The peat-fire flame : folk-tales and traditions of the Highlands & Islands

IN
CHAPTER XVIII
FOLK-TALES OF DOUGHTY MEN AND DOUGHTY DEEDS
an age of comparative lawlessness, when the
inhabitants of the Highlands tntsted in the ancient
right of the sword rather than in reason, and lived
day-to-day lives in face of want and violence, it is scarcely
surprising that there should have occurred innumerable
incidents affording opportunities for valour, and reflecting
in the folk-tales of the people a respect for the valorous,
amounting often to hero-worship, and sometimes even to a
form of idolatry. So far as the Highlands are concerned,
perhaps the classical incidents are those associated with Rob
Roy. The Islands, on the other hand, had their own
particular warrior in the person of Donald Cam MacAulay,
some of whose doughty exploits, as recorded in island folk-
tale, are described in the following pages.
Folk-tales, such as that connected with the gorge in Glen
Lyon known as MacGregor's Leap (from the repetition of
which I have spared you in these pages !), are to be heard
all over the Highlands where there exists anything in the
nature of a deep chasm sufificiently wide to make it highly
improbable that any ordinary person could clear it safely.
Similarly distributed are folk-tales describing the rescue or
destruction of heirs, and of the dexterity of swordsmen and
archers. With the reputed achievements of some of the
archers, so far as they have been recorded in folk-tale, I
have dealt in an earlier chapter.
Black Roderic Challenges Rob Roy.
No warrior was there in all Scotland more dexterous in
the mystery of swordsmanship than Black Roderic, one of
the Chiefs of the MacNeils of Barra. Having heard that
a similar claim had been made for Rob Roy, Black Roderic
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