Above Dupplin comes Gask, home of the Oliphants, one of whom was to win victories of sentiment for the lost Jacobite cause dear to this family. Carolina, Lady Nairne, the “Flower of Strathearn,” had as warm a heart for her native stream as for memories of Prince Charlie.
Fair shone the rising sky, The dewdrops clad wi’ many a dye, Larks lilting pibrochs high To welcome day’s returning. The spreading hills, the shading trees, High waving in the morning breeze, The wee Scots rose that sweetly blows Earn’s vale adorning!
The ruins of Gascon Hall beside the river claim to have made a refuge for William Wallace, when, hunted by a sleuth-hound through Gask wood, he struck off the head of his flagging comrade Fawdon, then could not so easily lay that traitor’s or hinderer’s ghost. The present mansion is the third or fourth worn out here by the Nairne family. It stands on the site of a Roman camp, with a Roman road beside it, one of many bits of way still locally known as “street roads.” At Gask we look over to the mouth of Strathallan, the pass between the Ochils and the foothills of the Grampians, that must often have echoed the clank of Roman arms. Across the moor of Orchill, with Wade’s military road running beside it, the Ardoch Camp is best preserved of such Roman fortresses in Britain, and one of the largest, laid out to contain an army of 25,000 men. And hereabouts, in Celtic stones and place-names, there are thick traces of still older history, overgrown by the plantations and steadings of a race enriched from regions where the Cæsars’ eagles never flew.
Ardoch stands out of the Earn basin, and the Allan flows to the Forth. From the end of the Ochils, the Ruthven Water is their last tributary to the Earn, whose next affluent comes off Highland moors. Strathallan Castle seems to belie its name in being on the north side of the pass by which the Caledonian railway debouches on a plain studded with notable names. Here is Tullibardine, cradle of the Atholl Murrays; Kincardine Castle shows how Montrose’s ancestral home was ruined by Argyll in their tit-for-tat warfare; and the gallant Grahames had Aberuthven for their burial-ground.
The chief place on this side is Auchterarder, where the first shot was fired in the Disruption of 1843. Nor is this the sole note of the neighbourhood in Scottish Church history. Behind Auchterarder, the upper waters of the Ruthven come down from Gleneagles, a beautiful gorge in the Ochils, leading over to Glendevon. Gleneagles was the old home of the Haldanes, now replaced here by their kinsman Lord Camperdown; but Mr. Haldane, whose name is familiar as author of our “Territorials,” has still a seat on the Ochil slopes at Cloanden. This war-minister--who rose to political note at an early age, for as a schoolboy I can remember being taken into his nursery to see him invested with his first dignity as “the new baby”--bears a name that has been better known to Scotland in connection with its religious life, when, a century ago, his grandfather and granduncle became the Wesleys of the Kirk then sunk to its zero of cold morality.