University of Virginia Library

This Venerable and magnificent relic of cathedral grandeur is situated in Elgin, Morayshire, on the banks of the river Lossie. It was built early in the thirteenth century. About a hundred and fifty years after the foundation, it was entirely burned down by the ruffian son of a Scottish king. the creature— a common destroyer—lives yet in hateful record, as “The Wolf of Badenoch.”

“The cathedral is surrounded by a burying-ground, one of the largest churchyards, perhaps, in Great Britain. In it are interred the remains of many distinguished persons, including several of the kings of Scotland. The churchyard is enclosed by a stone wall. What with the number of graves, the beauty and variety of the sculptured memorials of departed worth and greatness, and the grandeur of the dilapidated cathedral—a building which is, indeed, pre-eminently magnificent, even in ruins—the scene is calculated to make a strong impression on the spectator.”

It is not all of its early grandeur, nor of its later desolation, its splendour nor its ruin—not all the historian has told or antiquarian minuted—will impart an interest to the spot, like what it derives now from a maniac—an outcast mother and her orphan boy. It fell out thus:—In 1745, Marjory Gillan, a young woman, resided in Elgin—she was well connected and good-looking—was privately married to a young man who had enlisted in a regiment then quartered in the town—she went abroad with her husband, followed by the bitter reproach of her relatives and friends, who considered the step she had taken a discredit and an affront to all connected. In the same spirit of unrelenting harshness was she received on her return, which occurred about two years from the time she left. It was rumoured that her husband had used her ill, had left her behind, and was killed in battle. The forlorn one now sought her homeless native place, unsettled in mind, and carrying a baby in her arms. “The reception she met with, and the wild fancies of a wandering mind, induced her to take a strange step. Amidst the crumbling ruins of the cathedral, there is one chamber still entire; a small, cellar-like room, about five feet square, with scarcely any light, and which is said, in ancient times, to have been the sacristy, or place for keeping the vessels used in the offices of religion. Here the poor outcast took up her abode, rendered insensible, by her obscured reason, to the nocturanl horrors of a place which, in a better state of mind, she would have dreaded to approach after dusk. There was in this room an ancient sculptured font, which she used as a bed to her infant; other furniture she had none. When it was known that she had gone to reside in this dismal place, the people felt as if it were an imputation against their Christian feelings. She and her babe were repeatedly carried, by some one or other of them, to their houses, but she always made her way back to the sacristy. At length, finding her determined to live there, they contented themselves with giving her food and alms, and for several years she wandered about with her boy, under the appellation of ‘Daft May Gilzean’ —a harmless creature, that wept and sang by turns. Her lover or husband was no more heard of in the country, although he had several relations living in the neighbourhood, with whom he might have been expected to correspond, if he had remained in life. Andrew Anderson, the son of May Gilzean, grew up in all the raggedness and misery which might be expected under such circumstances to fall to his lot. It is questionable if he ever knew the comforts of a bed, or of a cooked meal of any kind, till his boyhood was far advanced. The one solacement of his forlorn existence was the affection which his mother always continued to feel for him.” Daft May dies—Andrew Anderson, her ragged and bewildered boy, is forced, by ungracious treatment from an uncle with whom he dwelt, to cast himself upon the world. Fortunately he had obtained some education gratuitously in his native place. With this, his only wealth, “he made his way to Leith, and thence to London, where he was taken into the workshop of a tailor, who, finding that he wrote neatly and had a knowledge of accounts, began, after some time, to employ him as a clerk. He was one day commissioned to take home a suit of clothes to a military gentleman, and to grant a discharge for the account. This gentleman was himself a Scotsman, and bore a commission in a regiment about to proceed to the East Indies. He was, like all Scotsmen at a distance from home, interested in hearing his native tongue spoken, by however humble a person. When, in addition to this, he observed the pleasing countenance and manners of the youth, and found that the discharge appended by him to the account was in a good regular hand, he entered into conversation, asked whence he came, what were his prospects, and other such questions, and finally inquired if he would like to go abroad as a soldier and officer's servant. Anderson required little persuasion to induce him to enter into the stranger's views. He enlisted as a private, and immediately after set sail with the regiment, in the capacity of drummer, acting at the same time, according to previous agreement, as the valet or servant of his patron.” A singularly marked Providence guided the footsteps of “Daft May's loonie,” and, after an absence of sixty years, he returned to the place of his nativity the renowned and wealthy Lieutenant-General Anderson of the East India Company's Service. He “founded and endowed, within the burgh of Elgin, an hospital for the maintenance of indigent men and women not under fifty years of age; also a school of industry for the maintenance and education of male and female children of the labouring classes, whose parents are unable to maintain and educate them, and for putting out the said children, when fit to be so, as apprentices to some trade or occupation, or employing them in such a manner as may enable them to earn a livelihood by their lawful industry, and make them useful members of society.”

The z in this name is not pronounced.

Chambers' Edinburgh Journal, No. 385.