Muthill lies between the grounds of Culdees Castle and of Drummond Castle, the latter famous for its gardens, avenues, and nobly wooded demesne. In passing up Tayside, I have told how it came into Southron hands, when the power of its old lords split on the rock that wrecked so many another Jacobite family; while the neighbour house of Murray tacked and trimmed its fortunes into calm waters. Strathearn has dark memories of the feuds between those names. When the old church of Monzievaird was being turned into a mausoleum for the Ochtertyre family, a quantity of charred wood and calcined bones came to light to bear out the tradition how a band of Murrays, fleeing before Drummonds, took refuge in this church with their wives and children, and were there burned to death by the savage pursuers. For this atrocity, indeed, several Drummonds came to be executed at Stirling. Only one Murray had escaped the holocaust, by the help, it is said, of a Drummond who loved his sister; later, this Drummond having fled for refuge to Ireland, he in turn was helped to pardon by the man he had saved, and came back with the agname Drummond-Ernoch, handed down to the victim of another revolting tragedy told in the introduction to _A Legend of Montrose_.
Drummond Castle is the Versailles of Crieff, itself the capital of Strathearn, where it stands among lovely surroundings and notable mansions--Monzie, Abercairney, Cultoquhey, Inchaffray, Ochtertyre, names that “fill the mouth as the mountains the eyes.” Such sounding names are, of course, wreckage of the once familiar speech that has ebbed far back into the Highlands. I never met any one in Perthshire who did not speak English; and even a knowledge of Gaelic, I fancy, is exceptional in this southern half of the country, certainly so in the lower half of Strathearn. But I forget what writer of a century or so back can record that at Monzie Castle--recently burned--only a mile separated the English-speaking lodge-keeper from neighbours who could not understand his tongue. A German traveller, in the early years of Queen Victoria, noted the east-enders of Loch Tay as speaking English, while Gaelic was still common about the other end. In our own generation, old inhabitants of Crieff could remember how troops of shock-headed lads and lasses came tramping down from the glens--like the _Schwabenkinder_ of Tirol--to learn English by working a summer on Lowland farms, turning an honest penny out of this course of education.
