INVERNESS--ROSS-SHIRE--TAIN--DORNOCH--GOLSPIE--PROGRESS OF
RAILROADS--THE SUTHERLAND EVICTION--SEA-COAST SCENERY--CAITHNESS--
WICK: HERRING FISHERIES--JOHN O'GROAT'S: WALK'S END.
Inverness is an interesting, good-sized town, with an intellectual
and pleasing countenance, of somewhat aristocratic and self-
complacent expression. It is considered the capital of the
Highlands, and wears a decidedly metropolitan air. It is well
situated on the Ness, just at its debouchement into the Moray
Firth,--a river that runs with a Rhine-like current through the town
and is spanned with a suspension bridge. It has streets of city-
built and city-bred buildings, showing wealth and elegance. Several
edifices are in process of erection that will rank with some of the
best in Edinburgh and Glasgow. It has a long and pretentious
history, reaching back to the Romans, and dashed with the romance of
the wild ages of the country. Oliver Cromwell, or Sledgehammer II.,
Macbeth, Thane of Cawdor, Queen Mary, Prince Charlie, and other
historical celebrities, entered their names and doings on the
records of this goodly town.
On Monday, Sept. 21st, I set out with a good deal of animation on
the last week-stage of my journey, which I was anxious to accomplish
as soon as possible, as the weather was becoming unsettled with
frequent rain. Reached Invergordon, passing through a most
interesting section of country, full of very fertile straths. It
was the part of Ross-shire lying on the Moray and Beauly Firths and
divided by rivers dashing down through the wooded gorges of the
mountains. I saw here some of the most productive land in Scotland.
Hundreds of acres were studded with wheat and barley stooks, and
about an equal space was covered with standing grain, though so near
the month of October. Plantations, parks, gentlemens' seats, glens
deep and grand, fir-clad mountains, villages, hamlets and scattered
cottages made up the features of every changing view. Indeed, one
travelling for a week between Perth and Inverness comes upon such a
region as this with pleasant surprise, as upon an exotic section,
imported from another latitude.
The next day I held on northward, though the weather was very
unfavorable and the walking heavy and fatiguing. Passed what seemed
the bold and ridgy island of Cromarty, so associated with the
venerated memory of Hugh Miller. The beating rain drove me
frequently to the wayside cottages for shelter; and in every one of
them I was received with kind words and pleasant looks. One of
these was occupied by an old woman in the regular Scotch cap--a
venerable old saint, with her Bible and psalm-book library on her
window-sill, and her peat fire burning cheerily. When on leaving I
intimated that I was from America, she followed me out into the
road, asking me a hundred questions about the country and its
condition. She had three sons in Montreal, and felt a mother's
interest in the very name America. The cottage was one of a long
street of them by the sea-side, and I supposed it was a fishing
village; but I learned from her that the people were mostly the
evicted tenants of the Duke of Sutherland, who were turned out of
his county some thirty years ago to make room for sheep. I made
only eleven miles this day on account of the rain, and was glad to
find cheery and comfortable quarters in an excellent inn kept by a
widow and her three daughters in Tain. Nothing could exceed their
kindness and attention, which evidently flowed more from a
disposition than from a professional habit of making their guests at
home for a pecuniary or business consideration. I reached their
house about the middle of the afternoon, cold and wet, after several
hours' walk in the rain, and was received as one of the family; the
eldest daughter, who had all the grace and intelligence of a
cultivated lady, helping me off with my wet overcoat, and even
offering to pull off my water-soaked boots--an office no American
could accept, and which I gently declined, taking the will for the
deed. A large number of Scotch _navvies_ were at the inns of the
town, making an obstreperous auroval in celebration of the monthly
pay-day. They had received the day preceding a month's wages, and
they were now drinking up their money with the most reckless
hilarity; swallowing the pay of five long hours at the pick in a
couple of gills of whiskey. How strange that men can work in rain,
cold and heat at the shovel for a whole day, then drink up the whole
in two hours at the gin-shop! These pickmen pioneers of the Iron
Horse, with their worst habits, are yet a kind of John-the-Baptists
to the march and mission of civilization, preparing its way in the
wilderness, and bringing secluded and isolated populations to its
light and intercourse. It is wonderful how they are working their
way northward among these bald and thick-set mountains. When I
first visited Scotland, in 1846, the only piece of railroad north of
the Forth was that between Dundee and Arbroath, hardly an hour long.
Now the iron pathways are running in every direction, making grand
junctions at points which had never felt the navvy's pick a dozen
years ago. Here is one heading towards John O'Groat's, grubbing its
way like a mole around the firths, cutting spiral gains into the
rock-ribbed hills, bridging the deep and dark gorges, and holding on
steadily north-poleward with a brave faith and faculty of patience
that moves mountains, or as much of them as blocks its course. The
progress is slow, silent, but sure. The world, busy in other
doings, does not hear the pick, nor the speech of the powder when it
speaks to a huge rock a-straddle the path. The world, even
including the shareholders, hears but little, if anything, of the
progress of the work for months, perhaps for a year. Then the
consummation is announced in the form of an invitation to the public
to "assist" at the opening of a railroad through towns and villages
that never saw the daylight the locomotive brings in its wake. So
it will be here. Some day, in the present decade, there will be an
excursion train advertised to run from London to John O'Groat's; and
perhaps the lineal descendant of Sigurd, or some other old Norse
jarl, will wear the conductor's belt and cap or drive the engine.
The weather was still unsettled, with much wind and rain. Resumed
my walk, and at about four miles from Tain, crossed the Dornoch
Firth in a sail ferry boat, and at noon reached Dornoch, the capital
of Sutherlandshire. This was one of the fourteen cities of
Scotland; and its little, chubby cathedral, and the tower of the old
bishop's palace still give it a kind of Canterbury air. The Earls
of Sutherland for many generations lie interred within the walls of
this ancient church. After stopping here for an hour or two for
dinner, I continued on to Golspie, the residence of the mighty lord
of the manor, or the owner, master and human disposer of this great
mountain county of Scotland. It is stated that full four-fifths of
it belong to him who now holds the title, and that his other great
estates, added to this territory, make him the largest landowner in
Great Britain and probably in Europe. Just before reaching Golspie,
a lofty, sombre mountain, with its bald head enveloped in the mist,
and which I had been two hours apparently in passing, cleared away
and revealed its full stature--and more. Towering up from its
topmost summit, a tall column lifted a human figure in bronze
skyward cloud-high and frequently higher still. I believe the
brazen face that thus looks into the pure and holy skies without
blushing, is a duplicate of the one worn in human flesh by His
Grace, Evictor I., who unpeopled his great county of many thousands
of human inhabitants, and made nearly its whole area of 18,000
square miles a sheep-walk. But I will not break the seal of that
history. It was full of bitter experience to multitudes. Not for
the time being was it joyous, but grievous exceedingly--surpassing
endurance to many. But it is all over now. The ship-loads of
evicted men and women who looked their last upon Scotland while its
mountains and glens were reddened with the flames of their burning
cottages, carried away with them a bitter feeling in their hearts
which years of better experience did not soften. Not for their good
did it seem in the motive of the transaction; but for their good it
worked most blessedly. It was a rough transplanting, and the
tenderest fibres of human affection broke and bled under the
uptearing; but they took root in the Western World, and grew
luxuriantly under the light and dew of a happier destiny. It was
hard for fathers and mothers who were taking on the frostwork of age
upon their brows; but for their children it was the birth of a new
life; for them it was the introduction to a future which had a sun
in it, rayful and radiant with the beams of hope and promise. Let
those who denounce and deplore this harsh unpeopling come and stand
upon the cold, bleak summit of one of these Sutherland mountains.
Let them bring their compasses, or some other instrument for
measuring the angles, sines and cosines of human conditions. Plant
your theodolite here; wipe the telescope's eye with your
handkerchief; look your keenest in the line of the lineage of these
evicted thousands. Steady, now! while the most tranquil light of
the future is on the pathway of your eye. This first reach of your
vision is the life-track of the fathers and mothers unhoused among
these mountains. Look on beyond, over the longer life-line of their
children; then farther still under the horizon of the remotest
future to the track of their childrens' children. Can you make an
angle of a single degree's subtension in the hereditary conditions
of these generations, or a dozen beyond? Can you detect a point of
departure by which the second generation would have diverged from
the first, or the third from the second, and have attained to a
higher life of comfort, intelligence, social and political position
had they remained in these mountain cottages, grubbed on their
cottage farms, and lived from hand to mouth on stinted rations of
oatmeal and potatoes, as their ancestors had done from time
immemorial? Can you see among all the hopeful possibilities of
Time's tomorrows, any such change for the better? You can sight no
such prospect with your telescope in that direction. Turn it around
and sweep the horizon of that other condition into which they were
thrust, weeping and wrathful against their will. Follow them across
the Atlantic to North America, to their homes in the States and in
the Canadas. Measure the angle they made in this transposition, and
the latitude and longitude of social and moral life they have
reached from this Sutherland point of departure. The sons of the
fathers and mothers who had their family nests stirred up so
cruelly, and scattered, like those of rooks, from their holdings in
the cliffs, gorges and glens of these cold mountains, are now among
the most substantial and respected men of the Western World. Some
of them to-day are mayors of towns of larger population than the
whole county of Sutherland. Some, doubtless, are Members of
Congress, representing each a constituency of one hundred thousand
persons, and a vast amount of intelligence, wealth and industry.
They are merchants, manufacturers, farmers, teachers and preachers,
filling all the professions and occupations of the continent. Is
not that an angle of promise to your telescope? Is not that a line
of divergence which has conducted these evicted populations, at a
small distance from this point of departure, into the better
latitudes of human experience? The selling of this Scotch Joseph to
America was more purely and simply a pecuniary transaction than that
recorded in Scripture; for in that the unkind and jealous brothers
sold the innocent boy for envy, not for the love of pelf, though the
Ishmaelites bought him on speculation. But not for envy was the
Sutherland lad sold and shipped to a foreign land, but rather for a
contemptuous estimate of his money value. The proprietor-patriarch
of the county took to a more quiet and profitable favorite--the
sheep, and sent it to feed on a pasture enriched with the ashes of
Joseph's cottage. It is to be feared he meant only money; but
Providence meant a blessing beyond the measurement of money to the
evicted; and what Providence meant it made for him and his
posterity, and they are now enjoying it.
Dunrobin Castle, the grand residence of the Duke of Sutherland,
looks off upon the sea at Golspie. It is truly a magnificent
edifice, ranking with the first palaces in Christendom. Nearly
eight hundred years has it been in building, though, I believe, all
that commands admiration for stature and style is the work of the
present century. Whatever the Sutherland family may have been in
local position and history in past centuries, one of the noblest
women that ever ennobled the nobility of Great Britain, has given
the name a celebrity and an estimation in America which all who ever
wore it before never won for it. The Duchess of Sutherland, the
noble and large-hearted sister of Lord Morpeth-Carlisle, has given
to the coronet she wore a lustre brighter to the American eye than
the light of diadems which have dazzled millions in Europe. When
the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Men shall come to its
high place in the hearts of nations as the crown-faith of all their
creeds, what this noble woman felt, said and did for the Slave in
his bonds shall be mentioned of her by the preachers of that great
doctrine in years to come. When the jewels of Humanity's memories
shall be made up, she who, as it were, bent down to him in his
prison-house and put her jewelled hands to the breaking of his
fetters, shall stand, with women of the same sympathy, only next to
her who broke her box of ointment on the Saviour's feet.
The next day made a walk to Helmsdale, a distance of about eighteen
miles. The weather was favorable, the scenery grand and varied with
almost every feature that could give it interest. The finest of
roads wound in and out around the mountain headlands, so that
alternately I was walking upon a lofty esplanade overlooking the
still expanse of the steel-blue sea, then facing inward to the
gorges of the grand and solemn hills. Found comfortable quarters in
one of the inns of Helmsdale, a vigorous, busy, fishing village
nestling under the shadow of the mountains at the mouth of a little
river of the same name. After tea, went down to the wharf or quay
and had some conversation with one of the masters of the business.
He cured and put up about 30,000 barrels of herrings himself in a
season, employing, while it lasted, 500 persons. Their chief market
is the North of Europe, especially Poland, and the business was
consequently much depressed on account of the troubles in that
country. The occupation of this little sea-side village illustrated
the ramifications of commerce. They imported their salt from
Liverpool, their staves from Norway and their hoops from London.
Set out again immediately after breakfast, feeling that I was
drawing near to the end of my journey. I was soon in the treeless
county of Caithness, so fraught with the wild romance of the
Norsemen. Passed over the bleakest district I had yet seen, called
Old Ord, a cold, rough, cloud-breeding region that the very heavens
above seem to frown upon with a scowl of dissatisfaction. Still,
the road over this dark, mountain desert, though staked on each side
to keep the traveller from wandering in the blinding snows of
winter, was as beautifully kept as the carriage-way in the park of
Dunrobin Castle. The sending of an English queen to conciliate the
Welsh, by giving birth to a son in one of their castles, was not a
much better stroke of policy than that of England in perforating
Scotland to the Northern Sea with this unparalleled and splendid
road, constructed at first for a military purpose. I heard a man
repeat a couplet, probably of unwritten poetry, in popular vogue
among the Highlands, and which has quite an Irish collocation of
ideas. It is spoken thus, as far as I can recollect--
Who knew these roads ere they were made
Should bless the Lord for General Wade.
I doubt if there are ten consecutive miles of carriage-road in
America that could compare for excellence with that over the desert
of Old Ord. I was overtaken by a heavy shower before I had made the
trajet, and was glad to reach one of the most comfortable inns of
the Highlands, in the beautiful, romantic and picturesque glen of
Berriedale. Here, nestling between lofty mountain ridges, which
warded off the blasting sea-winds sweeping across from Norway, were
plantations and groves of trees, almost the only ones I saw in the
county. Nothing could exceed the hospitality of the family that
kept the large, white-faced hotel at the bottom of this pleasant
valley; especially after I incidentally said that I had walked all
the way from London to see the country and people. They admitted me
into the kitchen and gave me a seat by the great peat fire, where I
had a long talk with them, beginning with the mother. Having
intimated that I was an American, the whole family, old and young,
including the landlord, gathered around me and had a hundred
questions to ask. They related many incidents about the great
eviction in Sutherland, which was an event that seems to make a
large stock of legendary and unwritten stories, like the old Sagas
of the Northmen. When I had dried my clothes and eaten a
comfortable dinner before their kitchen fire and resumed my staff,
they all followed me out to the road, and then with their wishes for
a good journey as long as I was in hearing distance. Continued my
walk around headlands, now looking seaward, now mountainward, now
ascending on heather-bound esplanades, now descending in zig-zag
directions into deep glens, over massive and elegant bridges that
spanned the mountain streams and their steep and jagged banks.
After a walk of eighteen miles, put up at an inn a little north of
the village of Dunbeath, kept by an intelligent and industrious
farmer. The rain had continued most of the day, and I was obliged
to seek shelter sometimes under a stunted tree which helped out the
protecting power of a weather-beaten umbrella; now in the doorway of
an open stable or cow-shed, and once with my back against the door
of a wayside church, which kept off the rain in one direction. This
being a kind of border-season between summer and autumn, there were
no fires in the inns generally except in the kitchen, and I soon
learned to make for that, and always found a kindly welcome to its
comforts; though sometimes the good woman and her lassie would look
a little flushed at having their busiest culinary operations
revealed so suddenly to a stranger. Some of these kitchens are
fitted for sleeping apartments; occasionally having two tiers of
berths like a ship's cabin, slightly and rudely curtained.
The family of this wayside inn, seemingly like every other family in
the country, had connections in America, embracing brothers, uncles
and cousins. I was shown a little paper casket of hair flower-work,
sent by _post_! It was wrought of locks of every shade and tint,
from the snow of a grandmother over one hundred years of age to the
little, sunny curls of the youngest child in the circle of kindred
families. The Scotch branch had collected specimens from relatives
in Great Britain and forwarded them to the family in America, one of
whose daughters had worked them into two bouquets of flowers,
sending one of them by post to this little, white cottage on the
Northern Sea, as a memento of affection. What enhanced the beauty
of this interchange was the fact, that forty-eight years had elapsed
since the landlord's brother left his native land for New England,
and had never seen it since. Still, the cousins, who had never seen
each other's faces, had kept up an affectionate correspondence. A
son and son-in-law of the brother in America were in the Federal
army, and here was a sea-divided family filled with all the sad,
silent solicitude of affection for beloved ones exposed to the
fearful hazards of a war sundering more ties of blood-relationship
than any other ever waged on earth.
Saturday, September 27th. Resumed my walk with increased animation,
feeling myself within two days' distance of its end. The scenery
softens down to an agricultural aspect, the country declining
northerly toward the sea. Passed through a well-cultivated
district, never unpeopled or wasted by eviction, but held by a kind
of even yeomanry of proprietors. The cottages are comfortable,
resembling the white houses of New England considerably. They are
nearly all of one story, with a chimney at each end, broadside to
the road, and a door in the middle, dividing the house into two
apartments. They are built of stone, the newest ones having a slate
roof. Some of them are whitewashed, others so liberally jointed
with mortar as to give them a bright and cheery appearance. These,
of course, are the last edition of cottages, enlarged and amended in
every way. The old issues are ragged volumes, mostly bound in turf
or bog grass, well corded down with ropes of heather, giving the
roof a singular ribby look, rounded on the ridge. In many cases a
stone is attached to each end of the rope, so as to make it hug the
thatch closely. I noticed that in a considerable number of the old
cottages, the stone wall only reached up a foot or two from the
ground, the rest being made up of blocks of peat. Some of the
oldest had no premonitory symptoms of a chimney, except a hole in
the roof for the smoke. These in no way differed from the stone-
and-turf cottages in Ireland.
Again occasional showers brought me into acquaintance with the
people living near the road. In every case I found them kind and
hospitable, giving me a pleasant welcome and the best seat by their
peat-fire. I sat by one an hour while the rain fell cold and fast
outside. The good woman and her daughter were busy baking barley-
cakes. They were the first I had seen, and I ate them with a
peculiar zest of appetite. Told them many stories about America in
return for a great deal of information about the customs and
condition of the working-people. They generally built their own
cottages, costing from 40 to 50 pounds, not counting their own
labor. I met on the road scores of fishermen returning to their
homes at the conclusion of the herring season; and was struck with
their appearance in every way. They are truly a stalwart race of
men, broad-chested, of intelligent physiognomy, with Scandinavian
features fully developed. A half dozen of them followed a horse-
cart containing their nets, all done up in a round ball, like a
bladder of snuff, with the number of their boat marked upon it.
At about four p.m., I came in sight of the steeples of Wick, a brave
little city by the Norse Sea, which may not only be called the Wick
but the Candle of Northern Scotland; lighting, like a polar star,
this hyperborean shoreland of the British isle. I never entered a
town with livelier pleasure. It is virtually the last and farthest
on the mainland in this direction. Its history is full of interest.
Its great business is full of vigor, daring and danger. Here is the
great land-home of the Vikings of the nineteenth century; the
indomitable men who walk the roaring and crested billows of this
Northern Ocean in their black, tough sea-boats and bring ashore the
hard-earned spoils of the deep. This is the great metropolis of
Fishdom. Eric the Red, nor any other pre-Columbus navigator of the
North American Seas, ever mustered braver crews than these sea-boats
carry to their morning beats. Ten thousand of as hardy men as ever
wrestled with the waves, and threw them too, are out upon that wide
water-wold before the sun looks on it--half of them wearing the
features of their Norse lineage, as light-haired and crisp-whiskered
as the sailors of Harold the Fair-haired a thousand years ago. They
come from all the coasts of Scotland, from Orkney, Shetland, the
Hebrides and Lewis islands, and down out of the heart of the
Highlands. It is a hard and daring industry they follow, and
hundreds of graves on the shore and thousands at the bottom of the
sea have been made with no names on them, as the long record of the
hazards they run in the perilous occupation. But they keep their
ranks full from year to year, pushing out new boats marked with
higher numbers.
The harbor has been dangerous and difficult of access, but of late a
great effort has been made to render it more safe and commodious.
The Scotch fisheries now yield from 600,000 to 700,000 barrels of
herrings annually, employing about 17,000 fishermen; Wick stands
first among all the fishing ports of the kingdom. It is a thriving
town, well supplied with churches, schools, hotels, banks and
printing-offices. Several new buildings are now being erected which
will rank high in architecture and add new features of elegance to
the place. The population is a vigorous, intelligent, highly moral
and well-read community, as I could not fail to notice on attending
service on the Sabbath at different places of worship. Wick is
honored with this distinction--it assembles a larger congregation of
men to listen to the glad Evangel on Sunday than any city of the
world ever musters under one roof for the same purpose. It is the
out-door church of the fishermen. They sometimes number 5,000 adult
men, sea-beaten and sun-burnt, gathered in from mountainous island
and mainland all around the northern coasts of Scotland.
Monday, Sept. 28th. The weather was favorable, and I set out on my
last day's walk northward with a sense of satisfaction I could
hardly describe. The scenery was beautiful in every direction. The
road was perfect up to the last rod; as well kept as if it ran
through a nobleman's park. The country most of the way was well
cultivated--oats being the principal crop. Here, almost within
sight of the Orkneys, I heard the clatter of the reaping machine,
which, doubtless, puts out the same utterance over and upon the sea
at Land's End. It has travelled fast and far since 1851, when it
first made its appearance in Europe in the Crystal Palace, as one of
the wild, impracticable "notions" of American genius. In Wick I
visited a newspaper establishment, and saw in operation one of the
old "Columbians," or the American printing-press, surmounted by the
eagle of the Republic. The sewing-machine is in all the towns and
villages on the island. If there is not an American clock at John
O'Groat's, I hope some of my fellow townsmen will send one there,
Bristol-built. They are pleasant tokens of free-labor genius. No
land tilled by slaves could produce them. I saw many large and
highly-cultivated farms on these last miles of my walk. The country
was proportionately divided between food and fuel. Oats and barley
constitute the grain-crops. The uncultivated land interspersed with
the yellow fields of harvest, is reserved for _peat_--the poor man's
fuel and his wealth. For, were it not for the inexhaustible
abundance of this cheap and accessible firing, he could hardly
inhabit this region. It would seem strange to an American, who had
not realised the difference of the two climates, to see fields full
of reapers on the very threshold of October, as I saw them on this
last day's walk. I counted twelve women and two men in one field
plying the sickle, all strongly-built and good-looking and well-
dressed withal.
The sea was still and blue as a lake. A lark was soaring and
warbling over it with as happy and hopeful a voice as if it were
singing over the greenest acres of an English meadow. When I had
made half of the seventeen miles between Wick and John O'Groat's, I
began to look with the liveliest interest for the first glimpse of
the Orkneys; but projecting and ragged headlands intercepted the
prospect. About three p.m., as the road emerged from behind one of
them, those famous islands burst suddenly into view! There they
were!--in full sight, so near that their grain-fields and white
cottages and all their distinguishing features seemed within half a
mile's distance. This was the most interesting coup d'oeil that I
ever caught in any country. Here, then, after weeks and months of
travel on foot, I was at the end of my journey. Through all the
days of this period I had faced northward, and here was the Ultima
Thule, the goal and termination of my tour. The road to the sea
diverged from the main turnpike, which continued around the coast to
Thurso. Followed this branch a couple of miles, when it ended at
the door of a little, quiet, one-story inn on the very shore of the
Pentland Firth. It was a moment of the liveliest enjoyment to me.
When I left London, about the middle of July, I was slowly
recovering from a severe indisposition, and hardly expected to be
able to make more than a few miles of my projected walk. But I had
gathered strength daily, and when I brought up at this little inn at
the very jumping-off end of Scotland, I was fresher and more
vigorous on foot than at any previous stage of the journey.
Having found to my great satisfaction that they could give me a bed
for the night, I went with two gentlemen of the neighborhood to see
the site of the celebrated John O'Groat's House, about a mile and a
half from the inn. There was only a footpath to it across
intervening fields, and when we reached it, a rather vigorous
exercise of the organ of individuality was requisite to "locate" the
foundations of "the house that Jack built." Indeed, pilgrims to the
shrine of this famous domicile are liable to much disappointment at
finding so little remaining of a residence so historical. Literally
not one stone is left upon another. A large stone granary standing
near is said to have been built of the debris of the house, and this
helps out one's faith when struggling to believe in the existence of
such a building at all. A certain ridgy rising in the ground, to
which you try to give an octagonal shape, is pointed out as
indicating the foundations; but an unsatisfactory obscurity rests
upon the whole history of the establishment. Whether true or not,
that history of the house which one would prefer to believe runs
thus:--
In the reign of James IV. of Scotland, three brothers, Malcolm,
Gavin, and John de Groat, natives of Holland, came to this coast of
Caithness, with a letter in Latin from that monarch recommending
them to the protection and countenance of his subjects hereabout.
They got possession of a large district of land, and in process of
time multiplied and prospered until they numbered eight different
proprietors by the name of Groat. On one of the annual dinners
instituted to commemorate their arrival in Caithness, a dispute
arose as to the right of precedency in taking the door and the head
of the table. This waxed very serious and threatened to break up
these annual gatherings. But the wisdom and virtue of John
prevented this rupture. He made a touching speech to them, soothing
their angry spirits with an appeal to the common and precious
memories of their native land and to all their joint experiences in
this. He entreated them to return to their homes quietly, and he
would remedy the current difficulty at the next meeting. Won by his
kindly spirit and words, they complied with his request. In the
interval, John built a house expressly for the purpose, of an
octagonal form, with eight doors and windows. He then placed a
table of oak, of the same shape, in the middle; and when the next
meeting took place, he desired each head of the different Groat
families to enter at his own door and sit at the head of his own
table. This happy and ingenious plan restored good feeling and a
pleasant footing to the sensitive families, and gave to the good
Dutchman's name an interest which it will carry with it forever.
After filling my pockets with some beautiful little shells strewing
the site of the building, called "John O'Groat's buckies," I
returned to the inn. One of the gentlemen who accompanied me was
the tenant of the farm which must have been John's homestead,
containing about two hundred acres. It was mostly in oats, still
standing, with a good promise of forty bushels to the acre. He
resided at Thurso, some twenty miles distant, and found no
difficulty in carrying on the estate through a hired foreman. I
never passed a more enjoyable evening than in the little, cozy, low-
jointed parlor of this sea-side inn. Scotch cakes never had such a
relish for me nor a peat-fire more comfortable fellowship of
pleasant fancies, as I sat at the tea-table. There was a moaning of
winds down the Pentland Firth--a clattering and chattering of window
shutters, as if the unrestful spirits of the old Vikings and Norse
heroes were walking up and down the scene of their wild histories
and gibbering over their feats and fates. Spent an hour or two in
writing letters to friends in England and America, to tell them of
my arrival at this extreme goal of my walk, and a full hour in
poring over the visitors' book, in which there were names from all
countries in Christendom, and also impressions and observations in
prose, poetry, English, French, Latin, German and other languages.
Many of the comments thus recorded intimated some dissatisfaction
that John O'Groat's House was so _mythical_; that so much had to be
supplied by the imagination; that not even a stone of the foundation
remained in its place to assist fancy to erect the building into a
positive fact of history. But they all bore full and sometimes
fervid testimony to the good cheer of the inn at the hands of the
landlady. There was one record which blended loyalty to palate and
patriotism--"The Roast Beef of Old England" and "God save the
Queen"--rather amusingly. A party wrote their impressions after
this manner--"Visited John O'Groat's House; found little to see;
came back tired and hungry; walked into a couple of tender chickens
and a good piece of bacon: God save Mrs. Manson and all the Royal
Family!" This concluding "sentiment" was doubtless sincere and
honest, although it involved a question of precedence in the rank of
two feelings which John the Dutchman could have hardly settled by
his eight-angled plan of adjustment.
The next morning, for the first time for nearly three months of
continuous travel, I faced southward, leaving behind me the Orkneys
unvisited, though I had a strong desire to see those celebrated
islands--the theatre of so much interesting history. Twenty years
ago I translated all the "Sagas" relating to the voyages and
exploits of the Northmen in these northern seas and islands, their
explorations of the coast of North America centuries before Columbus
was born, their doings in Iceland and on all the islands great and
small now forming the British realms. This gave an additional zest
to my enjoyment in standing on the shore of the Pentland Firth and
looking over upon the scene of old Haco's and Sigurd's doing, daring
and dying.
Footed it back to Wick, and there terminated my walk, having
measured, step by step, full seven hundred miles since I left
London, counting in the divergences from a straight line which I had
made. In the evening I addressed a large and intelligent audience
which had been convened at short notice, and I never stood up before
one with such peculiar satisfaction as in that North-star town of
Scotland. I had travelled nearly the whole distance incog., without
hearing my own name on a pair of human lips for weeks. To lay aside
this embargo and to speak to such a large congregation, face to
face, was like coming back again into the great communions of
humanity after a long and private fellowship with the secluded
quietudes of Nature.
At four p.m. the next day, I took the Thurso coach and passed over
in the night the whole distance that had occupied me a week in
travelling by staff. Stopped a night in Inverness, another at
Elgin, and spent the Sabbath with my friend, Anthony Cruickshank, at
Sittyton, about fifteen miles north of Aberdeen.