Scotland: Latest Posts — Folklore

In the parish of Rosskeen there is a large boulder-stone called Clach ceann nam meur, the "Stone of the Finger Ends," at the east of the Farm of Dalnacloich, "the field of the stone." Connected with this stone is a tradition which shows it as a horrible memorial of feudal times - that a laird of Achnacloich, when settling marches, asked a youth, whom he had taken to witness the settlement, whether he would remember that as the march-stone. On his replying that he would, the Laird commanded him to lay his hand flat upon the stone, and with a stroke of his sword cut off the tips of the lad's fingers, saying, "You will remember it now." And posterity still remembers it.

There is a curious mound by the side of the Blackadder, on the north of the stream, called "the King's Grave," which may be a natural eminence, or may have been formed by the debris of a rush of water through a ravine nearly opposite to it, but which certainly has the appearance of having been stirred - dug into - on a part of its extent, the tradition connected with which, seems to carry the mind back to the same stern times [of the sixth century].

The residence, according to this old tale, of a British Chief was surprised by Saxon assailants in his absence, and all who belonged to him were murdered or carried away, with the exception of one infant child who was a twin, who happened to have been carried out at the time in the arms of his nurse, and was by her concealed and preserved.

Many years afterwards this British Chief met a Saxon army, and the place of meeting must have been some where near to these lines. It was proposed by the Saxon leader and agreed to, that the matter in dispute between them should be decided by combat, one champion being chosen from each army. The Saxon champion was the Briton's stolen son, whose life had been spared by his enemies when they put to death the other members of his family who were in their power. It was his twin brother who represented the British host - and the two kinsmen both fell - mutually slain, and lie buried, as the tradition which I seek to give says, under the large and contiguous cairns on the "Twinlaw," a prominent eminence of the Lammermuir range, a few miles to the west. The armies having afterwards engaged in battle on the southern descent of the Lammermoors, near to Wedderlie, the British Chief was himself either mortally wounded or slain in the action, and, on the route of his dispirited army, was interred in that lonely mound by the Blackadder.

Antiquities. -- There is a hill in the parish of Aboyne, called Mullach's hill, in which there are a great number of cairns, said to be burial-places, after a great battle, in which one Mullach was killed.

No tradition.. exists of any [stones] having been removed, or that the group has ever been otherwise than it is at present. A certain superstitious respect still attaches to the spot, and may even have had something to do with the preservation of these curious relics, for gossip still records how upon one occasion some farmer, more zealous in the cause of agriculture than archaeology, attempted to remove one of them, and that the work was immediately arrested by a violent storm of thunder and lightning.