Stories from Scotland’s heart
From historical feuds and bloody battles, to mythical sagas and fairy mountains, centuries of fascinating stories are ingrained in Perthshire’s landscape, says
Perthshire is a huge county which stretches from the Pass of Drumochter in the north, to Strathmore in the west, to the Angus glens in the east, and Aberfoyle in the south. It abuts nine of the traditional counties of Scotland and has a dizzying array of landscapes, from the barren Rannoch Moor to Schiehallion and its surrounding peaks; from the douce city of Perth to the verdant arable countryside around Blairgowrie.
If Perthshire is a county which has something for everyone, that is also the case for its stock of myths and legends. In fact, on my bookshelf is Lindsey Gibb’s Perthshire Folk Tales, a well-thumbed book that I bought in the treasure trove that is the Watermill Bookshop in Aberfeldy and to which I’ve often returned. It lays out in wonderful detail over 200 deeply enjoyable pages the many stories which
The Big County has thrown up over the centuries.
Yet there are many more stories too, and
I suspect that if you were to include them all Gibb could write another couple of volumes. For that reason, I’m going to home in on some of my favourite Perthshire stories and concentrate on ones which might enliven an autumn weekend away. One of my favourite yarns is a story which has a very real physical manifestation: The Soldier’s Leap. The context for this story is the Battle of Killiekrankie on 27 July 1689 when Dundee’s kilted Jacobites rounded a 4,000 strong army of Government infantry, with the Lowlanders scattered by a Highland charge in the narrow Pass of Killiekrankie.
As the ranks of Lowlanders broke, one Redcoat called Donald MacBean was pursued by an armed Highlander and frantically looked for an escape route. Unfortunately the only way out was across
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Perthshire is a county that has something for everyone
a gap of over 18 feet high above the River Garry. According to MacBean, somehow desperation saw him over, but every time I go to that beautiful spot just off the A9 I look at that yawning chasm and ask myself whether it’s really possible.
Not far from Killiekrankie is an unremarkable small hamlet called Fortingall which is claimed be the birthplace of a very remarkable man – Pontius Pilate. The story goes that Fortingall, which is also home to a yew that is older than Christianity, was the stronghold of
Metallanus, a powerful
Caledonian chief whose base was in Glen Lyon.
At one stage Emperor
Caesar Augustus sent an envoy to the northern tribes, with that Roman later fathering a son who was then taken back to Rome. According to
Perthshire folklore, that son would go on to become the
Roman governor who ordered
Jesus’s crucifixion.
Whether Pilate had ever heard about Perthshire remains a subject of conjecture, but one even more famous man who has – and who contributed to the county’s already burgeoning fund of stories – is William Shakespeare. In his play Macbeth, the Bard famously