Here is the reference to Dr Park's Songs.

Songs, composed and in part written by the late Rev John Park DD St Andrews. With introductory notice by Principal Shairp LLD St Andrews.
London / Leeds: Archibald Ramsden; London: Arthur Allison, 1876. Reissued, London: Chappell & Co; Leeds, Archibald Ramsden, 1882.
A revision of some 20 songs by Sir Edward Elgar in 1920 excludes this particular song.

Music sized hardbak, 382 pages. Mi Nan Dhu begins on page 332.

John Park was composer, poet and musician, President of St Andrews Choral Society.


If you seek an earlier version, Ronald Stevenson's 1983 Edition Peters score introduction notes that the first published mention of the title is in Albyn's Anthology, by Archibald Campbell, published Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1816-1818, It is in volume II, 1818, pages 10-11, but with a different melody. The words are different too. The book refers to the Air as unlike another melody usually sung in the Highlands. But that's yet another version, not this one!

If you still seek the tune earlier elsewhere, but with a different title? - well, that needs searching for. A wee foray into the loch of early Scottish melodies for Nessie...
It is not in the Scots Musical Museum. Nor cited in Alan Gale's analysis 1900 with its useful long list of early Scottish songbooks and sources. The style is visible in Patrick McDonald's pioneering Highland Vocal Airs 1784, but not this melody nor the title. If one thinks of Lowlands - tune and Gaelic phrase or similar are not mentioned at all in Walter Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border 1802.

Dr Park's is a 19th century convolution, with poetry in the manner of Thomas Moore, transcribed for the Victorian drawing room at a time of general interest in Scotland, its scenery and traditional songs romanticised in the arts and in literature.