Travellers' Tales of Scotland

The following is from Travellers' Tales of Scotland by R. H. Coats:

XII - Thomas Pennant

(1769, 1772)

PENNANT is the conscientious traveller par excellence, the "chiel amang ye takin' notes." He visited Scotland in 1769 and 1772 and returned with so ample a record of his experiences that the reprint of them in Pinkerton's Voyages and Travels extends to over 550 closely printed pages of large quarto. Pennant brought to his investigations highly trained faculties and a cultivated mind. He was a landed gentleman from Flintshire, and one of the most learned naturalists of his day. Gilbert White's Selborne was first addressed to him in the form of a series of letters, and Linnaeus was one of his correspondents. Pennant was a D.C.L. of Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. He wrote learned treatises on British, Arctic, and Indian Zoology, and the Natural History of Quadrupeds; and when he died, in 1793, he was in the midst of a vast projected work of fourteen volumes, to be called Outlines of the Globe, which was to describe imaginary journeys through every country in the world.

"Pennant is a whig, sir; a sad dog. But he's the best traveller I ever read. ... He has greater variety of enquiry than almost any man, and has told us more than perhaps one in ten thousand could have done, in the time that he took." This is high praise from Dr. Johnson, but it is not unmerited. Pennant's book is a bewildering compendium of miscellaneous information respecting the climate, antiquities, customs, sports, industries, and superstitions of Scotland in the eighteenth century. The author sets down with equal impartiality and fulness the result of his enquiries into the government of the universities, the prevalence of blackmail, the revenues of the ancient monasteries, and the periodic migrations of shoals of herrings. On one page will be found a long catalogue of the pictures and curios to be seen in some old castle, and on the next, perhaps, a list of Highland diseases and their remedies. The reader has scarce begun to grasp, let us say, the details of the rental system in Scotland, or the use of the fiery cross, when he is treated to a dissertation on kitty wakes and capercailzies, or drawn into the vortex of a description of Corrievreckan. Through all there is to be observed a wide knowledge of English literature, and an easy command of ancient learning. Our author quotes freely from Vergil and from Ovid, from Chaucer, Spenser, Dryden, and Samuel Butler. He is as intimate with Agricola as with Macbeth or the Admirable Crichton. Now it is Sir David Lyndsay whom he quotes, in his description of a stag-hunt in the reign of King James V, and now an ancient statute of King Alexander I respecting salmon. The foot-notes teem with references to Fordun, Boethius, and Olaus Magnus, while large appendices are devoted to the more leisurely discussion of such subjects as "The Gold Mines of Scotland," "The Massacre of the Colquhouns," "The Fasting Woman of Ross-shire," and "The Parallel Roads in Glen Roy."

From such a mass of material it is difficult to select what will give one a representative picture of the whole. Pennant visited Scotland when bogs were being drained and a way cut to make the Forth and Clyde Canal. Mr. John Golbourne, of Chester, "that honest and able engineer," had just entered into a contract with the magistrates of Glasgow "to deepen the channel of the river Clyde to seven feet at the quay, even at neap tides." Loch Lomond, it seems, was then encroaching on the shore, and it was proposed to lower the level of the lake a few feet so as to recover some thousands of acres of agricultural land then under water. It was the time when three separate congregations met for worship in Glasgow Cathedral, one of them in the crypt, "where they may truly say, De profundis clamavi', "and when a fine organ had recently been erected in the Tron Church of Edinburgh, greatly to the concern of the godly in that city.

Like many another traveller into these regions, Pennant was greatly impressed with the poverty of the land, and he gives some harrowing pictures of scenes of misery in Islay, and of wandering groups in Skye, who "prowl like other animals along the shore to pick up limpets and other shellfish, the casual repast of hundreds during a part of the year." When we speak of the poverty of Scotland, however, it should be remembered that the wants of the people were few, and the food prices of the time extraordinarily low. Pennant could have bought beef in Aberdeen at 2½d. per lb., eggs in Inverness at seven a penny, and coal in Dunfermline at twenty-pence a ton. And if the people were poor, at any rate they thrived. Luss, when Pennant visited it, could show no fewer than six hale and hearty patriarchs, whose ages varied from eighty-six to ninety-four, and in Jura he met with an old woman of eighty "who could run down a sheep." Nor were the natives any less vigorous in mind than they were in body, if we may judge by the extraordinary craftsmen of genius whom Pennant met at Wick. "In this town lives a weaver who weaves a shirt with buttons and button holes entire without any seam, or the least use of the needle. But it is to be feared that he will scarce find any benefit from his ingenuity, as he cannot afford his labour under five pounds a shirt."

The large towns of Scotland had already acquired something of their modern character when Pennant saw them. Paisley, in 1772, was famous for its industry in soap and tallow candles, "both of which are esteemed excellent of their kinds, as the gentlemen concerned spared no expense to bring their manufacture to perfection. Their candles, especially their moulded ones, are reckoned the best and most elegant that have been made in Scotland. They are made after the Kensington manner, and with this view they had a man from London at very high wages. "Still more important was the thread industry, which had been introduced fifty years previously by a Mrs. Millar of Bargarran." In other places girls are bred to it, here they may rather be said to be born to it, as almost every family makes some threads, or has made them formerly. It must be extremely agreeable to every man who wishes well to his country to see, in the summer season, both sides of the river and a great many other fields about the town covered with cloth and threads; and to hear, as he passes along the streets, the industrious and pleasant noise of weavers' looms and twist mills." Campbeltown was then, as now, noted for its whisky. "This seems a modern liquor, for in old times the distillation was from thyme, mint, anise, and other fragrant herbs, and ale was much in use with them. The former had the same name with the usquebagh or water of life; but by Boethius' account it was taken with moderation. ... At night am admitted a freeman of Campbeltown, and according to the custom of the place consult the Oracle of the Bottle about my future voyage, assisted by a numerous company of brother burgesses."

Pennant was much shocked by the position accorded to women in some parts of Scotland. "The tender sex (I blush for the Caithnesians) are the only animals of burden. They turn their patient backs to the dunghills and receive in their keises, or baskets, as much as their lords and masters think fit to fling in with their pitchforks, and then trudge to the fields in droves of sixty or seventy." Fishwives might be seen tramping to Peterhead market, a distance of sixteen miles, each carrying a load in her basket such as only two men could lift. Yet life even for them was not all drudgery. "These women are very fond of finery, and will load their fingers with trumpery rings, when they want both shoes and stockings." Like Captain Burt, Pennant noticed that the women of the Highlands wore a plaid over their heads during divine worship. But he was charitable enough to suppose that this was done "so as to exclude every object that might interrupt their devotions," for "they keep drawing it forward in proportion as their attention increases."

With the reverent demeanour of Scotsmen during the ordinary religious services Pennant was much impressed, but he thought that the mode of observing "the Sacrament" left something to be desired. "It is celebrated but once in a year, when there are sometimes three thousand communicants, and as many idle spectators. Of the first, as many as possible crowd on each side of a long table, and the elements sometimes are rudely shoved from one to another; and in certain places, before the day is at an end, fighting and other indecencies ensue. It has often been made a season for debauchery; and to this day, Jack cannot always be persuaded to eat his meat like a Christian." Pennant had a poor opinion of the church architecture of Scotland. He was indignant that God should be "worshipped in a stable," and lost no opportunity of execrating the memory of that arch-devastator and iconoclast, John Knox. "How great is the horror of reflecting that the destruction of the cathedral of St. Andrews was owing to the barbarous zeal of a minister who, by his discourses, first inflamed and then permitted a furious crowd to overthrow edifices dedicated to that very Being he pretended to honour by their ruin!" Yet Pennant, ardent Episcopalian though he was, could not restrain his admiration for the Scottish Presbyterian ministers. "The clergy of Scotland, the most decent and consistent in their conduct of any set of men I ever met with of their order, are at present much changed from the furious, illiterate, and enthusiastic teachers of the old times, and have taken up the mild method of persuasion, instead of the cruel discipline of corporal punishments. Science almost universally flourishes among them, and their discourse is not less improving than the table they entertain the stranger at is decent and hospitable. Few, very few, of them permit the bewitchery of dissipation to lay hold of them, notwithstanding they allow all the innocent pleasures of others, which, though not criminal in the layman, they know must bring the taint of levity on the churchman. They never sink their character by midnight brawls, by mixing with the gaming world, either in cards, cocking, or horse-races, but preserve with a narrow income a dignity too often lost among their brethren south of the Tweed."

No parts of Pennant's book are more interesting or valuable than those which describe the superstitions of the Highlands. The belief in witchcraft he found to be dead or dying, chiefly on account of the repeal of the Witch Act in 1736; but large numbers of people were still firmly convinced of the existence of ghosts and fairies. Charms and incantations were invoked to avert the evil eye. Circle would be formed within magic circle to exorcize "the thin gigantic hag called Glas-lich."

Weird rites and ceremonies of all kinds attended the mysteries of birth, of marriage, and of death. Women formed a cross on the last oatmeal bannock of their baking. Midwives gave new-born babes a spoonful of earth and whisky. Water acquired curative powers if stirred with some old flint arrow-head that the elves had buried. In some cases, there even survived the sacrifices and libations of early paganism. "Every one takes a cake of oatmeal, upon which are raised nine square knobs, each dedicated to some particular being, the supposed preserver of their flocks and herds, or to some particular animal, the real destroyer of them. Each person then turns his face to the fire, breaks off a knob, and, flinging it over his shoulder, says, "This I give thee, preserve thou my horses; this to thee, preserve thou my sheep,' and so on. After that, they use the same ceremony to the noxious animals, 'This I give to thee, fox! spare thou my lambs this to thee, hooded crow! this to thee, eagle! '" Of the national characteristics of Scotsmen, Pennant has much to say, chiefly by way of compliment. He was much surprised to meet so few beggars on his travels, which circumstance he attributed to the fact that "the people are possessed of a spirit that will struggle hard with necessity before it will bend to the taking of alms." He greatly admired the national love of sound learning, "for in North Britain there is no gentleman of ever so small an estate but strictly attends to the education of his children, as the sure foundation of their future fortune." As for the common people, they were chiefly characterized by good manners, pride, inquisitiveness, and a genius for hospitality and religion. "They are much affected with the civility of strangers, and have in themselves a natural politeness and address, which often flows from the meanest when least expected. Through my whole tour, I never met with a single instance of national reflection; their forbearance proves them to be superior to the meanness of retaliation. I fear they pity us, but I hope not indiscriminately. They are excessively inquisitive after your business, your name, and other particulars of little consequence to them; most curious after the politics of the world, and when they can procure an old newspaper will listen to it with all the avidity of Shakespeare's blacksmith. They have much pride, and consequently are impatient of affronts and revengeful of injuries. They are decent in their general behaviour, inclined to superstition, yet attentive to the duties of religion, and are capable of giving a most distinct account of the principles of their faith."

Pennant was genuinely concerned for the welfare and prosperity of Scotland. He longed to see the power of feudalism broken, rents lowered, emigration stopped, the distress of the common people relieved, and "the wealth of the Antilles" spread throughout the land. And he left it at Berwick with kindly feelings of regret. "I look back to the north, and with a grateful mind acknowledge every benefit I received from the remotest Hebrides to the present spot, whether I think of the hospitality of the rich, or the efforts of unblameable poverty, straining every nerve to accommodate me amidst dreary hills and ungenial skies. The little accidents of diet or lodgings affect not me. I look further than the mere differences of living or of customs to the good heart and extensive benevolence which softens every hardship, and turns into delicacies the grossest fare."

XIII - Samuel Johnson (1773)