Unless one has a few days to spare that cannot well be better spent than in exploring Glen Devon and the nooks of the Ochils, he can only glance at the charming wooded valley and blue inviting heights as he follows the windings of the Forth, past the flat green “inches” of Tullibody and Alloa, under the North British Railway Bridge crossing the river between these two islands, to the busy town of Alloa.
CULROSS, FROM THE PIER. / CULROSS ABBEY.
More than Alloa itself, with its fame for the brewing of ale, and signs of active shipping and manufacturing trade, the eye will be attracted by Alloa Tower and Park, now the seat of the Earl of Mar and Kellie; for here once ruled the old line of the Erskines, Earls of Mar; here Queen Mary paid repeated visits, sailing up the Forth to meet Darnley, under the conduct of Bothwell as High Admiral; and here her son, King James, spent part of his boyhood, under the eye of the Regent Mar and the strict disciplinary rod of George Buchanan.
Below Alloa the river straightens and widens, taking more and more the character of an estuary. One should not miss noting the scattered houses of the old town of Clackmannan, scrambling up the slope to its church and the ancient tower of the Bruces. Clackmannan is the place which Aytoun’s recluse thought of selecting for rural retirement, because, “though he had often heard of it, he had never heard of anybody who had been there.” It is more out of the world than ever, now that county business has flitted to Alloa. Its visage is not, however, so forlorn as that of Kincardine-on-Forth, the pier of which we now approach; for Kincardine has plainly seen better days, and has little expectation of seeing their return. It was once a busy shipbuilding and shipowning port; and close by was distilled the famous Kilbagie whisky, by which the tinkler in the “Jolly Beggars” swore. Now there is no Kilbagie, and no shipping business to speak of; and Kincardine is a “dead-and-alive” place, and more dead than alive. There are many places like it all along the shores of the Forth—places favoured by special times and special circumstances of trade, which has since drifted or been drawn elsewhere.
The massive grey ruins of Tulliallan Castle are in the woods close behind Kincardine. This also was once a stronghold of the Bruces—in fact, it is “Bruce Country” all the way along this northern shore of the Forth, until we come to the last constriction of the estuary, over which the great railway bridge is being thrown at Queensferry. The spidery red limbs of this new giant bestriding the sea begin to come in sight after passing Kincardine Ferry and rounding Longannet Point. For now, especially when the broad mudbanks of the foreshore are covered at high water, the river takes a truly spacious expansion; the salt water begins to assert dominion over the fresh, and the line of the southern bank retires to the distance of three or four miles. It is no great loss; for Grangemouth and Bo’ness are little other than ports for the shipment of coal and pig-iron. The Carron Works show like pillars of fire by night and pillars of smoke by day, hiding Falkirk and Camelon and other spots of historic note. Further east the low shore-line is backed by a monotonous ridge that shuts us out from sight of the valley of which Linlithgow, with its loch and royal palace, is the centre; and even the woods of Kinneil, and the knowledge that along this crest, starting on the shore near the old Roman station of Carriden, run the remains of “Grime’s Dyke”—the Wall of Antonine—fail to make the southern side a joy to the eye. There is metal more attractive near at hand, within the sweep of the Bay of Culross.
Culross—Koo’ross, as the name sounds familiarly to the ears of those who know it—cherishes a fond tradition that Turner the painter, who visited Sir Robert Preston at the Abbey in the beginning of the century, compared its bay with that of Naples, rather to the disadvantage of the latter. Local partiality is doubtless the father of the legend. Yet there are wonderful charms embraced by the curve of coast facing the south and the Firth, betwixt “Dunimarle and Duniquarle,” with Preston Island and its ruined buildings in the string of the arc; the grey and white walls and red roofs of the little royal burgh, following the sinuosity of the shore, or struggling up the wooded slopes; the “corniced” roads and “hanging gardens” behind; crowning the near foreground, the Norman tower of the Abbey Church, the ruins of the ancient monastery, and the stately façade of the mansion of Culross Abbey (the design, it is said, of Inigo Jones); and behind, the forest, moorland, and cultivated tracts, rising towards the wavy green lines, fading into blue in the distance, of the Ochils and of the Cleish and Saline Hills. With the fresh light of morning or the soft colours of evening upon the waters and upon the hills, the scene may well be deemed lovely. Circumscribed as is the space, and few and insignificant as are the remaining actors, Culross and its vicinity have been the theatre of famous events, and have reared many men prominent in the civil and religious history of the country. Here St. Serf, the Apostle of Fife, is supposed to have been born, and to have died. Here St. Thenew, daughter of “King Lot of Lothian,” landed from the rotten shallop in which she had been cast adrift at Aberlady, far down the coast, and gave birth to the more famous St. Kentigern, or Mungo, patron saint of Glasgow. From Culross downward, both shores of the Firth, and the islands in its midst, are strewn with the memorials and traditions of the early Culdee missionaries, whose humble cells later became the sites of the wealthier and more imposing religious houses of Catholic times. Besides St. Serf and St. Mungo, Fillan, Palladius, Adamnan, Adrian, Monans, and Columba himself, set their imprint upon these curving coasts and solitary islets; and Inverkeithing, Dysart, and Pittenweem; Abercorn, Inchcolm, Inchkeith, the May, and the Bass, are among the places sanctified by memories of the Early Church.
It was not till 1217 that the Monastery of Culross, of which only some fragments remain, was founded by Malcolm, Earl of Fife. At the Reformation the Abbey lands passed chiefly into the hands of the Colvilles of Culross, and this family, with the Erskines, the Cochranes, the Prestons, and the Bruces, have since successively had “the guidin’ o’t” in the burgh and the surrounding district. So far from the ecclesiastical eminence of Culross terminating with St. Serf, it has continued almost down to our own day; for the town, and the district back from it—at Carnock, and eastward along the hill-skirts to Hill of Beath and beyond—have witnessed the keenest struggles between Conformity and Schism—have been special scenes of the labours of Bishop Blackadder and Bishop Leighton the “Saintly;” of John Row, and of John Blackadder the Covenanter, who held his Conventicles under the wakeful and vengeful eye of Dalzell of Binns—him with the “vowed beard,” whose hill-top for “glowering owre” Fife is on the opposite side of the Firth; and in later times, of Boston, of Ralph and Ebenezer Erskine, of Gillespie, and of other founders of the “Relief Church.”
Culrossians might adopt the Bruce motto, “Fuimus,” to describe their industrial as well as their religious past. More than once the burgh has been a spot favoured by trade, as well as by history. The celebrated Sir George Bruce, of Carnock, made its fortunes, as well as his own, by coal-mining and salt-making in the days of James I. of England. Remains, in the shape of a heap of stones, uncovered at low water, are seen of the “Moat”—an “unfellowed and unmatchable work; a darke, light, pleasant, profitable hell,” as John Taylor, the “Water Poet” described it in the early years of the seventeenth century—constructed to work the minerals lying under the bed of the sea. But Culross’s prosperity did not come to an end with them. Throughout Scotland its “girdles”—iron plates for baking the oaten bread of the “Land o’ Cakes”—were also “unfellowed and unmatchable” for many a day. The first of note among the ancestors of the Earl of Rosebery was of the honest guild of the girdlesmiths of the burgh. A “Cu’ross girdle” will soon only be found in an archæological museum; their glory is departing, their use will soon be forgotten.
DUNFERMLINE.
A lingering look may be cast in the direction of the “Standard Stone,” at Bordie, where Duncan and Macbeth withstood the Danes; and of the Castlehill,
