OF all Scotland’s lovely valleys,
none is lovelier than that through which flows the lordly Tay, and of the
Tay valley there is no lovelier bit than that which stretches west and
north from the town of Aberfeldy. Out from the mountains flows the river,
down the wide valley, past sloping fields rich and fertile with their cosy
farmsteads, sheep-runs, lands high and bare, decked out with birches, firs
and beeches, singly and in groups and plantations, past great houses set
within their policies, past pretty villages, quaint and straggling, every
mile rich in surpassing beauty and historic interest.
But there is one spot where it were
worth while to pause, for it is the birthplace of a great man, whose name
is written in large letters over the Canadian West. Four miles west of the
town of Aberfeldy the river takes a turn about one of the Grampian spurs
which ends here in a bold bluff crag. At the foot of the rock, on the
river’s north bank, lies one of those quaint straggling villages. This
bluff crag is the Rock of Dull, and this straggling group of houses
huddling at its base is the village of Dull. In this village James
Robertson was born.
The glory of the village lies in the
past. The ruins strewn everywhere about, gaunt and bare or half-covered
with kindly turf, proclaim that. It is an ancient village getting its name
from the ninth abbot of Iona who, when dying, commanded that they should
bear his body eastward towards Strathray till the withes by which the
coffin hung, should break. At the foot of a precipitous rock on the north
side of the Tay the withes broke. There they laid his saintly body to
rest, and from the breaking of the withes, dhullan, they named the
spot "Dhull," modern Dull. The place became a famous educational and
ecclesiastical centre. A college was established and a monastery founded,
with right of sanctuary attached, within a radius marked by crosses, of
which one, sorely battered, still stands in the village. In the time of
Crinan, the fighting Bishop of Dunkeld, son-in-law to King Malcolm II, and
father of Duncan, the unfortunate victim of Macbeth’s ambition, the
landholdings pertaining to the monastery of which Crinan was tenth abbot,
were greatly extended. The memory of this monastery demesne is preserved
in the Appin Abbatania of Dull. But long before the Reformation the
monastery was dissolved and the college transferred to St. Andrew’s, thus
becoming the nucleus of the oldest of the Scottish universities.
In those great old days Dull was not
only an educational and ecclesiastical centre; it was a populous,
commercial metropolis as well, with streets devoted to certain trades and
offering the principal produce market for the surrounding district. But
now of this ancient greatness, educational, ecclesiastical and commercial,
all that remains is the parish school, the parish church, itself a
pre-Reformation relic recently restored to its former splendour, the
straggling village, and those eloquent gaunt or turf-clothed ruins.
Unchanged by the passing years, the old gray Rock abides, and the flowing
river, for the generations of men come and go, leaving ruins behind to
show where they have been and where they have wrought! Ruins? Yes, but
more than ruins. For lives of men are more enduring than grim rocks and
flowing rivers. They never die, but in a people’s character and in a
people’s influence and in a people’s work in their home lands and in lands
far across the sea, they live eternally.
