Читать книгу The Highlands and Islands of Scotland онлайн

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From very early times the Macgregors passed for Ishmaelites, every hand against them, their fastnesses again and again threatened by commissions of fire and sword as soon as troubled Scottish kings could attempt to settle the quarrels of the Highland border. Their most resounding offence was the slaughter of the Colquhouns at Glenfruin by Loch Lomond, a little before James VI. posted off to his softer throne in London. This was a fair fight, made flagrant in tradition by the murder of the Dumbarton schoolboys who had come out to see the battle, as in our day lads might go some way to a football match. It is stated that the Macgregor chief bid these non-combatants take refuge in a church, either to keep them out of the way of shots, or to have under his hand a troop of hostages from among the principal families in Scotland; and that it was his foster-brother or some of his followers who stabbed the unfortunate youths, to the chief’s indignation. Another legend tells of a barn in which the poor boys were burned to death. One tradition points out two murderers, who henceforth lived as outlaws from the clan. Miss Murray Macgregor naturally defends her kinsmen from the charge of an atrocity so heavily weighing on their own conscience that for long no Macgregor would cross after nightfall the stream in that “Glen of Sorrow,” believed to be haunted by the ghosts of the victims. It is in print, though I cannot find any authority of weight, that up to the middle of the eighteenth century the Dumbarton schoolboys annually went through a ceremony of funeral rites on what was taken for the anniversary of the massacre, their dux being laid on a bier and with Gaelic chants carried to an open grave as effigy of those luckless predecessors.