Haunted Scotland (18 page)

After the day’s exertions, both fell asleep the moment they closed their eyes. Usually, they would have remained unconscious until sunrise but on this particular night they awoke
simultaneously.

‘There’s something over there,’ whispered Donald urgently, peering into the gloom. A rustling sound resonated in the long
grass on the far side of the
clearing, and through the half-light they could make out movement.

‘It’ll be a deer,’ said Andy calmly.

‘No, I don’t think so,’ replied Donald. ‘I think it’s more like a large cat.’

He turned on his torch and pointed it in the direction of the sounds. For a fleeting couple of seconds, they both saw it; what appeared to be a large black cat, a very large black cat. In an
instant they were out of their sleeping bags and although scantily clad, took cover in the undergrowth behind them. After that, there was a silence followed by the sounds of tugging and tearing,
and clank of metal as tin cups and a kettle were turned over. Then more silence.

For a full half-hour, neither Andy nor Donald spoke. With no wind, the night air was unnaturally still and heavy. Finally, Andy took the initiative. ‘Do you still have the torch?’ he
asked Donald.

Donald handed it to him. ‘What do you think we should do?’ he said hesitantly.

‘We could just sit here until the sun comes up, but I think that whatever it was would have come for us by now if it was going to,’ suggested Andy. ‘Thank the Lord, it’s
already starting to get light.’

Sure enough, in less than an hour a pale sun was gradually caressing the scenery with a pastel wash. Emerging from the prickly undergrowth, the friends looked nervously about them.

‘All clear,’ said Andy, then groaned. ‘Damn! Look what the bastard’s done to our kit!’

Across the clearing were signs of devastation. Andy’s sleeping bag had been ripped to pieces and their rucksacks plundered, the contents scattered all over the place. ‘I reckon we
had a bloody lucky escape,’ said Donald. ‘Thank God the bikes are OK.’

At the Clatteringshaws Visitor Centre, the ranger listened sympathetically to their story. ‘Must have escaped from a zoo,’ he concluded, shrugging his
shoulders. ‘I’ve heard about big cats being seen on Speyside and around Dundee, but never around here.’

‘Well, we know what we saw,’ said Donald. ‘It was as big as a lynx or a puma.’

The ranger smiled and made a note in his diary. ‘I’ll keep a look out for it,’ he said. ‘At least it didn’t attack you. If it had, we’d have beeen obliged to
shoot it.’

That was reassuring, thought Donald. ‘What about our things?’ he bemoaned. ‘My rucksack was brand new!’

The ranger shook his head. ‘You could try your insurance, if you have any, but I’d change your story if I were you. Giant cats are a wee bit Walt Disney. They’ll probably think
you’re trying it on.’

Having replaced their damaged belongings, and restocked their food provisions, Andy and Donald set off undeterred, this time wheeling their bikes alongside the shore of the Black Loch to cross
the Tenderghie Burn upstream to explore the waterfall. Once more, it was a day to remember as they threw off their shorts and vests to plunge into the icy torrent. That night they stretched out
under the stars, orchestrated by the sound of the Grey Mare’s Tail Burn splashing nearby.

‘Perhaps we should have returned to the campsite,’ reflected Donald as he opened a can of lager.

‘Nonsense,’ replied Andy. ‘It’s so much better being here. That’s what we came for, isn’t it, to get away from it all?’

Donald nodded in agreement. In a week’s time he would be back at his office desk, wearing a suit and tie. He should make the best of it.

As the light faded around them, they lay talking to one another in their sleeping bags until eventually they fell sleep. Yet again, it
was in the early hours that they
both awoke at the exact same moment, as if primed to do so. This time they could see the black bulk of something enormous standing over them, silhouetted against the night sky. It was so close they
could almost touch its thick black coat.

‘Oh my God,’ gasped Donald.

‘Don’t move,’ cautioned Andy.

For what seemed an eternity, they lay rigid while the beast held its ground, its head looming over them, examining them in turn. Then, quite suddenly, it turned on its heels and sloped off into
the darkness.

‘Do you think it followed us here?’ said Donald when his trembling subsided.

‘Well, at least it left our stuff alone this time,’ replied Andy nervously. ‘Do you think it’ll be back?’

‘Not now. It’ll be daylight soon.’ Neither was able to sleep, so Andy stoked up the remains of the fire and boiled the kettle to make tea. ‘What do you think it
was?’ he asked Donald as he spooned sugar into his mug.

Donald shook his head. ‘I reckon it’s an escaped panther, or something like that. But why did it decide to leave us alone this time?’ He stared hard at Andy. ‘I
wasn’t imagining it, was I? It was pretty huge, wasn’t it?’

His friend nodded. ‘Colossal,’ he concurred.

‘Ought we to tell the ranger?’

Andy shrugged his shoulders. ‘He didn’t seem that interested, did he? Besides, I really don’t want to go back there again. I think we should press on. We’ve only a day
left.’

Mid-morning, the fine weather changed and a thin spray of rain washed across the parched landscape. With temperatures remaining high, however, it proved a welcome contrast from the relentless
heat of the previous days. By evening, the sun had
returned, casting a golden glow. By then Andy and Donald had covered some thirty miles and were freewheeling into the town
of Newton Stewart.

‘Let’s find a hostel for tonight,’ pleaded Donald. ‘I don’t think I’d be able to cope with another cat call. Do you know what? I could really do with a pint
in a pub and a night’s uninterrupted sleep.’

Andy agreed, but, finding the town hostel full, they were redirected to an inexpensive bed and breakfast close to Creebridge. ‘You’ll like Mrs Hannay,’ the girl at the hostel
told them. ‘She’s really easy going. Just loves her young men, she does.’

‘I’m not sure I’m up to that,’ quipped Andy, but was reassured when Mrs Hannay turned out to be a plump, elderly woman intent on watering a flowerbed full of delphiniums
and snapdragons.

‘Come ben the hoos,’ she announced cheerily, escorting them into a spacious bedroom at the back of her cottage. ‘Ye’ll have to share, mind,’ she continued.
‘But it’s a big enough bed.’

‘Civilisation,’ sighed Donald as he caught sight of the fresh linen sheets and adjoining bathroom. ‘Not that it hasn’t been great being out in the open, but this is
paradise.’

The cottage, whitewashed with a tiled roof, was set back from the road and fringed by old trees. They deposited their bicycles in the garden shed, and their amiable landlady directed them to a
pub within walking distance. It was obviously well patronised and they were soon in conversation with Archie McLellan, who introduced himself as the local historian.

‘Ah, that’ll be the Dark Lord,’ he pronounced when they finished telling him about their experiences with the big cat.

‘The Dark Lord! Do you mean it’s some sort of phantom?’ gasped Andy, always susceptible to ghost stories.

‘Ay, that’ll be right,’ said Archie.

Long ago, he explained, all of the surrounding territory had
belonged to either the Stewart earls of Galloway or their neighbours, the mighty House of Douglas. The
Stewarts were a notably prolific dynasty, and, in the early eighteenth century, an earl of Galloway had presented a black cougar as a pet to one of his many illegitimate sons. It was a fine beast
imported as a cub from North America, and soon became so attached to its master that it would only leave his side when he retired to bed.

Now, as it transpired, this young man had recently quarrelled with a member of the Douglas family. Nobody remembers what the argument was about, only that on a dark autumnal night two armed
horsemen arrived at the castle to seize the young lord and carry him off into the darkness by force. He was never seen again.

The cougar cub was bereft and desperately searched for its master, eventually venturing further afield and disappearing into the hills. He was never caught, but as the years passed he became the
stuff of legend. From sightings of a large black beast reported at intervals over the centuries, the phantom cat eventually earned the nickname of the Dark Lord.

‘It’ll be the Dark Lord you saw,’ confirmed Archie confidently. ‘He’s still searching for his master and the two men who took him away.’

Back at the cottage, Andy and Donald joked about Archie’s story. ‘The Dark Lord must have thought our bikes were horses,’ quipped the former before falling asleep.

The softness of the mattress sent both of them into a deep, relaxed sleep in which they dreamed of the open road and waterfalls and rolling hills. Then, all of a sudden, they were both wide
awake and paralysed with terror.

Standing at the foot of the bed was the looming hulk of the large black cat, its yellow eyes inflamed.

‘How did it get into our room?’ gasped Andy, sitting up, his
back pressed against the headboard. ‘I thought you said you’d closed the
window!’

Donald was too petrified to speak.

Once again, the two friends sat it out in an attempt to outstare the beast. Another eternity passed before, entirely without warning, the panther turned sideways to effortlessly leap through the
bedroom wall. ‘My God, did you see that?’ groaned Donald. ‘I told you I shut the window.’

At breakfast, Mrs Hannay was highly entertained by their revelation. ‘Och, dinna believe a word Archie McLellan tells you,’ she said. ‘It’ll have been my own wee moggie
you saw.’

As she spoke, a small black cat jumped onto the window seat before slipping out into the garden. ‘Let’s just say that I named him after the Dark Lord,’ said Mrs Hannay with a
wink.

21

Phantom cats, poltergeists, omens, enchanted forests and ancient curses. These old wives’ tales have been around for such a long time that there simply has to be something
in them. Make fun of them if you must, but the very fact that nobody has ever been able entirely to disprove their credibility only serves to enhance the fascination we all have with them.

On touring Speyside, the impression is of long expanses of tranquil meadowland encroached upon by the passive reaches of the River Spey as it winds its leisurely way towards the Moray Firth.
This is the heart of Scotch whisky country, the land of the
uisge beatha
, the ‘Water of Life.’ Around every corner, and strikingly present in the intermittent small towns, are
the Speyside distilleries with their distinctive pagoda turrets. Is it any wonder
that here, more than anywhere else, the spirits of the past go hand in hand with spirits of
a more liquid substance?

Access to a reliable supply of water is integral to the manufacture of Scotch whisky. More than anything, it is the proximity of water which determines the setting for a distillery. But while
the Rothes Burn that flows in front of the Glenrothes Distillery, south of Elgin, provides the power to harness its water wheel, the water for the stills needs to be as pure and cold as
possible.

Luckily there have always been ample supplies in the hills upstream, bubbling up through the granite rocks to emerge in a series of springs and wells. Among these sources is the Fairies’
Well, allegedly the scene of a gruesome double murder at the end of the fourteenth century.

When the Fairies’ Well became a water source for Glenrothes a hundred or so years ago, it connected the distillery directly to one of the most enduring legends of Speyside. The story
centres around the now ruined Castle of Rothes, then home to Sir Andrew Leslie.

Sir Andrew’s daughter Mary was extremely beautiful and excited the interest of the notorious Alexander Stewart, the King’s Lieutenant in the Highlands, who later, for his various
nefarious deeds, became known as ‘the Wolf of Badenoch’.

Stewart soon realised he had competition for the lady’s hand in the form of Malcolm Grant, master of nearby Arndilly, who had recently returned from a crusade to the Holy Land. As long as
Grant was on the scene, Stewart’s efforts to win Mary’s heart would come to nothing, so he decided to imprison his rival at his Castle of Lochindorb. When Grant escaped, Stewart decided
to have him killed.

The chosen assassin was Stewart’s attendant, a grotesque-looking dwarf known as ‘The Hawk’, who followed the two lovers on an evening stroll beside the Rothes Burn. When they
reached
the Fairies’ Well and sat down for a rest, the Hawk crept up from behind and stabbed Grant with his
sgean dubh
. He was about to use his dagger again when
Mary Leslie leapt in between them and caught the blow. When the couple were discovered dead the next day, they were seen to be locked in each other’s arms beneath a bush that had grown up
overnight.

Thereafter, it is claimed, the bush only breaks into leaf on the anniversary of their deaths. Today, a small monument commemorating the legend stands opposite the Glenrothes Distillery beside
the Rothes cemetery where the couple were supposedly interred.

Whether this anecdote is to be believed or not, the Rothes kirkyard is undoubtedly the resting place of Biawa, one of the town’s favourite sons and also its most unlikely
resident.

Biawa, who died in 1972, had lived in Rothes from the end of the nineteenth century, when he was brought to Scotland from his native Africa by Major James Grant, owner of the Glen Grant
distillery. Grant had been on safari and had come across the boy, then aged about ten, abandoned by the wayside – hence the name he was given.

After efforts to trace his parents had failed, Major Grant decided to adopt Biawa as one of his servants. He started off as the major’s pageboy, served in the First World War and, at some
point afterwards, played for his local football club, Rothes FC. It must have made the town appear very exotic to visiting players. There were not many soccer teams in Scotland with an African
butler for a goalie.