Ross-shire

“ And now the eye, after completing its circuit, rests on the eminence of Dunskaith;—the site of a royal fortress erected by William the Lion, to repress, says Lord Hailes in his Annals of Scotland, the oft-recurring rebellions and disorders of Ross-shire. We can still trace the moat of the citadel, and part of an outwork which rises towards the hill; but the walls have sunk into low grassy mounds, and the line of the outer moat has long since been effaced by the plough. The disorders of Ross-shire seem to have outlived, by many ages, the fortress raised to suppress them. ”

“ Certainly the first comes later in life to the individual, and it is scarcely ever found among the uneducated. One of the finest wild scenes in Ross-shire—a deep, rocky ravine, overhung with wood, and with a turbulent Highland stream roaring through it—is known by all the country folk in the neighbourhood by the name of the Ugly Burn."
"The remark chimes in with my experience," said the manager. "I ever admired the beautiful; but it was Catherine who first taught me to admire the sublime. ”

“ As soon as the Earl of Caithness’s retainers heard of the escape of Earl Alexander, they collected a party of men favourable to their interests, and went in hot pursuit of him as far as Port-ne-Coulter; but they found that the earl and his friends had just crossed the ferry. [180]
Shortly after this affair a quarrel ensued between the Monroes and the clan Kenzie, two very powerful Ross-shire clans. Lesley, the celebrated bishop of Ross, had made over to his cousin, the Laird of Balquhain, the right and title of the castle of the Canonry of Ross, together with the castle lands. ”

“ The Macleods of Cadboll are cadets of the house of Assynt, but to what branch the Lady May of the legend belonged, it is difficult to decide, so many changes having occurred among Highland proprietors.
The cliffs of this part of Ross-shire are wild and precipitous, sinking with a sheer descent of two hundred feet to the ocean. The scenery is more rugged than beautiful—little verdure and less foliage. Trees are stunted by the bitter eastern blast, and the soil is poor. Alders are, however, plentiful, and from them the parish has derived its name of Fearn. ”

“ ROSS, WILLIAM (1762–1790) , Gaelic poet, was born at Broadford, Skye, in 1762. His father, a pedlar, settled for some time at Forres, Morayshire, where Ross was well educated. Afterwards the family removed to Gairloch, Ross-shire, his mother's native place. Ross made occasional excursions with his father, in the course of which he became proficient in the Gaelic dialects of the western highlands, and received impressions from scenery and character that stimulated his poetic powers. An accomplished musician, he both sang well and played with skill on several instruments. ”

“ Nefydd) , in Dumbartonshire; Roslin (the promontory on the pool) ; Kinross (the head of the promontory) , either with reference to the county—in regard to Fife, of which it anciently formed part—or with reference to the town at the head of Loch Leven. Fife was anciently called Ross: it got the name of Fife in honour of Duff, Earl of Fife, to whom it was given by Kenneth II.; and in 1426 Kinross was made a separate county. Roskeen (the head or corner of Ross-shire) ; Rosehearty, in Aberdeenshire, corrupt. from Ros-ardty (the dwelling on the high promontory) .
RÜHE (Ger.) ,
rest; e.g. ”

“ The large-farm system had been already introduced into the part of the country in which I at this time resided, on the [Pg 234] richer and more level lands; but many a Gaelic-speaking cottar and small tenant still lived on the neighbouring moors and hill-sides. Though Highland in their surnames and language, they bore a character considerably different from that of the simpler Highlanders of the interior of Sutherland, or of a class I had shortly afterwards an opportunity of studying—the Highlanders of the western coast of Ross-shire. Doors were not left unbarred at night in the neighbourhood ”

“ They offered a free passage, a farm, and a year’s free provisions to their dupes. On his arrival in Scotland, Ross drew a glowing picture of the land and other manifold advantages of the country to which he was enticing the people.
The Highlanders knew nothing of the difficulties awaiting them in a land covered over with a dense unbroken forest; and, tempted by the prospect of owning splendid farms of their own, they were imposed upon by his promise, and many of them agreed to accompany him across the Atlantic and embraced his proposals. ”

“ Ross is a well-known little town in Monmouthshire, on the banks of the Wye, on the borders of Wales. There, in the parish church, in the pew in which John Kyrle, the Man of Ross, sat, more than a hundred years since, a curious sight may be seen: two elm-trees rise, and spread out their arms, and flourish within the church; especially during the spring, and summer months, they form a singular adornment to the sacred edifice. The tradition is, that they are suckers from a tree planted by the “Man of Ross,” outside the church ”

“ From the summit of the glorious old relic we can sweep the whole arch of the horizon, from the pale blue hills of Wales on the one hand, to the brown heathy wastes that once formed part of the great forest of Macclesfield on the other. The palatinate which boasts itself the Vale Royal of England is usually reckoned a flat county, and this is in a great measure true, for league upon league of broad, flat, fertile meadows spread before us, but the eye as it ranges into the distance passes over a rich variety of undulating country. ”

“ In Wessex and the east the counties are either older kingdoms, like Kent, Sussex, and Essex; or else tribal divisions of the kingdom, like Dorset, Somerset, Norfolk, Suffolk, and Surrey. In Mercia, the recovered country is artificially mapped out round the chief Danish burgs, as in the case of Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire, and Leicestershire, where the county town usually occupies the centre of the arbitrary shire. In Northumbria it is divided into equally artificial counties by the rivers. ”

“ In an area some three hundred and fifty miles long by three hundred broad are contained the ruggedness of Cornwall, the idyllic softness of Devon, the dreamy solitudes of the South Downs, with their billowy, chalky contours, the agricultural fertility of Kent and Middlesex, the romantic woodlands and hilly pastures of Surrey, the melancholy fens of Lincolnshire, the broad, bosky levels of the midlands, the sudden wildness of Wales, with her mountains and glens, Yorkshire, with its grim, heather-clad moors, Westmoreland, with its fells and Wordsworthian "Lakes" ”

“ The southern portion of the country is remarkably fertile, highly cultivated, and presents to the stranger a long succession of luxuriant corn-fields, verdant pastures, and animated pictures of rural happiness and independence. It would be difficult to find any tract of land in Great Britain that can surpass the Vale of Glamorgan in richness of soil, or in soft and graceful scenery. This favoured region extends the whole length of the county—from the base of the mountains on the north to the shore of the Bristol Channel on the south-west. ”

“ On reaching Ross, after emerging from the tumult, or sublimity, of the lower passage, he will gaze with delight on one of the most quietly beautiful landscapes in England—whose smooth green eminences, gentle groves, orchards and hop plantations (the latter far finer objects than the vineyards of the continent) , white cottages, villages, and village spires, give an endless and yet simple variety to the picture. After passing Hereford, in quest of new excitement, the scene-hunter will pronounce a similar character of landscape tame. ”

“ We came this morning from Bollitree to Ross-Market, and, thence, to this place. Ross is an old-fashioned town; but it is very beautifully situated, and if there is little of finery in the appearance of the inhabitants, there is also little of misery. It is a good, plain country town, or settlement of tradesmen, whose business is that of supplying the wants of the cultivators of the soil. It presents to us nothing of rascality and roguishness of look which you see on almost every visage in the borough-towns, not excepting the visages of the women. ”

“ It is called an Act of Union because, by it, Wales and England were united on equal terms.
Anglesey, Carnarvon, Merioneth, Flint, Cardigan, and Carmarthen had been shires since I 284; and small portions of Glamorgan and Pembroke had been governed like shires, so that some Tudor writers call them counties. The chief difference between a shire and a lordship is that the king’s writ runs to the shire, but not to the lordship. The king administers the law in the shire, through the sheriff; the lord administers the law in the lordship through his own officials. ”

“ Two thousand years ago, what is now the East Riding of Yorkshire was chiefly forest land, with the exception of the Wold uplands, which were pastures, almost destitute of trees, having some semblance to the swelling and rolling waves of the ocean, where the Brigantes fed their flocks and herds, where they dwelt in scattered hamlets, and where they now sleep in their multitudinous tumuli. ”

“ Outside the shanty, when we stepped into the open air, we found most of Wales, clad in the{119} chilly, opaline tints of morning, waiting in complacent silence for the inevitable burst of admiration. On three sides of it was a hazy shimmer, a misty sparkle, betraying the environing sea, from the river Dee to the Bay of Cardigan, and close about us were the grey spines and huge slants of the Snowdon range. George Herbert, with a fine discrimination, has said—
“Praise the sea, but stay on shore.” ”

“ It is a rigidly utilitarian innovation on the old system, that does not at all promise to improve the picturesque aspect of the country. To “reconstruct the map” of a county, by wire-fencing it into squares of 100 acres each, after grubbing up all the hedges and hedge-trees, would doubtless add seven and a quarter per cent. to the agricultural production of the shire, and gratify many a Gradgrind of materialistic economy; but who would know England after such a transformation? ”

“ Thus she is a true country, not a province; indeed, she is made up of many counties and provinces, and each is utterly different from other, and their different genius may be caught by the attentive in their names, which are Kent, Sussex, Hampshire, Wiltshire, Dorset, Somerset, Devon, Cornwall, Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire, and Berkshire. Her variety thus lies in them and their dear, and let us hope, immortal differences and characteristics, their genius that is, which is as various as their scenery. ”

“ The primary meaning of shire is, a division of a realm; of county, the district held or governed by a count or earl. Every shire implies a realm, and was usually committed or left by the supreme ruler to the government of an earl. On the other hand, every county joined to a realm became a shire, or part of a shire. But many counties were not within any realm. Long after the formation of the ancient shires of Wales, the term "county" continued to be applied to Lordships Marchers which never even gave their names to shires, although, of course, comprised in the final shire-distribution. ”

“ The land is divided into counties, departments, provinces, administered according to such rules as the central legislature may think good to lay down. It is true that in our own country the shire is, both in idea and in part of the land in historical fact, older than the kingdom. But in a large part of England the shire is as truly a division of the kingdom as a French department, and where it is not so historically it has become so practically. ”

“ Distance and difficulty, and in early times danger too, keep many people away. And though a shire is not a wide tract of country for most purposes, and according to modern ideas, it was nevertheless quite wide enough in former times to bring about the result I have mentioned. In the times before the Norman conquest, if not before the completed union of England under Edgar, the shire-mote or county assembly, though in theory still a folk-mote or primary assembly, had shrunk into what was virtually a witenagemote or assembly of the most important persons in the county. ”

“ A similar change was in progress amongst the Anglo-Saxons, for in the reign of Ini, the king’s ealdorman was the leading judge of the shire, forfeiting his district for compounding a felony; and in Alfred’s days, no man of a certain class could pass from one shire to another without permission from the king’s ealdorman, who was still connected with the shire as the leading personage in the Gemote, and appealed to, on certain occasions, as an official. ”

“ Although every shire is a county, it is not every county to whose individual name the word “shire” may be added. The latter is essentially Anglo-Saxon, denoting a division of land possessed by an earl, and wherever it occurs it points conclusively to the Saxon occupation of England. Certainly, we do not speak of Essex-shire, Middle-sex-shire, or Sussex-shire, because the Saxon territories referred to, as well as their relative positions, are fully indicated in the names themselves. ”

“ But while two branches of the race grew, flourished, and fell, a third division rose to rank and fortune in this island, becoming closely allied by links of property and title with Devon, the fairest shire in the English land—links which the space of 750 years has strengthened, the glamour of an historic name, the charm of many a noble nature, have rendered unbreakable. ”

“ But every shire and every kingdom fought for itself alone. If the Dorset men could only drive away the host from Charmouth and Portland, they cared little whether it sailed away to harry Sussex and Hants. If the Northumbrians could only drive it away from the Humber, they cared little whether it set sail for the Thames and the Solent. The North Folk of East Anglia were equally happy to send it off toward the South Folk. ”