Part 7

Various human agencies have been long busy in the destruction and obliteration of our antiquarian earth and stone works. At no period has this process of demolition gone on in Scotland more rapidly and ruthlessly than during the last fifty or a hundred years. That tide of agricultural improvement which has passed over the country, has, in its utilitarian course, swept away--sometimes inevitably, often most needlessly--the aggers and ditches of ancient camps, sepulchral barrows and mounds, stone circles and cairns, earth-raths, and various other objects of deep antiquarian interest. Indeed, the chief antiquarian remains of this description which have been left on the surface of our soil are to be found on our mountain-tops, on our moors, or in our woods, where the very sterility or inaccessibility of the spot, or the kind protection and sympathy of the old forest-trees, have saved them, for a time at least, from reckless ruin and annihilation. Some of the antiquarian memorials that I allude to would have endured for centuries to come, had it not been for human interference and devastation. For, in the demolition of these works of archaic man, the hand of man has too generally proved both a busier and a less scrupulous agent than the hand of time.

Railways have proved among the greatest, as well as the latest, of the agents of destruction. In our island various cherished antiquities have been often most unnecessarily swept away in constructing these race-courses for the daily rush and career of the iron horse. His rough and ponderous hoof, for example, has kicked down, at one extremity of a railway connected with Edinburgh (marvellously and righteously to the dispeace of the whole city), that fine old specimen of Scottish Second-Pointed architecture, the Trinity College Church; while, at the other extremity of the same line, it battered into fragments the old Castle of Berwick, a fort rich in martial and Border memories, and a building rendered interesting by the fact, that in connection with one of its turrets there was--at the command of Edward I. "the greatest of the Plantagenets," (as his latest biographer boastfully terms him)--constructed, some six centuries ago, a cage of iron and wood, in which he immured, with Bomba-like ferocity, for four weary years, a poor prisoner, and that prisoner a woman--the Countess of Buchan--whose frightful crime consisted in having assisted at the coronation of her liege sovereign, Robert the Bruce. In the construction of the Edinburgh and Glasgow Railway the line was driven, with annihilating effect, through the centre of the old and rich Roman Station on the Wall of Antoninus at Castlecary. Some years ago, as I passed along the line, I saw the farmer in the immediate neighbourhood of this station busily removing a harmless wall,--among the last, if not the very last remnants of Roman masonry in Scotland. The largest stone circle near the English Border--the Stonehenge or Avebury of the north of England--formerly stood near Shap. The stone avenues leading to it are said to have been nearly two miles in length. The engineer of the Carlisle and Lancaster railway carried his line right through the very centre of the ancient stone circle forming the head of the chief avenue, leaving a few of its huge stones standing out on the western side, where they may be still seen by the passing traveller about half a mile south of the Shap station. If the line had been laid only a few feet on either side, the wanton desecration and destruction of this fine archaic monument might have been readily saved. Railway engineers, however, and railway directors, care far more for mammon and money than for mounds and monoliths.

But other and older agents have overturned and uprooted the memorials transmitted down from ancient times, with as much wantonness as the railways. Towards the middle of the last century the Government of the day ordered many miles of the gigantic old Roman wall, which stretches across Northumberland and Cumberland, to be tossed over and pounded into road metal. About the same time a Scottish proprietor--with a Vandalism which cast a stigma on his order--pulled down that antique enigmatical building, "Arthur's Oven," in order to build, with its ashlar walls, a mill-dam across the Carron. At its next flood the indignant Carron carried away the mill-dam, and buried for ever in the depths of its own water-course those venerable stones which were begrudged any longer by the proprietor of the soil the few feet of ground which they had occupied for centuries on its banks.

In many parts of our country our old sepulchral cairns, hill-forts, castles, churches, and abbeys, have been most thoughtlessly and reprehensibly allowed, by those that chanced to be their proprietors for the time, to be used as mere quarries of ready stones for the building of villages and houses, and for the construction of field-dikes and drains. In the perpetration of this class of sad and discreditable desecrations, many parties are to blame. Such outrages have been practised by both landlord and tenant, by both State and Church; and I fear that the Presbyterian Church of Scotland is by no means free from much culpability in the matter. But let us, at the same time, rejoice that a better spirit is awakened on the whole question; and let us hope that our Scottish landlords will all speedily come to imitate, when required, the excellent example of Mr. Baillie, who, when some years ago he found that one of his tenants had pulled down and carried off, for building purposes, some portions of the walls of the four grand old burgs standing in Glenelg, in Inverness-shire, prosecuted the delinquent farmer before the sheriff-court of the county, and forced him to restore and replace in situ, as far as possible, and at his own expense, all the stones which he had removed.

Almost all the primæval stone circles and cromlechs which existed in the middle and southern districts of Scotland have been cast down and removed. The only two cromlechs in the Lothians, the stones of which have not been removed, are at Ratho and Kipps; and though the stones have been wantonly pulled down, they could readily be restored, and certainly deserve to be so. In 1813 the cromlech at Kipps was seen by Sir John Dalzell still standing upright. In describing it, in the beginning of the last century, Sir Robert Sibbald states that near this Kipps cromlech was a circle of stones, with a large stone or two in the middle; and he adds, "many such may be seen all over the country." They have all disappeared; and latterly the stones of the Kipps circle have been themselves removed and broken up, to build, apparently, some neighbouring field-walls, though there was abundance of stones in the vicinity equally well suited for the purpose.

Among the most valuable of our ancient Scottish monuments are certainly our Sculptured Stones. Most of them, however, and some even in late times, have been sadly mutilated and destroyed, to a greater or less degree, by human hands, and converted to the most base uses. The stone at Hilton of Cadboll, remarkable for its elaborate sculpture and ornamental tracery, has had one of its sides smoothed and obliterated in order that a modern inscription might be cut upon it to commemorate "Alexander Duff and His Thrie Wives." The beautiful sculptured stone of Golspie has been desecrated in the same way. Only two of these ancient sculptured stones are known south of the Forth. One of them has been preserved by having been used as a window-lintel in the church of Abercorn--the venerable episcopal see, in the seventh century, of Trumwine, the Bishop of the Picts. The other serves the purpose of a foot-bridge within a hundred yards of the spot where we are met; and it is to be hoped that its proprietors will allow this ancient stone to be soon removed from its present ignominious situation to an honoured place in our Museum. I saw, during last autumn, in Anglesey, a stone bearing a very ancient Romano-British legend, officiating as one of the posts of a park gate--a situation in which several such inscribed stones have been found. Still more lately, I was informed of the large central monolith in a stone circle, not far from the Scottish border, having been thrown down and split up into seven pairs of field gate-posts.

"Standing-stones"--the old names of which gave their appellations to the very manors on which they stood--have been repeatedly demolished in Scotland. An obelisk of thirteen feet in height, and imparting its name to a landed estate in Kincardineshire, was recently thrown down; and a large monolith, which lent its old, venerable name to a property and mansion within three or four miles of Edinburgh, was, within the memory of some living witnesses, uprooted and totally demolished when the direction of the turnpike road in its neighbourhood happened to be altered.

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A healthier and finer feeling in regard to the propriety of preserving such national antiquities as I have referred to, subsists, I believe, in the heart of the general public of Scotland, than perhaps those who are their superiors in riches and rank generally give them credit for. Within this century the standing-stones of Stennis in Orkney were attacked, and two or three of them overthrown by an iconoclast; but the people in the neighbourhood resented and arrested the attempt by threatening to set fire to the house and corn of the barbaric aggressor. After the passing of the Parliamentary Reform Bill, during a keen contest for the representation of a large Scottish county, there was successfully urged in the public journals against one of the candidates, the damaging fact that one of his forefathers had deliberately committed one of the gross acts of barbarism which I have already specified, in the needless destruction, in a distant part of Scotland, of one of the smallest but most interesting of Scottish antiquarian relics; and the voters at the polling-booths showed that they deemed a family, however rich and estimable, unfit to be intrusted with the parliamentary guardianship of the county, which had outraged public feeling by wantonly pulling down one of the oldest stone memorials in the kingdom.

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In the name of this Society, and in the name of my fellow-countrymen generally, I here solemnly protest against the perpetration of any more acts of useless and churlish Vandalism, in the needless destruction and removal of our Scottish antiquarian remains. The hearts of all leal Scotsmen, overflowing as they do with a love of their native land, must ever deplore the unnecessary demolition of all such early relics and monuments as can in any degree contribute to the recovery and restoration of the past history of our country and of our ancestors. These ancient relics and monuments are truly, in one strong sense, national property; for historically they belong to Scotland and to Scotsmen in general, more than they belong to the individual proprietors upon whose ground they accidentally happen to be placed. There is an Act of Parliament against the wilful defacing and demolition of public monuments; and, perhaps the Kilkenny Archæological Association were right when they threatened to indite with the penalties of "misdemeanour" under that statute, any person who should wantonly and needlessly destroy the old monumental and architectural relics of his country. Many of these relics might have brought only a small price indeed in the money-market, while yet they were of a national and historical value which it would be difficult to estimate. For, when once swept away, their full replacement is impossible. They cannot be purchased back with gold. Their deliberate and ruthless annihilation is, in truth, so far the annihilation of the ancient records of the kingdom. If any member of any ancient family among us needlessly destroyed some of the olden records of that one family, how bitterly, and how justly too, would he be denounced and despised by its members? But assuredly antiquarian monuments, as the olden records of a whole realm, are infinitely more valuable than the records of any individual family in that realm. Let us fondly hope and trust that a proper spirit of patriotism--that every feeling of good, generous, and gentlemanly taste--will insure and hallow the future consecration of all such Scottish antiquities as still remain--small fragments only though they may be of the antiquarian treasures that once existed in our land.

Time, like the Sibyl, who offered her nine books of destiny to the Roman king, has been destroying, century after century, one after another of the rich volumes of antiquities which she formerly tendered to the keeping of our Scottish fathers. But though, unhappily, our predecessors, like King Tarquin, rejected and scorned the rich antiquarian treasures which existed in their days, let us not now, on that account, despise or decline to secure the three books of them that still perchance remain. On the contrary,--like the priests appointed by the Roman authorities to preserve and study the Sibylline records which had escaped destruction,--let this Society carefully guard and cherish those antiquities of our country which yet exist, and let them strive to teach themselves and their successors to decipher and interpret aright the strange things and thoughts that are written on those Sibylline leaves of Scottish Archæology which Fate has still spared for them. Working earnestly, faithfully, and lovingly in this spirit, let us not despair that, as the science of Archæology gradually grows and evolves, this Society may yet, in full truth, restore Scotland to antiquity, and antiquity to Scotland.

FOOTNOTES:

ON AN OLD STONE-ROOFED CELL OR ORATORY IN THE ISLAND OF INCHCOLM.

Among the islands scattered along the Firth of Forth, one of the most interesting is the ancient Aemonia, Emona, St. Columba's Isle, or St. Colme's Inch--the modern Inchcolm. The island is not large, being little more than half-a-mile in length, and about a hundred and fifty yards across at its broadest part. At either extremity it is elevated and rocky; while in its intermediate portion it is more level, though still very rough and irregular, and at one point--a little to the east of the old monastic buildings--it becomes so flat and narrow that at high tides the waters of the Forth meet over it. Inchcolm lies nearly six miles north-west from the harbour of Granton, or is about eight or nine miles distant from Edinburgh; and of the many beautiful spots in the vicinity of the Scottish metropolis, there is perhaps none which surpasses this little island in the charming and picturesque character of the views that are obtained in various directions from it.

Though small in its geographical dimensions, Inchcolm is rich in historical and archæological associations. In proof of this remark, I might adduce various facts to show that it has been at one time a favoured seat of learning, as when, upwards of four hundred years ago, the Scottish historian, Walter Bower, the Abbot of its Monastery, wrote there his contributions to the ancient history of Scotland; and at other times the seat of war, as when it was pillaged at different periods by the English, during the course of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. For ages it was the site of a monastic institution and the habitation of numerous monks; and at the beginning of the present century it was temporarily degraded to the site of a military fort, and the habitation of a corps of artillery. During the plagues and epidemics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it formed sometimes a lazaretto for the suspected and diseased; and during the reign of James I. it was used as a state-prison for the daughter of the Earl of Ross and the mother of the Lord of the Isles--"a mannish, implacable woman," as Drummond of Hawthornden ungallantly terms her; while fifty years later, when Patrick Graham, Archbishop of St. Andrews, was "decernit ane heretique, scismatike, symoniak, and declarit cursit, and condamnit to perpetuall presoun," he was, for this last purpose, "first transportit to St. Colmes Insche." Punishments more dark and dire than mere transportation to, and imprisonment upon Inchcolm, have perhaps taken place within the bounds of the island, if we do not altogether misinterpret the history of "a human skeleton standing upright," found several years ago immured and built up within the old ecclesiastic walls. Nor is this eastern Iona, as patronised and protected by St. Columba,--and, at one period of his mission to the Picts and Scots, his own alleged dwelling-place,--devoid in its history of the usual amount of old monkish miracles and legends. The Scotichronicon contains long and elaborate details of several of them. When, in 1412, the Earl of Douglas thrice essayed to sail out to sea, and was thrice driven back by adverse gales, he at last made a pilgrimage to the holy isle of Aemonia, presented an offering to Columba, and forthwith the Saint sped him with fair winds to Flanders and home again. When, towards the winter of 1421, a boat was sent on a Sunday (die Dominica) to bring off to the monastery from the mainland some house provisions and barrels of beer brewed at Bernhill (in barellis cerevisiam apud Bernhill brasiatam), and the crew, exhilarated with liquor (alacres et potosi), hoisted, on their return, a sail, and upset the barge, Sir Peter the Canon,--who, with five others, was thrown into the water,--fervently and unceasingly invoked the aid of Columba, and the Saint appeared in person to him, and kept Sir Peter afloat for an hour and a half by the help of a truss of tow (adminiculo cujusdam stupæ), till the boat of Portevin picked up him and two others. When, in 1385, the crew of an English vessel (quidam filii Belial) sacrilegiously robbed the island, and tried to burn the church, St. Columba, in answer to the earnest prayers of those who, on the neighbouring shore, saw the danger of the sacred edifice, suddenly shifted round the wind and quenched the flames, while the chief of the incendiaries was, within a few hours afterwards, struck with madness, and forty of his comrades drowned. When, in 1335, an English fleet ravaged the shores of the Forth, and one of their largest ships was carrying off from Inchcolm an image of Columba and a store of ecclesiastical plunder, there sprung up such a furious tempest around the vessel immediately after she set sail, that she drifted helplessly and hopelessly towards the neighbouring island of Inchkeith, and was threatened with destruction on the rocks there till the crew implored pardon of Columba, vowed to him restitution of their spoils, and a suitable offering of gold and silver, and then they instantly and unexpectedly were lodged safe in port (et statim in tranquillo portu insperate ducebantur). When, in 1336, some English pirates robbed the church at Dollar--which had been some time previously repaired and richly decorated by an Abbot of Aemonia--and while they were, with their sacrilegious booty, sailing triumphantly, and with music on board, down the Forth, under a favouring and gentle west wind, in the twinkling of an eye (non solum subito sed in ictu oculi), and exactly opposite the abbey of Inchcolm, the ship sank to the bottom like a stone. Hence, adds the writer of this miracle in the Scotichronicon,--and no doubt that writer was the Abbot Walter Bower,--in consequence of these marked retaliating propensities of St. Columba, his vengeance against all who trespassed against him became proverbial in England; and instead of calling him, as his name seems to have been usually pronounced at the time, St. Callum or St. Colam, he was commonly known among them as St. Quhalme ("et ideo, ut non reticeam quid de eo dicatur, apud eos vulgariter Sanct Quhalme nuncupatur").

But without dwelling on these and other well-known facts and fictions in the history of Inchcolm, let me state,--for the statement has, as we shall afterwards see, some bearing upon the more immediate object of this notice,--that this island is one of the few spots in the vicinity of Edinburgh that has been rendered classical by the pen of Shakspeare. In the second scene of the opening act of the tragedy of Macbeth, the Thane of Ross comes as a hurried messenger from the field of battle to King Duncan, and reports that Duncan's own rebellious subjects and the invading Scandinavians had both been so completely defeated by his generals, Macbeth and Banquo, that the Norwegians craved for peace:--

"Sueno, the Norways' King, craves composition; Nor would we deign him burial of his men Till he disbursed, at Saint Colmes Inch, Ten thousand dollars to our general use."

Inchcolm is the only island of the east coast of Scotland which derives its distinctive designation from the great Scottish saint. But more than one island on our western shores bears the name of St. Columba; as, for example, St. Colme's Isle, in Loch Erisort, and St. Colm's Isle in the Minch, in the Lewis; the island of Kolmbkill, at the head of Loch Arkeg, in Inverness-shire; Eilean Colm, in the parish of Tongue; and, above all, Icolmkill, or Iona itself, the original seat and subsequent great centre of the ecclesiastic power of St. Columba and his successors. An esteemed antiquarian friend, to whom I lately mentioned the preceding reference to Inchcolm by Shakspeare, at once maintained that the St. Colme's Isle in Macbeth was Iona. Indeed, some of the modern editors of Shakspeare, carried away by the same view, have printed the line which I have quoted thus:--

"Till he disbursed, at Saint Colme's-kill Isle,"

instead of "Saint Colmes ynch," as the old folio edition prints it. But there is no doubt whatever about the reading, nor that the island mentioned in Macbeth is Inchcolm in the Firth of Forth. For the site of the defeat of the Norwegian host was in the adjoining mainland of Fife, as the Thane of Ross tells the Scotch king that, to report his victory, he had come from the seat of war--

"from Fife, Where the Norwegian banners flout the sky."

The reference to Inchcolm by Shakspeare becomes more interesting when we follow the poet to the original historical foundations upon which he built his wondrous tragedy. It is well known that Shakspeare derived the incidents for his story of Macbeth from that translation of Hector Boece's Chronicles of Scotland, which was published in England by Raphael Holinshed in 1577. In these Chronicles, Holinshed, or rather Hector Boece, after describing the reputed poisoning, with the juice of belladonna, of Sueno and his army, and their subsequent almost complete destruction, adds, that shortly afterwards, and indeed while the Scots were still celebrating this equivocal conquest, another Danish host landed at Kinghorn. The fate of this second army is described by Holinshed in the following words:--

"The Scots hauing woone so notable a victorie, after they had gathered and diuided the spoile of the field, caused solemne processions to be made in all places of the realme, and thanks to be giuen to almightie God, that had sent them so faire a day ouer their enimies. But whilest the people were thus at their processions, woord was brought that a new fleet of Danes was arriued at Kingcorne, sent thither by Canute, King of England, in reuenge of his brother Suenos ouerthrow. To resist these enimies, which were alreadie landed, and busie in spoiling the countrie, Makbeth and Banquho were sent with the Kings authoritie, who hauing with them a conuenient power, incountred the enimies, slue part of them, and chased the other to their ships. They that escaped and got once to their ships, obteined of Makbeth for a great summe of gold, that such of their friends as were slaine at this last bickering, might be buried in Saint Colmes Inch. In memorie whereof, manie old sepultures are yet in the said Inch, there to be seene grauen with the armes of the Danes, as the maner of burieng noble men still is, and hieretofore hath beene vsed. A peace was also concluded at the same time betwixt the Danes and Scotishmen, ratified (as some haue written) in this wise: that from thencefoorth the Danes should neuer come into Scotland to make anie warres against the Scots by anie maner of meanes. And these were the warres that Duncane had with forren enimies, in the seuenth yiere of his reigne."

To this account of Holinshed, as bearing upon the question of the St. Colme's Isle alluded to by Shakspeare, it is only necessary to add one remark:--Certainly the western Iona, with its nine separate cemeteries, could readily afford fit burial-space for the slain Danes; but it is impossible to believe that the defeated and dejected Danish army would or could carry the dead and decomposing bodies of their chiefs to that remote place of sepulture. And, supposing that the dead bodies had been embalmed, then it would have been easier to carry them back to the Danish territories in England, or even across the German Ocean to Denmark itself, than round by the Pentland Firth to the distant western island of Icolmkill. On the other hand, that St. Colme's Inch, in the Firth of Forth, is the island alluded to, is, as I have already said, perfectly certain, from its propinquity to the seat of war, and the point of landing of the new Scandinavian host, namely, Kinghorn; the old town of Wester Kinghorn lying only about three or four miles below Inchcolm, and the present town of the same name, or Eastern Kinghorn, being placed about a couple of miles further down the coast.

We might here have adduced another incontrovertible argument in favour of this view by appealing to the statement, given in the above quotation, of the existence on Inchcolm, in Boece's time, of Danish sepulchral monuments, provided we felt assured that this statement was in itself perfectly correct. But before adopting it as such, it is necessary to remember that Boece describes the sculptured crosses and stones at Camustane and Aberlemno, in Forfarshire, as monuments of a Danish character also; and whatever may have been the origin and objects of these mysteries in Scottish archæology,--our old and numerous Sculptured Stones, with their strange enigmatical symbols,--we are at least certain that they are not Danish either in their source or design, as no sculptured stones with these peculiar symbols exist in Denmark itself. That Inchcolm contained one or more of those sculptured stones, is proved by a small fragment that still remains, and which was detected a few years ago about the garden-wall. A drawing of it has been already published by Mr. Stuart. (See woodcut, Fig. 1.) In the quotation which I have given from Holinshed's Chronicles, the "old sepultures there (on Inchcolm) to be seene grauen with the armes of the Danes," are spoken of as "manie" in number. Bellenden uses similar language: "Thir Danes" (he writes) "that fled to thair schippis, gaif gret sowmes of gold to Makbeth to suffer thair freindis that war slane at his jeoperd to be buryit in Sanct Colmes Inche. In memory heirof, mony auld sepulturis ar yit in the said Inche, gravin with armis of Danis." In translating this passage from Boece, both Holinshed and Bellenden overstate, in some degree, the words of their original author. Boece speaks of the Danish monuments still existing on Inchcolm in his day, or about the year 1525, as plural in number, but without speaking of them as many. After stating that the Danes purchased the right of sepulture for their slain chiefs (nobiles) "in Emonia insula, loco sacro," he adds, "extant et hac ætate notissima Danorum monumenta, lapidibusque insculpta eorum insignia." For a long period past only one so-called Danish monument has existed on Inchcolm, and is still to be seen there. It is a single recumbent block of stone above five feet long, about a foot broad, and one foot nine inches in depth, having a rude sculptured figure on its upper surface. In his History of Fife, published in 1710, Sir Robert Sibbald has both drawn and described it. "It is (says he) made like a coffin, and very fierce and grim faces are done on both the ends of it. Upon the middle stone which supports it, there is the figure of a man holding a spear in his hand." He might have added that on the corresponding middle part of the opposite side there is sculptured a rude cross; but both the cross and "man holding a spear" are cut on the single block of stone forming the monument, and not, as he represents, on a separate supporting stone. Pennant, in his Tour through Scotland in 1772, tells us that this "Danish monument" "lies in the south-east [south-west] side of the building (or monastery), on a rising ground. It is (he adds) of a rigid form, and the surface ornamented with scale-like figures. At each end is the representation of a human head." In its existing defaced form, the sculpture has certainly much more the appearance of a recumbent human figure, with a head at one end and the feet at the other, than with a human head at either extremity. The present condition of the monument is faithfully given in the accompanying woodcut, which, like most of the other woodcuts in this little essay, have been copied from sketches made by the masterly pencil of my esteemed friend, Mr. James Drummond, R.S.A.

It is well known that, about a century after the occurrence of these Danish wars, and of the alleged burial of the Danish chiefs on Inchcolm,--or in the first half of the thirteenth century,--there was founded on this island, by Alexander I., a monastery, which from time to time was greatly enlarged, and well endowed. The monastic buildings remaining on Inchcolm at the present day are of very various dates, and still so extensive that their oblong light-grey mass, surmounted by a tall square central tower, forms a striking object in the distance, as seen in the summer morning light from the higher streets and houses of Edinburgh, and from the neighbouring shores of the Firth of Forth. These monastic buildings have been fortunately protected and preserved by their insular situation,--not from the silent and wasting touch of time, but from the more ruthless and destructive hand of man. The stone-roofed octagonal chapter-house is one of the most beautiful and perfect in Scotland; and the abbot's house, the cloisters, refectory, etc., are still comparatively entire. But the object of the present communication is not to describe the well-known conventual ruins on the island, but to direct the attention of the Society to a small building, isolated, and standing at a little distance from the remains of the monastery, and which, I am inclined to believe, is of an older date, and of an earlier age, than any part of the monastery itself.

The small building, cell, oratory, or chapel, to which I allude, forms now, with its south side, a portion of the line of the north wall of the present garden, and is in a very ruinous state; but its more characteristic and original features can still be accurately made out.