The Logans flourished in their eyrie above the Loch of Restalrig, and
intermarried with the best houses, Sinclairs, Ogilvys, Homes, and Ramsays
of Dalhousie. It may be that some of them sleep under the muddy floor of
St. Triduana’s Chapel, in the village of Restalrig, at the foot of the
hill on the eastern side of their old château. This village, surrounded
by factories, is apparently just what it used to be in the days of James
VI. The low thick-walled houses with fore-stairs, retain their ancient,
high-pitched, red-tiled roofs, with dormer windows, and turn their tall
narrow gables to the irregular street. ‘A mile frae Embro town,’ you
find yourself going back three hundred years in time. On the right hand
of the road, walking eastward, what looks like a huge green mound is
visible above a high ancient wall. This is all that is left of St.
Triduana’s Chapel, and she was a saint who came from Achaia with St.
Regulus, the mythical founder of St. Andrews. She died at Restalrig on
October 8, 510, and may have converted the Celts, who then dwelt in a
crannog in the loch; at all events we hear that, in a very dry summer,
the timbers of a crannog were found in the sandy deposit of the lake
margin. The chapel (or chapter-house?), very dirty and disgracefully
neglected, has probably a crypt under it, and certainly possesses a
beautiful groined roof, springing from a single short pillar in the
centre. The windows are blocked up with stones, the exterior is a mere
mound of grass like a sepulchral tumulus. On the floor lies, broken, the
gravestone of a Lady Restalrig who died in 1526. Outside is a patched-up
church; the General Assembly of 1560 decreed that the church should be
destroyed as ‘a monument of idolatry’ (it was a collegiate church, with a
dean, and prebendaries), and in 1571 the wrought stones were used to
build a new gate inside the Netherbow Port. The whole edifice was not
destroyed, but was patched up, in 1836, into a Presbyterian place of
worship. This old village and kirk made up ‘Restalrig Town,’ a place
occupied by the English during the siege of Leith in 1560. So much of
history may be found in this odd corner, where the sexton of the kirk
speaks to the visitor about ‘the Great Logan,’ meaning that Laird who now
comes into the sequel of the Gowrie mystery.
For some thirty years before the date of which we are speaking, a Robert
Logan had been laird of Restalrig, and of the estate of Flemington, in
Berwickshire, where his residence was the house of Gunnisgreen, near
Eyemouth, on the Berwickshire coast. He must have been a young boy when,
in 1560, the English forces besieging Leith (then held by the French for
Mary of Guise) pitched their camp at Restalrig.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account