Volume 1 — ARCHÆOLOGY: (continued 2)

"I raised the powerful King, The Lord of the heavens; I dared not fall down," etc. etc.

Who was to decide between the very diverse opinions, and still more diverse readings, of this inscription by the English antiquary and his Danish rivals? An accidental discovery in an old manuscript may be justly considered as having settled the whole question. For, two or three years after Mr. Kemble had published his reading of the inscription, the identical Anglo-Saxon poem which he had found written on the Ruthwell cross was casually discovered in an extended form under the title of the "Dream of the Rood." The old MS. volume of Saxon homilies and religious lays from which the book containing it was printed, was found by Dr. Blum in a library at Vercelli, in Italy.

With these rambling remarks I have already detained you far too long. Ere concluding, however, bear with me for a minute or two longer, while I shortly speak of one clamant subject—viz. the strong necessity of this Society, and of every Scotsman, battling and trying to prevent, if possible, the further demolition of the antiquarian relics scattered over Scotland.

Various human agencies have been long busy in the destruction and obliteration of our antiquarian earth and stone works. At no period has this process of demolition gone on in Scotland more rapidly and ruthlessly than during the last fifty or a hundred years. That tide of agricultural improvement which has passed over the country, has, in its utilitarian course, swept away—sometimes inevitably, often most needlessly—the aggers and ditches of ancient camps, sepulchral barrows and mounds, stone circles and cairns, earth-raths, and various other objects of deep antiquarian interest. Indeed, the chief antiquarian remains of this description which have been left on the surface of our soil are to be found on our mountain-tops, on our moors, or in our woods, where the very sterility or inaccessibility of the spot, or the kind protection and sympathy of the old forest-trees, have saved them, for a time at least, from reckless ruin and annihilation. Some of the antiquarian memorials that I allude to would have endured for centuries to come, had it not been for human interference and devastation. For, in the demolition of these works of archaic man, the hand of man has too generally proved both a busier and a less scrupulous agent than the hand of time.

Railways have proved among the greatest, as well as the latest, of the agents of destruction. In our island various cherished antiquities have been often most unnecessarily swept away in constructing these race-courses for the daily rush and career of the iron horse. His rough and ponderous hoof, for example, has kicked down, at one extremity of a railway connected with Edinburgh (marvellously and righteously to the dispeace of the whole city), that fine old specimen of Scottish Second-Pointed architecture, the Trinity College Church; while, at the other extremity of the same line, it battered into fragments the old Castle of Berwick, a fort rich in martial and Border memories, and a building rendered interesting by the fact, that in connection with one of its turrets there was—at the command of Edward I. "the greatest of the Plantagenets," (as his latest biographer boastfully terms him)—constructed, some six centuries ago, a cage of iron and wood, in which he immured, with Bomba-like ferocity, for four weary years, a poor prisoner, and that prisoner a woman—the Countess of Buchan—whose frightful crime consisted in having assisted at the coronation of her liege sovereign, Robert the Bruce. In the construction of the Edinburgh and Glasgow Railway the line was driven, with annihilating effect, through the centre of the old and rich Roman Station on the Wall of Antoninus at Castlecary. Some years ago, as I passed along the line, I saw the farmer in the immediate neighbourhood of this station busily removing a harmless wall,—among the last, if not the very last remnants of Roman masonry in Scotland. The largest stone circle near the English Border—the Stonehenge or Avebury of the north of England—formerly stood near Shap. The stone avenues leading to it are said to have been nearly two miles in length. The engineer of the Carlisle and Lancaster railway carried his line right through the very centre of the ancient stone circle forming the head of the chief avenue, leaving a few of its huge stones standing out on the western side, where they may be still seen by the passing traveller about half a mile south of the Shap station. If the line had been laid only a few feet on either side, the wanton desecration and destruction of this fine archaic monument might have been readily saved. Railway engineers, however, and railway directors, care far more for mammon and money than for mounds and monoliths.

But other and older agents have overturned and uprooted the memorials transmitted down from ancient times, with as much wantonness as the railways. Towards the middle of the last century the Government of the day ordered many miles of the gigantic old Roman wall, which stretches across Northumberland and Cumberland, to be tossed over and pounded into road metal. About the same time a Scottish proprietor—with a Vandalism which cast a stigma on his order—pulled down that antique enigmatical building, "Arthur's Oven," in order to build, with its ashlar walls, a mill-dam across the Carron. At its next flood the indignant Carron carried away the mill-dam, and buried for ever in the depths of its own water-course those venerable stones which were begrudged any longer by the proprietor of the soil the few feet of ground which they had occupied for centuries on its banks.

In many parts of our country our old sepulchral cairns, hill-forts, castles, churches, and abbeys, have been most thoughtlessly and reprehensibly allowed, by those that chanced to be their proprietors for the time, to be used as mere quarries of ready stones for the building of villages and houses, and for the construction of field-dikes and drains. In the perpetration of this class of sad and discreditable desecrations, many parties are to blame. Such outrages have been practised by both landlord and tenant, by both State and Church; and I fear that the Presbyterian Church of Scotland is by no means free from much culpability in the matter. But let us, at the same time, rejoice that a better spirit is awakened on the whole question; and let us hope that our Scottish landlords will all speedily come to imitate, when required, the excellent example of Mr. Baillie, who, when some years ago he found that one of his tenants had pulled down and carried off, for building purposes, some portions of the walls of the four grand old burgs standing in Glenelg, in Inverness-shire, prosecuted the delinquent farmer before the sheriff-court of the county, and forced him to restore and replace in situ, as far as possible, and at his own expense, all the stones which he had removed.

Almost all the primæval stone circles and cromlechs which existed in the middle and southern districts of Scotland have been cast down and removed. The only two cromlechs in the Lothians, the stones of which have not been removed, are at Ratho and Kipps; and though the stones have been wantonly pulled down, they could readily be restored, and certainly deserve to be so. In 1813 the cromlech at Kipps was seen by Sir John Dalzell still standing upright. In describing it, in the beginning of the last century, Sir Robert Sibbald states that near this Kipps cromlech was a circle of stones, with a large stone or two in the middle; and he adds, "many such may be seen all over the country." They have all disappeared; and latterly the stones of the Kipps circle have been themselves removed and broken up, to build, apparently, some neighbouring field-walls, though there was abundance of stones in the vicinity equally well suited for the purpose.

Among the most valuable of our ancient Scottish monuments are certainly our Sculptured Stones. Most of them, however, and some even in late times, have been sadly mutilated and destroyed, to a greater or less degree, by human hands, and converted to the most base uses. The stone at Hilton of Cadboll, remarkable for its elaborate sculpture and ornamental tracery, has had one of its sides smoothed and obliterated in order that a modern inscription might be cut upon it to commemorate "Alexander Duff and His Thrie Wives." The beautiful sculptured stone of Golspie has been desecrated in the same way. Only two of these ancient sculptured stones are known south of the Forth. One of them has been preserved by having been used as a window-lintel in the church of Abercorn—the venerable episcopal see, in the seventh century, of Trumwine, the Bishop of the Picts. The other serves the purpose of a foot-bridge within a hundred yards of the spot where we are met; and it is to be hoped that its proprietors will allow this ancient stone to be soon removed from its present ignominious situation to an honoured place in our Museum. I saw, during last autumn, in Anglesey, a stone bearing a very ancient Romano-British legend, officiating as one of the posts of a park gate—a situation in which several such inscribed stones have been found. Still more lately, I was informed of the large central monolith in a stone circle, not far from the Scottish border, having been thrown down and split up into seven pairs of field gate-posts.

"Standing-stones"—the old names of which gave their appellations to the very manors on which they stood—have been repeatedly demolished in Scotland. An obelisk of thirteen feet in height, and imparting its name to a landed estate in Kincardineshire, was recently thrown down; and a large monolith, which lent its old, venerable name to a property and mansion within three or four miles of Edinburgh, was, within the memory of some living witnesses, uprooted and totally demolished when the direction of the turnpike road in its neighbourhood happened to be altered.

A healthier and finer feeling in regard to the propriety of preserving such national antiquities as I have referred to, subsists, I believe, in the heart of the general public of Scotland, than perhaps those who are their superiors in riches and rank generally give them credit for. Within this century the standing-stones of Stennis in Orkney were attacked, and two or three of them overthrown by an iconoclast; but the people in the neighbourhood resented and arrested the attempt by threatening to set fire to the house and corn of the barbaric aggressor. After the passing of the Parliamentary Reform Bill, during a keen contest for the representation of a large Scottish county, there was successfully urged in the public journals against one of the candidates, the damaging fact that one of his forefathers had deliberately committed one of the gross acts of barbarism which I have already specified, in the needless destruction, in a distant part of Scotland, of one of the smallest but most interesting of Scottish antiquarian relics; and the voters at the polling-booths showed that they deemed a family, however rich and estimable, unfit to be intrusted with the parliamentary guardianship of the county, which had outraged public feeling by wantonly pulling down one of the oldest stone memorials in the kingdom.

In the name of this Society, and in the name of my fellow-countrymen generally, I here solemnly protest against the perpetration of any more acts of useless and churlish Vandalism, in the needless destruction and removal of our Scottish antiquarian remains. The hearts of all leal Scotsmen, overflowing as they do with a love of their native land, must ever deplore the unnecessary demolition of all such early relics and monuments as can in any degree contribute to the recovery and restoration of the past history of our country and of our ancestors. These ancient relics and monuments are truly, in one strong sense, national property; for historically they belong to Scotland and to Scotsmen in general, more than they belong to the individual proprietors upon whose ground they accidentally happen to be placed. There is an Act of Parliament against the wilful defacing and demolition of public monuments; and, perhaps the Kilkenny Archæological Association were right when they threatened to indite with the penalties of "misdemeanour" under that statute, any person who should wantonly and needlessly destroy the old monumental and architectural relics of his country. Many of these relics might have brought only a small price indeed in the money-market, while yet they were of a national and historical value which it would be difficult to estimate. For, when once swept away, their full replacement is impossible. They cannot be purchased back with gold. Their deliberate and ruthless annihilation is, in truth, so far the annihilation of the ancient records of the kingdom. If any member of any ancient family among us needlessly destroyed some of the olden records of that one family, how bitterly, and how justly too, would he be denounced and despised by its members? But assuredly antiquarian monuments, as the olden records of a whole realm, are infinitely more valuable than the records of any individual family in that realm. Let us fondly hope and trust that a proper spirit of patriotism—that every feeling of good, generous, and gentlemanly taste—will insure and hallow the future consecration of all such Scottish antiquities as still remain—small fragments only though they may be of the antiquarian treasures that once existed in our land.

Time, like the Sibyl, who offered her nine books of destiny to the Roman king, has been destroying, century after century, one after another of the rich volumes of antiquities which she formerly tendered to the keeping of our Scottish fathers. But though, unhappily, our predecessors, like King Tarquin, rejected and scorned the rich antiquarian treasures which existed in their days, let us not now, on that account, despise or decline to secure the three books of them that still perchance remain. On the contrary,—like the priests appointed by the Roman authorities to preserve and study the Sibylline records which had escaped destruction,—let this Society carefully guard and cherish those antiquities of our country which yet exist, and let them strive to teach themselves and their successors to decipher and interpret aright the strange things and thoughts that are written on those Sibylline leaves of Scottish Archæology which Fate has still spared for them. Working earnestly, faithfully, and lovingly in this spirit, let us not despair that, as the science of Archæology gradually grows and evolves, this Society may yet, in full truth, restore Scotland to antiquity, and antiquity to Scotland.

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