On the other side of the Dee is Lunphanan parish, in the “wood” of which Macbeth—according to Wyntoun, though not according to Shakespeare—met his death. His “cairn” is still to be seen on a bare hill in this district, though another tradition tells us that his dust mingles with the dust of “gracious Duncan” in the sacred soil of Iona. The Dee, now leaving its native county, flows for a few miles through the Mearns or Kincardineshire. It returns to Aberdeenshire in the parish of Drumoak, forming for the remaining fourteen miles of its course the boundary between the two counties.
ABERDEEN.
It is here we come across the most interesting historical memory connected with Deeside, for it is a memory of Queen Mary. On the south side of the Hill of Fare there is a hollow, where the battle of Corrichie was fought in 1562. I do not wish to enter into the history of that troubled time. Suffice it to say that the Earl of Huntly, chief of the Gordons, and head of the Catholics, was intriguing to secure the power which Murray was determined he should not have. The Queen was with Murray, though her heart, they said, was with the Gordons. Anyhow, she dashed northward gaily enough on a horse that would have thrown an ordinary rider. Murray’s diplomacy forced the Gordons into a position of open hostility, and his superior generalship easily secured him the victory at Corrichie. The old Earl of Huntly was taken, it seemed, unhurt, but he suddenly fell down dead—heart-broken at the ruin of himself and his house, said some; crushed by the weight of his armour, said others. They took the body to the Tolbooth in Aberdeen. Knox tells us that the Countess had consulted a witch before the fight, and was comforted by the assurance that her husband would lie unwounded that night in the Tolbooth. The remains, embalmed in some rude fashion, were carried to Edinburgh; for a strange ceremony yet remained ere the Gordon lands were divided among the victors. A Parliament in due time met in Holyrood, and the dead man was brought before his peers to answer for his treasons. A mere formality, perhaps, but an awfully gruesome one. His attainder, and that of his family, together with the forfeiture of his lands, was then pronounced. The battle was a great triumph for the Protestant lords; even the sneering, sceptical Maitland, says Knox, with one of those direct, forcible touches of his, “remembered that there was a God in heaven.” There was one who looked on the matter with other eyes. “The Queen took no pleasure in the victory, and gloomed at the messenger who told of it.” Indeed, there was a tragedy within this tragedy. Among the prisoners taken at Corrichie was Sir John Gordon, Huntly’s second son, “a comely young gentleman,” wild and daring, and, though then an outlaw, one who had ventured to hope for the Queen’s hand. It was whispered that she was not unfavourable to him; some ventured to say “she loved him entirely.” For such a man there was but one fate possible, and that was death. He was executed in the market-place of Aberdeen. Murray looked on at the death of his foe with that inscrutable calm which he preserved in victory and defeat—at his own death, as well as at the death of others. The Queen, too, was forced to be there. Before the axe fell, Gordon professed his unalterable devotion to her. Her presence, he said, was a solace to him, though she had brought him to destruction. The sight was too fearful for Mary, who, in a deadly swoon, was carried to her chamber. Even in her strange life-story there is nothing more terrible. Fotheringay itself is not so tragic. The last four miles of our well-nigh eighty miles’ journey are, as noted, on the border of Aberdeen and Kincardine. Here the river enjoys a peaceful old age, after the wild turmoil of its youth. The water, still beautifully clear, moves placidly along amidst rich meadows; the near hills are low, with soft rounded summits. The dwellings of men give a cheerfulness to the scene. It is the very perfection of pastoral landscape. And then, at last, we come to Aberdeen and the sea. But on the wonders of that famous town I cannot here enter. Suffice it to say that our record of the Highland Dee is finished.
Francis Watt.
BRIDGE OF TAY, KENMORE.
THE TAY.
The Tiber and the Tay—History and Legend—Perthshire and the Tay—The Moor of Rannoch—Blair—Pitlochrie—Killin—Kenmore—The Lyon—The “Rock of Weem”—The “Birks” of Aberfeldy—Dunkeld and Birnam—Invertuthil—The Loch of Clunie—The Isla—Strathmore—Dunsinane Hill—Scone and the Ruthvens—Perth—The Views from Moncrieffe and Kinnoull—Strathearn and the Carse of Gowrie—Dundee—The Tay Bridge, New and Old—View from the “Law”—“Men of Blood” and Men of Business.
“Behold the Tiber!” said the conquering Roman, when from one of the many ’vantage-grounds commanding the noble stream that sweeps past Perth, the Imperial eagles first saw as fair a scene as they had yet reached in their flight. The ardent lovers of the river—meaning all who know its banks well—have ever since felt, with Scott, half flattered by the traditional compliment, half scornful of the comparison of the puny and “drumlie” Roman stream with the broad, clear, and brimming Tay—the dusty Campus Martius with the green “Inches” of Perth—the featureless and desolate Campagna with the glorious stretch of hill and plain, water and woodland, overlooked from Kinnoull Hill or the “Wicks of Baiglie.”
It is true that when this pioneer of countless hosts of Southern invaders and sightseers came hither, to admire and covet, the Tay flowed through a savage and shaggy land. There might have been a handful of the skin or wicker-work wigwams of the “dwellers in the forest” on the site of Perth, or at Forteviot or Abernethy, afterwards the capitals of the Picts, and a sprinkling of Caledonian coracles on the neighbouring waters. But if Perthshire and the Tay had a history before the coming of Agricola and the building of the lines of Roman roads and stations that converged upon their great camp, dedicated to Mars, near the meeting-place of this prince of Scottish streams with the tributary waters of the Almond and the Earn, it is utterly lost in the mists of antiquity.
History of the most stirring kind the Tay has known enough of since. Every glen and hillside is thronged with memories and legends of the days of romance, which, in Perthshire and on the banks of the Tay, came to an end only about a century ago, when some of the Jacobite lairds were still in exile for being “out” in the ’45, and had not utterly given up hope of the “lost cause.” Every old castle and little township has played its part in the strange, eventful drama of the national history; and by their record, not less than by its position, Perthshire can lay claim to be the heart, and the Tay to be the heart’s blood, of the northern kingdom.
Perthshire is the Tay, almost as truly as Egypt is the Nile. It is the case that some of the head-waters of this many-fountained stream rise in other counties—that its furthest, if not its most important, source is in the desolate Moor of Rannoch—“a world before chaos,” crudely compounded of bog and rock, where Loch Lydoch trails its black and sinuous length out of Argyllshire into Perth; that, further north, Loch Ericht, straight as a sword-blade, thrusts its sharper end miles deep into the mountains of Laggan, in Inverness-shire, hiding, as tradition tells us, the ruins of submerged fields and houses under its gleaming surface; and that the Isla draws from Forfarshire that portion of its waters which murmurs under the haunted old walls of Airlie and Glamis. True, also, a choice and lovely portion of Perthshire—many deem it the choicest and loveliest of all—drains through the Trossachs to the Forth; and that the Tay itself, after it has ceased to be a river, and has become an arm of the sea, overpasses the bounds of the “central county,” and meets the ocean between the Braes of Angus and the hills of Fife—between the clustering