----------------------------book club
From John O’Groats to Land’s End
by Robert & John Naylor (1916)
FOURTH WEEK’S JOURNEY — Oct. 9 to Oct. 15.
We journeyed along an upward gradient with a view of Craigmillar Castle to our left, obtaining on our way a magnificent view of the fine city we had left behind us, with its castle, and the more lofty elevation known as Arthur’s Seat, from which portions of twelve counties might be seen. It was a curiously shaped hill with ribs and bones crossing in various directions, which geologists tell us are undoubted remains of an old volcano. It certainly was a very active one, if one can judge by the quantity of debris it threw out. There was an old saying, especially interesting to ladies, that if you washed your face at sunrise on May 1st, with dew collected off the top of Arthur’s Seat, you would be beautiful for ever. We were either too late or too soon, as it was now October 9th, and as we had a lot to see on that day, with not overmuch time to see it in, we left the dew to the ladies, feeling certain, however, that they would be more likely to find it there in October than on May Day. When we had walked about five miles, we turned off the main road to visit the pretty village of Rosslyn, or Roslin, with its three great attractions: the chapel, the castle, and the dell. We found it surrounded by woods and watered by a very pretty reach of the River Esk, and as full of history as almost any place in Scotland.
The unique chapel was the great object of interest. The guide informed us that it was founded in 1446 by William St. Clair, who also built the castle, in which he resided in princely splendour. He must have been a person of very great importance, for he had titles enough even to weary a Spaniard, being Prince of Orkney, Duke of Oldenburg, Earl of Caithness and Stratherne, Lord St. Clair, Lord Liddlesdale, Lord Admiral of the Scottish Seas, Lord Chief Justice of Scotland, Lord Warden of the three Marches, Baron of Roslin, Knight of the Cockle, and High Chancellor, Chamberlain, and Lieutenant of Scotland!
The lords of Rosslyn were buried in their complete armour beneath the chapel floor up to the year 1650, but afterwards in coffins. Sir Walter Scott refers to them in his “Lay of the Last Minstrel” thus:—
There were more carvings in Rosslyn Chapel than in any place of equal size that we saw in all our wanderings, finely executed, and with every small detail beautifully finished and exquisitely carved. Foliage, flowers, and ferns abounded, and religious allegories, such as the Seven Acts of Mercy, the Seven Deadly Sins, the Dance of Death, and many scenes from the Scriptures; it was thought that the original idea had been to represent a Bible in stone. The great object of interest was the magnificently carved pillar known as the “Prentice Pillar”, and in the chapel were two carved heads, each of them showing a deep scar on the right temple. To these, as well as the pillar, a melancholy memory was attached, from which it appeared that the master mason received orders that this pillar should be of exquisite workmanship and design. Fearing his inability to carry out his instructions, he went abroad to Rome to see what designs he could find for its execution. While he was away his apprentice had a dream in which he saw a most beautiful column, and, setting to work at once to carry out the design of his dream, finished the pillar, a perfect marvel of workmanship. When his master returned and found the pillar completed, he was so envious and enraged at the success of his apprentice that he struck him on the head with his mallet with such force that he killed him on the spot, a crime for which he was afterwards executed.
We passed on to the castle across a very narrow bridge over a ravine, but we did not find much there except a modern-looking house built with some of the old stones, under which were four dungeons. Rosslyn was associated with scenes rendered famous by Bruce and Wallace, Queen Mary and Rizzio, Robert III and Queen Annabella Drummond, by Comyn and Fraser, and by the St. Clairs, as well as by legendary stories of the Laird of Gilmorton Grange, who set fire to the house in which were his beautiful daughter and her lover, the guilty abbot, so that both of them were burnt to death, and of the Lady of Woodhouselee, a white-robed, restless spectre, who appeared with her infant in her arms. Then there was the triple battle between the Scots and the English, in which the Scots were victorious:
Here, too, was the inn, now the caretaker’s house, visited by Dr. Johnson and Boswell in 1773, the poet Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy in 1803, while some of the many other celebrities who called from time to time had left their signatures on the window-panes. Burns and his friend Nasmyth the artist breakfasted there on one occasion, and Burns was so pleased with the catering that he rewarded the landlady by scratching on a pewter plate the two following verses:
Rosslyn at one time was a quiet place and only thought of in Edinburgh when an explosion was heard at the Rosslyn gunpowder works. But many more visitors appeared after Sir Walter Scott raised it to eminence by his famous “Lay” and his ballad of “Rosabelle”:
Hawthornden was quite near where stood Ben Jonson's sycamore, and Drummond’s Halls, and Cyprus Grove, but we had no time to see the caves where Sir Alexander Ramsay had such hairbreadth escapes. About the end of the year 1618 Ben Jonson, then Poet Laureate of England, walked from London to Edinburgh to visit his friend Taylor, the Thames waterman, commonly known as the Water Poet, who at that time was at Leith. In the January following he called to see the poet Drummond of Hawthornden, who was more frequently called by the name of the place where he lived than by his own. He found him sitting in front of his house, and as he approached Drummond welcomed him with the poetical salutation:
"Welcome! welcome! Royal Ben,"
to which Jonson responded,
"Thank ye, thank ye, Hawthornden."
The poet Drummond was born in 1585, and died in 1649, his end being hastened by grief at the execution of Charles I. A relative erected a monument to his memory in 1784, to which the poet Young added the following lines:
Rosslyn Glen was a lovely place, almost like a fairy scene, and we wondered if Burns had it in his mind when he wrote:
We walked very quietly and quickly past the gunpowder works, lest conversation might cause an explosion that would put an end to our walking expedition and ourselves at the same time, and regained the highway at a point about seven miles from Edinburgh.