Near Fortingall was at home that Campbell of Glenlyon who carried out the massacre of Glencoe, for which his descendants held themselves to be accursed. According to Robert Chambers, one of them was Rob Roy’s mother. A name of wider ill-fame is connected with Fortingall, if we believe a thin legend that makes it birthplace of Pontius Pilate, son of a Roman official quartered in the camp laid out under older strongholds ascribed to chiefs of the Fingal age. So far into the Highlands seem to have been pushed the eyries
Where Rome, the Empress of the world, Of yore her eagle wings unfurled.
Another lion is the Fortingall yew, given out as three thousand years old and perhaps the oldest tree in Europe, which, declares a Perthshire historian, “must have been a goodly sapling when Nebuchadnezzar had his dwelling with the beasts of the fields”; but Dr. John Lowe shakes his head over such reputations. In his iconoclastic book on _Yew-trees_, he blasts the very existence of a supposed old yew at Fotheringay, the place of Queen Mary’s execution; but he might have guessed how that pretender crept into print, had he known that the ancient name of Fortingall was _Fothergill_, which is also found spelt _Fortirgall_.
The most authentic renown of Fortingall is as vicarage of James Macgregor, Dean of Lismore, who, in the first half of the sixteenth century, along with his brother Duncan, compiled the earliest collection of Gaelic poetry, which bears the title _Book of Lismore_, though it was made in the centre of Perthshire. Naturally the Macgregor Dean gives a good place to legends and achievements of his own race, whose proud genealogy has thus been embalmed; but he admits praises of the Clan Donachie, the Clan Dougal, and other neighbours; also preserving memories of such misty heroes as Finn and Oscar, and many poems attributed to Ossian, similar to those upon which Macpherson afterwards founded his _remaniement_. The name of the supposed author is usually prefixed to each contribution. Among the rest is the romantic legend of Fraoch and the dragon, outlined in _Highlands and Islands_. A passage from this, as translated by the Rev. T. Maclauglan, may be quoted to show how poets have always drawn on the same similes and hyperboles.