The Fallen Meteor: Hugh Miller and Local Tradition
[In the following essay, Alston emphasizes Miller's analytical and literary contributions as a folklorist of Scottish legends, myths, and stories.]
Hugh Miller collected around 350 traditional tales and customs,1 the bulk of which were published in Scenes and Legends of the North of Scotland (1835) and in his autobiographical My Schools and Schoolmasters (1854). This number does not include stories from written sources, which he wove together with his own collection into the ‘traditional history of Cromarty’, the subtitle of Scenes and Legends. Traditional stories also form the bulk of Tales and Sketches (1863), edited by his wife Lydia after his death, and including his biography of the Cromarty merchant William Forsyth, a work which drew on local memories and tales. Books based on his journeys in Britain in the 1840s and 1850s—First Impressions of England (1847) and The Cruise of the Betsey (1858)—show continued interest in local traditions, and even his geological and theological writings include a scattering of traditional tales.
Such interest in the stories of the common people was not yet fashionable and Miller briefly, but eloquently, found it necessary to defend his interest in what was revealed in these tales:
Human nature is not exclusively displayed in the histories of only great countries, or in the actions of only celebrated men; and human nature may be suffered to assert its claim on the attention of the beings who partake of it, even though the specimens exhibited be furnished by the traditions of an obscure village.
(Miller 1858, p. 9)
Although superstition and custom would continue, it would take new forms; what was passing away was ‘the production of centuries’ and would not be repeated (Miller 1858, p. 3), so something of the diversity of human nature would be lost, unless such tales were preserved. Miller also made the claim, more cautiously advanced, that the intrinsic quality of some of the tales was such that they could compare with the best of classical mythology (Miller 1858, p. 5).
Miller was preceded in Scotland by only three earlier collectors: Walter Scott, Allan Cunningham and Robert Chambers. Miller was the first collector in the north of Scotland, albeit in a non-Gaelic-speaking area whose cultural links were with the south. Richard Dorson in British Folklorists claims that Miller's books ‘reveal what the whole literature of folklore rarely divulges, the place that folk tradition occupies in the life of a town, and in the life of a man’. (Dorson 1968, p. 138, emphasis added) It is a claim which should be treated with caution. The term ‘folklore’ was coined in 1846, during Miller's lifetime, by William J. Thoms, to describe the beliefs, customs and stories current among the common people and the study of them (Drabble and Stringer 1986, p. 204). Miller did not use the term to describe his own collection; he was, indeed, little concerned with current beliefs, customs and stories. He described his material collectively as ‘a fallen meteor’—superstitions, customs and tales which had once been fiery and bright, but had now lost their prominence and were curiosities from the past rather than living beliefs. So it is only to a limited extent that we can see the place of these traditions in the life of the town of Cromarty. They throw far more light, and brighter light, on Miller's own life.
MILLER AND CROMARTY: THE TOWN AND HIS SOURCES
It was Miller's interest in local tradition, rather than geology, poetry or church affairs, which first earned him a reputation in his home town. John Barclay, who visited Cromarty in 1833, in an effort to recover some family property from relatives, consulted Miller on the family's history. Barclay described Miller as having published ‘a volume of poetry, a history of the herring fishery, and also a history of the antiquities of Cromarty’.2 Miller was ‘quite the lion of that part’ and was likely to take an interest in the matter of the Barclay family because it ‘jumps with his favourite hobby’ (Hill 1978, p. 186).
Cromarty, where Miller lived from his birth until he left for Edinburgh in 1839, had long been recognized as one of the finest and best-sheltered natural harbours in Europe. The portrayal by Miller's biographer, Peter Bayne, of the climate of Cromarty and the Black Isle as ‘one of the most bleak and ungenial districts in Scotland’ is peculiarly misleading, for this eastern tip of the Black Isle has a mild climate and is almost completely free from the ‘chill fogs’ also mentioned by Bayne; nor do gales blow from the North Sea at every season to ‘pierce every nook and cranny of the shivering town’ (Bayne 1871, I, p. 7). One may suspect that such inaccuracies are features of the image Miller created for himself when in Edinburgh, and a suitably wild place of origin for the bulky, stooped figure, in antiquated shepherd's plaid, which he presented to his public.
In Miller's boyhood Cromarty was a thriving town with a population of over 2,000, but from the 1830s it declined to the point that Miller could describe it as almost ‘a second deserted village’ (Bayne 1871, II, p. 441). The small estate of Cromarty (consisting of Cromarty Castle, much of the town and surrounding land) had been acquired in 1767 by George Ross, a native of Ross-shire who, having made a fortune in London, devoted himself to the improvement of his property. In consequence, Cromarty enjoyed a remarkable period of growth, becoming a model of what could be achieved with the resources of the area. Ross, with the assistance of a local merchant, William Forsyth, built one of the first factories in Scotland, which employed between 200 and 250 hands within its walls and over 600 outworkers in neighbouring parishes, in the production of handloom-woven hemp cloth for sacking and bagging, using hemp imported principally from St Petersburg. Ross was a local pioneer in many other respects: he introduced lace making, nail and spade manufacture, improved farming practices and introduced large-scale pig rearing; he built a brewery; he obtained government funds for the building of the town's Courthouse and harbour; he financed the construction of a Gaelic chapel for incoming workers; he built Cromarty House on the site of the medieval castle; and he initiated a local fashion for rebuilding, during which most houses in the town were replaced. Visitors remarked on the appearance of the town and its inhabitants: ‘the common people are remarkable complaisant and cleanly’ (Loch 1778, p. 55); and ‘houses are everyday building and neatness and cleanness are studied’ (Wight 1781, p. 256). This building boom which continued into the nineteenth century provided steady employment for twenty to thirty local masons and this life, rather than that of a travelling mason, was perhaps what the young Miller had in mind in deciding to apprentice himself to this trade.
By the end of the century, the prominent improver Sir John Sinclair, considered that Inverness was ‘the emporium of the Northern Highlands’, but, he continued,
It will have a serious rival in Cromarty … which is obviously the best adapted to become the grand depot, the great granary and storehouse of merchandise and trade, in the northern end of the Island of Great Britain; and when the day shall arise (and come it will) that Government will assuredly see the utility and vast importance of a naval establishment at this port, Cromarty will be seen to rise rapidly and become the general mart of the North
(Sinclair 1795, p. 60).
In 1815 the town grew further with a boom in herring fishing, and by the 1820s it was the eighth largest herring-curing station in Britain. The industries established by George Ross were still for the most part thriving, and the town in which Miller grew up was far grander than the small fishing village it was later to become.
By Miller's day the town had become sufficiently cosmopolitan for a French consular agent to be appointed (probably in the 1820s) and for the Baltic trade to bring regular news from Russia. Cromarty was also something of a frontier town. It had, since its establishment around 1200, been in ‘border territory’, an outpost of Scots speakers on the edge of the true Highlands. Gaelic was spoken in the neighbouring parishes and by incoming workers in the hemp factory, and in Miller's day the people of Cromarty retained their sense of superiority to the Gaelic-speaking Highlanders. Although he later expressed regret at not speaking Gaelic, Miller championed the townspeople in their opposition to an attempt by the minister of the Gaelic chapel either to have a parish of his own or be appointed joint minister of the existing parish (Miller 1874b, p. 92). The opposition was, at root, based on the perceived inferiority of the Gaelic congregation, mostly workers in the hemp factory. To accede to the request would (as Miller expressed the view of the townspeople) have made the Gaelic-speaking minister into whole minister to half of them or half a minister to all of them.
Miller collected traditions from in and around this town, tales which were on the verge of disappearance. The number of tales collected may suggest that Miller presented a comprehensive account of local lore rather than a personal selection, yet he was aware ‘how incalculably numerous must such stories once have been, when the history of one little domicile [i.e. his own house] furnishes so many’ (Miller 1858, p. 358). His mother, Harriet Wright, was a principal source and she provided him with the more powerful supernatural tales. Although Miller does not discuss his mother's influence on him, the view of his family, particularly of his wife Lydia, was conveyed in no uncertain terms to Miller's biographer:
His mother was not remarkable for mental power or strength of character. She had, however, one intellectual faculty in extraordinary vigour, to wit, memory, and she loaded it with knowledge of a peculiarly unprofitable kind. Her belief in fairies, witches, dreams, presentiments, ghosts was unbounded, and she was restrained by no modern scruples from communicating her fairy lore, or the faith with which she received it, to her son
(Bayne 1871, I, p. 15).
Lydia held that almost all the material for Scenes and Legends came from Hugh's mother. She also believed that Hugh had, as a result of his mother's superstition, been brought up as a young boy in an atmosphere of ‘overpowering terror’—created by the combination of this superstition with his mother's occupation as a seamstress, involving the sewing of shrouds—which ‘returned in his last days, stimulating the action of a diseased brain’ (Bayne 1871, I, p. 17).
Hugh was much in the company of his mother's brothers, James and Sandy Wright, after his father's death. The brothers had not married and remained with their parents, Catherine Rose (who died in 1811) and Robert Wright (who survived until 1818), and so the young boy was exposed to the same influences which had provided his mother with her stock of traditional tales. Catherine Rose was one of three sisters who had been orphaned at a young age and brought up in the neighbouring parish of Nigg by their grandfather Donald Roy, a powerful lay leader in the church who was also regarded as a seer. He was said, for example, to have known in some supernatural way of Catherine's recovery from a serious illness. Catherine's sister Isobel appears in Scenes and Legends as the Gudewife of Minitarf (Miller 1858, pp. 396-407) and the third sister married a Nigg man, named Munro, who may be the ‘elderly relative’ who provided Miller with the sequence of stories which constitute Chapter XXV of the same book (Miller 1858, p. 358). The three Rose sisters appear to have been brought up in a background which combined devout religion and a strong belief in the supernatural, a combination for which Miller never lost respect but which seems to have been alien to his wife's family and to many of his Edinburgh acquaintances.3
Harriet may also have derived some of her lore from having, as a young girl, spent much time in the company of Ann Feddes, whose daughter (Jean Robertson) was Miller's father's first wife. Following Jean Robertson's early death Ann Feddes (herself a sailor's widow) ran a small school, attended by Harriet and an elder sister. As Ann grew old the elder Wright girl moved to live with her and take care of her and Harriet ‘used, as before, to pass much of her time with her sister and her old mistress’ (Miller 1869, p. 11). Ann Feddes was related to Harriet but was also a cousin of Miller's father, and through her Harriet had access to the traditions of her future husband's family.
Miller held that the best traditional tales came from women. He described women in general as ‘more poetical, more timid, more credulous than men’ and believed that when this was coupled with other characteristics and circumstances, namely ‘a judgement not naturally vigorous, an imagination more than commonly active, an ignorance of books and of the world, a long cherished belief in the supernatural, a melancholy old age, and a solitary fireside’, then the result was ‘that terrible poetry which revels among skulls, and coffins, and enchantments’ (Miller 1858, p. 7). This description of ‘a melancholy old age’ does not fit Harriet herself (who was a young woman when widowed) nor Catherine Rose (who lived contentedly with her sons), but it corresponds with the ‘dreary solitude’ of Ann Feddes after her daughter's death (Miller 1869, p. 11).
We see, then, that the women in Miller's family included a number of powerful story tellers and that their family traditions extended beyond Cromarty itself to the neighbouring Highland (Gaelic-speaking) parish of Nigg and across the Moray Firth to the Lowlands. Thus the family stories included those of James Mackenzie, the Episcopalian curate of Nigg, and his twenty children, one of whom (Jenny, who later married Donald Roy) he once forgot was his own daughter (Miller 1858, p. 144); a whole clutch of stories of Donald Roy (Miller 1858, pp. 145-152; Miller 1869, p. 32); traditional tales such as the ‘Green Lady of Banff’, from his mother's grandfather who had come from this area (Miller 1858, p. 366; Miller 1874b, p. 250); and even such detail as that a pair of ravens had nested on the same spot at Navity since the boyhood of his great grandfather (Miller 1874c, p. 296). Miller's oldest story, with a clearly identified source, was also a family tale, that of Elspat Hood who reputedly died in 1701 at the age of 120 and could remember a time when the Clach Malloch, a large boulder exposed at low tides, was surrounded by corn fields (IC 25 November 1829).4
Despite the obvious influence on him of women story-tellers, Miller is more explicit about the influence of his uncles. From James, who like Miller had a prodigious memory, he gleaned factual local history and an immense amount of local lore gathered when James travelled as a saddler to surrounding farms. James also encouraged young Hugh in his reading, directing him at an early age to Blind Harry's Wallace. Sandy Wright, the more intense and serious of the two, provided him with tales of adventure, stories of life and passion, with strokes of poetry, and tales of the sea. Sandy's small library included such volumes as Travels in North America, with accounts of the manners and customs of the Indians, and he also aroused Miller's interest in natural history.5 Miller only indirectly revealed James Wright's own experience of the supernatural, in the tale of ‘The Gudewife of Minitarf’. As a young man, James had worked as a saddler at Invergordon and while sleeping in the ruined castle he had, in a dream, a vision of the funeral of his cousin (Isobel Rose's son, John) in Morayshire—a funeral which he attended a few days later (Miller 1858, p. 395-407). The honesty and uprightness of the Wright brothers is stressed by Miller, and it must have been almost impossible for him to doubt the truth of this story.
Stories of a different kind came from the gatherings in the evenings at James's work bench, with local characters such as the eccentric Francie, and here Miller heard many of the local ghost stories. Later, as a journeyman mason, he heard similar tales from the wildly inventive story teller Jock Mo-ghaol in the masons' barrack at Conon. Other story-telling sessions gave him a significant part of his knowledge of his father, who was drowned at sea when Miller was only five years old, through stories told by the mate, Jack Grant and by James Wright, who had greatly admired him (Miller 1869, p. 17).
Miller had to search out many of the other stories he recorded. The body of local tradition—the fallen meteor—had to be unearthed. When Nicholas Dickson visited Cromarty in 1858, little more than a year after Miller's death, a visit inspired by his admiration of Miller's writings, he found that the local fishermen, although they knew the names of places around the coast mentioned by Miller, knew none of the tales associated with them (Dickson 1858, p. 78). Miller had, in fact, drawn many of his tales of the fishing community from George Hossack, who died aged 82 years in the 1820s (IC 13 May 1829). Other old inhabitants were sought out by Miller and, in his own image, cannibalized by him. In this way he received fast-disappearing accounts of Cromarty: of the castle, demolished in 1772 but remembered by an old woman who, as a girl, had been a companion to the last remaining servant (Miller 1858, p. 79); of Meg o' the Shore's grave, which another old woman remembered having seen opened when she was five years old, on which occasion a friend of Meg's removed pins as a keepsake from the linen cap still on Meg's skull (Miller 1858, p. 386). After many inquiries, he discovered the name of the well, simply known as ‘the Saint's Well’, at Navity from an old man whose father had farmed the place a hundred years before (Miller 1874a, p. 155).6
In searching out stories, Miller had an admirable ability to relate to social outcasts, such as the mad woman at Conon and a number of ‘idiots’, and this coupled with his later position as a respectable member of society provided him with many additional sources. Miller's researches also led him to explore the history of the town in a more conventional manner through local church records and private collections of papers.
However, he had his own place within its society and was not a detached recorder of the affairs of the town. One example is the fact that there is no reference in his writings to the distinctive dialect of the fisher community of Cromarty, and this despite Miller's expressed interest in dialect and his retention of his native pronunciation.7 There were two distinct dialects of Scots spoken in Cromarty, one by the fisherfolk and the other by the rest of the community. The dialect of the fisherfolk, which was almost identical with the dialect of the fishers of Avoch, also on the Black Isle, was characterized by the dropping and insertion of ‘h's, as in Cockney. The Scottish National Dictionary (Grant and Murison 1931) in its introductory survey of varieties of Scots claims that this dialect contains some of the oldest forms of Scots. Why did Miller turn a blind eye to it? It may be that the dialect, since it does not reflect what are characteristically seen as the features of Scots, was regarded by him as a degenerate form of language and that he simply ignored it in his descriptions of Cromarty. If so, this is a useful reminder that Miller, far from standing apart from his community, shared its prejudices.
It was perhaps a mark of Miller's success that, despite the oddities of his character and what must have appeared at the time as his peculiar interests, he remained part of and was ultimately honoured by his home town. Miller rose to local fame through his attention to local tradition and history, rather than through an interest in natural history, but he wisely turned his attention away from contemporary customs and from at least some local affairs. Two interesting contrasts are provided by his fellow geologist Robert Dick and the later Cromarty folklorist, Donald A. Mackenzie. Dick, a Thurso baker, was rejected by his own community: his interest in natural history, with the resultant trips into the country at odd hours of the day and night, marked him as an eccentric. Mackenzie, recorded a number of traditional stories and customs of Cromarty early in the twentieth century but, after publishing an article using the fisher dialect, was on occasion pelted with stones by those fisherfolk who thought he was mocking them.8 Miller trod a fine line, conveying little of contemporary belief and concentrating on past customs and tales.
MILLER AND CROMARTY: THE HISTORY OF THE PEOPLE
The enduring value of Miller's tales of the history of Cromarty, as distinct from his supernatural stories, lies largely in the wealth of local detail and colour, which bring to life the affairs of the town, chiefly in the eighteenth century. They provide little reliable information on the town before 1690 (only six or seven tales refer to events before this) and, indeed, little in detail before the 1730s. Miller heard much of this tradition as a boy and consolidated his knowledge in the 1820s; the timescale here is interesting in illustrating that Cromarty, despite being a long-established burgh, was not a community which transmitted its own history over the centuries.
Miller had remarkably high faith in the reliability of oral testimony:
There is a habit of minute attention almost peculiar to the common people (in no class, at least, is it more perfect than in the commonest), which leads them to take an almost microscopic survey of every object suited to interest them; and hence their narratives of events which have really occurred are as strikingly faithful in all the minor details as Dutch paintings. Not a trait of character, not a shade of circumstance is permitted to escape
(Miller 1858, p. 4).
Not only did Miller hold such tales to be, in general, historically accurate, but he believed that what was true in such stories could almost invariably be distinguished from false elements.
Nothing more common than those faithful memories which can record whole conversations, and every attendant circumstance, however minute; nothing less so than that just conception of character and vigour of imagination, which can alone construct a natural dialogue, or depict, with the nice pencil of truth, a scene wholly fictitious. And thus though anyone … can mix up falsehoods with the truths related in this way, not one of a million can make them amalgamate. The iron and clay, to use Bacon's illustration, retain their separate natures, as in the feet of the image, and can as easily be distinguished
(Miller 1858, p. 4).
Miller surely claimed too much, perhaps because of his high regard for the Wright brothers' recollections, and on examination it proves that his traditional history conveys some distorted views on the religious history of the parish. Two chief examples are his accounts of Bernard Mackenzie, last Episcopalian incumbent of the parish church, and of the Catholic proprietor of the estate, Captain John Urquhart (Miller 1858, pp. 143-4 and pp. 349-54). Miller described Mackenzie (minister from 1678 until 1690) as ‘a quiet, timid sort of man, with little force of character, but with what served his turn equally well, a good deal of cunning’ (Miller 1858, p. 143). Such a description is not borne out by the facts. Mackenzie was on occasion prepared to stand up to the Mackenzie lairds, who were his patrons, as when, following a dispute over the payment of grain rents, he vouched for the good character of those who had broken into the laird's storage loft at the castle and removed some of the grain. In 1704, although removed as minister, he was again in the area, championing those who wished to see the restoration of Cromarty's status as a royal burgh and falling foul of the laird by encouraging fishermen to stop making customary payments of fish. Mackenzie emerges from this and other accounts as a forceful man, with popular support and apparent good relations with at least some Presbyterians.
A similar distortion emerges in Miller's account of the dispute in Cromarty in the 1750s over the appointment of a new minister. The Cromarty estate was acquired in 1741 by Captain John Urquhart, a Catholic, who had been out in the Jacobite rising of 1715, subsequently served in the Spanish navy and returned to buy the old family estate. Following the death of the parish minister in 1749, there was a prolonged dispute between Captain John and the elders of the church, over who had the right to appoint a new minister. Miller accurately reports these events but what is missing is an account of the earlier deterioration of relations between Urquhart and the parish, as a result of the bigotry of some of the elders. Moreover, local tradition appears to have forgotten Urquhart's improvements on the estate, with the result that Miller gave the sole credit for the economic development of Cromarty in the 1740s and 1750s to William Forsyth. Much of this was well deserved: Forsyth was an enterprising merchant and a hard-headed business man—but Miller overstated the case for Forsyth whom he credited with first importing coal, developing linen spinning, and first manufacturing kelp. Coal was already imported; it was Urquhart and the local merchant Gilbert Barclay who introduced the linen industry to the area; and Barclay was already shipping kelp in 1746. William Forsyth flourished following, and probably because of, the bankruptcy of Barclay, whom he replaced as agent for the British Linen Company. It is interesting to note that Barclay was an Episcopalian and a supporter of Captain Urquhart, while Forsyth was a Presbyterian.
It appears that the religious revival of the mid-eighteenth century, with the resulting strengthening of Presbyterian attitudes, led not only to a victory for the local elders in church affairs, but to an eclipsing in popular history of the role which had been played by non-Presbyterians in the economic development of the town. This has the strange result that Miller's accounts belittle his own forebear, the Reverent James Mackenzie of Nigg, and obscure the fact that the Feddes family had supported Urquhart's candidate in the patronage dispute.
It is unlikely that Miller's would have deliberately distorted his material but he certainly accepted uncritically, and perhaps credulously, these views of the religious history of the town. This may be explained in terms of Miller's own character. While he could be a fierce, and at times radical, critic of others, he needed a secure base for himself, which was partly provided by his beloved Cromarty. These traditions represented the people of Cromarty as almost wholly united in their Presbyterian and evangelical beliefs (at least from the 1730s) and enabled Miller to perceive himself as the product of a community which, in experiencing evangelical revival and successfully opposing the patronage claims of the laird, had held firmly to those very principles of religious belief and church government which would remain so important to him. Just as he regarded the area around Cromarty as embodying the main truths of his geology and saw the geological world through the rocks of his beloved birthplace, as David Oldroyd shows in his contribution to this book, so Cromarty's ecclesiastical history exemplified values to which he remained attached. And, one may add that, in a similar way, the responsible use of wealth and exercise of power by the eighteenth-century laird, George Ross, and the merchant, William Forsyth (both of whose contributions to Cromarty were recorded by Miller in uncritical and glowing terms), provided enduring models of social responsibility. The traditional history of Cromarty thus encouraged Miller in his tendency to see the world through the microcosm of his native town and, indeed, Mackenzie in his study of Miller suggests that ‘in all subjects he had made his mind up before he left Cromarty’ (Mackenzie 1905, p. 242).
STORIES AND THE LOCAL ENVIRONMENT
Miller, as we have seen, explicitly stated that most stories were not, when collected, the living beliefs of the community. However, these were the stories of the town (and its environs) in a different and important sense. The tales are, almost without exception, set in a particular place, known to Miller even if not specified in such a way that allows for their identification now (and thus we have, for example, lost the site of St Duthac's chapel). His stories tell of a particular place, at a particular time.
His achievement for his readers is to recreate in his descriptions a landscape in which both the past or the supernatural (often both) are part of the reader's vicarious experience of the natural world. Nor are the stories simply located on the landscape. They penetrate it. Through the Drooping Cave, still to be seen on the shore to the east of Cromarty, lie caverns where ancient warriors sleep (Miller 1858, p. 332); the Fisherman's Widow, in a dream, sees a dead man walking under the sea—perhaps drawing, in the description, on Miller's experiments with diving on the west coast (Miller 1858, p. 179); the spring Sludach rises on one side of the Cromarty Firth, only to dry up and reappear on the other side, mysteriously linked beneath the sea bed (Miller 1858, p. 5); mountains are stones dropped by a giantess (Miller 1858, p. 14); the Guardian Cock protects a house from destruction by meteors from above (Miller 1858, p. 73); the devil is to be met in the depths of the Black Gorge at Evanton (Miller 1858, p. 166).
The power of Miller's story telling mirrors the strength of his popular geological work which conveys to the reader, through a vivid description of the natural world and Miller's own experience, a sense of the geological past. David Oldroyd remarks in this volume that ‘Miller's geological writing was as much autobiographical as descriptive of rock types, fossils, geological systems and processes’ and, similarly, Miller's folktales are an important part of his own life history. In retelling the tales, Miller is conveying his own way of experiencing the world in which he grew up.
Why were these tales so important to him? As a boy, despite being a leader of his school fellows, he was often cool and distant, even with his few friends, and lived much in the world of his own imagination. He maintained this coolness in his personal relationships in adult life and was, as Mackenzie puts it, ‘shy and strangely reserved, he lived much alone, he had but a few devoted friends and moved in no circle’ (Miller 1907, p. xi). From an early age, and perhaps as an alternative to friendship, he enlivened his environment with stories: he was one of the few to spend much of his time on the Gallowhill, above Cromarty, where stories played a large part in his games. Having read Gulliver's Travels he recreated his own Lilliputian world on the slopes of Gallowhill and describes how he himself seemed to become a tiny figure (Miller 1874a, p. 174). He re-enacted the stories of Wallace to which his uncle had introduced him, hiding in a cave, pursuing a defeated English army and lifting the siege of Cromarty Castle. His interest in geography, in plans and in historical detail enhanced his stories and imaginative games: the voyages of his toy ships on the horse pond, a quarter of a mile from the town, were as a result more complex than those of his companions and he constructed earth and mud fortifications on a scientific basis (to the amusement of the estate factor, Walter Ross, who had commanded the Loyal Cromarty Volunteers).
Some of his other early reading included descriptions of English landscapes which Miller absorbed in such a way that when he visited England as an adult he already ‘knew’ some of the places through his boyhood reading of, for example, the eighteenth-century poet and landscaper William Shenstone (to whose works he returned every year until he was nineteen) and the novelist Mary Sherwood. He created his own version of these places in his imagination and seems to have retained much of this, while carrying with him the memory of places he knew at first hand. He found Edinburgh disappointing partly because he had already built, in his mind, a much finer Edinburgh of his own. His imagination gave stories such a vitality that he generally found theatre disappointing. He attended the Theatre Royal in Edinburgh in 1823 only to find that he had already enacted the Shakespearean plays more satisfactorily in his own mind in the settings of Cromarty Hill (Miller 1829).
In his personal relationship with the environment, geology to some extent replaced his interest in traditional history—or became an alternative stimulus to his imagination. He claimed that an important transition took place early in his life. On a visit as a boy of eleven to the Drooping Cave, which he was exploring, alone and by torchlight, in an attempt to retrace the steps of Willie Millar (who, according to local tradition, had encountered sleeping hosts of warriors in caverns far beyond the entrance), Miller realized that the story was false as the cave narrowed and became impassible. But he reflected that he had taken pleasure in the investigation which proved the legend false and had been attracted by the natural phenomena of the cave. He wished things to be both ‘marvellous and true’ and, although his childhood belief in ‘the ghost, and the wraith, and the fairy’ had gone, he now knew that his mind would be fed by philosophy and the arts (Miller 1858, p. 339).
This account is part of the material added to Scenes and Legends in its second edition of 1850 and its tone establishes Miller more in the role of a recorder of curiosities than a teller of stories. However, it sits uneasily with the account in My Schools and Schoolmasters of Miller's exploration of the Drooping Cave with his uncles when he (in this version) saw the caves by torchlight for the first time and was aware of their limited extent. It may be an example of Miller in later life overemphasizing his early scientific interests. Whenever the change took place, Miller did indeed move to a greater interest in geology and in his geological lectures he proposed geology as a form of ‘poesy’ equal to the old mythology (Miller 1874a, p. 80).
Yet one can also sense the continuing importance of the stories of his native Cromarty. Passing over the ferry from Ardersier and setting out towards Cromarty he entered that ‘part of the country where every little locality, and every more striking feature of the landscape, has its associated tradition’ (Miller 1874b, p. 294). He had this relationship with no other place. In Edinburgh, his second home, he knew, from his first visit in 1824, of saints' wells at Restalrig and later gleaned one near contemporary story of thieves at Tantallon Castle during a trip to the Bass Rock, but otherwise he lacked the background of tales he enjoyed in Cromarty (Miller 1875, pp. 236, 271).
Miller also had a more conventional appreciation of the picturesque aspects of the countryside and was heartbroken, returning to Cromarty in the late 1840s, to find the hedgerows planted by George Ross in the 1770s pulled out and, in the town, to find the house and garden of Captain Swan (father of his boyhood friend) sadly changed (Bayne 1871, II, p. 442). However, for one to whom the natural environment was so important, it is strange to find that Miller's supernatural tales almost always convey a threatening presence behind the physical world. He delighted, if that is the word, in discovering new monsters haunting lonely glens—such as the one-legged Ludaig who hopped from rock to rock in the bogs near Isle Ornsay, Skye (Miller 1874b, p. 103). On a number of occasions in his later travels he regretted the ‘absence’ of a ghost: near Evanton ‘the scene lacked but a ghost to make it perfect’ (Miller 1874b, p. 337) and there was a similar lack in the burn outside Portsoy (Miller 1874b, p. 264). A hut by the Shin Falls would, ‘when the cry of the kelpie mingled with the roar of the flood’, have made a ‘sublime lodge’ (Miller 1869, p. 57).
Miller cites apparitions as the most common form of folktale (a point borne out by his own collection) and again what strikes the reader of these tales is the power and menace of the supernatural figures: the Green Lady crouching by the embers of a fire washing her sickly child in the blood of the baby of the house, now destined to die (Miller 1858, p. 70); the Navity goblin shivering by the hearth, with its dirty cloths pulled down over its knees after destroying the farm's cattle (Miller 1858, p. 71); the half-naked fairy woman of Morial's Den disappearing with a scream on hearing that there is no message of salvation in the Bible for her folk (Miller 1858, p. 72). There is little sense of nature as kindly, few good spirits and little indication of powers of healing. (The ghost of the farmer's wife [Miller 1858, p. 362] who returned to comfort her children, mistreated by their stepmother, is a rare exception.) Whatever Miller's considered theological views, in his collected folklore mankind is pitted against nature.9
It may be that Miller, writing with no predisposition to romanticize his subject, is more accurate in the impression he conveys of the tenor of local folktales than later collectors inspired by a romantic view of nature. He was aware of the process by which native tradition might be altered and noted that the Fingalian legends he had heard in the Highlands related the exploits of ‘a tribe of gigantic savages’ and had little in common with the tales of ‘high-minded warriors’ passed off by James Macpherson as the work of the bard Ossian.
An indicator of the tenor of native superstition may be found in the one rag well still in use in the Black Isle, known as the ‘clootie well’ from the cloots [cloths or rags] hung there. The almost universal reaction to this is as an ugly and sinister place and, indeed, it appears from an account published in the 1880s that this well, known then as the Hurdyhill Well, was a site where sickly children were left overnight—allegedly in the hope of a cure but presumably, if the tradition is correct, as a licensed form of child murder by exposure.
Yet, even if Miller is accurately conveying the tenor of local tradition, he did so with considerable input of his own. He undoubtedly focused on these aspects of the tales and the impression of a threatening landscape is enhanced by his deliberate ambiguity towards the supernatural. The general question of the truth of omens, foretelling, even apparitions is seldom addressed, with the result that the impact of the tales on the reader is enhanced.
THE CUSTOMS OF THE PEOPLE
The stories collected by Miller had, at the time they were collected, more of a place in the environment than a function in the community. The supernatural folktales were not stories which mattered any more—though they mattered to Miller. Miller's interest, being avowedly antiquarian, was similarly directed away from contemporary customs and beliefs.
The customs recorded by Miller in his books were, with a few exceptions, extinct or were mere remnants of belief reduced to children's amusements. Fishermen no longer calmed the waves by the motions of their hands, Halloween customs had become children's games and it was children who spat on the carved figure in St Regulus graveyard known as the ‘burnt cook’ (Miller 1858, pp. 58, 62 and 210). Miller knew, from a fellow workman, of water used as a charm to cure cattle after a belemnite (popularly thought to be a thunderbolt) had been placed in it, but this was in his informant's grandfather's time (Miller 1874b, p. 374; Miller 1873a, p. 41). Some stories reveal older customs and beliefs, but as incidental detail: thus we hear of farmers blessing cattle each morning, of foretelling the future by casting a ‘clew’ of thread into a darkened kiln-barn, of the herring in the firth leaving when blood was spilt on the water, of the stone ‘fairy cradle’ used, until 1746, to restore changelings (children stolen by the fairies, who would leave their own sickly offspring in their place) (Miller 1858, pp. 68, 71, 105 and 252). Where customs survived or emerged Miller generally regarded them as trivial or humorous: the masons' customs in the barrack at Conon were little more than horseplay, and fortune-telling with tea leaves, oat stalks or nuts was mere superstition (Miller 1829; Miller 1870, p. 15). The fisherwomen who believed their children had been taken by the fairies after boys of the town moved the children from one house to another were laughed at for their credulity; fishermen who believed in the bad luck brought when anyone asked about their voyage were teased by townboys who would shout ‘Men, men! Where are you going?’; and aversion to pigs was a characteristic of Gaelic speakers rather than the townsfolk (Miller 1858, p. 450).
Miller displayed a different attitude in some of his early reporting for the Inverness Courier. When he wrote of witchcraft in the neighbouring parish of Resolis (IC 17 February 1830 and 18 August 1830), he mocked, with the same force which later characterized him as editor of the Witness, those who had resorted to a local witch, Miss Hay, and to a white wizard in Speyside whose family possessed a bridle once used by the devil to ride a water horse. When superstition lived on and adversely affected the behaviour of the people, Miller had no tolerance of it. He had direct experience of at least one other living superstition in the fishing community, the belief that a wind could be called up by whistling, but in this case he saw no moral harm in the custom (Miller 1858, p. 58).
Miller acted more as an observer (being an outsider) during his stays as a boy with cousins in Sutherland, reporting contemporary customs (although, not speaking Gaelic, he could not understand all he heard). He gleaned some knowledge of folk medicine from his cousin who used herbs to cure cattle of illness and to disenchant bewitched cattle, knew how to make potions to induce love and hate, and told Hugh of how a cow might be given a live fish to swallow in certain cases (Miller 1869, p. 111). In the first edition of Scenes and Legends, in a section not carried in the second, Miller described seeing, as a boy, the ‘charm of the egg’ used for fortune telling in the cottage of his relations in Sutherland, and indicates how he vividly imagined himself in ancient Rome watching a ceremony of augury.
The only other customs which seem to have made a profound impression on Miller were funeral customs: he refers on a number of occasions to the traditional lykewakes at which the corpse was laid out with a plate of salt, candles burning and the furniture draped in white. On his visit to England the only local customs he noted were when he saw a coffin (not, as in Scotland, painted black) being carried to the churchyard by its handles (rather than on the shoulders) (Miller 1870, p. 227).
The absence of customs, charms and rituals in Miller's collection may be accounted for largely by a prudent turning away from recording living beliefs in his own community. Moreover, much ceremony and ritual simply did not appeal to him. There may have been some change in his attitude here or some ambivalence. Although he did not join the Freemasons' lodge in Cromarty, an early contribution to the Inverness Courier contains a sympathetic description of an ‘impressive’ ceremony at the laying of a foundation stone for the new Gardeners' Lodge, as part of which chalices of corn, wine and oil were poured over the stone (IC 21 April 1830). Later in life he was unmoved by ritual in the Church of England which he described as ‘common placed by the daily repetition of two centuries’ (Miller 1870, p. 23) and he considered, with obvious distaste, that before the Reformation ‘pageants and ceremonies … constituted the entire religion of the country’ (Miller 1873c, p. 28). Yet he was not entirely unmoved by such things. He attended a Roman Catholic Mass and recognized the artistry of the priest—although he regarded it as merely artistry—and in My Schools and Schoolmasters he makes a striking comparison between family prayers in the smoke-filled turf house of his Sutherland relations and high mass in the incense-filled cathedral (Miller 1869, p. 48).
Miller was also unresponsive to much symbolism. St Regulus, the graveyard in Cromarty, where he worked and buried his infant daughter, has a fine collection of late seventeenth-century carvings of the emblems of death: skulls, hourglasses, coffins, bells and gravedigger's tools. Miller had a low opinion of their ‘heavy grotesque style’ and was similarly dismissive of medieval carvings in Manchester Collegiate Church (Miller 1858, p. 210; Miller 1870, p. 38). Gravestones carved by Miller, distinguishable by their scalloped edges, are plain and severe; he seems to have assessed their quality by the workmanship of the lettering and by the sentiments expressed in the inscription.
An explanation can be found in the fact that symbols, ritual and charms are often means of controlling the supernatural by bringing luck, calling up natural or supernatural powers, restoring health or causing harm. In such magic, Miller had no interest. The supernatural world appealed to him as something which, when belief was suspended, was simply there. Its creatures were different, generally frightening, and not within human control. The imaginative world which he created was thus invested with sufficient independence to sustain his relationship with it.
MILLER'S ANALYSIS OF FOLKLORE
Early in Scenes and Legends Miller offers an analysis of three classes of tradition. First are traditional and historically truthful stories, with accurate delineation of character, which he associates with male sources. Second are fanciful and imaginative tales, generally of little value other than as humorous stories, although some local tales are of a superior kind within this class. And third are the highest class which combine either historical truth or accurate representation of character with flashes of invention, and these tales Miller associates with women storytellers. Miller's three classes seem to correspond, respectively, with the accurate historical tales and reminiscences of the Wright brothers, the humorous tales and ghost stories heard in gatherings at his uncle's workbench and in the masons' barrack, and the stories told by his mother or gleaned from other women. However, the analysis is not repeated in any other work and seems more a justification for the collection of traditional tales than a tool for study of them. Indeed, Miller's main point seems to be that stories of the third class have a value which compares with, for example, classical myth and legend. Having produced the analysis, Miller gets down to his main business of telling stories.
In his account of the parish of Cromarty for the Second Statistical Account of Scotland Miller produced a different analysis, this time of the origins of traditional tales.
Some belong evidently to a very early period, and seem to have floated into it [i.e. Cromarty] from the Highlands. There are other stories which are peculiar to it as a remote sea port, inhabited for ages by sailors and fishermen; while a third and more recent class belongs to it as an insulated lowland colony
(Miller 1845, p. 9).
Miller's main contribution to a study of traditional tales is, however, in a number of asides to his main business of telling stories. He is astute in recognizing the role minor superstitions had played within organized religion until what was, for him, the recent past. A few of Miller's examples refer to the seventeenth century when, after the Reformation and the sweeping away of what Miller would have regarded as gross superstition, leading evangelical figures such as Thomas Hogg of Kiltearn were seen as protecting their communities against the Devil, in the tale of the Watchmen of Cullicudden (Miller 1858, p. 167). However, his main examples refer to the evangelical revival of the 1740s and other evidence, particularly from kirk session records, confirms that this marked an important period of change. Before this time local belief in witchcraft was still a sufficiently important issue for Church authorities to act against such practices as counter-charming by cutting the alleged witch's forehead.
The evangelical revival put an end to many beliefs and practices, such as the frequenting of holy wells (at least on Sundays) but incorporated into the new ‘enthusiasm’ were beliefs that leading figures in the community could work miracles, predict the future, and deal with apparitions of evil spirits or spirits of the dead. The body of tales of Miller's ancestor Donald Roy are of this nature (Miller 1858, pp. 146-52). Donald Roy's gift of rings to his daughters before their marriages, as a reminder of their marriage to Christ is a fascinating example of inventive religious symbolism within a community—and is indeed the one case of such a usage with which Miller seems to have sympathy (Miller 1869, p. 33).
Miller saw the evangelical revival as having done away with dangerous superstition, at least among the most credulous. Superstition remained but it was generally benign. The Cromarty fishers, while they had little acquaintance
‘with the higher standards of right, had a code of foolish superstitions, which, strange as it may seem, served almost the same end. They respected an oath, in the belief that no-one had ever perjured himself and thriven; regarded the murderer as exposed to the terrible visitations of his victim, and the thief as a person condemned to a down look; reverenced the Bible a protection against witchcraft, and baptism as a charm against the fairies’
(Miller 1829, p. 83).
Miller made some perceptive comments as to the loss of oral tradition, noting the effect of agricultural changes in the 1830s in ending transmission of local lore. The holdings of small tenant farmers were replaced by large farms which relied on a more mobile work force of farm labourers, engaged each year at hiring fairs. Returning to Conon in later life he found, because of these changes, that no one now knew the tales he had heard when working there as a journeyman mason (Miller 1874b, p. 164). In visiting the island of Eigg he noted the lack of long-standing traditions, which he took to be the result of earlier movements of population. He also noted how events, such as the discovery of a skeleton near the Shoremills, might revive a story (in this case, the Guardian Cock) which had lain dormant in the minds of a few old people for over 60 years (Miller 1874b, p. 322).
Miller was interested in parallel myths in primitive peoples, seeing them as the result of the deep psychological roots of myth; and he held that there were remnants of ‘the old mythology’ in local belief: the legends of Green Ladies, the story of the Guardian Cock and the tale of Morial's Den struck him as such. He held that, in principle, traditional tales might contain very old historical information and presented a sustained analysis of flood traditions in the folklore of various cultures in order to make a theological point in The Testimony of the Rocks, but none of the material he collected himself was relevant to this exercise (Miller 1874c, p. 270).
MILLER'S BELIEFS
What did Miller believe about the supernatural elements in the tales he recorded? Of the supernatural tales, a number are presented as having natural explanations: the spectre ships reputedly seen at night on the Mulbuie Common were trees rising above a low-lying sea of mist; some ghostly lights, such as at Castle Craig, may have been from illicit stills (and no doubt the belief in their supernatural origin was encouraged); the apparition at Ferindonald might be attributed to the quantity of drink consumed before it was seen; and the decline in appearances of ghosts might in general be attributed to a change in drinking habits—‘tea cam in and ghaists and fairies gaed out’ (Miller 1858, pp. 22, 167; Miller 1874b, p. 379). Others stories were transparent and amusing inventions, and Miller gives the opinion that a high proportion of tales might originate with spinners of yarns.
In many other cases Miller's attitude is unclear. He believed that he had experienced an omen of death, through a dream which appears, without identifying Miller, in Scenes and Legends as the Apprentice's Dream. While working at Poytnzfield House in 1822 he dreamed that he was in the nearby graveyard of Kirkmichael and saw a large metal bar, like the gnomon of a sundial on the gable end of the church, mysteriously move until the shadow rested at a certain point among the tombs. The sky then grew dark and he fled. Five weeks later he attended a funeral of a relative who was buried at the spot marked by the gnomon (Miller 1858, p. 434).
Miller's own experiences also included the apparition of a disembodied hand, contemporaneous with the drowning of his father, although with no possibility of the disaster being avoided, and he believed that he had seen, as a young boy, the ghost of John Feddes. Such boyhood experiences are recounted in a manner which leaves open to the reader the interpretation that Miller is presenting the events as they appeared to him at the time rather than giving his considered view as an adult, and this is the interpretation of his biographer (Bayne 1871, II, p. 15). But elsewhere Miller makes strong claims for the reliability of early childhood memories, citing the example of a woman who recounted to Miller how she was taken in her nurse's arms to see the burning of a witch at Dornoch in 1722 (Miller 1874c, p. 267; Miller 1869, p. 126). He came close to justifying belief in omens of death in the words of his uncle James (the young saddler in ‘The Gudewife of Minitarf’) who believed that his foreknowledge (through a dream or vision) of the death of his cousin had led him to see ‘that there is indeed an invisible world, and that all the future is known to Him’ (Miller 1858, p. 407). Such a view would have allowed Miller to accept as true almost all the stories about his revered great-grandfather Donald Roy.
Miller noted that apparitions of evil spirits were ‘the most numerous class of our traditions’ (Miller 1858, p. 165). In some cases, as we have seen, he provides a natural explanation, but in general the effective telling of the tale has priority. There is no instance, at least before his final illness, of Miller believing himself to have seen such an apparition, yet he recounts a dream of an attack by ‘a frightful female’, following a day in which he was soaked and chilled, with startling immediacy, as if it had happened in reality. (Miller 1874b, p. 378)
Other superstitions, including belief in ghosts, Miller held to have an important moral function in the absence of ‘a deeper sense of religion … than most people entertain’ (Miller 1858, p. 357). Ghosts were presumably a reminder of the last things—death, judgement and immortality—and his views on the moral benefits of other superstitions in the fishing community has already been quoted. There is also a strong sense of moral order in many non-supernatural tales, exemplified by the tale of the kindness of Sandy Wright (Miller's great-grandfather) to an orphan, who in later life returned the kindness by preventing Wright from losing his pension as a customhouse boatman.
Yet Miller goes beyond a mere suspension of disbelief and perhaps the most striking feature of his treatment of the supernatural is the absence of any systematic discussion of these questions. An interesting example of his ambiguity is the story of the Eathie fairies, which was sufficiently important to him to warrant a footnote in his geological work The Old Red Sandstone. One is tempted to say that he must surely have disbelieved such tales and yet Robert Dick, the Thurso baker and geologist who provided Miller with many specimens, reacted to Miller's death by saying that Miller had always been too taken up with fairies. He related an incident when Miller, with Dick in Buchan, had insisted that the fairies were nipping him, in circumstances which suggest he had merely been bitten by an insect (Smiles 1878, p. 235).
In passing we may note that Miller may himself have been taken in, in the case of the Eathie fairies, by a story originating with a teller of tall tales. Donald Calder, a Cromarty merchant, had, it seems, been passing the ravine of the Eathie Burn when returning from the Fortrose market. He heard a voice calling his name and wandered down into the mist-filled valley. Apparently, a mystery. The voice continued to call but always from some different place. Donald gave up the search after a short time and climbed up from the burn only to find that the whole night had passed. However, contemporary Court records reveal that Donald Calder, merchant in Cromarty, was on one occasion the subject of a paternity suit following his ‘connexion’ with the widow, Betty Stuart, at the Tain Market. And so a solution to the mystery seems to emerge once we credit Calder with a strong need to account for overnight absences from home.
Such tales—traditional or invented—may have been a ‘fallen meteor’ for the community in general but they burned brightly enough in Miller's mind and his description of an elderly relative in Nigg might be applied to Miller himself.
He had … a good deal of the sceptic in his composition, and regarded his ghost stories rather as the machinery of domestic poetry than as pieces of real history; but, then, no one could value them more as curious illustrations of human belief, or show less the coldness of infidelity in his mode of telling them
(Miller 1858, p. 359).
MILLER'S ACHIEVEMENT
Miller recognized traditional tales as a suitable subject for serious and analytical study, and his recognition of their value is a credit to his independence of mind. The enduring value of his collection of tales and customs lies in its being predominantly a collection of material from one small area (although, as we have seen, it does not include contemporary customs). The historical material contains much of local interest which would otherwise have been lost or difficult to recover. All the same Miller should not be regarded as an historian: he presents, in his own words, a ‘traditional history’ which is a view of the history of the community through the eyes of a particular section of the people. Nor, for that matter, is he a systematic folklorist. The stories of Scenes and Legends were collected in the late 1820s and early 1830s and primarily articulated his relationship with Cromarty and its neighbourhood. His later collecting in Scotland was limited by time and by the circles in which he then moved, and in his travels in England he did not strike up the relationships which enabled him to hear traditional tales.
Nevertheless, Miller made a contribution to the study of folklore and by providing us with a comprehensive early survey Miller enables us to see the development of folklore in the area. New stories emerge (the Clach Malloch is now said to be cursed because a fisherwoman left her child there while she gathered bait and the child was drowned by the incoming tide), customs are revived (the Saint's Well at Navity, barely used as a rag well in Miller's day, was reportedly decked with rags in 1934), and old stories are transferred to new locations (more than one child has assured me that the Green Lady, who haunted houses in Miller's boyhood, is alive and well and living in the tower of the school building).
Miller also provided us with some analysis of folklore but, despite his analysis, he avoided ‘the coldness of infidelity’ and remained a storyteller. In doing so he was maintaining a link with his mother, a storyteller who his family, even while deploring her credulity, found had ‘a power of enchaining the attention of listeners (which) was quite extraordinary’ (Bayne 1871, I, p. 18). One might add that Miller, in turn, delighted in the imaginative vitality of his children, as when one ‘saw’ the shape of an angel in the head of a fossil describing it as ‘the lady in the lobster’ (Miller 1859, p. 77).
Miller's cautiously advanced view was that the best of local folktales could equal even the finest parts of ‘the old classics’ (Miller 1858, p. 5). Although his tales were indeed traditional, Miller rightly noted that ‘much depends on the manner in which a story is told’ and in the manner of telling they are Miller's creation (Miller 1858, p. 9). Recognizing this may help to explain why Miller stopped creating stories himself; he channelled his creativity, first into the retelling of traditional stories and subsequently into geology and journalism. ‘The Boatman's Tale’, composed in Edinburgh in 1823 and published in his early volume of poetry, seems to have been his last attempt at an original story10—although there are occasional wild flights of fancy in later polemical writings in which Miller exercises once more his story telling art. The effect of these later ‘tales’ can be bizarre, as in his imaginative fantasy of the two Mr Clerks at Tomnahurich (a ‘fairy hill’ in Inverness). Clerk, a minister who had changed his views on matters close to Miller's heart, is portrayed stepping out from the thickets of the hill, dressed as a conjuror, whereupon he sets up and brings to life two little human figures made of carrots, cabbages and turnips. Shortly afterwards a landslide sweeps into their midst the ‘Mr Clerk of three years ago’, dressed in black and ‘wriggling … like a huge blue-bottle in an old cobweb’ (Miller 1873b, p. 346).
The strength of Miller's story telling lies in his capacity for visualization and ability to convey this vision to the reader, characteristics recognized by his early friend and critic William Ross. In the winter of 1820 Ross and Miller would take moonlight walks by Cromarty's Crook Burn where Miller would not only find striking descriptions for the stream (a flash of lightning, a stream of lava, a strip of the Aurora Borealis) but describe trees and stones as the ‘fays and spectres by which the place was tenanted’, even giving ‘a minute detail of the particular expression of their features, and the peculiarities of their attire’ (Miller 1829).
In the account of his early life which he wrote for Principal Baird in 1829, Miller described how his thinking relied on clearly conceived images. His image of the solar system was that of ‘an orrery of about sixty miles in diameter’, the greatest distance which he could see from a mountain top. Miller's mental image was on a vast scale and was conceived in such detail that he could use it as a means of analytic thought:
I imagine the space … to be occupied by an atmosphere like that of the earth, which reflects the light of the sun in the different degrees of excessive brightness, noon-tide-splendour, the fainter shade of evening, and grey twilight obscurity. I perceive that this veil of light is thickest towards its centre; for when my glance rests on its edges I behold the suns of other systems peeping through it. I see Mercury sparkling to the sun with its oceans and rivers of molten glass, and its fountains of liquid gold. I see the ice mountains of Saturn, haar through the twighlight; I behold the earth rolling upon itself from darkness to light, and from light to darkness. … I see the pyramid of shade which each of the planets casts from its darkened side into the space behind; and I perceive the stars twinkling through each pyramid, as through the angular doors of a pavilion
(Miller 1829).
Here is the ‘poesy’ of science which could vie with the ‘old mythology’ and, as with his folklore, the strength of the account lies in the detail with which it is realized.
This high degree of realism, which gives strength to his geological (and cosmological) writing and description of the natural world, has an added impact in his supernatural tales by Miller's addition of grotesque details, conveyed with this same immediacy. (His vision of geology would seem to lack the dark undertones of the folktales.) The penetrating imagination, which enabled the interpretation of geological data, is applied to the human body in a fascination with death and decay, as in the account from Orkney of a drowned man with his eyes detached from their sockets ‘staring from a wreath of seaweed’ (Miller 1874b, p. 432). In all this there was no doubt an influence from the death of his father at sea and the consequent imaginings as to the fate of his body.
In collecting and retelling the tales with his power of visualization, his realism and his sense for grotesque detail, Miller's is a literary creation. Miller recognised the unique power of writing to convey experience and in commenting on the effect produced by contemplating monuments of remote antiquity, such as standing stones and cairns, he doubted the ability of a painted image to convey ‘that blended feeling of the sublime and solemn’ which the writer could evoke (Miller 1873c, p. 344). His description of the natural world, while precise, struck his critic Mackenzie as exhibiting a lack of human interest and a ‘certain hardness’ (Mackenzie 1905, p. 39). Yet, it is perhaps this quality which gives his supernatural tales their power by creating a sense of a supernatural world independent of the reader's or listener's emotions. One cannot but note that, whatever the cause of Miller's final illness, it manifested itself through this remarkable power for visualization in a nightmare which, in his own words, ‘burned’ his brain. He was driven to suicide by a tale become too real, too independent—no longer a fallen meteor but a fiery comet.
Notes
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Of these 350 tales and customs collected by Miller, just over half have a supernatural element. The largest group of supernatural tales is of apparitions: of ghosts (24), beings such as mermaids, the devil, goblins and green ladies (27), fairies (11) and other phenomena (11). A second major group concern supernatural knowledge either of the future or of events as they happen: omens of death (12), prophecies (7) and contemporaneous visions of disasters (5). There are also customs associated with charms, luck and fortune telling (12) and a body of traditional legend and giant lore (13). Accounts of witchcraft (10) reveal some supernatural beliefs, as do some customs (20). The bulk of the non-supernatural tales are, as Miller described them, ‘traditional history’ from the Black Isle, Easter Ross and Sutherland. Miller's own family background is reflected in the fact that over 30 are tales of fishing and seafaring.
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This was a series of articles in the Inverness Courier (henceforth referred to in text as IC), republished in 1834 as the Traditional History of Cromarty and incorporated in Scenes and Legends of the North of Scotland.
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One should note, however, that the tradition of lay evangelism represented by Donald Roy (but without the supernatural trappings) was much admired by Miller's wife, Lydia, as is clear from her novel Passages in the Life of an English Heiress (1847). For an account of the novel, see Calder (1993).
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Although this story appears in Scenes and Legends, Miller does not there make it clear that Elspat Hood was his great-great-grandmother.
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Among books held at Hugh Miller's Cottage. Information supplied by Frieda Gostwick, National Trust for Scotland.
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Apparently, St Kennat's, although it was noted in the 1760s as being St Bainan's. It is puzzling that Miller in Scenes and Legends calls it St Bennet's, even in the first edition of 1835. It may be that Miller had, in Scenes and Legends, simply assumed that the well bore the same dedication as the chapel. The discovery of the name ‘St Kennat's’ apparently interested him because he believed this must have been a saint of the Celtic rather than the Roman church.
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Mackenzie quotes two examples: ‘The buttur kip of affluction’ (the bitter cup of affliction) in his introduction to My Schools and Schoolmasters (Miller 1907) and ‘the exe hed been bussy in the gleds’ (the axe had been busy in the glades) (Mackenzie 1905, p. 47).
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W. M. Mackenzie and his brother, Donald Alexander Mackenzie (both Cromarty men) will be mentioned a number of times in this essay. Their father, Alexander Mackenzie, was noted for his knowledge of local family histories and local affairs, and had met Hugh Miller as a boy, remembering Miller's huge head and the wonderful power of his eyes: Alexander's father, Donald, had been a friend of Miller since boyhood. W. M. Mackenzie was a respected historian, secretary to the Royal Commission in Scotland on Ancient and Historical Monuments and editor of the poems of the medieval Scots poet Dunbar. He was meticulous, with almost an overpowering fear of making a mistake, and his detailed local and family knowledge adds weight to the reliability of his Hugh Miller: A Critical Study and to his introduction to and annotation of the 1907 edition of My Schools and Schoolmasters. His brother, D. A. Mackenzie, a journalist and folklorist, produced a number of popular collection of myths and legends, studies of folklore, and plays, poems and short stories—but was more ‘adventurous’ in his beliefs.
D. A. Mackenzie notes a number of sayings and beliefs relating to a figure known as ‘Gentle Annie’, associated with sudden squalls in the Firth; a forked rowan tree in which fishermen left pebbles before setting out on a voyage; a spitting stone near a rowan, known as the rock tree (boys threw stones at the tree before going rock climbing and turned back if the pebble rebounded from the tree); that curses were delivered by an individual standing or kneeling bare kneed on the Clach Malloch; and of rocks on the Cromarty shore flung by giants (Mackenzie 1935, pp. 100-3, 159-61, 255, 273).
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A few folk customs from the neighbouring parish of Resolis can be found among the ‘hymns and incantations’ collected by Carmichael in the late nineteenth century (Carmichael 1992). These are charms for healing and are of a quite different tenor to the customs noted by Miller. However, since there was an influx of Gaelic speakers to this area during the nineteenth century, it is not clear if these traditions were to be found in Miller's day (Carmichael, 1992).
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In 1837 Miller wrote ‘Thomas of Chartres’ for Wilson's Tales of the Borders, an extended retelling of an episode from Blind Harry's Wallace, which had enthralled him as a boy (Miller, 1891). This is perhaps the closest he came to attempting historical fiction and, like his retelling of traditional tales, it is notable for the detail in which Miller visualized the scenes.
References
Bayne, P. (1871). The Life and Letters of Hugh Miller, 2 vols. Strahan, Edinburgh.
Calder, A. (1993). ‘The Disruption in Fiction’. In Scotland in the Age of the Disruption, ed. S.J. Brown and M. Fry, pp. 113-132. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh.
Carmichael, A. (1992). Carmina Gaedelica. Floris Books, Edinburgh.
Dickson, N. (1858). Cromarty: Being a Tourist's Visit to the Birthplace of Hugh Miller. Thomas Murray and Son, Glasgow.
Dorson, R. (1968). The British Folklorists. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Drabble, M. and Stringer, J. (1990). The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature. Oxford University Press.
Grant, W. and Murison, D. (ed.) (1931). Scottish National Dictionary, Vol. 1. Scottish National Dictionary Association, Edinburgh.
Hill, B. (1978). The Remarkable World of Frances Barkly: 1869-1845. Gray's Publishing Limited, Sidney, British Columbia.
Loch, D. (1778). A Tour through most of the Trading Towns and Villages of Scotland. Edinburgh.
Mackenzie, D. A. (1935). Scottish Folklore and Folklife. Blackie, Glasgow.
Mackenzie, W. M. (1905). Hugh Miller: A Critical Study. North Star, Dingwall.
Miller, H. (1829). Hugh Miller's First Autobiography, to the Very Reverend Principal Baird. Manuscript in New College Library, Edinburgh.
Miller, H. (1845). ‘Parish of Cromarty’. In A New Statistical Account of Scotland, William Blackwood and Sons, Edinburgh, 14, 1-18.
Miller, H. (1858). Scenes and Legends of the North of Scotland, or, the Traditional History of Cromarty. William P. Nimmo, Edinburgh. (First published 1835)
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Miller, H. (1863). Tales and Sketches. William P. Nimmo, Edinburgh.
Miller, H. (1869) My Schools and Schoolmasters; or, the Story of my Education. William P. Nimmo, Edinburgh. (First published 1854)
Miller, H. (1870). First Impressions of England and its People. William P. Nimmo, Edinburgh. (First published 1847)
Miller, H. (1873a). The Old Red Sandstone; or, New Walks in an Old Field. William P. Nimmo, Edinburgh. (First published 1841)
Miller, H. (1873b). Leading Articles on Various Subjects. William P. Nimmo, Edinburgh. (First published 1870)
Miller, H. (1873c). The Headship of Christ, and the Rights of the Christian People. William P. Nimino, Edinburgh. (First published 1861)
Miller, H. (1874a). Sketch-book of Popular Geology; being a Series of Lectures Delivered before the Philosophical Institution of Edinburgh. William P. Nimmo, Edinburgh. (First published 1859)
Miller, H. (1874b). The Cruise of the Betsey; or, A Summer Ramble among the Fossiliferous Deposits of the Hebrides. With Rambles of a Geologist; or, Ten Thousand Miles over the Fossiliferous Deposits of Scotland. William P. Nimmo, Edinburgh. (First published 1858)
Miller, H. (1874c). The Testimony of the Rocks; or, Geology in its Bearing on the two Theologies, Natural and Revealed. William P. Nimmo, Edinburgh. (First published 1857)
Miller, H. (1875). Edinburgh and its Neighbourhood, Geological and Historical; With the Geology of the Bass Rock. William P. Nimmo, Edinburgh. (First published 1864)
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Miller, H. (1891). ‘Thomas of Chartres’. In Wilson's Tales of the Borders ed. A. Leighton, XVIII, Edinburgh.
Miller, H. (1907) My Schools and Schoolmasters; or, the Story of my Education (Introduction and annotations by W. M. Mackenzie), Edinburgh. (First published 1854)
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