Once Upon a Time in Scotland

Visit Scotland have declared 2022 The Year of Stories. A long tradition of storytelling north of the Border, combined with long summer nights and a rich, frequently bloody, history has made Scotland a great place to spin a tale. Hudson’s has picked a few Scottish stories to share with you.

SCOTLAND’S STORY MAKER Abbotsford, near Melrose

Sir Walter Scott is Scotland’s premier storyteller. He began his literary career as a collector of Border ballads and folk tales, preserving an oral tradition of story telling for later generations. His historical novels, published in the fi rst decades of the 19th century, made him a global superstar. The tales he spins remain some of the greatest in the English language and he also contributed to our concepts of modern Scotland by championing highland traditions and the wearing of clan tartans. One of his most successful and enduringly popular novels is Rob Roy, which weaves the real highland rebel, Rob Roy MacGregor, into the fi ctional story of Frank Osbaldistone and his Northumberland cousins. Sent by his father to Northumberland on business, Frank encounters his bold young cousin Diana Vernon before fi nding himself caught up in the 1715 Jacobite Rising through the dubious activities of his villainous cousin Rashleigh. The scene moves to Edinburgh and Loch Lomond, where Frank and Diana fi nd a champion in the legendary highland outlaw Rob Roy MacGregor and, after various mishaps and escapes from Government troops, return to Northumberland where Rashleigh is killed by Rob Roy, leaving Frank free to marry Diana and live happily ever after. Scott keeps the pages turning, interlacing contemporary issues with Scots dialect. Scott was an avid collector and among his possessions still preserved at his home at Abbotsford near Melrose are a dirk and purse which belonged to the real Rob Roy.

THE WITCHES OF TULLIBOLE Tullibole Castle, Perthshire

In 2003, the current laird of Tullibole Castle, near Kinross, planted the fi rst of 2,000 beech trees to form a maze, centred on a sandstone pillar inscribed with the names of 11 people, victims of the infamous 1662 witch trials in the village of Crook of Devon. Scotland was a thoroughly superstitious place in the 17th century and in the early 1660s a wave of irrational terror was unleashed. It was the previous owners of the castle who were at the centre of this historical injustice. Thirteen villagers were accused of belonging to a coven, casting spells and, worse, communing with the Devil, even holding ‘witches’ sabbaths’ involving fevered dancing and pledges to Satan. Margaret Lister was accused of casting a ‘falling sickness’ spell, perhaps epilepsy; Janet Paton of cursing a horse which died; and Agnes Murie of striking a man dumb. The fi ve separate witch trials were presided over by William and John Halliday of Tullibole Castle, probably in the castle itself, and, after hearing some highly coloured ‘confessions’, perhaps a response to torture, all of the group were condemned. Only two escaped their fate, Margaret Hoggin, who was 80 years old, and may have died before the trials ended and Agnes Pittendreich, who was pregnant and exempted. The unlucky eleven were taken to a mound near the village, strangled by the hangman and their bodies were burned. They were some of an estimated 150 people executed for witchcraft in Scotland in this fateful year but the Tullibole Maze, which was opened in 2012, is a living memorial to their fate.

INTRIGUE AT THE RUSSIAN COURT Rammerscales, Dumfriesshire

The country house of the Bell-MacDonald family at Rammerscales in Dumfriesshire has an unusual number of doors. Today many of these have been repurposed as cupboards and presses but when the house was built around 1760 the doors provided the owner with multiple means of escape should his enemies track him down. The owner then was Dr James Mounsey and his supposed enemies were Russian. In 1736, a young James Mounsey had been recruited by Prince Kantemir, the Russian Ambassador to Britain, to serve in a naval hospital near St Petersburg where he apparently communicated in Latin, having no French or Italian. By 1740, Mounsey had qualifi ed as a doctor in Paris and Rheims and returned to Russia to serve as an Army physician where he worked alongside his friend and fellow Scot, General James Keith, in the Russo-Swedish War of 1741. By the late 1750s, he was First Physician to the Empress Elizabeth and after her death held a position as head of the Medical Chancery which governed the application of medicine in all Russia. After the coup led by Catherine the Great in July 1762 Dr Mounsey obviously found his position too hot to handle for within a month he had resigned and returned to Edinburgh. In the political volatility of the Russian court, Dr Mounsey may have made enemies and though there is apparently no truth in the local rumour, that a secret passage runs under the house at Rammerscales to aid his escape from Russian assassins, the glamour of his senior appointment at the court of Catherine the Great clearly still surrounded him.

GHOSTS IN THE WALLS Delgatie Castle

Some of the best loved tales are ghost stories, after all, everyone loves a story that sends a shiver down your spine. Delgatie Castle in Aberdeenshire is an ancient place, dating to the 1570s but also incorporating an earlier castle but don’t be fooled by its homely and inviting atmosphere – the castle may harbour two ghosts. Soldiers who were billeted at Delgatie in the Second World War reported several times seeing a redhaired girl. Later ghost hunters have described hearing tapping and the sound of a woman humming. The girl is Rohaise, the daughter of an early laird of Delgatie who is said to have saved the castle from an attack. Even more creepy, are the sightings of a ghost which only began when workman, involved in restoring the castle in the 1950s, found a skeleton walled up in a hidden chamber. Since the Hay family of Delgatie remained Catholic after the Reformation and supported the Catholic Jacobite kings in the early 18th century, the unfortunate victim may have been a priest employed in secret by the family and hidden in a priest’s hole. Things have quietened down at Delgatie Castle after an exorcism. If the ghosts are still there, none seem to disturb visitors or the many guests who stay in the castle’s holiday accommodation but the stories live on.

THE RAPE-MASTER GENERAL Gosford House, East Lothian

In 1732, Francis Wemyss inherited substantial property at the death his maternal grandfather, Colonel Francis Charteris, the owner of a fortune and large landholdings near Haddington. To honour his inheritance, Francis changed his name to Charteris and, by 1790, was styling himself 7th Earl of Wemyss even though the title had been forfeited by his elder brother after the Jacobite Risings. In 1790 he also commissioned the aging architect, Robert Adam, to build him a substantial mansion at Gosford House. The inheritance that partly funded the building, Robert Adam’s last commission, came with a scandalous story attached. Francis’ grandfather, Colonel Charteris, was a thoroughly bad character, even by the standards of the early 18th century. Described, a generation later, by Lord Chesterfield as “the most notorious blasted rascal in the world”, Colonel Charteris’ poor reputation was sealed by a notorious rape trial in 1730 which was the media sensation of the period. He was born into Edinburgh’s landed classes and joined the army, probably hoping to make his fortune. He was drummed out of the army for cheating at cards, then again for fabricating a robbery, a third time dismissed by Parliament for taking bribes. Military service however, allowed him to prosper either through gambling or, more frequently, lending money at exorbitant rates. By 1715, he was a Colonel (although he reputedly won the rank at cards) and by 1720, he had made a significant fortune speculating in The South Seas Company. Meanwhile, according to the poet, Alexander Pope “his house was a perpetual bawdy-house” where young girls were regularly lured by agents with the promise of a position as a servant only to be sexual abused. In 1722, he had bought his way out of a rape conviction in Musselburgh but in 1730, the accusation of servant girl, Ann Bond, found its mark. Ann, something of a heroine for a Georgian #MeToo movement, claimed he had employed her under a false name and when she refused his advances, imprisoned her in his house before raping her. Charteris defended himself by attempting to blacken his victim’s reputation, but he was convicted of the capital offence of rape. Charteris spent time in Newgate prison but by the time of his death in 1732, had reclaimed his lands and fortune and secured a pardon. His reputation, however, was never to recover, not least because the lively pamphleteers of the time pitted his previous dismal reputation against Ann Bond’s demonstrable innocence. He was immortalised as the epitome of a Georgian degenerate, by both Alexander Pope and as a model for the Rake in Hogarth’s popular prints ‘A Rake’s Progress’.

What stories will you hear this year? Please send Hudson’s your favourites, we’d love to hear them.