Treeheads Together - A modern day adventure in fairyland, Aberfoyle

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But when Malcolm Canmore and his Anglicising queen did so much to bring Scotland into touch with its more civilised neighbour, they moved their chief seat no nearer the new border than Dunfermline. For long after Scotland had developed into a vertebrate organism, its heart beat in the geographical centre.

Its kings were crowned at Scone, Charles II. The adjacent city of Perth, with its Castle, its Cathedral, and its four monasteries, was the Winchester of Scotland, as Scone the Westminster. The early Parliaments met at Perth more often than at other towns that might suit the convenience of kings who had to be much on the move through their agitated dominion.

The honour of being the capital was not definitely taken from Perth till the murder of James I. Before the seat of government came to be fixed at Edinburgh, king and parliament are often found at Stirling, with Linlithgow for the Versailles of Scottish Royalty. Perth still held a high place, recognised by a decree of James VI. Down to the end of his reign, its Provosts were as often as not the great lords of the neighbourhood. It had a leading voice in national opinion. Some of the earliest martyrs suffered here; then here broke out the first tumult of the Reformation. Later on, it became a hot focus of Presbyterian and Covenanting zeal; and after the popular worship had been firmly established, it was around Perth that sprang up several of its sectarian offshoots.

Prince Charlie made a more dashing appearance at Perth for a few days; but when he had marched on, the douce burghers let it be seen that their hearts did not go with him. They more warmly received the Duke of Cumberland, as representing the orderly settlement that was good for trade. The Fair City, while willing to keep friends with the Tory lairds whose names have been familiar to her for centuries, cast her douce vote for prosperity and progress. Meanwhile, the blending of once hostile races had gone on faster in the centre of Scotland than at its extremities.

Where first a national government had come into being, a higher organisation of tribal life was evolved. Here, as elsewhere, civilisation proceeded by steps over which civilised philanthropy shakes its head. The Perthshire Highlands, not to speak of Strathmore, contained fertile straths and valleys that offered themselves as cheap reward for the followers and favourites of Scottish kings.

Norman, Saxon, and still farther-fetched adventurers got charters to make good by the sword against the sons of the soil. Its lords, native or fremd , lost and won at taking a hand in the general game of Scottish history, as when the abetters of Bruce turned out to have played on the right card, or again, when the murderers of James I. But, in the main, plaids did not hold out against coats of mail, so that for centuries the great lords of Perthshire have been of Lowland origin. But while those strangers rose to power and wealth upon the heather, they fell captive to its spirit, taking on the manners, sentiments, and dress of the dispossessed clans.

The Stewarts from England, the Campbells from Ireland, was it? Most remarkable is the adoption of what has come to be called the Scottish national dress, which, according to some modern critics, ought rather to be the mackintosh. There was a time when Stewart or Murray looked on the plaid as badge of a savage foeman; there would be a time when the imported Highlanders grew as proud of kilt and bagpipes as if these had come down to them straight from Adam.

All over the world have gone those badges of a race that gave them to its conquerors in exchange for its proudest blood. The cult of the tartan, revived in our own age by romantic literature and royal patronage, is an old story. But when one of those blackamoor retainers, liveried in a kilt, was sent to meet a practically-minded countryman landing from Scotland, the effect of so transmogrified a figure proved appalling.

Away from Scotland, all true Scots carry over the world an outfit of which the colours, the trimmings, and the gewgaws come from the Highlands, while the hard-wearing qualities of the stuff are rather of Lowland manufacture. Both spinning and dyeing, I maintain, have best been done in Perthshire, a county of varied aspects, which set me the example of passing to a change of metaphor. It is in this central region that a right proportion of the Saxon dough and the Celtic yeast, baked for centuries by fires of love and war, have risen into the most crusty loaf of Scottish character.

In the damp western Highlands and the cold north the baking may have been less effectual, producing a more spongy mass, not so full of nutriment, but more relished by some as a change from the stodginess of modern life. In some parts of the Lowlands, again, the dough turns out more dour and sour, not enough leavened by fermentations that leave it too leathery for all teeth. While all over Scotland there has been going on a more or less thorough interaction and coalescence of once repellent bodies, in Perthshire, I assert, the amalgamation has been most complete.

The same fusion as between Highlander and Lowlander, between Norman and Saxon, it has been the work of time to bring about between Northerner and Southerner, the process there hindered by a fixed border-line of hostile memories, of variant creeds, customs, and laws, going to keep up natural antipathies. What is as yet a mechanical mixture tends to become a chemical one, as these wandering atoms find affinities in a fresh environment; then the substance of national life should be enriched, as every generation goes on incorporating the coarse good-humour and practical temper of the plainsman, with the generous affections and mettlesome hardihood of the mountaineer.

The result as yet may be best seen in London, that crucible of blood and manners, where there are Englishmen who would fain affect to be Scots, and Scots who have forgotten all but their pride in Scotland. I met one such the other day in a train, who had his boy arrayed in a kilt, but neither of them knew what tartan it was. Where a Campbell wears the colours of a Cameron with indifference, he unconsciously continues what was begun by a Graham or a Gordon inventing a tartan for himself, and may end in plaid and tweed taking their turn of fashion with serge and broadcloth, when Tros Tyriusque are indistinguishably mixed in one name and nature.

Such is a consummation devoutly to be wished. But there are centrifugal as well as centripetal forces at work. When the fear of a foreign foe no longer hangs over us, we fall into wars of interests, of classes, of sexes; and piping times of peace breed likewise artificial injuries, useless martyrdoms, unpractical patriotisms, by which we would fain set our teeth on edge from the real sufferings of our fathers.

Idly retrospective persons find nothing better to do than to rub up old sores into an imitation of plague spots, instead of leaving them to heal and vanish in the way of nature. Some discontented spirits among my countrymen have lately been agitating for the protection of Scottish rights and sentiments: While the sovereign of the United Kingdom is bound to be of Scottish descent, and while custom fills the English archbishoprics with an apostolic succession of sons of the Covenant, there still, indeed, remains such a scandal as the Prime Ministership being occasionally open to mere Englishmen.

No school-book would sell north of the Tweed in this generation that let an English army serve a king of England. But what is this slight to the carelessness of foreign authors quoting Scott and Burns among the English poets! It is perhaps inevitable that a firm with a long title should come to be best known by the name of the prominent partner. One never could be expected to style Messrs.

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Quirk, Gammon, and Snap in full, unless by way of formal address; had it been no more than Dodson and Fogg, one might make shift at an Austria-Hungary bracketing. I confess to having lukewarm sympathy with the perfervid patriotism that is too ready to find quarrel in straws. In this kingdom we take much the same place as the Manchus in China. All over the world we go forth to prosper like that Chosen People of the old dispensation, with this difference, that we have our Sion in our own hands, to which come pilgrims from all nations.

The comparison would fit better if it allowed me to call Perthshire the Scottish land of Judah. So Penelope peoples, in their darkness, undo the work of civilising daylight. Let Bohemia rage and the states of the Balkans imagine vain things. But why should Scotland waste time and electric light on looking back too fondly to the things that are behind, while she cannot help pressing forward to the inevitable destiny before her? With the warning of Ireland at hand, some of us cry out for Home Rule and such-like retrogressions that might go to giving back, at one end of the United Kingdom, the shadow of its cloudy dignity along with the substance of its old discords.

Where is this reactionary Particularismus to stop? There are parts of Caledonia which, in its stern and wild times, were independent of each other, some that still are as different from one another in blood and speech, as most of Scotland is from England. Shall Badenoch or Buchan awake its overlaid individuality? May not Galloway and Strathclyde set up for recognition of their ex-independence?

Then why not encourage Strathbogie, the Cumbraes, the Braes of Bonny Doon, or the parish of Gandercleugh, to lament upon the fate that has made them members of one greater body? Nay, now that the clans are broken up, could they not contrive to respin their warp of local loyalty, crossing the woof of national patriotism?

I am informed of a movement for putting the kingdom of Fife in its right place before a world too apt to jest at its pretensions. These are many and serious. Of old, Fibh had kings of its own, of such immemorial antiquity that their very names, much more their portraits, are not forthcoming. Enclosed between two firths, this region makes almost an island, with the Ochils as border-line cutting it off from the rest of Scotland. Thus the Roman legions thundered by it; and its maiden independence was never violated, if we reject a scandalous suggestion as to Cupar being the Mount Graupius of Tacitus.

The kings of Scotland were much at home here, notably Malcolm Canmore, that effectual founder of the modern kingdom. If Bruce were born who knows where, he came to be buried at Dunfermline. History tells how Queen Mary was lodged at Lochleven, and how more than one King James had to be snatched away, by force or fraud, from his chosen residence in Fife.

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The dialect of Fife, mixed with that of Lothian, made the standard Court language, while Gaelic was ebbing out of the Perthshire straths. The see of the old Scottish Church was at St. The most famous national product, next to flesh and blood and whisky, is golf, whose headquarters are in the East Neuk of this choice shire. When we consider the many towns of Fife, its wealth in horn and corn, and coal and fish, its output of textile fabrics, and remember its past history, should we not allow that this and not Perthshire is truly the heart of Scotland?

It has even a Wales in Kinross, whose craving for separate status might one day raise a troublesome question. Nor does it want a classic bard to invoke for it the trumpet of fame:. Gentle reader, can you guess what standard poet I quote? Je vous le donne en cent. After this fling by the way, I fall back into my jogtrot.

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But it has to be admitted that Edward I. There being, indeed, a doubt as to how far Edward Baliol made his reign a fait accompli in Fife, some precisians propose to meet the case by treating our king locally as the second and a half Edward.

Adrian Bain (Author of Treeheads Together)

In the army, of course, it is not to be borne that the Fife contingent shall be lumped together with English forces. In future, one or more British regiments must be equipped and distinguished as Fifers. The epithet Fifeish should come into more constant use; but as misconception might arise from vulgar misuse, Fifeian may be coined as an untarnished adjective, the old one to be applied to the less admirable or more commonplace features of the county, its distilleries, railway junctions, colliery villages, east winds, and so forth, while a discrimination is to be made in quoting those qualities and achievements that have made Fife the noblest member of the greatest empire in the world, whose style shall forthwith run, at least in local acts, The Kingdom of Fife, with the adjacent kingdoms of Scotland, England, and Ireland, and the rest of the British dominions, etc.

It is long since Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, with that excellent taste which characterises her writings, expressed her opinion that the most interesting district of every country, and that which exhibits the varied beauties of natural scenery in greatest perfection, is that where the mountains sink down upon the champaign, or more level land.

The most picturesque, if not the highest hills, are also to be found in the county of Perth.

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The rivers find their way out of the mountainous region by the wildest leaps, and through the most romantic passes connecting the Highlands with the Lowlands. Above, the vegetation of a happier climate and soil is mingled with the magnificent characteristics of mountain-scenery; and woods, groves, and thickets in profusion, clothe the base of the hills, ascend up the ravines, and mingle with the precipices. It is in such favoured regions that the traveller finds what the poet Gray, or some one else, has termed, Beauty lying in the lap of Terror.

I see that certain critics accuse me of being flippant, discursive, garrulous, gossiping, everything that your gravely plodding writers are not, and they no doubt find readers to their mind. It must be confessed that as a model of style I have an eye rather on the upper waters of the Tay, with its swirls and eddies and ripples, than on its broad and placid flow by the fat Carse of Gowrie. All I can say for myself is that I keep my course amid windings and tumblings, and that my foaming shallows may sweep along the same silt as loads drumlier currents lower down.

Yet one loves to please all tastes, within reason, so for once let me try to be as steady and slow as the mill-lead at Perth, which, if all traditions be true, began as a Roman aqueduct, and so may give itself airs of classical authority. The Tay, then, is the principal river of Scotland, which discharges into the North Sea a larger volume of water than any other in Britain. The Tay has its course of miles almost entirely in Perthshire, receiving many tributaries from the mountains on either side, and thus draining a basin of some square miles. At Perth it becomes navigable for small vessels, and debouches at the thriving port of Dundee, where its estuary separates the shires of Forfar and Fife.

For further details, see any geographical work. Scots are not in the way of belittling their own advantages; but a certain Italian writer gravely comments on this statement by giving an estimate as to the depth of the Tiber at Rome, whereas he himself has seen a bare-legged boy wading the Tay above Perth bridge to pick up pebbles. If classic poets are to be trusted, yellow is the best epithet of the Tiber, while Ruskin admiringly tells us how the pools of the Tay glint brown and blue among black swirls and rippling shallows.

In the matter of climate, at all events, we are not going to let any foreigner over-brag us, for as the local poet, Alexander Glas, exclaims beside the Tay:. This bard, perhaps, was not aware that the snow lies longer on Soracte than on Kinnoull Hill; nor does he confess that for two or three months in the year the happy Caledonian swain may now and then welcome Italian ice-cream merchants; and in fair prose he ought to own his ocean breezes for east winds on this side of the country.

The city of Perth, indeed, stands hardly a score of miles back from the sea, and made a thriving port in days when it was an advantage to unload goods up-country, well out of the way of attack. Its mariners carried on not only a coasting trade, but sailed to the Hanse ports, and took a turn at fighting with their English rivals when competition would sometimes be pushed to the point of piracy. It appears that trading craft plied as far up as Scone, below which a row-boat is now apt to stick in shallow rapids. Through the international war-time flourished at Perth a notable line of Mercers, who appear as wealthy traders, magistrates, and benefactors of their native city, sometimes rising to higher posts in the state, coming to make noble alliances through which their head branch is now engrafted in the Lansdowne title.

The old staple trade of the Fair City was glove-making; its skinners became an important corporation, and tanning held out to our day, but has been overlaid by dyeing, trades that might all merge into each other. Another industry of Perth used to be shipbuilding, where, up to the end of the eighteenth century, vessels came and went by the hundred, and a smack sailed for London every few days. Perth was in the way of improving her port and deepening its approaches, when railways brought about a permanent low tide in the Tay traffic. While ships were growing larger, the Tay estuary had been silting up and narrowing as its flat shores were reclaimed into the fertile Carse of Gowrie.

This dry ground was won by inches , a name often met along Tayside, where what were once islands have become welded on to the shore. The Inches, par excellence , are the public parks above and below Perth; the Inch being its North Inch, in which the Romans are fondly believed to have hailed their Campus Martius— Parvam Trojam, simulataque magnis Pergama. The North Inch is best known to fame for the battle of the Clans in , when threescore Highlandmen let out most of their quarrelsome blood before an excited multitude, the king and court looking on from what served as a grand stand, the Gilten Arbour in the Dominican Gardens, a structure that probably stood near the present site of the Perth Academy in Rose Terrace.

There can be no doubt about the authenticity of this battle; a record is extant of making the lists for it, the number of combatants being expressly stated as sixty. But, among the pregnant confusion of Highland names, it is not easy to be sure who those champions were. We used to be taught from Tales of a Grandfather that they represented hostile confederacies called the Clan Kay and the Clan Chattan, the latter perhaps wild cats of the mountains, the former by no means to be identified with the Mackays of the north.

But the Kay and the Chattan names appear to cover one another, while the other party seems better distinguished as the Clan Quhele, in whom some see the Camerons and a hint of Loch iel , others the Macdougals, their name thus transformed by a tour de force of etymology, while also it has been conjectured that this mysterious clan did not survive its defeat, scattered and absorbed into luckier kindreds.

Adam, it seems, in this wet climate, is quite capable of being weathered down into Ay, Hay, or Kay. The name Dougal sounds in Gaelic something like Gooil , or Hooil , which Lowland writers might make a shot at as Quhele , Quhevil , Queill , Chewill , and other forms in which it appears. Their rivals in certain books are called Clachinyha , which Dr. Maclagan claims as the origin of his own name, and to illustrate the contention, presents some forty spellings of Maclagan varied through four centuries, also nearly a dozen used by the same family in the records of one generation.

Not only at home, indeed, are Scottish names apt to be transmogrified. Belize, in Honduras, is said to be a corruption of Wallace, the pirate, not the patriot; and there is a story that a Macdougal, shipwrecked of old on the Barbary coast, so much impressed himself on the natives as a santon that his tomb stood mumbling godfather to the port of Mogador.

The king sent the Earls of Dunbar and Crawford to do what justice could be done upon this outrage; and they have the credit of suggesting the settlement of an obstinate feud by picked bloodshed in the royal presence. Some writers have wasted ink on the feebleness of Robert III. As a matter of fact it is recorded that the border had peace from the caterans for long after this signal blood-letting. The early historians differ as to details. Several mention a man as missing from the Clan Quhele ranks, to fill whose place a sturdy Perth craftsman volunteered on promise of reward.

If it be true, as somewhere stated, that his posterity, the Gows, were recognised as a shoot of Clan Chattan, it may be that Harry Smith was the real Conachar, apprenticed at Perth to a trade which Highland chiefs might well see cause to patronise. Scott, however, seems romancing in putting the combatants into shirts of mail.

All the accounts agree as to two bands of next to naked Highlandmen hacking and hewing each other with swords, axes, and dirks, till of one side only ten or eleven were left sorely wounded, and of the other, one escaped or was taken prisoner, his fate being variously stated as pardon and hanging. No doubt the show furnished as much satisfaction to its public as when, sixty years ago, the German traveller, J. Kohl, found the Inch again covered with people eager to see a circus clown give bold advertisement to his company by crossing the Tay in a washing-tub drawn by four geese.

It has been supposed, by the way, that the combat of Highlanders may have been arranged partly for the amusement of a body of French knights then visiting the Scottish court, and no doubt finding it dull as well as rude. Since that slaughterous day, some real fights and many sham ones have been enacted on the Inch of Perth.

One of my first appearances in efficient arms was at the head of a column that marched on to the lower end of the Inch before more spectators than would be gathered about the arena of that clan-combat. The foe here coming into view, it behoved my company to extend in skirmishing order, covering the deployment of our column into line. So much I could do; and we found ourselves exposed in the van facing a hostile line of Dundee Highlanders who held the centre of the Inch.

But the report of what then befell is so little to our credit that I throw it into shamefaced small print. My men were delighted with this movement, which gave the effect of our winning the battle by our special prowess; and not knowing better, we went on fighting for our own hand, till we had nearly run out of ammunition. Meanwhile from our side rang out imperious bugle-calls, which made me none the wiser. There seemed something wrong here; but before I could consider what to do about it, an aide-de-camp galloped up, shepherding us with objurgations: Get out of the way!

That was not the worst of it. And already I had made a blunder of etiquette. A considerable force of regulars were present, while we, as a local body, held the place of honour. During the hours of uncertainty officers of rank kept galloping to and fro, to whom I was uncertain whether or no I should pay military compliments. I asked my colonel, who was as much at a loss as myself.

Then I consulted the staff-sergeant on whom I depended as my coach, and his advice struck me as full of wisdom: I could tell other tales of the Perthshire Volunteers in their early days, but all I will say here is that if the Territorials who have taken our place are more smart and efficient, they cannot surpass us in good-will to serve our country. To a veteran of a former generation quartered at Perth was born a son, afterwards well-known as Charles Mackay, editor and poet, and as stepfather of one of the most popular novelists of our day, whose modestly retiring disposition is so notorious that I do not mention her name.

In my youth the neighbourhood of Perth was strongly garrisoned by retired officers, some of whom belonged to the Sandemanian congregation here, an exclusive body that, like the Plymouth Brethren in England, had a curious attraction for old Indian soldiers. The Anglican form of worship has in the last generation made great way among townsmen, but it then was apt to mark either English associations or hereditary Toryism. Now, so strongly has turned the tide of ecclesiastical fashion, it is the Cathedral at whose door a string of equipages may be seen standing of a Sunday morning, and three or four English prelates officiating at the altar in the shooting season.

The English soldiers were marched to it from the other end of the town, though that empty Cathedral stood neighbour to their barracks; and thereby hangs a tale to be caught at in my reminiscent mood. One warm summer forenoon, some of the congregation may have been finding the sermon too long, when it was broken on by a stirring incident. A whispered message came to the officer of the military party. The men abruptly rose to clatter out, heedless of the pulpit.

Presently the captain sent back for his sword, and his wife turned pale before the surmising eyes of the congregation. What could be the matter? Had the French landed? Neither preacher nor people could give all their minds to the conclusion of the service. As we streamed forth, all agog with curiosity, the street showed the unusual Sabbath sight of cabs full of policemen dashing up towards what was then the General Prison for Scotland, beyond the South Inch. The excitement that followed seemed a godsend to youngsters, and perhaps to older captives of the dull Sabbath.

But, as usual, rumour exaggerated. There had been a conspiracy to break prison, which, in the case of the men, proved a fiasco; while the women, after throwing their Bibles at the chaplain as signal of revolt, got loose into a yard, but failed either to make their escape from the walls or to release the men, as had been plotted. These incidents I state with reserve, after the example of the Father of History in dealing with facts beyond his own observation.

The story that passed current was that our gallant centurion reached the scene of action in hot haste, but on beholding the enemy he marched off in high dudgeon, flatly refusing to lead his company against a mob of women. In the end, we understood, those Bacchanals were quelled by the artillery of the Fire Brigade. If all tales be true, this is not the most ignominious retreat forced upon our gallant soldiers at the hands of Scotswomen. When it came to the turn of a married man, sentenced to five hundred lashes for stealing a few potatoes to feed his family, their feelings boiled over.

Led by these pitying Amazons, the crowd broke through the ranks to rescue the sufferer, and his fellow-soldiers apparently made no stout resistance. The officers were set to flight, the unfortunate adjutant being captured, whom the women are said to have stripped and whipped on the spot as a lesson in humanity. That made the last flogging on the North Inch. Later on, soldiers would be billeted upon the townsfolk, as the militiamen were in my recollection; and their pay was so poor that, like that culprit already mentioned, they did not always prove honest guests.

Gowrie House, presented by the loyal townsfolk to the victor of Culloden, was made into an Artillery Barrack, but afterwards given back to the town to serve as its jail and county buildings in exchange for ground above the South Inch, where the General Prison came to be built. English soldiers, one supposes, are not now needed to guard Perth, its ordinary garrison a small body of the Black Watch or other local regiment.

The example of that hero warns me not to linger on the Perth Inch, but to be off up the Tay, keeping as near it as one can for parks, and for the jealously guarded banks of valuable salmon fisheries. For the first two miles there is a public walk up the right bank to the Almond mouth. On the opposite side, hidden in lordly foliage, lies Scone Palace and the site of the old Pictish capital. The Scot is so notoriously modest that English example has often led him to mishandle his own names: To modern Scone we could come on that side by a tramway which is turning this goodly village into a suburb of Perth.

At the gates of great proprietors, at all events, a Scottish village usually compares well with an English one in point of comfort if not of picturesqueness. The churches of Scotland make no such points of dignity, as a rule; but their old austerity now often becomes relaxed by more ambitious architecture of Anglican-aping days; and here and there has been spared some stout hull that weathered the Reformation storms. One feature of a northern parish seems past praying for.

As a child I remember my nurse, and she was an Englishwoman, pointing out to me for reprobation what seemed the Popish sacrilege of a wreath laid upon a grave. Such Protestant superstition has been broken down in the last half-century. Large towns, even so long ago, had more or less ornamentally laid-out cemeteries, which were allowed to be the goal of a Sabbath walk. But still, in out-of-the-way parts, the disposition is not to mantle the king of terrors in any sentimental disguise; and weeds may be more common than flowers about tombstones that give lessons of warning rather than of consolation.

But Scone, in its semi-urbanity, is no fair specimen of a Scottish village, nor are we yet in the Highlands, though hints of them peep to view as we pass up towards the blue Grampian barrier.

But these meads of Luncarty were once dyed red rather than white, when the Danes had almost overcome a Scottish king, till a peasant named Hay, with his two sons, held a narrow pass so well with his ploughshare that the Vikings in turn were put to flight by those rustic champions, claimed as ancestors for the House of Errol.

Be this a fable or no, when the bleach-field came to be laid out, several tumuli were opened containing skeletons and weapons. Should I be spared another score of years or so, I could tell some queer tales about more than one late laird in this nook, whose memory at present must rest in the truce de mortuis. As for Lady Macbeth, does not Shakespeare himself admit evidence to justify a soft-hearted verdict of temporary insanity?

But the great name hereabouts in the old days was the Drummonds, lords of Stobhall on the Tay, their principal residence till they built a more lordly one in Strathearn. A century later, when the family had moved their main seat to Drummond Castle, another connection with royalty again brought about a mysterious crime. By unknown hands, Margaret Drummond and her two sisters were poisoned at Drummond Castle, and they lie beneath three slabs of blue marble in Dunblane Cathedral.

A daughter of this doubtful union was married successively to the Earl of Huntly, the Duke of Albany, and to a kinsman of her own; then her infusion of Stuart blood has passed into at least a score of Scottish noble families. The strain of royal descent was reinforced when the head of the Drummond house married a daughter of this lady by the Stuart Duke of Albany. Supported by a pension from a more fortunate kinsman, he lived latterly in seclusion at Kew, and was buried there a few years ago, his life shadowed by a painful tragedy that left his house without a direct heir to its pride and its poverty.

His home was literally a cottage, a striking contrast to the glories of Drummond Castle; but to friendly neighbours, who respected his misfortunes, he could humorously boast of being by rights a duke in two countries. The poor youth was taken out a corpse; then too late came lifelong repentance to his resentful sweetheart—. Above Cargill, the river is spanned by the Caledonian railway; then on the left bank comes in the Isla leading up to Blairgowrie, behind which opens one of the great passes into the Highlands.

The Highland line cuts across this elbow bend to pass opposite Caputh, reached by a floating bridge that looks safer than that coble of Cargill. In Bonnie Scotland I could not but speak of the grounds of Murthly, with their show of ambitious structures; but I am not sure if I did justice to the gardens and miles of magnificent avenues, that, like those of Meikleour and Ballathie lower down, and of Dunkeld above, might call a blush to the cheek of Dr.

From near Murthly station one may walk for two and a half straight miles on a grass ride bordered by coniferous trees, bringing us down to the Dunkeld road, beyond Bankfoot, a highway which has taken care not to follow the vagaries of the river. It is only fourteen miles to Dunkeld from Perth, whence houses on the Grampian slope may be made out on a clear day. Add to Wish List. This page works best with JavaScript. Disabling it will result in some disabled or missing features. You can still see all customer reviews for the product. Top-rated Most recent Top-rated. All reviewers Verified purchase only All reviewers All stars 5 star only 4 star only 3 star only 2 star only 1 star only All positive All critical All stars All formats Format: There was a problem filtering reviews right now.