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CAWDOR CASTLE

The Highlanders in those days were as noted for sobriety as for valour, declares General Stewart, in proof of which he asserts that when rum was served out on a campaign, the Highland soldiers alone could be trusted with three or four days’ allowance at once, like officers. There is indeed reason to hold that the Highlands have not always deserved a name for intemperance. The former drink of the people was ale, if not water; whisky does not figure in their ancient songs and proverbs, as does the Pictish “heather ale,” the secret of making which is long lost. With Pitt’s excise laws, we are told, began the smuggling and illicit distillation that did so much to demoralise a race which, if all stories are true, has sadly fallen away from primitive virtue. So Stewart protests as to the temperance of the early Highland regiments; yet more critical observers in George I.’s reign speak of whisky houses as already a curse to the country from which those troops were raised; and indeed all travellers of that date who got themselves into print are apt to touch on a habit of “correcting” or “qualifying” the rawness of Highland air, where a funeral, as well as a feast, was like to end in a drunken fray, when dirks served for forks.