Part 1 (1/2)
Chronicles of Strathearn.
by Various.
PREFACE
This book has been written in connection with a Bazaar held in Crieff in the month of August, 1896, for the better endowment of the Parishes of ARDOCH, CRIEFF WEST, GLENDEVON, and MONZIE. The Editorial Committee venture to hope that the contents will be of some interest to the dwellers in Strathearn, especially those within the bounds of the Presbytery of Auchterarder. The warm thanks of the promoters of the Bazaar are due to the ladies and gentlemen who composed the various Committees. To them, as representing many hearty sympathisers and willing workers, the ”CHRONICLES OF STRATHEARN” is respectfully dedicated.
In name of the Editorial Committee,
JOHN HUNTER, M.A., CRIEFF.
HUGH M. JAMIESON, MONZIE.
INTRODUCTION
THE OPENING UP OF STRATHEARN
By Rev. JOHN HUNTER, M.A., Crieff
Quite recently it was said to me by a man who had been holiday-making in Switzerland, that he greatly missed the Alps in every home landscape.
The remark was made on the Knock of Crieff, one beautiful afternoon in the late autumn, when the sun was setting and the after-glow lay like a purple semi-transparent mist all along Glenartney from Ben Ledi to Comrie. I felt rich enough in the enjoyment of the surpa.s.sing loveliness of our own Strath to say ”Laich in”--(I would not hurt any person's feelings for the world)--”Plague take your Alps, with their sky-sc.r.a.ping ridges and peaks and winding sheets of snow,--we don't want them here; they would simply spoil a scene like that before us.” I don't know, and may never know, the meaning my companion read into my silence. Having shortly before made the frank confession that I had never seen the Alps, he may have intended to excite envious feelings within me, and imagined he had succeeded. But I can deny the fact with a good conscience, and until some benevolent person shall give me the opportunity of making a comparison between home and foreign landscapes, I shall continue to a.s.sert--happy in my ignorance, it may be, but still happy--that there is no fairer prospect upon earth than the Strath of Earn from the Knock of Crieff. ”Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise.”
Let me adventure to describe it. Right opposite to the south-west is Turleum--rising to the height of 1300 feet--the highest hill in Scotland wooded to the top, as our local boast was--shorn of its beauty somewhat in recent years, but, although bare, still picturesque enough with its comb of st.u.r.dy fir-trees, survivors from the destructive gale of November, 1893. To the right of it, and running due west, is the pa.s.s into the misty hill country by Comrie and St Fillans--the glen of Bonnie Kilmeny and Dunira. Midway between us and the mouth of the pa.s.s is a miniature Turleum--Tomachastel to wit, the site of the old Castle of the Earn, famous in the days when the Celtic Earls of Strathearn were a power in the land. Lovers of the old ways were these proud and wily Earls--fiercely impatient of the incoming Saxon customs which found favour at the Court of Malcolm Canmore and his sons--genuinely pious men, too, in some instances--(did not Earl Gilbert found or endow Inchaffray, so that ma.s.ses might be said for his soul?)--of a keen courage as with Earl Malise, who at the Battle of the Standard dared his mail-clad fellows--the barons of King David--to show themselves a single foot in advance of his naked breast. Right worthy and most n.o.ble men they were in their n.o.blest--they were not all so--cherishers of the national spirit in the dreary times that followed upon the death of Alexander III. at Kinghorn, like the one who gave a fair daughter of the house and land in tocher to the son of Sir Andrew Moray, patriot and friend of Wallace, in whom the Morays of Abercairny find their origin. Such were the men; and over there on Tomachastel was their home--a place famous then, and very noticeable still, with its gleaming memorial obelisk to ”oor Davie” of Ferntower, the hardy soldier who overcame the fierce Tippoo Sahib at Seringapatam. Beyond lie the Aberuchill Hills, with the flat pyramidal face of Ben Voirlich filling up a gap, and sending its roots, on one side, down into ”lone Glenartney's hazel shade,” and, on the other, into Loch Earn--sixteen miles away. Further off, and only to be seen on rare days, when the sun's rays are dancing to be dry after rain, are st.u.r.dy, broad-shouldered Benmore, and slender, graceful Binnein, the twin guardians of the enchanted region beyond, where Beauty lies in the lap of Terror, and the Atlantic surf sings lullaby. There are the Monzievaird hills to the right, rising in Benchonzie to the height of 3048 feet, and to something under this figure in the Cairngorm or Blue Craig, upon which you see the stone-heap of Cainnechin--memorial, as it is said, of a battle fought within what are now the policies of Ochtertyre, and as the result of which Malcolm II. came to the throne of Scotia, having defeated and slain his rival Kenneth Duff or Don--Kenneth, the swarthy--”at a place where two valleys meet.” Many battles have been fought out in the Strath, for it must always have been a rich prize; but this one has a special historical interest, inasmuch as it connects us with one of the great tragedies in our annals, in which the genius of Shakespeare found material for one of his masterly delineations of the strange workings of human pa.s.sion. It is said that Fraoch, wife of Macbeth Maormor of Moray, had a good claim to the throne as the grand-daughter of this Kenneth Duff, and, prompted by ambition and revenge, instigated her husband to the murder of his Sovereign and guest--the gracious Duncan, grandson of Malcolm II., at Bothgowan, near Elgin. Loch Turret lies in the gorge that separates Benchonrie from the Blue Craig. It is likely enough that the descendants of the wild fowl that Robert Burns scared on the occasion of his visit to Ochtertyre still nest and pair in the solitude.
To the left of Turleum is a wider expanse, that carries the eye to the Moor of Orchill, which overlooks the plain of Ardoch--the Lindum of the Romans--traditional scene of the battle of Mons Grampus. Some miles away Stirling finds shelter under its rock,--not visible to us, however, where we stand, and only audible across the intervening twenty-two miles when birthday and other honours are paid to Royalty.
The Ochil range--memorial of fierce volcanic action when the lower old red sandstone was being deposited in the inland lake which stretched from east to west across the Lowlands of Scotland, and away southward without a break to the southern uplands, close to the border of England;--this Ochil range, which means high ground, as Glenogle means high glen, bounds our view to the south-east. It has no towering peaks, but Bencleuch and its neighbour, King Seat, command magnificent panoramic views to north and south from an elevation of 2000 feet. The gap before us is Gleneagles,--Glen-eccles--Kirk glen--one of the pa.s.ses into the Lowlands of Fife and Kinross, by which, it may be, Agricola found his way into Strathearn after the conquest of Fife. In the very heart of the Ochils its name changes from Gleneagles to Glendevon. Here again we are upon cla.s.sic ground--in the vale of the clear winding Devon, which more than any other stream recalls Yarrow with its hills green to the top and its pastoral melancholy. And let me note the fact that here, too, is the tiniest and daintiest parish church in Scotland--the outpost of the Presbytery of Auchterarder in this direction.
Between us and the gap, but much nearer the gap, is a bit of rising ground, running eastward almost parallel with the Ochils, with a downward slope from west to east, upon which may be seen, if the atmosphere is clear, smoking chimneys and a faint ruddy hue, as if with the memory of tiles now discarded for the prosaic if more permanent roofing slate.
That is the ”lang toon” of Auchterarder, climbing up the slope somewhat after the fas.h.i.+on of the Canongate and High Street of Edinburgh, not so conspicuously or hurriedly, however, as if aware that there was no Castle Rock from which to view the fertile Strath below. An ancient place, truly, pedigreed, but by no means penniless, the Presbytery seat, famous in ecclesiastical annals for its creed, crotchets, and conflicts; resonant, too, in profane history for its fifty drawbridges--the gift of the imagination and pawky Scotch humour of George Buchanan, Latinist, publicist, and tutor to that high and mighty Prince, the British Solomon, James I. of England and VI. of Scotland. The drawbridges are no more, for the ”lang toon” is a burgh now, with a douce Provost of its own, and Bailies, and such like novel things and persons. But this we cannot tell from our present standpoint, and we might easily persuade ourselves this afternoon that Auchterarder has suffered no sea change, were it not that every now and again the columns of our local newspaper foam under the rage of its munic.i.p.al contendings.
In the far east, the Strath seems to be shut off by the Moncrieffe Hill--wooded still, as in the days when it was first named. But the Earn slips between this seeming obstacle and the spurs of the Ochils, making such haste as it can through ca.r.s.e-like land to join the lordly Tay hard by Abernethy--the ancient capital of the Southern Picts--the centre of missionary enterprise, when darkness was thick upon the land after Ninian had died at Whithorn, on the Solway, and before Columba had set foot upon Iona. The valley at our feet, the limits of which I have attempted to mark off, is Strathearn--a right n.o.ble expanse of fertile soil, richly wooded, abundantly watered, dotted over with villages and guardian Parish Churches, like that of Muthill; bright with Castles that have left their names in history, and with mansion-houses of hardly less fame, that gleam from among their ancestral trees--a Strath that may be fitly characterised as the Scottish Esdraelon, in which many things have happened, and many men have been well worthy of being held in remembrance.
I had intended in this paper to give an account of some early inroads into Strathearn, but the exigencies of s.p.a.ce have determined for me that I can deal with only one--the earliest of all--the Roman invasion. I should have liked to have told the story of the invasion by Egfrid of Northumbria, which ended so disastrously for him at Nechtansmere--most likely Dunnichen, in Forfars.h.i.+re, in the year 685 A.D., and of which it may well be that we have a solitary trace in the name Abercairny--plainly identical with Abercornig--Abercorn in the Lothians--where the Angles founded a monastery under Abbot Trumuini, who, being engaged in Strathearn advocating the adoption of the Roman in opposition to the prevalent Columban cult, had to beat a hasty retreat beyond the Forth when disaster came to Egfrid. The larger subject would have included also the invasion by Siward, Earl of Northumberland, in support of the claims of Prince Malcolm, afterwards Malcolm Canmore, in opposition to Macbeth, the usurper, as he is commonly, perhaps unfairly, called. The first stage of the inroad ended with an encounter at Tula Amon--at the junction of the Tay and the Almond, near Perth. The result was not decisive, for it would seem that for a little while Macbeth kept possession of the country north of the Forth, being especially strong in Fife, where he had powerful family connections and friends in the Culdee brotherhood at Lochleven, while Malcolm reigned in the Lothians. And a little later, in connection with the complications into which Malcolm was forced through his fortunate marriage with Margaret, sister of the Atheling, we have traces--somewhat indistinct, truly, but still historical--of an inroad by the grim conqueror of England--William, and of a meeting between him and Malcolm at Forteviot. All this might have proved instructive in detailed exposition, but I must content myself with this condensed reference. My subject is, therefore, the earliest historical inroad into Strathearn--the Roman inroad, which I have called, in the heading of this paper, the Opening Up of Strathearn.
Everybody knows that Julius Caesar set foot in Britain and conducted a campaign against the native tribes in 55-54 B.C. He made no permanent impression. But successive expeditions were sent out, and the tide of conquest flowed further and further east and west and north till it reached the Solway. The details of the conflict do not concern us here.
But it would be unpardonable to omit mentioning Boadicea, Queen of the Iceni, in the East, and of Caractacus, leader of the Silures, in the West, both of whom offered strenuous opposition to the Roman advance.
The powerful tribe of the Brigantes, who possessed the country between the Humber and the Solway, made a stout defence in the North, but by the year 70 A.D. the Roman province was coterminous with the present southern boundary of Scotland. It was now that the Romans heard the name of a new tribe--the Caledonian Britons, who, according to report, lived upon fish and milk, clearly indicating a less advanced stage of civilisation than that of the tribes they had encountered hitherto. The unexplored territory in which they dwelt was vaguely called Thule. Tacitus, the historian, and son-in-law of Julius Agricola--the discoverer of Strathearn--imagined it to be an island formed by the meeting of the Firths of Forth and Clyde. But the time was now come when more accurate information was to be obtained concerning Caledonia and its inhabitants.
Some external characteristics had been noted. The Caledonians were described as Caerulei, from the green colour with which they stained their bodies. It was also said that they fought with chariots like the Britons of the interior, whom Caesar heard of 125 years before.
Julius Agricola was the man who first brought the Caledonians within the ken of distinct history. He came to Britain in 78 A.D. His first campaign was on the Welsh border, his second in the territory of some outlying Brigantian tribes along the northern sh.o.r.es of the Solway.
These were the Selgovae, who occupied what is now the county of Dumfries, and the Novantes further to the west in the modern counties of Kirkcudbright and Wigton. To the north of these lay the great nation of the d.a.m.nonii--of the same stock as those who occupied Devons.h.i.+re in the south of England. They held extensive territories in the centre of Scotland, including the counties of Ayr, Lanark, Renfrew, south of the Firths of Forth and Clyde, and, north of these estuaries, the counties of Dumbarton and Stirling and the districts of Menteith, Stratherne, and Forthreve, or the western half of the peninsula of Fife. They were the ”novae gentes,” or new nations, whose territories Agricola ravaged as far as the ”Tavaus,” or Tay, in his third campaign. They were somewhat civilised, having towns, of which we know the names of six--three lying south of and three north of the Firths. The chief of the southern towns was Coria--Carstairs, near Lanark, on the Clyde. North of the Forth there were Alauna, where the Allan joins the Forth; Lindum--that is Ardoch, at our own doors; and Victoria, in Fife, situated on a small lake. The lake has disappeared, but the name Loch.o.r.e remains, and is otherwise famous than as a town of the d.a.m.nonii. The natural division line between the Selgovae, Novantes, and d.a.m.nonii was the hilly country which separates the waters that flow north from those that find their way into the Solway--the Ituna Aestuarium, as its name then was. Crossing this mountain barrier, Agricola struck into the valley of the Clyde, pa.s.sed with his legions through Lanarks.h.i.+re and Stirlings.h.i.+re, then by the fords of the Forth and the Vale of the Allan into Strathearn, thence onward to the Tay. There was an alternative route. A fleet accompanied his movements. He might have crossed the Firth of Forth--the Bodotria Aestuarium--and penetrated through Fife to the Tay. But Tacitus usually mentions the crossing of estuaries, and he omits it in this case.
Besides, he states that the natives on the north sh.o.r.e of the Forth were new to him in the fifth campaign.
It was, therefore, in the year 80 A.D., during his third campaign, that Agricola entered Strathearn by way of Alauna. He did not effect a permanent conquest. His operations rather resembled a reconnaisance in force. But he meant serious business. He planted forts in commanding situations, choosing so wisely, from a strategic point of view, that not one of them was ever taken or surrendered. They were placed so as to command the princ.i.p.al pa.s.ses into the Highlands. They form a ring-fence round the territory hastily overrun by Agricola in this third campaign.
Beginning in the west with Bochastle, at the Pa.s.s of Leny, near Callander, we come successively to Dalginross, at Comrie; Fendoch, at the mouth of the Sma' Glen; the camp at the junction of the Almond and the Tay; and, Ardargie, in the parish of Forgandenny, on the River May, commanding an extensive prospect of the Ochils, and along the course of the road from the Tay to the great camp at Ardoch. Here was evidently the base of operations, with accommodation, if need arose, for the entire Roman army in Scotland.
Having thus viewed the land and pegged out his claim by means of forts, Agricola returned to winter quarters. In the following summer--the summer of 81 A.D., he made no forward movement. But he was meditating a great enterprise--no less an enterprise than to penetrate beyond the Tay and break the power of the Caledonians in their remote fastnesses. It behoved him to be cautious, so he constructed the chain of forts which afterwards became the Wall of Antonine--from Borrowstonness, on the Forth, to Old Kilpatrick, on the Clyde. Meantime he was laying his plans with admirable foresight. He entrusted the forts in Strathearn to the courage of their slender garrisons, and the issue proved that he could do so safely. But there was unexplored territory westward and eastward.