single gnarled and wide-branched oak represents all that remains of the original Birnam Wood. The glory of the ancient Cathedral has also departed, or undergone a change. For some fifteen hundred years, it is reckoned, there has been a Christian house on this spot; and at as early a date Dunkeld (“Dun-Caledon”) had a royal residence, probably on the site of the “dun” or fort on the “King’s Seat.” St. Columba is thought to have founded the church, and to have preached here to the natives of “Atholl, Caledon, and Angus;” and he is said to have found burial at Dunkeld. Adamnan and Crinan were among its Culdee abbots; and in the long line of its Roman Catholic bishops, whose diocese extended over the greater part of the basin of the Tay, Gawin Douglas, the poet and translator of the “Æneid,” is not the only eminent name. Very stately without and beautiful within, the edifice of the Cathedral Church must have looked in its prime, before the Lords of the Congregation sent word to “purge the kyrk of all kynd of monuments of idolatrye,” but to “tak guid heid that neither the windocks nor dooris be onywise hurt or broken”—a saving clause to which the zealous Reforming mob paid scant attention.
The main portion of the Cathedral—the nave—has long been roofless, but the tower, in which the “Cameronian Regiment” of 1689 offered their brilliant and successful resistance to the victors of Killiecrankie, and stemmed the Highland tide rushing down on the Lowlands, still stands, and the choir has been restored and is used as the parish church. Within the walls, the “Wolf of Badenoch,” Alexander Stewart, Earl of Buchan—that type of a savage and ruthless Highland chieftain—is buried; here also are the vaults of the Athole family, and a monument recording the deeds of the “Black Watch.” Without, the beautiful lawns, gardens, and woods of Dunkeld Palace, one of the seats of the Duke of Athole, surround the Cathedral ruins, and come down to the river’s edge. Fine villa residences are ranged along the hillside, and the town of Dunkeld offers every evidence of prosperity.
At Dunkeld, the Tay takes a long sweep eastward, until at the meeting with the Isla at Meikleour it forms a great elbow and resumes its southward flow. The Murthly estate, which belongs to the owner of Grandtully, occupies the south bank of the river along this portion of its course. From the earliest times royalty, like romance and poetry, has had the good taste to frequent these scenes. The wraiths of Neil Gow, the famous fiddler, and of the Highland caterans hanged in the “eerie hollow” of the Stare Dam, dispute with the ghost of Macbeth the honour of being the familiar spirits of Birnam Hill, once again magnificently clothed with wood. In Auchtergaven is the birthplace of Robert Nicol, the “Peasant Poet;” and here also stood the “Auld House of Nairne,” which recalls the name of Caroline Oliphant, Baroness Nairne, the laureate of Jacobite song, and which, like her ancestral home in Strathearn—the “Auld House of Gask”—gave shelter to Prince Charlie. At the Royal Castle of Kinclaven, now a neglected ruin, many a Scottish Sovereign, from the time of Malcolm Ceanmohr and Queen Margaret, had solaced themselves after the chase or battle, before it was captured and recaptured, rebuilt and demolished, in the days of Wallace and Bruce.
The northern bank of the Tay is equally rich in scenic beauty and historical associations. Between the grounds of Delvine and Meikleour, and opposite the “Bloody Inches”—believed to preserve the memory of the spot where Redner Lodbrog, the Norse viking and skald, was beaten back to his ships—the important Roman station of Tulina, now Invertuthil, is supposed to have stood. Meikleour the Marchioness of Lansdowne has inherited from her ancestors the Mercers, descendants of a warlike Provost of Perth in the fourteenth century. The village is one of the quaintest and most charming of Scottish hamlets; and the great “beech hedge,” ninety feet high, is among the many arboricultural marvels in the valley of the Tay. Hidden from sight among hills and woods, like many other lakes and famous sites of this district, is the Loch of Clunie, with its island castle, the hunting seat of kings and place of rest and retirement of bishops in the old days. The Lunan drains from it into the Isla; but to trace the Isla would be to write pages of description and history concerning Glenardle and Glenshee, Stormont and Strathmore, the slopes of the Sidlaws and the passes through the Grampians into Braemar. We should have to give some idea of the beauties collected about Bridge of Cally, Craighall, and Blairgowrie on the Ericht; to visit the “Reekie Linn,” the “Slugs of Auchrannie,” and Lintrathen on the Isla; to seek the sites, mythical or otherwise, of Agricola’s victory over Galgacus and of Macbeth’s defeat by Macduff near Dunsinane Hill; and to speak of what makes Glamis and Airlie and Inverqueich, Alyth and Meigle and Coupar, and the rest of the country lying along the borders of Perth and Angus, memorable and attractive. It would even lead us as far as Forfar and its loch and castles, and the rival little burgh of Kirriemuir—the “Thrums” of recent delightful sketches of old-world Scottish “wabster” and kirk life in Angus—and detain us to the end of the chapter.
We resume, instead, the line of the Tay below Meikleour and Kinclaven, and beyond the “Coble o’ Cargill,” replaced by the more prosaic bridge carrying the railway line from Perth to Aberdeen. This is the heart of Strathmore—the “great valley.” Ballathy, Stobhall, Muckersy, and Stanley maintain the repute of the Tay for noble prospects of hill, wood, and stream. Stobhall was the seat of the Drummond family—still a power in Perthshire—before they removed to Drummond Castle on the Earn; and near by, at the Campsie Linn, beside an ancient cell of the monks of Coupar-Angus Abbey, is the waterfall over which—teste the author of the “Fair Maid of Perth”—Conacher, the refugee from the battle on the North Inch, flung himself to hide his shame. Macbeth’s Castle, on Dunsinane Hill, and the field of Luncarty—where, nine centuries ago, the peasant ancestor of the Hays of Tweeddale, Errol, and Kinnoull is said to have turned the battle for the Scots against the Danes with his plough-yoke—might detain us. But now, close ahead, the explorer of Tayside views, fringing the right bank of the river for miles opposite the mouth of the Almond, and extending to the environs of the Royal City of Perth, the woods of Scone—
“Towers and battlements he sees,
Bosomed high on tufted trees.”
This is Scone Palace, the magnificent mansion of the Earls of Mansfield, standing almost on the site of the ancient Abbey and royal residence of Scone. Modern Scone and all its surroundings are stately and spacious, but the relics of its early grandeur have disappeared from the landscape, and almost the only memorials of the days when it was the meeting-place of parliaments and councils, the crowning-place of kings, “the Windsor of Scotland,” are the mound of the “Motehill,” the sycamore tree planted by Queen Mary, and the cross which marks the place where stood the old “City of Scone.” In its neighbourhood was fought the last battle that decided the supremacy of the Scots over the Picts and the amalgamation of the two nations in one. On the Motehill, Kenneth Macalpine proclaimed the “Macalpine Laws.” Hither, according to tradition, the “Stone of Destiny” was brought, more than a thousand years ago, from the old capital of the Dalriadic Scots in the west—from Dunstaffnage or Beregonium—and the Sovereigns of Scotland continued to be crowned on it until it was carried off to England, as the trophy of conquest, by Edward I. It forms part of the Coronation Chair at Westminster; and patriotic Scots declare that the prophecy bound up in the fateful stone is still being fulfilled, and that where it is, the Sovereigns of a Scottish house rule the land. Though the Coronation Stone was taken away, kings continued to be crowned here. Robert the Bruce was enthroned, and received the homage of his vassals, at Scone; and—to make a wide leap in history—Charles II. was crowned King of Scotland at the spot where his ancestors had been anointed and installed, before he set out on the unlucky expedition which ended at Worcester. Similar preparations were made for the coronation of the Old Pretender; but on the very eve of the event dissensions among his followers, and the approach of Argyll’s army, caused him to take flight back to the Continent, leaving his adherents to their fate—an inglorious end to “an auld sang!”
PERTH, FROM THE WEST.
Before Kenneth Macalpine’s day, Scone was a place where councils of
