And in time we came to Tobar nan Ceann, the Well of the Heads. This memorial to a bloody deed is a pillar of four sides, each of which tells the same tale in a different language: Gaelic, English, French, and Latin. The four sides are brought to a point surmounted by seven stone heads, cut off at the throat, with a hand grasping a dirk laid vengefully on top of them.

The story is of two sons of Keppoch (a branch of the Macdonells) being educated in France, and, in their absence, of seven male cousins at home enjoying the family power. On their return the two were murdered by the seven, and at last the bard of the family managed to avenge the deed by slaughtering the seven. Thereupon (as the memorial puts it): ‘The Heads of the Seven Murderers were presented at the foot of the Noble Chief, in Glengarry Castle, after having been washed in this Spring: and ever since that event, which took place early in the Sixteenth Century, it has been known by the name of “Tobar-nan-ceann,” the Well of the Heads’ It was erected in 1812, by the reigning chief, ‘As a Memorial of the ample and summary Vengeance, which, in the swift course of Feudal Justice . . .’

Looking around this grim record, you may think the well is gone, but if you go down off the road, on the loch side, you come on a low archway extending right under the road. As we entered, past some tramp’s litter, the darkness of the vault after the bright day made us blink and grope carefully. I must have gone between twenty and thirty feet, doubled up, when my hand, feeling before me, went to the wrist in the bloody well.

As we came out, I looked at my hand. It was quite clean. But the cold water had in an instant obliterated the centuries more effectively than had the thirty-six lines of sculptured letters in four tongues. In fact, the contact for some time induced an odd sensation, that seemed akin to, if not part of, complicity in the deed itself!

For the power of the well is extremely strong. Of Druidic practices, worship of or at the well is perhaps the only real survival. On the first Sunday in May, great crowds still gather at the Culloden Wishing Well, above Inverness, to drop their coin in and wish their secret wish and make festival, crowds of the folk themselves who would never dream of going the extra mile or two to look at the Culloden battlefield. There, too, they tie their pieces of coloured cloth to the trees, leave their secret hopes to the gods. But the wishing-well hopes are pagan hopes, hopes for love and well-being and laughter on the earth where life is good; not hopes for personal salvation in some shadowy hereafter, made to seem as full of righteous gloom as the insides of their churches.

And as around Loch Lochy, so by the Culloden Wishing Well there is now growing a State forest, and to the top-knot of a young pine I saw, the other year, a girl tie a gay pink strip torn from her clothing. She swayed more lissom than the released pine and her laughter bubbled more deliciously than ever did the old pagan well. Well and forest and young girl, and love among them in a laughing breeze for a few thousand years. Humanity may make something of that, without either feudal memorial or sculptured letters about summary vengeance.