Читать книгу The Rivers of Great Britain, Descriptive, Historical, Pictorial: Rivers of the East Coast - Various - Страница 9

SHORE STREET, LEITH.

Of all the objects dwarfed and changed by the Bridge, Inch Garvie and its Castle have perhaps suffered most. Built long ago to protect the upper waters against the pirates that infested the Outer Firth, it has often since played a part in schemes of national defence. “Roy of Aldivalloch” held Inch Garvie with twenty musketeers against Monk’s troops, at the time of Cromwell’s invasion; and it was afterwards manned to repel Paul Jones. Now, looking down upon it from the summit of the great pier, it seems as if a good-sized stone would crush, like a toy, the queer admixture of old and new buildings huddled upon it. From this great height, both expanses of the Firth, with their bounding shores, lie spread below like a map.

The southern shore, now become once more rich in interest and beauty, has complacently drawn nearer hand. Looking westward, and withdrawing the eyes from the fine amphitheatre of hills that enclose the upper course of the Forth, Blackness Castle—one of the four royal fortalices specially mentioned in the Treaty of Union, and the scene of many stirring events in the national annals: Edinburgh, Stirling, and Dumbarton being the others—is full in sight, upon its peninsula. Nearer are the woods of Abercorn, whose history goes back to Roman times, and earlier; closer still, the magnificent colonnaded front, the sea-terraces, the deer-parks, and the stately lime avenues of Hopetoun House, the seat of the Earl of Hopetoun; and almost below, and on the hither side of Port Edgar Harbour, the ancient town of South Queensferry. The last few years have made “a mighty difference” in many ways to the little burgh, but have not materially altered the somewhat grimy features of its main street, which runs eastward, at the base of the hill, towards the Bridge, the “Hawes Brae,” and the “Hawes Inn,” where, it will be remembered, Jonathan Oldbuck and his young friend Lovel descended from the Edinburgh Diligence, and cemented acquaintance over a magnum of port, and where, also, adventures first began to overtake the hero of “Kidnapped.”

EDINBURGH, FROM THE FIFE SHORE.

Turning eastward, this southern shore is prolonged in the wooded knolls of the Dalmeny estate, and round the projecting point, and on the very sea-marge, is the old, but now renovated, Castle of Barnbougle, once the seat of the Mowbrays. Behind it is Dalmeny House, with beautiful sward and woodland extending as far as Cramond, where Lord Rosebery keeps a boat to ferry the public across the Almond water into Midlothian.

These latter objects, as has been said, are out of sight from the Bridge, but on the northern side one sees well into the deep inlet of Inverkeithing Bay, where the old royal burgh, dating from before William the Lion’s time, lies stranded in mud. It is still proud of having witnessed the last assembly of the Culdees, and the first movement of Scottish “Voluntaryism,” and boasts also of containing the “palace” of Queen Annabella Drummond, and the birthplace of Admiral Greig, of the Russian service. For miles the domain of Donibristle follows the advancing and retiring points of the Fife shore, which, now that the outer Firth opens up, recedes away northward as well as eastward. Within the half-circle of Dalgety Bay are the ruins of old Dalgety Church, and what remains of Donibristle House. The estate belongs to the Earl of Moray, the owner of Doune and of many broad lands in the north. The mansion was accidentally burned thirty years ago; but destined for longer remembrance is its burning, not accidental, three centuries since, when took place the tragedy of “the Bonnie Earl o’ Moray.” The “Bonnie Earl”—son-in-law of the famous Regent Moray—was in 1591 slain, as he was escaping from the blazing building, by Gordon of Buckie and other retainers of Lord Huntly, with the connivance, as was suspected, of James VI. The ballad-writers have their explanation, for

“The Bonnie Earl o’ Moray,

He was the Queen’s love.”

An Earl and Regent Moray of an earlier stem—Randolph, the companion of the Bruce and of the Black Douglas—had his home at Aberdour, the next indentation in this singularly beautiful coast. The line had soon to give place to the Douglases, Earls of Morton, who have ruled here for some five centuries, though their old castle, overlooking the lovely bay, with its projecting bluffs and shining sands, now a favourite resort for bathers and summer visitors, has been long untenanted. The wily and unscrupulous Regent Morton came hither to amuse himself with gardening, in the intervals when, from choice or compulsion, he was not in the thick of political intrigue. Edinburgh was always in view from Aberdour, and nature and simple country pursuits could not hold him long. Through the high beech groves and hanging woods, one of the most charming of walks leads for three miles to Burntisland. But the charm is no longer what it was, for the new railway line running athwart the slope has played havoc with the trees.

Outside Aberdour, and partly shielding the bay, is Inchcolm Island. It would need a volume to do justice to the islands of the Forth. Some we have already glanced at. “St. Colme’s Inch,” where, as Shakespeare tells us, the routed Norsemen were fain to crave permission of the Thane of Cawdor to bury their dead, is the most famous of them all—except perhaps the Bass. The square tower and mouldering walls of its Abbey, rising close to the narrow isthmus where the isle is almost cut in two by the sea, are still prominent objects in the view. The Monastery was founded in 1123, by King Alexander I., in gratitude for his miraculous rescue from shipwreck, and entertainment here by a hermit who followed the rule of St. Columba. It once owned rich possessions in half a dozen shires, granted in part by a Lord Alan Mortimer of Aberdour, whose body the monks flung overboard in a storm while crossing to the island, thus giving a name to the inner channel of “Mortimer’s Deep.” Invaders, pirates, and rebels, as well as the hand of time, have since sorely visited the island, but still portions of the old buildings stand, and are even habitable.

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 soil of the “cock” or “bonnet” laird, whose proverbial heritage was “a wee pickle land, a good pickle debt, and a doo-cot.” Little better than a ruined dove-cote—or “a corbie’s nest,” as the Merry Monarch called Dreel Castle, the old tower of the Anstruthers—shows many a crumbled seat of the long-pedigreed Fife gentry. But they were the nurseries of famous men—witness the Leslies, Alexander and David, and a host besides—who found not only their native shire but their native country too narrow a field for their talents and their ambition. In this, as in other respects, the shores of Fife offer an epitome of Scottish history, and the quintessence of Scottish character.

Turn now towards the Southern shore. The spell even of the coasts of Fife cannot long detain us, when Edinburgh, seated on her hills, and queening it over the waters, with the couchant lion of Arthur’s Seat beside her, is in view. As Stirling presides over the “Links of Forth,” and the upper courses of the river, Edinburgh Rock with its Castle appears the Guardian Genius of the Firth. Round the base of this “Bass Rock upon land,” the masses of buildings seem to swirl and surge like a tide-race of human life, and to climb, in broken wave upon wave, crested by the spires and roofs of the Old Town, and overhung by the murky spray of its proverbial “reek,” all up the steep slope to the battlements of the Castle. Stirling itself is scarcely its peer for dignity of situation or for renown. From the highest platform of the Rock, where hooped and battered Mons Meg guards the old chapel of Canmore and Margaret, to the profoundest depths of the shadows cast by the tall and beetling houses of the Grassmarket, the West Port, and the Cowgate, it is haunted by traditions; and its history, like its aspect, is most sombre and most striking.

Looking from the windows of the rooms which Mary occupied, and whence the infant James was let down in a basket to the bottom of the rock, one glances across the “plainstanes” of the Grassmarket, the scene of Jock Porteous’s slaughter, to the Old Greyfriars Churchyard and its graves of martyrs and of persecutors, to the dome and towers of the old and new University buildings, and to the piled and crowded buildings, thinning out and becoming newer as they descend the warm slopes of Morningside and Newington towards the bluffs of Craiglockhart, the whinny slopes of the Braids, and Craigmillar Castle, behind which are the finely pencilled lines of the Pentlands, the Moorfoots, and the Lammermoors. Or the eye can follow the impending walls of the many-storeyed houses of the Lawnmarket and the High Street, as far as the “Crown” of St. Giles and the Parliament House—each of them part and parcel of the national life—and so on by the Canongate and its memorable old “lands” and closes, towards the spot where the Palace and the ruined Abbey of Holyrood, shouldered by breweries and canopied by the smoke of gasworks, shelter under the Salisbury Crags. Or looking away from the grim Old Town, one may travel far before seeing anything to compare with the stately front of Prince’s Street, facing its gardens and the sun, and turned away from the cold blasts of the north; the Calton Hill and its monuments; the serried lines of the New Town streets and squares, broken by frequent spires and towers, and sweeping away in one direction towards the wooded sides of Corstorphine, and in the other joining Leith and its shipping; while beyond, if the day be fine, the glorious view is bounded by the Firth and its islands and the hills of Fife, melting in a distance where land, sea, and sky are indistinguishable.

Too often, viewing it from the “clouded Forth,” the grey city, its castle, and its subject hills are swallowed up in the “gloom that saddens heaven and earth” during the dismal Edinburgh winter and spring, and the uncertain summer and autumn. Sometimes they show huge and imposing, like ghosts in the mist, or rise like islands over the strata of smoke and haze in which Leith lies buried. But there are gloriously fine days at all seasons of the year, even in this much-abused climate, and then the long pier, the shipping in the roadstead, the tangle of masts and rigging in the spacious docks, and the warehouses, churches, and close-built houses of the port of Leith make a brave show in the low foreground of a lovely picture. To the west, the wide arms of the Granton breakwaters enclose a harbour, built at the cost of the Duke of Buccleuch. Nearer to Leith is the white pier-head of Newhaven, with stalwart fishermen, and comely fishwives in white “mutches” and short petticoats, grouped about its quays. Leith itself is an old as well as a brisk seat of trade and shipping. The large business it continues to conduct with the ports of the Baltic and the North Sea it has carried on for many centuries, and in these days it has extended its commercial relations to nearly all parts of the world. Many of the most famous episodes in the national annals began and ended in Leith. But royal embassies no longer land or embark there; it is happily exempt from hostile invasions and bloody civil and religious feuds.

THE BASS ROCK, FROM NORTH BERWICK.

Eastward from Leith, sewage meadows and brick-and tile-works suddenly give place to the mile-long front of the Portobello Esplanade, with its pier and bathing coaches and strip of sand, dear to Edinburgh holiday-makers, and with the outline of Arthur’s Seat as a noble background to the masses of handsome villas and lodging-houses. Beyond comes a string of little seaside watering-places, fishing and shipping ports—Fisherrow, Musselburgh, Morrisonhaven, Prestonpans, Cockenzie—which, with the country behind them, vie in picturesqueness of aspect with the Fife towns opposite. A high ridge, the last heave of the Lammermoors, marks the limits of this belt of coast country—the old approach of hostile armies from the South—which might dispute with the district around Stirling the title of the “Battlefield of Scotland.” Carberry Hill, where Mary fell into the hands of the Lords of the Covenant, overlooks the woods of Dalkeith Palace and the Esk, not far above where, between Fisherrow harbour and Musselburgh, that classic stream enters the sea. A continuation of Carberry are the Fawside braes, and right underneath the ruined castle on the sky-line, and between it and Inveresk Church, was fought the battle of Pinkie, so disastrous for the Scots, when the little burn trickling through Pinkie Woods “ran red with blood.” It was on this ground, too, that Cromwell was out-manœuvred by Leslie, and compelled to fall back, “to make the better spring” upon Dunbar; and by the venerable bridge across the Esk, the Young Pretender led his troops from Edinburgh, on hearing that the Royalist forces were advancing by the coast upon the capital. The site of the battle of Prestonpans is in the fields beyond the tumbledown old town of that name, which boasts—and looks as if it boasted truly—of being the first place in Scotland where coal was worked and salt manufactured from sea-water. In the more thriving looking village of Cockenzie, they point out the house in which “Johnnie Cope” was soundly sleeping when the Highlanders, making a circuit of the high ground behind Tranent, and crossing the marsh at Seton, “sprang upon him out of the mist” of a September morning.

TANTALLON CASTLE, LOOKING EAST.

Seton, with its woods and wild-flowers, its lovely sweep of sands, the remains of its ancient church, and the Castle standing on the site of the Palace of the Earls of Winton, is redolent of memories of the “high jinks” of Queen Mary and of other members of the unfortunate House of Stuart, in whose mischances the loyal Setons faithfully shared. The parks of Gosford, their trees strangely bent and twisted by the east wind, line the coast for miles, and the great white front of Lord Wemyss’s mansion is a shining landmark. Then comes Aberlady Bay, an expanse of sand and mud at low water, but at high tide a broad arm of the Firth, running up close under the walls of the venerable Parish Church and pretty village of Aberlady, and skirting the favourite golfing links of Luffness and Gullane.

From here all the way round to North Berwick, the sea-margin, with its long stretches of grassy turf, interspersed with bent hillocks, whins, sand “bunkers,” and other hazards dear to the devotees of cleek and driving-club, may be said to be sacred to the Royal Game of Golf. Four or five spacious golfing courses interpose between; and ardent pursuers of the flying gutta ball have been known to play across the whole distance of seven or eight miles. Numbers of them take up their quarters at Aberlady or at Gullane, placed idyllically upon the edge of the common and the ploughed land, with views extending across the green links and the sea to Fife, and landward over the rich fields of East Lothian to the Lammermoors, with the nearer Garleton Hills, Traprain, and North Berwick Law; a few also at the beautiful old village of Dirleton, beside the ivied ruins of its Castle.

North Berwick, however, is the golfer’s Mecca on this side of the Firth; and bathers, artists, and other seekers after the pleasures of the sea-shore succumb to its attractions in increasing numbers every season. The sands and the links, the sea lapping upon the beach, or chafing round Craigleith and the other rocky islets and points, exercise a potent spell. But North Berwick’s great lion, and a conspicuous landmark over sea and country for a score of miles around, is the natural pyramid of the “Law.” It rises immediately behind the town, in lines as steep and symmetrical as if built by art, and from its summit, nearly 1,000 feet high, an almost unrivalled view is obtained over the Forth and the Lothians. Though one would hardly guess it, looking at the clean streets and handsome hotels and villas that line the shore, North Berwick is a burgh and port of great antiquity.

That it never throve to any remarkable extent in its earlier history may possibly be in part due to its dangerous proximity to Tantallon Castle, the hold of the Douglases, Earls of Angus. Every visitor to North Berwick, after he has surmounted the Law and wandered his fill by the beach, makes an excursion to Tantallon Castle. The coast eastward is bold and precipitous, and fretted by the waters of the North Sea, for we are now at the very lip of the Firth of Forth; and the Bass Rock, lying opposite the beautiful curve of Canty Bay, looks like a mass of the shore-cliffs washed bodily out to sea. Just where the coast is wildest and least accessible one sees—

“Tantallon’s dizzy steep

Hang o’er the margin of the deep.”

The eyrie of the Douglas is now a mere shell; but the extent and immense thickness of the walls still proclaim its strength in the days when it was a proverb to “ding doon Tantallon and make a bridge to the Bass.” On three sides it was protected by the sea, and

“Above the booming ocean leant

The far-projecting battlement.”

On the land side were those gate-works and walls which Marmion cleared, after bidding bold defiance to the “Douglas in his hall,” and behind which the turbulent Earls of Angus, for their part, so often bade defiance to their Sovereigns. James V. once brought up against it “Thrawn-mu’d Meg and her Marrow,” and other great pieces of mediæval ordnance from Dunbar, where three lords were placed in pawn for their safe return. But he failed to “ding doon Tantallon”; that feat was reserved for the Covenanters.

Now the spirit of Walter Scott seems to haunt the ruins, in company with the ghosts of “Bell-the-Cat,” and the other dead Douglases who built or strengthened these storm-battered walls. The Magician of the North has waved his wand over the Forth from Ben Lomond to Tantallon and the Bass!

John Geddie.

NORTH BERWICK, FROM THE HARBOUR.

BERWICK-ON-TWEED.