, the boys regularly played at
soldiering. They used to appoint their officers, enlist and arm their men
with wooden swords and guns, hold court-martial over, deserters, and
imprison and punish the refractory; a friend of John's, James Barclay,
spoken of in this history, being thus immured for a considerable time in a
hen-house. These mimic war-plays were entered into with remarkable zest by
the boys of that time, and, no doubt, did much to develop a patriotic spirit
and intensify the national hatred of the great continental aggressor.
Then what was grander in the
world than the liveried four-in-hand coach from Aberdeen, which daily
clattered into town, drawing an admiring crowd of urchins, and then slowly
climbed the Red Braes to the south, on its way to Edinburgh; the red-coated
guard with the post bags catching it up, by a short cut, at the top: while
the return coach from Edinburgh came rattling down them at a splendid pace,
and repeated the same pleasures?
When little Johnnie was able
to take a wider range, as he grew older, there existed in the country round
a wonderful field for developing his muscles, strengthening his nerves, and
instilling quieter and deeper lessons into his youthful heart, which, in
after years, moulded and elevated the man. There was the long, pebbly beach,
between the Cowie and the sea, to which the boys used to wade in ebb tide,
to play with the plunging waves, bathe in their waters, and seek for the
pretty pink, ribbed shell (Cyproa Europea) to be found there, a
favourite both for its beauty and for its rarity—known by the Pentland Firth
and vended there as "Groatie buckies," and called, in sacred Iona, by the
great name of St. Columba, and sold there also by the children. There were
the breezy Links, where the new town now stands, with their undulating
hollows, redolent with wild flowers and wavy with bent, the haunt of
children and cattle, where Johnnie first saw and smelled the favourites of
his life. There was the Bog Well under the Red Braes, across the Carron to
the south, to which, when of age, he went daily for water for his mother,
and where he was always sure to meet with merry groups of women and bairns
bent on the same errand; for these were the days before water-pipes were
dreamt of, and this well supplied the whole town with its famed limpid
treasures. There was also the more distant St. Kieran's Well, a good
chalybeate, with healing virtues—then in its natural wildness, but now
conserved in a granite fountain—to which he and his mother walked across the
Links, when the pressure of over-toil somewhat relented; but not during the
Sabbath rest, for in these strict times such journeyings would have been
profanation.
Beyond this, finely set
amidst its woods, was the house of Ury, the abode of that religious
enthusiast and sufferer, Robert Barclay, the moral-force Quaker apologist,
of his son the founder of new Stonehaven, and of his physical-force
grandson, the pedestrian and pugilist, to whom John's mother had probably
been nursemaid, for she always called him "my boy"—the burial-place of the
family in the grounds, called "the Howf," being then a boyish haunt. There
were also those never-failing attractions to youth, the Cowie and the Carron,
with their shady nooks and minnow pools for "gudling," where boys spent
hours together in untold bliss. There were the ruins of St. Mary's Chapel
and its churchyard, and the fishing village of Cowie, on the way to them,
where the lad watched its strange inhabitants; and where he once saw a
marriage amongst them, full of old-world customs, as he used to tell, when
the bride made her affianced swear to be true to her, by her father's house,
the fishing boat and the fish he caught. Across the Carron amidst tall
trees, there stood the quaint old Kirk of Dunnottar, the parish church of
the town, to which his worthy mother regularly took her boy, and where she
pointed out the Covenanter's Stone, which was erected for those who had
perished when descending the Dunnottar cliff from their foul prison, and at
which Sir Walter Scott first saw "Old Mortality," then engaged in renovating
it the amiable enthusiast having died when John was five years old.
Then, last to mention, but
first in youthful estimate, there were, still more distant and dangerous,
and therefore all the more attractive, the glorious "heughs" and "coves" and
"braes," the wild and wonderful cliffs, that guard the bay of Stonehaven on
both sides, and stretch away to what seemed illimitable distance—a splendid
region, rich in health, adventure, beauty, grandeur, poetry and deathless
memories to all who have had the advantage of roaming in their youth along
such wild and precipitous shores; a happy privilege which the author recalls
with gratitude, as spent on a similar coast in the neighbouring county of
Angus. This glorious education John Duncan enjoyed and profited by to the
utmost, and, to his dying day, he never wearied of talking of the thymy
braes and magnificent rocks, with their associations and stirring
adventures, around Stonehaven and Dunnottar.
Geologically, the bay of
Stonehaven is most interesting, from this amongst other facts, that it
occupies, and no doubt greatly owes its existence to, a junction between the
Silurian and the Old Red Sandstone, not far from the Kirk of Cowie. It thus
exhibits two very diverse styles of rock and scenery on its two sides—the
twisted gneiss on its northern half, and the thick-bedded conglomerate on
its southern. It is this picturesque conglomerate that forms the famous
cliffs round the Castle of Dunnottar. The scenery along the shore, with its
high precipitous crags, washed by the waves, and scooped into magnificent
headlands frowning over the deep, its isolated stacks, gloomy caverns, and
winding rock-bound bays, is unsurpassed in its way for variety, wildness and
grandeur. For boys, these contain the very essence of romance. Even the
names they possess are irresistible to youthful imagination and promise
endless adventure—the Boar Stone, the Diel's Kettle, the Fowls' Heugh, with
its countless sea birds, the Long Gallery, the rock of Dunnacair, the very
word enticing to fearlessness, the shelves of Dunnimail, famous for dulse,
and many more, equally picturesque in sound and signification. Then within
two miles of the town, protected by its almost inaccessible precipices
seawards, and its guarded portal landwards, rose the magnificent ruins of
the Castle of Dunnottar, which form one of the grandest and most striking
sea-pieces in Scotland, rich as the land is in such scenes.
This remarkable coast was the
constant haunt of John Duncan in his early years, and few surpassed him in
adventurous courage and power of scaling a cliff. As he expressed it
himself, "I had a terrible faculty o' clirnbin'. I was wonderfu'
venturesome; awfu' fine at the fit (foot) ; and fear never cam' on s me."
Dunnottar itself was the chosen scene of countless scrambles, which
strangely never issued in accident, though pursued under conditions that, to
the unaccustomed, would be gruesome and appalling. He and his companions
used to approach the castle both by sea and land, and to them it was simple
cowardice to enter by the prosaic gateway, then, as now, under lock and key.
They must climb the seemingly inaccessible cliffs near the end of the
headland, only reached by boat; or clamber in by Wallace's Hole, a small
window on the south side in the portal wall, now closed up but then open to
the venturous, by means of which the champion of his country once gallantly
wrested the castle from English hands. This loophole Johnnie was always the
first of the band to reach, when he would haul up his more timorous
companions. Tripping over the rubbish which then filled the now empty room
behind, they would range "roond and roond aboot like cats," as he said,
through the whole interior. They entered every room, explored every dungeon,
seated themselves on the topmost turrets, till they were sated with
enjoyment; and hunger, calling a halt, sent them back to town.
Though he could not then
understand the stirring history and cruel tragedies that had passed within
those crumbling, grey-lichened walls, these were glorious days, "grand
times," as John used to call them. They were more—they were an unrivalled
training of the future man. |
