They were constructed, says tradition, through the agency of the arch-wizard Michael Scott. Michael had called up the hosts of Faery to erect the cathedral of Elgin and the chanonry kirk of Fortrose, which they completed from foundation to ridge, each in a single night,--committing, in their hurry, merely the slight mistake of locating the building intended for Elgin in Fortrose, and that intended for Fortrose in Elgin; but, their work over and done, and when the magician had no further use for them, they absolutely refused to be _laid_; and, like a _posse_ of Irish laborers thrown out of a job, came thronging round him, clamoring for more employment. Fearing lest he should be torn in pieces,--a catastrophe which has not unfrequently happened in such circumstances in the olden time, and of which those recent philanthropists who engage themselves in finding work for the unemployed may have perhaps entertained some little dread in our own days,--he got rid of them for the time by setting them off in a body to run a mound across the Moray Frith from Fortrose to Ardersier. Toiling hard in the evening of a moonlight night, they had proceeded greatly more than two-thirds towards the completion of the undertaking, when a luckless Highlander passing by bade God-speed the work, and, by thus breaking the charm, arrested at once and forever the construction of the mound, and saved the navigation of Inverness.
I stood for a few seconds at the Burn of Rosemarkie undecided whether I should take the Scarfs-Craig road,--a break-neck path which runs eastwards along the cliffs, and which, though the rougher, is the more direct Cromarty line of the two,--or the considerably better though longer line of the White Bog, which strikes upwards along the burn in a westerly direction, and joins the Cromarty and Inverness highway on the moor of the Maolbuie. I had got into a part of the country where every little locality, and every more striking feature in the landscape, has its associated tradition; and the pause of a few moments at the two roads recalled to my memory the details of a ghost-story, long regarded in the district in which it was best known as one of the most authentic of its class, but which seems by no means inexplicable on natural principles.[13]