Cramond Island, almost opposite Inchcolm, hugs the other shore, and there is a road across the sands to its little farmhouse at low tide; while in the mid-channel there are many rocky islets, some of them the chosen resorts of cormorants and other sea birds. Further down, half-way between Leith Pier and Kirkcaldy Bay, Inchkeith stretches its length for nearly a mile across the Firth. Inchkeith, also, has harboured anchorites and stood sieges; and there are many curious legends connected with its coves and caves. But its most prominent feature is now the white lighthouse perched upon its highest crest; and barely visible to the eye are the powerful batteries that sweep, on the one side, Leith Roads, and on the other side the North Channel, between the island and Pettycur Point, where also great guns are mounted for the defence of the Forth. Then a long way farther out, at the very entrance to the Firth, and visible only in clear weather and easterly wind, runs the long rock wall of the May Island. In other days the May was a great resort of pilgrims, who held it a merit to reach a place so difficult of access, and barren women especially found a blessing in drinking from the well that had refreshed St. Fillan and St. Adrian. There was a religious house here connected with the Priory of Pittenweem on the adjacent Fife coast, but the monks found it by-and-bye most convenient to reside on shore. Though the light of faith has gone out, another light—a guide to the commerce entering the Firth—has been kept burning upon the May for two centuries and a half. Now its only residents are the lighthouse-men and their families, and its only regular visitors are myriads of sea-fowl.
The Carr Rock and Fidra Island lights mark, with the May, the entrance to the Firth; and scattered along the East Lothian coast, from Fidra eastwards, are numerous little islands, “salt and bare.” But none of them have the fame or the aspect of the “Bass.” This huge mass of rock, heaved up by some convulsion of nature, like North Berwick Law and other great bluffs on shore, presents seawards its precipitous cliff, rising sheer to a height of 400 feet, while towards the land it shows a green slope descending steeply to the landing-place and the remains of its old prison castle. The crevices of the rocks are filled with the nests of the solan-goose and other sea-fowl, and the air around is alive with their cries and the sweep of their wings. But otherwise it is impossible to imagine a spot with the aspect of grim isolation more thoroughly impressed upon it. St. Baldred is said to have lived and died on the Bass Rock; but it came most conspicuously forward in history when it was made the prison of the Covenanters, charged with no other offence than that of following their consciences against the will of the King; and afterwards, when its Jacobite garrison held out for years after every other place in the kingdom had submitted to William of Orange.
But on the way from Inchcolm to the Bass, what a marvellous series of noble land and sea pieces, of famous or hallowed sites, we have passed! It were hard to say whether scenic beauty and historical associations cluster more closely upon the shores of the Firth, or upon the surrounding amphitheatre of hills. In the profile of the hills of Fife, the broad-shouldered Lomonds, with their double or triple heads, overtop all—the East Lomond looking down upon the ruins of the old royal hunting seat of Falkland, the scene of Rothesay’s cruel pangs, and the western heights upon Loch Leven and the Island Castle, whence Mary made her romantic escape. More in the foreground are Dunearn, crowded by the remains of a Pictish fort, and the steep, rugged front of the Binn of Burntisland, overhanging the town of that name. Rossend Castle—a favourite residence of the Queen of Scots, where took place the incident that cost the enamoured French poet Chastelard his life—fronts the sea at the west end of Burntisland harbour; and to the east, behind a beautiful sweep of sand and “links,” rises the cliff at which an evil fate overtook Alexander III. and Scotland.
PORTOBELLO.
Beyond Pettycur, and the high ground of Grange, once the home of that famous champion, Kirkcaldy of Grange, the wide curve of Kirkcaldy Bay opens up. The old burgh of Kinghorn is at one extremity, and the still more ancient town of Dysart at the other; and the middle foreground is largely occupied by the houses and shipping of the “Lang Toun.” The very names of Kirkcaldy (“Kirk of the Culdees”) and of Dysart (“Desertum”) point to the antiquity and the sanctity of the origin of places that to this day are strongly “Churchy.” The grotesque folk-tale relates that the devil was “buried in Kirkcaldy,” and that his complaint that “his taes were cauld” led the good-natured inhabitants to build house to house, until now the town, with the villages connected, stretches some four miles in a straight line. The story may have had its origin in some of the apostolic doings of St. Serf, who had for a time his “desert” in one of the caves in the red cliffs at Dysart; or else in some magic feat of the wizard Michael Scott—the friend of Dante and Boccaccio—whose weird tower of Balwearie is an uncanny neighbour of the “Lang Toun.” The ruins, close by the shore, of Seafield Tower and of Ravenscraig Castle—the latter the home of the line of “high St. Clair,” and of the “lovely Rosabelle”—are now strangely backed by floor-cloth factories.
KIRKCALDY, FROM THE SOUTH-EAST.
Kirkcaldy has, however, other and even better things to be proud of; for here Adam Smith was born; here Edward Irving taught and preached, with Thomas Carlyle, the dominie of a competing school, as his friend and companion on excursions to Inchkeith, and to quaint nooks of the Fife coast. The author of “Sartor Resartus” had kindly recollections of the folks of the “Kingdom”—“good old Scotch in all their works and ways;” and with strong unerring touches brings before us their “ancient little burghs and sea villages, with their poor little havens, salt-pans, and weather-beaten bits of Cyclopean breakwaters, and rude innocent machineries.”
Portentous for length is the mere list of these surf-washed Fife towns—beloved of wandering artists and haunted by memories and traditions of the olden time—that are sprinkled along the coast eastward. Mention cannot be avoided of Wemyss, Easter and Wester, with their caves and coal-pits rendering upon the sea, and their castles, old and new; of tumbledown Methil and the “ancient and fish-like flavour” of Buckhaven; of Leven and Lundin, their Druidical stones and stretches of breezy links, the delight of golfers; of Largo, where the Law looks down upon “Largo Bay” and its brown-sailed fishing boats, upon the cottage of “Auld Robin Gray,” and upon the birthplace of the famous Scottish admiral, Sir Andrew Wood, and of Alexander Selkirk, the “original” Robinson Crusoe; of Elie, most delightful of East Coast watering-places; of St. Monance and its picturesque old church and harbour and ruined tower; of Pittenweem and the remains of its priory, on the site of St. Fillan’s cell; of Anstruther, Easter and Wester, the scene of “Anster Fair,” and the home of Maggie Lauder; of Cellardyke, Kilrenny, and, quietest and remotest of them all, “the weel-aired ancient toun o’ Crail,” where Knox preached and Archbishop Sharp was “placed,” situated close by Fife Ness, with its wind-twisted bents, its caves, and traces of Danish camps and forgotten fights.
The smell and the sound of the sea are about all these Fife burghs and fishing villages, and not less saturated with romance and history are the old-fashioned mansion-houses of the lairds of the East Neuk, that seek shelter in every fold of the land. For Fife was the true