Slains Castle and the Bullers of Buchan. (August 24-25).

At Aberdeen Johnson had found awaiting him a letter from London which must have been six days on the road.[533] He did not receive another till he arrived at Glasgow, nearly ten weeks later. He was now going “to the world’s end extra anni solisque vias, where the post would be a long time in reaching him,” to apply to the Hebrides the words which four years later he used of Brighton.[534] It was only seven and twenty years before he drove out from Aberdeen that the Duke of Cumberland with six battalions of foot and Lord Mark Kerr’s dragoons had marched forth along the same road to seek the rebels. With a gentle breeze and a fair wind his transports at the same time moved along shore.[535] Though no military state waited upon our travellers yet their fame went before them. At Ellon, where they breakfasted, the landlady asked Boswell: “Is not this the great Doctor that is going about through the country? There’s something great in his appearance.” “They say,” said the landlord, “that he is the greatest man in England, except Lord Mansfield.” THE ROAD TO SLAINS CASTLE. They turned here out of their course to visit Slains Castle, the seat of the Earl of Errol. The country over which they drove this day was more desolate than any through which they had as yet passed. In one place, writes Johnson, “the sand of the shore had been raised by a tempest, and carried to such a distance that an estate was overwhelmed and lost.” Sir Walter Scott, who in the summer of 1814, sailed along the shore in a Lighthouse Yacht, says that northwards of Aberdeen “the coast changes from a bold and rocky to a low and sandy character. Along the Bay of Belhelvie a whole parish was swallowed up by the shifting sands, and is still a desolate waste. It belonged to the Earls of Errol, and was rented at £500 a year at the time. When these sands are past the land is all arable. Not a tree to be seen; nor a grazing cow, or sheep, or even a labour-horse at grass, though this be Sunday.”[536] The Earl who welcomed Johnson to Slains Castle had done what he could to overcome nature. “He had cultivated his fields so as to bear rich crops of every kind, and he had made an excellent kitchen-garden with a hot-house.” His successors have diligently followed in his steps, and taking advantage of a hollow in the ground have even raised an avenue of trees. They can only grow to the height of fifteen or twenty feet, for when the shoots rise high enough to catch the blasts from the North Sea they are cut down the following winter. SLAINS CASTLE. The situation of the Castle struck Johnson as the noblest he had ever seen.

Boswell was also impressed with the position of this old house, set on the very verge of life. “The King of Denmark,” he says, “is Lord Errol’s nearest neighbour on the north-east.” The Castle was built on the edge of the granite cliffs, in one spot not leaving even a foothold for the daring climber. A foolhardy fellow who had tried to get round lost his life in the attempt. I was greatly disappointed at finding that “the excellent old house” which Boswell describes, with its outside galleries on the first and second story, no longer remains. I had looked forward to standing in the very bow-window of the drawing-room fronting the sea where Johnson repeated Horace’s Ode, Jam satis terris. In the new building, however, the bow-window has not been forgotten,—and there I looked out on the wild scene which met his view. I saw “the cut in the rock made by the influx of the sea,” into which the rash climber had fallen as he tried to go round the Castle. Below me there were short slopes of grass ending in a precipice. So near was the edge that a child could have tossed a ball over it from the window. Red granite rocks in sharp and precipitous headlands ran out into the sea. A fishing-boat with brown sails was passing close by, while in the distance in a long line lay a fleet of herring-smacks. The sea-birds were hovering about and perching on the rocks, mingling their melancholy cries with the dashing of the waves. The dark waters were surging through the narrow chasms formed by rocky islets and the steep sides of the cliffs. For the storm-tost sailor it is a dreadful coast. A SHIPWRECK OFF SLAINS CASTLE. On a wild night in winter not many years ago one of the maids, as she was letting down the blinds in the drawing-room, heard confused sounds which came, she thought, from the servants’ hall beneath. The butler in another part of the house had caught them too. Yet when they reproached their fellow-servants with their noisiness they were told that it was not from them that the sounds had come. They thought no more about it that night, but next morning when the day broke the masts were seen of a ship-wrecked vessel on the rocks below the Castle. The waves were breaking over it, and not a soul was left alive. Then they understood that it was the despairing cries of the unhappy sailors which had in vain reached their ears. The story, that was told me as I stood looking out on the sea, gave an air of sadness to a room which had already raised sad thoughts in my mind. THE EARL OF KILMARNOCK. For on the wall was hanging the portrait of an innocent and pretty boy who, before so many years were to pass over him, on the scaffold on Tower Hill was to pay the penalty of rebellion with his life.

On the table was lying a curious but gloomy collection of the prints of his trial and execution.[537] Boswell’s rest was troubled by the thoughts of this unhappy nobleman. He had been kept awake by the blazing of his fire, the roaring of the sea, and the smell of his pillows, which were made of the feathers of some sea-fowl. “I saw in imagination,” he writes, “Lord Errol’s father, Lord Kilmarnock, who was beheaded on Tower Hill in 1746, and I was somewhat dreary.”

In the drawing-room was hanging that fine whole-length picture of Lord Errol, which led Johnson to talk of his friend, the great painter, and “to conclude his panegyric by saying, ‘Sir Joshua Reynolds, sir, is the most invulnerable man I know; the man with whom if you should quarrel, you would find the most difficulty how to abuse.’”

In the rebellion of 1745, Lord Errol, following a plan not unknown among the Scotch nobility, had served on the opposite side from his father. At Culloden he had seen him brought in prisoner. “The Earl of Kilmarnock had lost his hat, and his long hair was flying over his face. The son stepped out of the ranks, and taking off his own hat placed it over his father’s disordered and wind-beaten locks.”[538] The young man in his loyalty to George II., did not follow the example of his forefathers, for he was descended from at least three lines of rebels. “He united in his person the four earldoms of Errol, Kilmarnock, Linlithgow, and Callander.” The last two were attainted in 1715, and Kilmarnock in 1746.[539] As we gaze at the haughty-looking man whom Reynolds has so finely painted in the robes of a peer, we call to mind the coronation of George III., where he played his part as High Constable of Scotland—“the noblest figure I ever saw,” wrote Horace Walpole.[540] To Johnson he recalled Homer’s character of Sarpedon.[541] At the coronation banquet in Westminster Hall, Walpole thought, as well he might, on that “most melancholy scene” which he had witnessed less than fifteen years before in that same hall, when the earl’s father, “tall and slender, his behaviour a most just mixture between dignity and submission,” had in vain pleaded for mercy.[542]

From Slains Castle our travellers drove a short distance along the coast to the famous Bullers of Buchan—“a sight,” writes Johnson, “which no man can see with indifference, who has either sense of danger or delight in rarity.” Boswell describes the spot as:—

As the weather was calm they took a boat and rowed through the archway into the cauldron. “It was a place,” writes Johnson, “which, though we could not think ourselves in danger, we could scarcely survey without some recoil of mind.” He thought that “it might have served as a shelter from storms to the little vessels used by the northern rovers.” Sir Walter Scott, however, was told that this was impossible, for “in a high gale the waves rush in with incredible violence. An old fisher said he had seen them flying over the natural wall of the Bullers, which cannot be less than two hundred feet high.”[544] In the Gentleman’s Magazine for 1755 (p. 200), two strange pictures are given of this curious place, which must surely have been drawn in St. John’s Gate, Clerkenwell, by an artist who had never seen it.

Not far off is Dun Buy,[545] a lofty island rock placed in an angle of the shore that is formed by no less lofty cliffs. The sea, with its dark waters in endless rise and fall, washes through the narrow channel, its ceaseless murmur answering to the cries of the countless water-fowl who high up on the ledges breed in safety. On one side, where there is a steep, grassy slope, Dun Buy can be scaled. I climbed up it many years ago one hot summer’s day, and thought that I had never seen so strange and wild a spot. Johnson had also visited it, but his mind was not affected as was my young imagination, for he said that “upon these rocks there was nothing that could long detain attention.”