The Long Arm of Rob Roy
Nearly seventy years after his death, the roguish laird still cast a spell over the farm-folk of the Highlands.
1803
King George III 1760-1820
A frosty evening in the Trossachs, seen through a farmhouse window.
© Michal Klajban, Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.
This is the view through the window of a farmhouse in the Trossachs, a region of the Scottish Highlands by Loch Lomond that is now a National Park. The Wordsworths were keen to see it, as they lived in the English Lake District and believed that the Trossachs would beautiful in the same way. Scenic tourism was, however, a new idea at the time, and those who had been there before the Wordsworths had not passed the same way. “A laugh was on every face when William said we were come to see the Trossachs” Dorothy recalled; “no doubt they thought we had better have stayed at our own homes. William endeavoured to make it appear not so very foolish, by informing them that it was a place much celebrated in England, though perhaps little thought of by them, and that we only differed from many of our countrymen in having come the wrong way in consequence of an erroneous direction.”
Introduction
In 1803, William Wordsworth, his sister Dorothy and their friend Samuel Coleridge travelled to Scotland, taking in beautiful Loch Lomond and the Trossachs. They begged bed and board from a startled Scottish farmer, and at breakfast the following morning (it was Saturday August 27th) the Macfarlanes told them in their slow English about Rob Roy.
Speaking of another neighbouring laird, they said he had gone, like the rest of them, to Edinburgh, left his lands and his own people, spending his money where it brought him not any esteem, so that he was of no value either at home or abroad. We mentioned Rob Roy,* and the eyes of all glistened; even the lady of the house,* who was very diffident, and no great talker, exclaimed, “He was a good man, Rob Roy! he had been dead only about eighty years, had lived in the next farm, which belonged to him, and there his bones were laid.”* He was a famous swordsman. Having an arm much longer than other men, he had a greater command with his sword. As a proof of the length of his arm, they told us that he could garter his tartan stockings below the knee without stooping, and added a dozen different stories of single combats, which he had fought, all in perfect good-humour, merely to prove his prowess.
* Rob Roy was the affectionate name for Robert Roy MacGregor (1671-1734). See posts tagged Rob Roy MacGregor.
* Mrs Macfarlane comes very well out of Dorothy’s account. She was “a tall fine-looking woman, neatly dressed in a dark-coloured gown, with a white handkerchief tied round her head”, and despite the alien surroundings of a Scottish croft “she did not differ in appearance from an English country lady.” She spoke English, unlike her children, though it was not her first language, and bustled about, pressing tea and barley cakes on her unexpected guests, drying out Dorothy’s clothes (she had been caught in a rain shower), sharing out soft, new-made woollen blankets, and generally “behaved to me with the utmost attention and kindness.”
* In fact, Robert Roy MacGregor lies buried in Balquhidder, Stirlingshire, sixteen miles as the eagle flies across the Trossachs National Park from Tarbet on Loch Lomond, and twice the distance by road. Mrs Macfarlane was also not quite right about Rob Roy’s dates: he died in 1734, and the sixty-ninth anniversary of his death was coming up on December 28th.
