St. Ronans Well | Page 7

siege they added to its security, for each
commanded the one immediately below it, so that they could be
separately and successively defended, and all were exposed to the fire
from the place itself--a massive square tower of the largest size,
surrounded, as usual, by lower buildings, and a high embattled wall. On
the northern side arose a considerable mountain, of which the descent
that lay between the eminence on which the Castle was situated seemed
a detached portion, and which had been improved and deepened by
three successive huge trenches. Another very deep trench was drawn in
front of the main entrance from the east, where the principal gateway
formed the termination of the street, which, as we have noticed,
ascended from the village, and this last defence completed the
fortifications of the tower.
In the ancient gardens of the Castle, and upon all sides of it excepting
the western, which was precipitous, large old trees had found root,
mantling the rock and the ancient and ruinous walls with their dusky
verdure, and increasing the effect of the shattered pile which towered
up from the centre.
Seated on the threshold of this ancient pile, where the "proud porter"
had in former days "rear'd himself,"[I-2] a stranger had a complete and
commanding view of the decayed village, the houses of which, to a
fanciful imagination, might seem as if they had been suddenly arrested
in hurrying down the precipitous hill, and fixed as if by magic in the
whimsical arrangement which they now presented. It was like a sudden
pause in one of Amphion's country-dances, when the huts which were
to form the future Thebes were jigging it to his lute. But, with such an
observer, the melancholy excited by the desolate appearance of the

village soon overcame all the lighter frolics of the imagination.
Originally constructed on the humble plan used in the building of
Scotch cottages about a century ago, the greater part of them had been
long deserted; and their fallen roofs, blackened gables, and ruinous
walls, showed Desolation's triumph over Poverty. On some huts the
rafters, varnished with soot, were still standing, in whole or in part, like
skeletons, and a few, wholly or partially covered with thatch, seemed
still inhabited, though scarce habitable; for the smoke of the peat-fires,
which prepared the humble meal of the indwellers, stole upwards, not
only from the chimneys, its regular vent, but from various other
crevices in the roofs. Nature, in the meanwhile, always changing, but
renewing as she changes, was supplying, by the power of vegetation,
the fallen and decaying marks of human labour. Small pollards, which
had been formerly planted around the little gardens, had now waxed
into huge and high forest trees; the fruit-trees had extended their
branches over the verges of the little yards, and the hedges had shot up
into huge and irregular bushes; while quantities of dock, and nettles,
and hemlock, hiding the ruined walls, were busily converting the whole
scene of desolation into a picturesque forest-bank.
Two houses in St. Ronan's were still in something like decent repair;
places essential--the one to the spiritual weal of the inhabitants, the
other to the accommodation of travellers. These were the clergyman's
manse, and the village inn. Of the former we need only say, that it
formed no exception to the general rule by which the landed proprietors
of Scotland seem to proceed in lodging their clergy, not only in the
cheapest, but in the ugliest and most inconvenient house which the
genius of masonry can contrive. It had the usual number of
chimneys--two, namely--rising like asses' ears at either end, which
answered the purpose for which they were designed as ill as usual. It
had all the ordinary leaks and inlets to the fury of the elements, which
usually form the subject of the complaints of a Scottish incumbent to
his brethren of the presbytery; and, to complete the picture, the
clergyman being a bachelor, the pigs had unmolested admission to the
garden and court-yard, broken windows were repaired with brown
paper, and the disordered and squalid appearance of a low farm-house,
occupied by a bankrupt tenant, dishonoured the dwelling of one, who,

besides his clerical character, was a scholar and a gentleman, though a
little of a humourist.
Beside the manse stood the kirk of St. Ronan's, a little old mansion
with a clay floor, and an assemblage of wretched pews, originally of
carved oak, but heedfully clouted with white fir-deal. But the external
form of the church was elegant in the outline, having been built in
Catholic times, when we cannot deny to the forms of ecclesiastical
architecture that grace, which, as good Protestants, we refuse to their
doctrine. The fabric hardly raised its grey and vaulted roof among the
crumbling hills of mortality