The Poetical Works of David Macbeth Moir :: :: University of Virginia Library

A lovely eve! though yet it is but spring
Led on by April,—a refulgent eve,
With its soft west wind, and its mild white clouds,
Silently floating through the depths of blue.
The bird, from out the thicket, sends a gush
Of song, that heralds summer, and calls forth
The squirrel from its fungus-covered cave
In the old oak. Where do the conies sport?
Lo! from the shelter of yon flowering furze,
O'ermantling, like an aureate crown, the brow
Of the grey rock, with sudden bound, and stop
And start, the mother with her little ones,
Cropping the herbage in its tenderest green;
While overhead the elm, and oak, and ash,
Weave for the hundredth time their annual boughs,
Bright with their varied leaflets.

Hark! the bleat
From yon secluded haunt, where hill from hill
Diverging leaves, in sequestration calm,

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A holm of pastoral loveliness: the lamb,
Screened from the biting east, securely roams
There, in wild gambol with its peers, on turf
Like emerald velvet, soft and smooth; and starts
Aside from the near waterfall, whose sheet
Winds foaming down the rocks precipitous,
Now seen, and now half-hidden by the trunks
Contorted, and the wide umbrageous boughs
Of time and tempest-nurtured woods. Away
From the sea-murmur ceaseless, up between
The green secluding hills, that hem it round
As 'twere with conscious love, stands Kelburn House,
With its grey turrets, in baronial state,

In the text, reference is made more to the situation of Kelburn Castle and its capabilities than either to its real antiquity, or to historical events connected with it. Its appearance under a fine April sunset, and the associations awakened by the surrounding scenery, were such as are there faintly delineated.

In a more concentrated form, (that of a square tower,) Castle Kelburn is, however, of very considerable antiquity, most of the present additions having been made by David, Earl of Glasgow. Richard Boyle, Dominus de Kaulburn, is mentioned in a transaction with Walter Cumyn in the reign of Alexander the Third, the hero of Largs; and Robert de Boyville of Kelburn, and Richard de Boyville of Ryesholm, were subscribers of the Ragiment Roll in 1296, both of which properties are to this day possessions of the family.

Kelburn Castle is thus noticed by old Pont:—“Kelburne Castell, a goodly building, veill planted, having werey beutifull orchards and gardens, and in one of them a spatious room adorned with a christalin fontane cutte all out of the living rocke. It belongs heritably to John Boll, laird thereof.”

A proud memento of the days when men
Thought but of war and safety. Stately pile
And lovely woods! not often have mine eyes
Gazed o'er a scene more picturesque, or more
Heart-touching in its beauty. Thou wert once
The guardian of these valleys, and the foe
Approaching heard, between himself and thee,
The fierce, down-thundering, mocking waterfall;
While, on thy battlements, in glittering mail,
The warder glided; and the sentinel,—
As neared the stranger horseman to thy gates,
And gave the pass-word, which no answer found,—
Plucked from his quiver the unerring shaft,
Which, from Kilwinning's spire, had oft brought down
The mock Papingo.

The Papingo is a bird less known to Sir William Jardine or to Mr James Wilson than to heraldry; and in the days when the bow and arrow were used in war throughout the whole of Europe, by several of the acts of the old Scotch Parliament, the young men of every parish were strictly commended, in spite of the Sir Andrew Agnews of their age, to practise archery, for an hour or two every Sunday, after divine service. When this custom fell into desuetude in almost every other quarter, archery appears to have remained even to our own day as a favourite recreation and accomplishment at Kilwinning, the most distinctive kind being the shooting at the Papingo, which is cut in wood, fixed in the end of a pole, and placed about a hundred and twenty feet high, on the steeple of the monastery, the archer who shoots it down being honoured with the title of Captain for the year. The laws and usages of the Company are known only by tradition prior to 1488, but from 1688 regular records have been kept. At this latter period a piece of plate was substituted for a sash, which had been the victor's reward from the former era. This sash, or benn, was a piece of taffeta or Persian, of different colours, chiefly red, green, white, and blue, and not less in value than £20 Scotch.

The festival of the Papingo is still annually held at Maybole, in the same county; and from a curious description of it in the history of the Somerville family, Sir Walter Scott acknowledges to have drawn the hint of the inimitable serio-comic descriptive scene in Old Mortality, wherein Goose Gobbie, in his negligé armour, runs full tilt at the Noah's ark carriage of Lady Margaret Bellenden, the unfailing remembrancer of King Charles the Second, of blessed memory.

Mournfully, alas!
Yet in thy quietude not desolate,

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Now, like a relic of the times gone by,
Down from thy verdant throne, upon the sea,
Which glitters like a sheet of molten gold,
Thou lookest thus, at eventide, while sets,
In opal and in amethystine hues,
The day o'er distant Arran, with its peaks
Sky-piercing, yet o'erclad with winter's snows
In desolate grandeur; and the cottaged fields
Of nearer Bute smile in their vernal green,
A picture of repose. High overhead
The gull, far-shrieking, through yon stern ravine
Of wild, rude rocks, where brawls the mountain stream,
Wings to the sea, and seeks, beyond its foams,
Its own precipitous cliff upon the coast
Of fair and fertile Cumbrae; while the rook,
Conscious of coming eventide, forsakes
The leafing woods, and round the chimneyed roofs
Caws as he wheels, alights, and then anon
Renews his circling flight in clamorous joy.