 | The Poetical Works of David Macbeth Moir |  |
THE BASS ROCK.
The solan-goose sits on the laik,
Yearly in the spring.
Ray's Itineraries, (1661.)
I.
'Twas Summer's depth; a more enlivening sunNever drank up the gelid morning dews,
Or crimsoned with its glow the July flowers,
Than that on which our boat, with oar and sail,
Left Canta Bay, with its embosomed huts,
And through the freshening tide, with eager prow,
Bore onward to thy rocks, horrific Bass!
II.
Light blew the breeze, the billows curled around;'Mid clouds of sea-fowl, whose unceasing screams
Uncouth filled all the empty heavens with sound,
Forward we clove: at times the solan's wing,
As if to show its majesty of strength,
Brushed near us with a roughly winnowing noise;
And now, aloft, a lessening speck, was seen
Over the cloudlets, 'mid engulfing blue.
In myriads, restless, multitudinous,
Wedge-like, at intervals their inner plumes
Glancing like silver in the sunny ray;
The parrot dived beside us; slowly past
Floated the graceful eider-duck; with shrieks
The snipe zig-zagg'd, then vanished in alarm;
And all in air and ocean seemed astir;
Until the sole and narrow landing-place
The Bass is only accessible at one flat shelvy point to the south-east,—the sole landing-places, and these but a few feet wide, being the south and north sides of this point. To command these there is a small fortalice, now unroofed, and in ruins. To the west the cell in which Blackadder was imprisoned and died is still pointed out, with its three small ironbarred windows; and half-way up the acclivity, a little beyond the ancient garden, where now not even a “flower grows wild,” are the remains of a Roman Catholic chapel, which, when the island was made the bastille of Scotland, state necessity converted into an ammunition magazine.
The Bass is about a mile and a half from the shore, and nearly the same in circumference. Around it the sea has been fathomed to the depth of 180 feet; and as the rock rises above it to the height of 420, the total elevation from the base is about 600 feet. Its most precipitous aspect is towards the north, where the descent to the ocean is almost a sheer perpendicular; and below there is a remarkable caverned passage leading completely through the rock to the southward, which is navigable in calm weather even at full tide.
We reached, and, grappling with the naked crags,
Wound to a smoother ledge our sheer ascent.
III.
Never was transit more electrical!An hour ago, and by thy traceried walls
We drove, Newbyth, beneath the o'erhanging boughs
Of forests old, wherein the stock-dove plained
In sequestration; while the rabbit, scared,
Took to its hole under the hawthorn's root;
And lay our path through bright and bloomy fields,
Where, from the scented clover to the cloud,
Arose the lyric lark on twinkling wings;
And linnets from each brake responsively
Piped to each other, till the shady groves
Of Tyningham seemed melody's abode.
Everything breathed of happiness and life,
Which in itself was joy; the hill-side farms
Basked in the sunshine with their yellow cones
Of gathered grain; the ploughboy with his team
Stalked onward whistling; and, from cottage roofs,
The wreathing smoke, which spake domestic love,
In household duties cheerfully performed;
And, wading in the neighbouring rivulet,
With eager fingers, from the wild-flower banks
Sweet-scented, childhood gathered nameless blooms.
And now, as if communion were cut off
Utterly with mankind and their concerns,
Amid the bleak and barren solitude
Of that precipitous and sea-girt rock
We found ourselves; the waves their orison
Howled to the winds, which from the breezy North
Over the German Ocean came, as 'twere
To moan in anger through the rifted caves,
Whose echoes gave a desolate response!
IV.
Far in the twilight of primeval time,This must have been a place (ponderingly
Methought) where aboriginal men poured forth
Their erring worship to the elements,
Long ere the Druid, in the sullen night
Of old oak forests, tinged his altar-stone
With blood of brotherhood. It must be so;
So awfully doth the spirit of their powers—
The desolating winds, the trampling waves,
With their white manes, the storm-shower, and the sun—
Here, in this solitude, impress the mind.
Yet human hearts have beat in this abode,
Tradition asserts that the Bass was the residence of Baldred, the disciple of Kentigern, in the sixth century; and he is regarded by Major, and by Spotswood, (vide Church History,) as the apostle of East Lothian, having fixed his cell at Tyningham, and preached through the neighbouring country. This account is countenanced by Smith's Bede, (p. 231-254,) where it is said that a Saxon monastery, dedicated to him, existed there. The diocese of the saint is described by Simeon as “tota terra quæ pertinet ad monasterium Sancti Balthere quod vocatur Tyningham a Lambermore usque ad Escemuthe (Inveresk.”) Consequently it comprehended the whole superficies of East Lothian.
All sullen and repulsive though it be—
Lone captive eyes, for many a joyless month,
Have marked the sun, that rose o'er eastward May,
Expire in glory o'er the summits dun
Of the far Grampians, in the golden west:
Yea, still some ruins, weather-stained, forlorn,
And mottled with the melancholy weeds
That love the salt breeze, tell of prisons grim,
In 1406 the unfortunate King Robert the Third placed his son, afterwards James the First, of poetic memory, in this fortalice on the Bass, as being the stronghold of greatest security against the machinations of his uncle, the cruel and perfidious Duke of Albany. It was for many generations the property of the ancient family of Lauder, who styled themselves of the Bass, and who are now, I believe, represented by Sir Thomas Dick Lauder of Fountainhall and Grange, the accomplished author of the Account of the Morayshire Floods, A Coasting Voyage round Scotland, The Wolf of Badenoch, and other well-known works. It is supposed, however, that their mansion was not on the island, but on the shore near North Berwick; and a flat stone in the cemetery of the Auld Kirk is said to mark out their resting-place.
The island was afterwards converted into a state-prison, alike for civil and ecclesiastical delinquents; and during the reigns when Presbytery was proscribed and persecuted, many of its adherents, as testified by the pages of Wodrow, were confined here. The most distinguished of these was Blackadder, whose memoirs have been ably and interestingly written by Dr Crichton.
Where, in an age as rude, though less remote,
Despotic Policy its victims held
In privacy immured; and where, apart,
The fearless champions of our faith reformed,
Shut up, and severed from the land they loved,
Breathed out their prayers—that day-spring from on high
Should visit us—to God's sole listening ear!
V.
A mighty mass majestic, from the rootsOf the old sea, thou risest to the sky,
In thy wild, bare sublimity alone.
All-glorious was the prospect from thy peak,
Thou thunder-cloven Island of the Forth!
Landward Tantallon lay, with ruined walls
Opposite to the Bass, and on three sides surrounded by the sea, rise the majestic ruins of Tantallon Castle, the great strong-hold of the ancient Douglases, from which they defied alike the threats of the foe and the commands of the sovereign. It could only be approached from the west, and by a drawbridge defended by a massive tower and a double ditch. The walls, which form an irregular hexagon, are of enormous strength and thickness. Over the entrance the memorable emblem of the “bloody heart” may still be traced. The stronghold arose with the settlement of the Douglases in East Lothian under Robert the Second; and such was its power of security and resistance, that popular conviction, as evinced by the saying,
“Ding doun Tantallon?Build a brig to the Bass!”
regarded its destruction as among impossibilities.
Quantum mutatum ab illo!—The very mention of Tantallon carries back the mind to the days of chivalry and romance, and to Archibald Bell-the-Cat, as depicted in the glorious pages of Marmion.
Sepulchral—like a giant, in old age,
Smote by the blackening lightning-flash, and left
A prostrate corpse upon the sounding shore!
Behind arose your congregated woods,
Leuchie, Balgone, and Rockville—fairer none.
Remoter, mingling with the arch of heaven,
Blue Cheviot told where, stretching by his feet,
Seaward, the Forth, a glowing, green expanse,
Studded with many a white and gliding sail,
Winded its serpent form—the Ochils rich
Down gazing in its mirror; while beyond,
The Grampians reared their bare untrodden scalps;
Fife showed her range of scattery coast-towns old—
Old as the days of Scotland's early kings—
Malcolm, and Alexander, and the Bruce—
From western Dysart, to the dwindling point
Of famed and far St Andrews: all beyond
Was ocean's billowy and unbounded waste,
Sole broken by the verdant islet May,
In early times such was the reputation of the fishery in the neighbourhood of the Isle of May, at the mouth of the Firth of Forth, that it was resorted to even by the fishermen of other countries. A curious authentication of this fact exists in a MS. life of St Kentigern, (Bibl. Cotton. tit. A. xix.,) written about the end of the reign of David the First:—
See as quoted in M`Pherson's Notes on Winton, vol. ii. p. 479.
The same site remains to this day the most favourite fishing-station on the Forth — turbot and other fine fish being thence supplied to the London and Edinburgh markets.
Whose fitful lights, amid surrounding gloom,
When midnight mantles earth, and sea, and sky,
From danger warns the home-bound mariner;
And one black speck—a distant sail—which told
Where mingled with its line the horizon blue.
VI.
Who were thy visitants, lone Rock, since ManShrank from thy sea-flower solitudes, and left
His crumbling ruins 'mid thy barren shelves?
Up came the cormorant, with dusky wing,
From northern Orkney, an adventurous flight,
Floating far o'er us in the liquid blue,
While many a hundred fathom in the sheer
Abyss below, where foamed the surge unheard,
Dwindled by distance, flocks of mighty fowl
Floated like feathery specks upon the wave.
And lo! the myriad wings, that like a sheet
Of snow o'erspread the crannies—all were up!
It is curious to remark that the existing varieties of sea-fowl frequenting the Bass are almost exactly the same as those described and enumerated by the naturalist John Ray, in his curious visit to the island in 1661, (Itineraries, p. 191-194.) The most celebrated of these then and now is the gannet or solan-goose—an immense bird, measuring six feet from tip to tip of the wings, and which is almost peculiar to this rock and Ailsa Craig, on the Ayrshire coast. Of these birds there are many thousands, which may be seen, in the months of June and July, hatching their young on the bare shelves of the rock. Hence, in Drummond of Hawthornden's famous Macaronic poem, the Polemo-middinia, the island is characterised as the Solangoosifera Bassa.
The gannet, guillemot, and kittiwake,
Marrot and plover, snipe and eider-duck,
The puffin, and the falcon, and the gull—
Thousands on thousands, an innumerous throng,
Darkening the noontide with their winnowing plumes,
A cloud of animation! the wide air
Tempesting with their mingled cries uncouth!
VII.
Words cannot tell the sense of lonelinessWhich then and there, cloud-like, across my soul
Fell, as our weary steps clomb that ascent.
Amid encompassing mountains I have paused,
At twilight, when alone the little stars,
Brightening amid the wilderness of blue,
Proclaimed a world not God-forsaken quite;
I've walked, at midnight, on the hollow shore,
In darkness, when the trampling of the waves,
The demon-featured clouds, and howling gales,
Seemed like returning chaos—all the fierce
Terrific elements in league with night—
Earth crouching underneath their tyrannous sway,
And the lone sea-bird shrieking from its rock;
And I have mused in churchyards far remote,
And long forsaken even by the dead,
To blank oblivion utterly given o'er,
Beneath the waning moon, whose mournful ray
But never, in its moods of phantasy,
Had to itself my spirit shaped a scene
Of sequestration more profound than thine,
Grim throne of solitude, stupendous Bass!
Oft in the populous city, 'mid the stir
And strife of hurrying thousands, each intent
On his own earnest purpose, to thy cliffs
Sea-girt, precipitous—the solan's home—
Wander my reveries; and thoughts of thee
(While scarcely stirs the ivy round the porch,
And all is silent as the sepulchre)
Oft make the hush of midnight more profound.
| The Poetical Works of David Macbeth Moir | |