SCOTLAND’S ANCIENT GLORIES

Dominion, Volume 16, Issue 35, 4 November 1922, Page 17

SCOTLAND’S ANCIENT GLORIES

A KILTED FESTIVAL. Nearly a hundred and fifty years ago a band of Scottish lairds ordained “that an annual meeting of Indies ond gentlemen shall be held within yhs Royal Burgh of Inverness not earlier than-Thursday and Friday of tho thiixl week in September." . Td-day the landed proprietors of the counties of Banff, Caithness, Inverness, Moray, Ross alia Cromarty, apa Sutherland, and their wives, sons, and daughters, as well as some of the ioik north of the Spey, and visiting celebrities, are enjoying the balls and the Highland games inßtitutod away back in 17S8 - r K „1 Run down the list of members and you will find-many of the most famous ' names in braid Scotia. Lord Loyat. Chief of tho Frasers; Lochiel, Chief of the Camerons; and The Macintosh of Macintosh, Chief of Clan Chattan; head the list of Highland gentlemen which includes Brodies and Davidsons, Duffs and Grants, Munros and Sinclairs, and Macdonalds, Mackenzies, Macleods, and Macphersons who have written weir names large in the history of Caledonia. For a few days the ancient capital of tile Highlands lifts its head m royally as in the days when it sheitgrOd Scottish kings. . But not so picturesque the visitors. More than a hundred years ago the Highland gentlemen foregathered in buff and grass-green coat® with- black velvet capes and black silken breeches. Now they make merry in kilted By Hay they sit in the shade of the Hill of the Fairies, fir-clad Tomnahurioh, and listen to the wailing of the bagpificS in Lamont and librcch. night they “Hooch 1” and “Sweel in the tangles of the m the local assembly rooms, as .their fathers and fathers’ fathers did before ■' By’ day Flora Macdonald with her faithful dog gazes wistfully from her pefch on the Castle Hill across the meeting ground to distant Skye. By night Jane Duchess of Gordon, who inaugurated the dances, and her eon, the last duke, popularly called rhe Cock o’ tho North,” smilo down from their frames on the ballroom wall. _ I do not know a fairer sight by why and night than th<s meetings. .Framed in homespun and tartan, set in burnished trees with thfi mists curling hazily across from Loch Nees, and tho alternate sob and skirl of the bagpipes, and the soft-voiced burr of the Hiolantyjen, the games play out the Studded with jewels and! silken raiment, and checked jvdth tartan, tho dances Occupy the nights. So onoo a year docs Inverness recaptore the glory that was hers. Only during the late war did she let the past suffice. With the Camerons and* the Seaforths and the Argyll and Sutherlands were her kilted braves, the InveriiGss gathering is nothing without them.—London paper. “No boarding-house dinner can compare with the delight of the evening neal in camp. Camp cookery is simply ’ascihating and fascinatingly simple.. —“Lady." x x