The Rivers of Great Britain, Descriptive, Historical, Pictorial: Rivers of the East Coast - Various

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and few and insignificant as are the remaining actors, Culross and its vicinity have been the theatre of famous events, and have reared many men prominent in the civil and religious history of the country. Here St. Serf, the Apostle of Fife, is supposed to have been born, and to have died. Here St. Thenew, daughter of “King Lot of Lothian,” landed from the rotten shallop in which she had been cast adrift at Aberlady, far down the coast, and gave birth to the more famous St. Kentigern, or Mungo, patron saint of Glasgow. From Culross downward, both shores of the Firth, and the islands in its midst, are strewn with the memorials and traditions of the early Culdee missionaries, whose humble cells later became the sites of the wealthier and more imposing religious houses of Catholic times. Besides St. Serf and St. Mungo, Fillan, Palladius, Adamnan, Adrian, Monans, and Columba himself, set their imprint upon these curving coasts and solitary islets; and Inverkeithing, Dysart, and Pittenweem; Abercorn, Inchcolm, Inchkeith, the May, and the Bass, are among the places sanctified by memories of the Early Church.

      It was not till 1217 that the Monastery of Culross, of which only some fragments remain, was founded by Malcolm, Earl of Fife. At the Reformation the Abbey lands passed chiefly into the hands of the Colvilles of Culross, and this family, with the Erskines, the Cochranes, the Prestons, and the Bruces, have since successively had “the guidin’ o’t” in the burgh and the surrounding district. So far from the ecclesiastical eminence of Culross terminating with St. Serf, it has continued almost down to our own day; for the town, and the district back from it—at Carnock, and eastward along the hill-skirts to Hill of Beath and beyond—have witnessed the keenest struggles between Conformity and Schism—have been special scenes of the labours of Bishop Blackadder and Bishop Leighton the “Saintly;” of John Row, and of John Blackadder the Covenanter, who held his Conventicles under the wakeful and vengeful eye of Dalzell of Binns—him with the “vowed beard,” whose hill-top for “glowering owre” Fife is on the opposite side of the Firth; and in later times, of Boston, of Ralph and Ebenezer Erskine, of Gillespie, and of other founders of the “Relief Church.”

      Culrossians might adopt the Bruce motto, “Fuimus,” to describe their industrial as well as their religious past. More than once the burgh has been a spot favoured by trade, as well as by history. The celebrated Sir George Bruce, of Carnock, made its fortunes, as well as his own, by coal-mining and salt-making in the days of James I. of England. Remains, in the shape of a heap of stones, uncovered at low water, are seen of the “Moat”—an “unfellowed and unmatchable work; a darke, light, pleasant, profitable hell,” as John Taylor, the “Water Poet” described it in the early years of the seventeenth century—constructed to work the minerals lying under the bed of the sea. But Culross’s prosperity did not come to an end with them. Throughout Scotland its “girdles”—iron plates for baking the oaten bread of the “Land o’ Cakes”—were also “unfellowed and unmatchable” for many a day. The first of note among the ancestors of the Earl of Rosebery was of the honest guild of the girdlesmiths of the burgh. A “Cu’ross girdle” will soon only be found in an archæological museum; their glory is departing, their use will soon be forgotten.

DUNFERMLINE.

      DUNFERMLINE.

      A lingering look may be cast in the direction of the “Standard Stone,” at Bordie, where Duncan and Macbeth withstood the Danes; and of the Castlehill, or Dunimarle, near by, which lays claim to be the scene of the murder of Lady Macduff and her “pretty chickens” by the Usurper—a claim, however, disputed by the “Thane’s Castle,” near East Wemyss, by Rhives, and by other sites in the East of Fife. To this famous Whig shire we eventually come at Torryburn, for thus far, since leaving Stirling, we have been skirting on the left the shores of Clackmannan and of a sporadic fragment of Perthshire projected upon the Forth. In its scenic, social, and historic characteristics, however, the whole ground, from where the river begins to broaden, is “Fifish,” and, from Dunmyatt to the “East Neuk,” bears the traces, in place-names, legends, and ancient remains, of old Pictish possession, and of Norse, Saxon, and Highland incursions; of Culdee settlement and of Roman intrusion; and of all the later strife, in Kirk and State, in which Fife has “borne the gree.” Neighbours have been ready to observe that the joint effects of geographical isolation and outside pressure are quite as deeply marked in the character, habits, and ways of the inhabitants; and that, besides occupying a separate “Kingdom,” they are in many respects a “peculiar people.”

FORTH BRIDGE, FROM THE SOUTH-WEST.

      FORTH BRIDGE, FROM THE SOUTH-WEST.

      Charlestown and Limekilns, after Culross, are but upstart villages, built by the Earls of Elgin as shipping-places for the coal, lime, and ironstone upon their Broomhall Estate. Before us, a prominent object by the shore, is the stark grey keep of Rosyth Castle. And now we are fairly in “St. Margaret’s Hope,” and under the shelter of the high ground projecting from the Fife shore, which narrows, by a full half, the width of the Firth, and forms, with Inch Garvie island as a stepping-stone in mid-channel, the natural abutment whence the Forth Bridge makes its flying leap to the southern bank. From the lee of this rocky ridge Queen Mary, having rested at Rosyth, set sail for the other shore, after her escape from Loch Leven Castle. On the beach here Sir Patrick Spens may have paced when the “braid letter” was put into his hands, sending him on the luckless voyage to bring back the “Maiden of Norway,” while not far off

      “The King sat in Dunfermline tower,

      Drinking the blood-red wine.”

      But most famous of the events in the annals of the “Hope”—and one of the epoch-making accidents in the history of Scotland—was the landing, in 1069, of Edgar Atheling and his sisters in this safe harbourage, after grievous tossings by storms and ill-fortune. The then royal residence of Dunfermline is four miles distant, the road leading past Pitreavie, where, six centuries later, Cromwell, descending from the Ferry Hill, so terribly mauled the Scottish army. Tradition points out a stone where the weary Saxon Princess Margaret rested, on a way which became so familiar to her. For she found favour in the sight of King Malcolm Canmore, and made many journeys, by the haven and the ferry that bear her name, to Edinburgh, and to pilgrim shrines in the south. It might almost be said that civilisation, and the English speech, and the Roman hierarchy and influence, landed on the Scottish shores with Saint Margaret; and the whole district around the “Queen’s Ferry” is redolent with memories of her to this day.

      “Dunfermline Tower,” or rather the foundations of what is considered the first royal seat there, are within the grounds of Pittencrieff, on the high bank overlooking the Lyne burn. Farther up, and more adjacent to the modern town, is the Palace, built in later times, and still showing a stately front, sixty feet in height, rising above the ancient trees and overlooking the beautiful Glen. Beyond these walls, and the crypt-like chambers which served as kitchen and other offices, little of the Palace remains. The mullioned windows are pointed out of the rooms in which Charles I. and his sister Elizabeth, the “Winter Queen” of Bohemia, were born, and where Charles II. signed the “Solemn League and Covenant;” but within, as without, they only look into “empty air.”

      The Palace communicated by underground passages with the Abbey, founded and dedicated to the Holy Trinity by Malcolm Canmore and Margaret in 1072, and enlarged and beautified by the munificence and piety of their successors. Beyond fragments of the walls, nearly all that remains of the monastic buildings is the Frater Hall, with the delicate Gothic tracery of its west window. But close behind is the Abbey Church, surrounded by its graves, its rookery, and the old houses of the town; and it still ranks as one of the proudest and best-preserved specimens of Anglo-Norman church architecture in Scotland. Rich and quaint are the carvings on its doorways, and dim and mysterious is the light that falls through its illuminated windows as you tread your way between the massive old pillars, and literally over the dust of kings and princes, to the spacious and lightsome New Abbey Church. This portion of the Abbey structure was rebuilt seventy years ago, and in the course of the operations the workmen came upon the tomb and remains of Robert the Bruce—recognisable, among other evidences, by the gigantic stature and by the breast-bone, from which a piece had been sawn to reach the heart

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