BAGPIPE CHAMPIONS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LI, Issue 15658, 11 July 1914, Page 5 (Supplement)

BAGPIPE CHAMPIONS.

LAST OF THE McCRIMMONS.

McCkijimo.y!

• Southrons may not thrill to tho name, but there is no true Scot to whose ears it does not bring the skirl of the pipes and the sad murmur of tho greatest of all Gaelic laments, " McCrimmon's Lament."

For the McCrimmons, hereditary pipers to the Clan McLcod, are famed in the oral tradition of the far fastnesses of the Highlands as tho greatest masters of tho bagpipes, the men who taught generation after generation of Gaels the art of piping. The last man of the family died many years ago, and now news- has recently reached Glasgow from, a steamer which has visited St. Kilda of tho death in that island during tho past winter of one Rachel McCrimmon, who is stated to have been the last surviving niembtr of the' family The origin of their name is a curious one. At a time now far remote it is said that one of the chiefs of McLcod travelled in Italy, and that he brought home with him a musician from the town of Cremona. This man was a player of the harp, and he may be taken to have arrived in Scotland in tho days when the harp was still the favourite instrument of the Gael.

It was as pipers, however, that the descendants of the man from Cremona, styled McCrimmon, were to earn fame. Not only did they become great performers on the instrument; they were tho composers 'if great numbers of pibrochs and 'it her forms of bagpipe music. More famous still in Highland tradition became their school for pipers, which they carried on ior generations at their home at Dunvegan, in Skye. Thither went pupils from all parts of the Highlands and the Isles \ and the sons of chieftains were sent as part of their education to learn piping from tho McCrimmons.

The race of the McCrimmons virtually disappeared in 1822, when the last of the great pipers died. To-day their name is "kept alive, for the most part, in Highland story and song. Little about them is to bo found-in any book, but many a Gael can tell you, if ho likes, what ho has learned about them in a traditional way, and what ho frequently a good deal— the instrument with which their name is associated. ''There's many pipers, and there's good pipers, but there's never any more McCrimmons."