Dr. Mac Culloch on the Parallel Roads of Glen Roy. 345 



a very remote origin. The largest and western tower is called the 

 Cummin's tower. The name however is not of itself sufficient to 

 prove that this castle appertained to the Cummins, or that it was 

 erected hy that once formidable Clan, whose ancient fame and 

 power have, like those of Fingal himself, associated its name with 

 buildings and transactions in which it might have been no way 

 concerned: yet its aspect would not induce us to refer to it to a 

 date higher than that of Edward I. the period in which the power 

 of that clan was in its greatest splendour. There is an idle tra- 

 dition that it had been a seat of Bancho, head of the race of Stuarts, 

 and that a league had been signed there by Charlemagne and 

 Achaius about the end of the eighth century. But authentic records 

 show that Bancho was not the ancestor of the Stuart family ; nor 

 was it possible that Bancho, had he existed, could have been a 

 Thane of Lochaber ; since that district was not at this remote 

 period under the dominion of the kings of Scotland. The history 

 of Achaius and his treaty with Charlemagne, so f?.r from being 

 merely involved in obscurity, has been shown by learned antiquaries 

 to be a fiction. 



So far do the arguments from tradition reach. Let us next 

 enquire, tradition apart, whether theie is any thing either in the 

 physical construction, the disposition, the antiquity, or the alledged 

 uses of these lines, which can justify the supposition that they are 

 works of art. The magnificence of the object itself, when con- 

 sidered as a work of art, is such as to impose on the judgment by 

 heating the imagination ; and it is not therefore wonderful that 

 s-uch a notion should have been maintained with considerable per- 

 tinacity by remote highlanders, whose traditional belief in the power 

 and splendour of their heroic ancestors, although fast expiring, is 

 by no means entirely obliterated. But the phenomenon is of too 



