THE TROSSACHS ROUND
Beyond Edinburgh, perhaps the best known town in Scotland is Stirling,
which hordes of pilgrims pass in the round trip of a single day through
the famous Trossachs District, displaying such a finely mixed assortment
of Scottish scenery, lochs, woods, and mountains
that like giants stand
To sentinel enchanted land.
Stirling, on the edge of the Highlands, played a central part, even long
after the Scottish kings had been drawn down to the rich fields of
Lothian and the Merse. From the rock on which the Castle stands, only
less boldly than that of Edinburgh, one looks over the Links of Forth,
making such sinuous meanderings upon its Carse, and across to the Ochil
Hills that border Fife; then from another point of view appear the
rugged Bens among which Roderick Dhu had his strongholds. Not fair
prospects alone are tourists’ attraction to Stirling. The palace of
James V., the houses of great nobles like Argyll and Mar, the execution
place of the last Roman Catholic Archbishop of Scotland, the memorials
of Protestant martyrs, the proud monuments of Bruce and Wallace, the
ruins of Cambuskenneth Abbey, with its royal sepulchre, all show this
region the heart of mediæval Scottish history. While Edinburgh grew to
be recognised as the capital, Stirling Castle was the birthplace and the
favourite residence of several among the James Stuarts that came to such
an uneasy crown in boyhood; sometimes it was their prison or their
school of sanguinary politics, when possession of the royal person
counted as ace in the game played by truculently treacherous nobles. It
has the distinction of being the last British castle to stand a siege,
raised in 1746 by the Duke of Cumberland, when, as his panegyrical
historian says, “in the Space of one single Week, his Royal Highness
quitted the Court of the King his Father, put himself at the head of his
Troops in _Scotland_, and saw the Enemy flying with Precipitation before
him, so that it may be said that his progress was like Lightning, the
rebels fled at the flash, fearing the Thunder that was to follow.” Its
ramparts look down on Scotland’s dearest battlefields, that where
Wallace ensnared the invader at the Old Bridge, and that of Bannockburn,
when Bruce turned the flower of English chivalry to dust and to gold,
for, as the latest historian says, “it rained ransoms” in Scotland after
this profitable victory.
One may speculate what might have been the fate of the United Kingdom
had Bannockburn ended otherwise. Would the barons of the north have
found a master in Edward III.? Would the Plantagenets, with Scotland to
back them, have made good their conquest of France? Would the stern
reformers across the Tweed have suffered the Tudors to shape and
re-shape the Church as they
[Illustration: STIRLING CASTLE FROM THE KING’S KNOT]
did? Would the Scottish adventurers who once kept their swords sharp as
soldiers of fortune all over Europe, have sooner found a career in
forcing themselves to the front of British society? This much seems
clear, that there has been a woeful waste of ill-blood before a union
that came about after all, in the way of peace. Yet are we so made that
the most philosophic Scot, even fresh from a course of John Stuart Mill
or Herbert Spencer, cannot look down upon these battle-grounds without a
throb in his heart. It was Bannockburn that made us a nation, poor but
free to be ourselves. Then, since we did not always come off so well in
our battles with England, naturally we make much of the points won in a
doubtful game. When I was at school there came among us perfervid young
Scots an English boy, before whom, we agreed, it would be courteous and
kind not to mention Bannockburn. Yet in the end some itching tongue let
slip this moving name, but without ruffling our new comrade’s pride. It
turned out that he complacently took Bannockburn to have been an English
victory; at all events, one more or less made no great matter to his
thinking. Englishmen take their own national trophies so much for
granted, that they are apt to forget the susceptibilities of other
peoples. Such a one was rebuked by a coachman driving him over the field
of Bannockburn. “You Scotch are always boasting of your country, but
when you come south you are in no hurry to get back again.” With thumb
pointed to the ground, the Scot made stern answer: “There was thirty
thousand o’ you cam north, and no mahny o’ them went back again!” There
are other battlefields about Stirling, of which Scotland has no such
title to be proud, as that of Falkirk, where Wallace brought his renown
to a falling market and Prince Charles Edward had but half a victory;
that of Sauchieburn, where James III. was foully slain; and that of
Sheriffmuir, the Culloden of 1715.
Let us hang a little longer upon the Castle ramparts to take a
bird’s-eye view of the stirring story that often came to centre round
this rock. Over Highland mountain and Lowland strath the clouds lift
away, giving here and there a doubtful glimpse of Scots from Ireland,
Celts from who knows how far, Britons of Strathclyde, and dim Picts of
the east, each such a wild race as “slew the slayer and shall himself be
slain,” among whom intrude Roman legions and Norse pirates, the former
falling back from their thistly conquest, the latter settling themselves
firmly on the coasts. Out of this welter, as out of the Heptarchy in the
south, emerges a more or less dominant kingdom seated on the Tay. While
the power of the Scots seems to have gone under, their name floats at
the top, so as to christen the new nation, that on the south side, from
the wide bounds of Northumbria, takes in a stable element destined to be
the cement of the whole.
The next act shows the struggle of a partly Saxonised people against the
Anglo-Norman kings and their claims to feudal superiority. The curtain
rises on a sensational melodrama of confused alarms and excursions,
where the ill-drilled Celtic supernumeraries at the back of the stage
often fall to fighting like wild cats among themselves, while the
mail-clad barons prance now on one side and now on the other, as the
scenes shift about a border-line almost rubbed out by the crossing and
recrossing of
[Illustration: THE OUTFLOW OF LOCH KATRINE, PERTHSHIRE]
armies. The heroes of the most thrilling tableaux are Wallace and Bruce;
and the loudest applause hails the culminating blaze of lime-light on
Bannockburn.
The wars of Independence are not yet at an end, but the Scots people
have learned more or less firmly to stand together, and their chiefs,
when not led astray by feud and treachery, begin to enter into the
spirit of the piece, in which France now takes a leading part. But
Banquo’s ill-fortune dogs the line not yet fully consecrated by
misfortune. Over the stage passes that woeful procession of boy kings,
most of them cut off before they had learned to rule, each leaving his
son to be in turn kidnapped and tutored by fierce nobles to whom John
Knox might well have preached on the text “Woe to thee, O land, when thy
king is a child!” more profitably than he denounced that “monstrous
regiment of women.” This act culminates in the Reformation, when for a
generation Scotland is not clear whether to cry “Unhand me, villain!” to
France, or to England, the two powers that at her side play Codlin and
Short in a tragic mask.
When James VI. had posted off to his richer inheritance, we might expect
an idyllic transformation scene of peace out of pain. But the Scot has
no turn for peace. Is it the mists and east winds that set such a keen
edge on his temper? When not at loyal war, he is robbing and raiding his
neighbours, as if to keep his hand in; and if no strife be stirring at
home, he hires himself out as a professional fighter or football player
over foreign countries and counties, for pelf indeed, but also for the
zest of the game. And now that Scotland has no longer its wonted
national exercise of defending itself against England, it developed at
home that notable taste for spiritual combat; so the next act has for
its main interest a controversy as to what things were Cæsar’s,
throughout which the hard-headed and hot-hearted theologians of the
north made fitful efforts to be loyal to Cæsar, who, on his part, gave
them little cause for loyalty.
With the Revolution Settlement and the Act of Union the stage appears
cleared for a happy denouement, which, indeed, but for episodes of
rebellion and vulgar grudges on both sides, comes on at length as the
two rivals learn how after all they are not hero and villain, but
long-lost brothers, the one rich and proud but generous, the other poor
and honest. Already, before the world’s footlights, we see them fallen
into each other’s arms, blessed by nature and fortune, to the music of
“Rule, Britannia,” amid the cheers of a crowd of colonies, though
foreign spectators may shrug their shoulders and twirl their moustaches
when invited to applaud.
But may there not be an epilogue to the sensational acts of Scottish
history? As Saxondom overcame the plaided and kilted clans, is not
Scotland in turn destined to overlie the rest of the island? Here we
approach a delicate subject of consideration. In this enlightened age
when, as a great Scotsman says, “the Torch of Science has now been
brandished and borne about with more or less effect for five thousand
years and upwards,” the truly philosophic mind should be capable of
rising above the pettiness of national prejudice. Only foolish and
uninstructed persons can cling to the belief that their peculiar
community, large or small, is necessarily identified with the highest
excellences of creation. Wise
[Illustration: IN THE HEART OF THE TROSSACHS, PERTHSHIRE]
men agree to recognise that as a poor vanity which winks fondly at the
halo consecrating its own faults, while blind to the plainest merits of
its neighbours. Excesses, defects, and compensations must be everywhere
recognised and allowed for, then at last we can take a calm and exact
account of human nature in its different manifestations regarded by the
light of impartial candour. And when in such a judicious spirit we come
to survey mankind from China to Peru, there can surely be little doubt
as to the due place of Scots in the broken clan of McAdam.
The above edifying principles were earnestly enforced upon me by a
French _savant_ with whom I once travelled in the Desert of Sahara, who
yet almost foamed at the mouth if one pointed the moral with a Prussian
helmet-spike. Hitherto, alas! international characterisations have been
coarse work, usually touched with a spice of malice. Every parish
flatters itself by locating Gotham just over its boundary, as any county
may have some unkind reproach against its neighbours, Wiltshire
moon-rakers, Hampshire hogs, or what not; and nations, too, bandy
satirical epithets, like those of a certain poet--
France is the land of sober common-sense,
And Spain of intellectual eminence.
In Russia there are no such things as chains;
Supreme at Rome enlightened reason reigns.
Unbounded liberty is Austria’s boast,
And iron Prussia is as free--almost.
America, that stationary clime,
Boasts of tradition and the olden time.
England, the versatile and gay,
Rejoices in theatrical display.
The sons of Scotia are impulsive, rash,
Infirm of purpose, prodigal of cash.
But Paddy----
But, indeed, the rest is too scandalous for publication.
The most marked feature of the Scottish national character is perhaps an
engaging modesty that forbids me to dwell on the achievements of a small
country’s thin population, who have written so many names so widely over
the world. But it must be admitted how the King of Great Britain sits on
his throne in virtue of the Scottish blood that exalted a “wee bit
German lairdie.” Our men of light and leading are naturally Scotsmen,
the leaders of both parties in the House of Commons, for instance. Since
Disraeli--himself sprung from the Chosen People of the old
Dispensation--Lord Salisbury was our only Premier not a Scotsman. Both
the present Archbishops of the Anglican Church come from Presbyterian
Scotland. The heads of other professions in England usually are or ought
to be Scotsmen. The United States Constitution seems to require an
amendment permitting the President to be a born Scot; but such names as
Adams, Polk, Scott, Grant, McClellan, and McKinley have their
significance in the history of that country, while in Canada, of course,
Mac has come to mean much what Pharaoh did in Egypt. It is believed that
no Scotsman has as yet been Pope; but there appears a sad falling away
in the Catholic Church since its earliest Fathers were well known as
sound Presbyterians. The first man mentioned in the Bible was certainly
a Scot, though English jealousy seeks to disguise him as James I. Your
“beggarly Scot” has the Apostles as accomplices in what Englishmen look
on as his worst sin, a vice of
[Illustration: BRIG O’ TURK AND BEN VENUE, PERTHSHIRE]
poverty which, in the fulness of time, he begins to live down. Both
Major and Minor Prophets deal with their Ahabs and Jezebels much in the
tone of John Knox. A legend, not lightly to be despised, makes our
ancestress Scota, Pharaoh’s daughter; but I do not insist on a possible
descent from the lost Tribes of Israel. Noah is recorded as the first
Covenanter. Cain and Abel appear to have started the feud of Highlander
and Lowlander. Father Adam is certainly understood to have worn the
kilt. The Royal Scots claim to have furnished the guard over the Garden
of Eden, in which case unpleasing questions are suggested as to the
duties of the Black Watch at that epoch. The name of Eden was at one
time held to fix the site of Paradise in the East Neuk of Fife; but the
higher criticism inclines to Glasgow Green. In the south of Lanark,
indeed, are four streams that have yielded gold; but they compass a
country more abounding in lead, and the climate seems not congenial to
fruit trees. “I confess, my brethren,” said the controversial divine,
“that there is a difficulty here; but let us look it boldly in the face,
and pass on.”
The antiquities of Stirling contrast with the modern trimness of its
neighbour, the Bridge of Allan, lying at the foot of the Ochils two or
three miles off, a Leamington to the Scottish Warwick, the tramway
between them passing the hill on which, to humble southron tourists,
Professor Blackie and other ardent patriots reared that tall Wallace
Monument whose interior makes a Walhalla of memorials to eminent
Scotsmen like Carlyle and Gladstone. Bridge of Allan is a place of mills
and bleach works, and of resort for its Spa of saline water,
recommended, too, by its repute for a mild spring climate, rare in the
north. The “Bridge,” which we have so often in Scottish place-names,
points to a time when bridges were not matters of course; as in the
Highlands we shall find “Boats” recording a more backward stage of
ferries. This bridge spans the wooded “banks of Allan Water,” up which a
pleasant path leads one to Dunblane, with the Ochil moorlands for its
background.
Dunblane is notable for one of the few Gothic cathedrals still used in
Scotland as a parish church. Sympathetically restored, it has even
become the scene of forms of worship which scandalised true-blue
Presbyterians, while on the other hand I once came across an Anglican
lady much shocked to find how “actually there was a Presbyterian service
going on!” Carved screen, stalls, and communion table make ornaments
seldom seen in the bareness of a northern kirk, this one admirable in
its proportions and mouldings, if without the elaborate decoration of
Melrose. It has a valuable legacy in the library of a divine well known
in both countries, the tolerant Archbishop Leighton.
Among Scotsmen, Dunblane enjoys a modest repute as a place of
_villeggiatura_; to tourists it is perhaps best known as junction of the
Caledonian line to Oban, which brings them to Callander, a few miles
from the Trossachs. This line at first follows the course of the Teith,
“daughter of three mighty lakes,” past Doune Castle, not Burns’s “Bonnie
Doon,” but an imposing monument of feudal struggles and crimes, that has
housed many a royal guest, if not, as one of its parish ministers
gravely declares for unquestionable, Fitz-James himself on the night
before his adventurous chase. So late as 1745,
[Illustration: BIRCHES BY LOCH ACHRAY, PERTHSHIRE]
Home, the author of _Douglas_, had an adventure here, confined as
prisoner of war in a Jacobite dungeon, from which he escaped, with five
fellow-captives, in quite romantic style; and this, we know, was one of
the stages of Captain Edward Waverley’s journey. Farther up the river,
another place of note is Cambusmore, where Scott spent the youthful
holidays that made him familiar with the Trossachs country. Callander he
does not mention, its name not fitting into his metre, whereas its
neighbour Dunblane’s amenity to rhyme brought to be planted there a
flower of song at the hands of a writer who perhaps knew it only by
name. But Callander has grown into a snug little town of hotels and
lodging-houses below most lovely scenery, little spoiled by the chain of
lakes above being harnessed as water-works for thirsty Glasgow, whose
Bailie Nicol Jarvies now lord it over the country of Rob Roy and
Roderick Dhu.
Another way to the Trossachs is by “the varied realms of fair Menteith,”
through which a railway joins the banks of the Forth and the Clyde. The
name of Menteith has an ugly association to Scottish ears through Sir
John Menteith, a son of its earl, who betrayed Wallace to the English;
the signal for these Philistines’ onrush was given by his turning a loaf
upside down, and so to handle bread was long an insult to any man of the
execrated name. Sir John afterwards fought under Bruce; but however
Scottish nobles might change sides in the game of feudal allegiance, the
Commons were always true to patriotic resentment; and no services of
that house have quite wiped out the memory of a traitor remembered as
Gan among the peers of Charlemagne or Simon Girty on the backwoods
frontier of America. And fortune seems to have concurred in the popular
verdict, for till even the shadow of it died out in a wandering beggar,
little luck went with the title of Menteith, least of all in a claim to
legitimate heirship of the Crown; then this earldom seemed doubly cursed
when transferred to the Grahams, one of whom was ringleader in the
murder of James I.
Menteith, one of the chief provinces of old Scotland, has shrunk to the
name of a district described in a witty booklet by a son of the soil,
far travelled in other lands.[A] “A kind of sea of moss and heath, a
bristly country (Trossachs is said to mean the bristled land) shut in by
hills on every side,” in which “nearly every hill and strath has had its
battles between the Grahams and the Macgregors”; but now “over the
Fingalian path, where once the red-shank trotted on his Highland garron,
the bicyclist, the incarnation of the age, looks to a sign-post and sees
_This hill is dangerous_.” Its stony fields and lochans lying between
hummocks are horizoned by grand mountains, among which Ben Lomond, to
the west, is the dominating feature, “in winter, a vast white
sugar-loaf; in summer, a prismatic cone of yellow and amethyst and opal
lights; in spring, a grey, gloomy, stony pile of rocks; in autumn, a
weather indicator; for when the mist curls down its sides, and hangs in
heavy wreaths from its double summit ‘it has to rain,’ as the Spaniards
say.”
[A] _Notes on the District of Menteith_, by R. B. Cunninghame Graham.
Menteith became a resort before Callander, when, early in the eighteenth
century, we find Clerk of Penicuik taking
[Illustration: HEAD OF LOCH LOMOND, LOOKING UP GLEN FALLOCH,
PERTHSHIRE]
his family there on a “goat’s whey campaign,” for which remedy the
Highland borders were often visited in his day. At an earlier day, canny
Lowlanders would be shy of trusting themselves, on business or pleasure,
beyond the Forth; and, even later, we know how Bailie Nicol Jarvie
thought twice before venturing into the haunts of that “honest” kinsman
of his. As Ben Lomond dominates this landscape, so looms out the memory
of Rob Roy Macgregor, that doughty outlaw who, like Robin Hood, has
taken such hold on popular imagination. Graham as he is, one suspects
the above-quoted representative of the old earls to have his heart with
an ancestral enemy who practised a kind of wild socialism--
To spoil the spoiler as he may,
And from the robber rend the prey.
It appears that Scott had Rob Roy in his eye as a model for Roderick
Dhu, and it is the Macgregor country which he has given to his
fictitious Vich Alpines. Mr. Cunninghame Graham points out how the
Highland borders were always more troubled than the interior clandom,
and how here especially the vicinity of a rich lowland offered constant
temptation for followers of the “good old rule, the simple plan”
recorded by Wordsworth. The Forth made a boundary against these
predatory excursions, yet sometimes a Roderick Dhu would harry fields
and farms as far as the home of “poor Blanche of Devon,” beyond
Stirling. The “red soldiers” in turn came to pass the Highland line. On
Ellen’s Isle women and children took refuge from Cromwell’s men; Monk
marched by Aberfoyle, noting for destruction its woods that harboured
rebels; and not to speak of Captain Thornton’s unlucky expedition, no
less authentic a hero than Wolfe once commanded the fortress which the
Georges placed at Inversnaid, near Rob Roy’s home, to bridle that broken
clan of Ishmaelites.
The railway, from Glasgow or from Stirling, passes to the south of the
Loch of Menteith, with its islands, to which a short divagation might be
made. Here, on the “Isle of Rest,” shaded by giant chestnuts which
tradition brings from Rome, are the ruins of a cloister whither the
child Queen Mary was carried for refuge after the battle of Pinkie,
before setting out for France with her playmate maids of honour.
Last night the Queen had four Marys,
To-night she’ll have but three;
There was Mary Beaton and Mary Seaton
And Mary Carmichael and me.
Mary Livingston was the authentic fourth of the quartette in those days,
and Mary Fleming held the place of Mary Carmichael. The luckless heroine
of this touching ballad was a Mary Hamilton supposed by Scott to have
been one of the Queen’s attendants later on, but her identity is
somewhat dubious; and one writer shows reason to believe that the story
of her crime and punishment has been strangely shifted from the Russian
Court of Peter the Great, where she might well exclaim--
Ah! little did my minnie think,
The night she cradled me
The lands that I should travel in,
The death that I should dee!
Beyond this lake a railway branch brings us to
[Illustration: GOLDEN AUTUMN, THE TROSSACHS, PERTHSHIRE]
Aberfoyle, on the banks of the “infant Forth,” its nursery name the Avon
Dhu, “Blackwater,” haunted like a child’s dreams by fairies of whom
prudent Bailie Nicol Jarvie spoke under his breath, though he professed
to hold them as “deceits of Satan.” Here the change-house of Lucky
M‘Alpine has been replaced by an hotel offering all the comforts of the
Saltmarket, along with golf links and fishing at Loch Ard. As Ipswich
shows the very room in the White Hart occupied by Mr. Pickwick and the
green gate at which Sam Weller met Job Trotter, so among the lions here
are the ploughshare valiantly handled by Bailie Nicol Jarvie, nay, even
the identical bough from which he swung suspended by his coat tails.
Such relics let one guess why that worthy citizen would not give “the
finest sight in the Hielands for the first keek o’ the Gorbals of
Glasgow!” But he might have taken another view had he seen the great
slate quarries that now scar the braes of Aberfoyle, or that
pleasure-house on Loch Katrine set apart for Glasgow magistrates to
disport themselves at the source of their city’s water supply.
From Aberfoyle or from Callander, the rest of the journey is by road to
the Trossachs Hotel, which seems to represent Fitz-James’s imagination
of “lordly tower” or “cloister grey”; then on through the mile of
bristling pass to the foot of Loch Katrine. How many a peaceful stranger
has passed this way since the Knight of Snowdoun’s steed here “stretched
his stiff limbs to rise no more”! What “cost thy life, my gallant grey”
would be the fact that even in the poet’s day, the path to Ellen’s Isle
was more like a ladder than a road. Now the danger most to be feared is
from Sassenach cycling, which caused a coach accident in the vicinity a
few years ago. Umbrellas had replaced claymores so far back as
Wordsworth’s time; and waterproofs are the armour most displayed, where
once
Refluent through the pass of fear
The battle’s tide was pour’d;
Vanish’d the Saxon’s struggling spear,
Vanish’d the mountain-sword.
As Bracklinn’s chasm, so black and steep,
Receives her roaring linn,
As the dark caverns of the deep
Suck the wild whirlpool in,
So did the deep and darksome pass
Devour the battle’s mingled mass:
None linger now upon the plain,
Save those who ne’er shall fight again.
Macaulay, in his slap-dash style, has explained the want of taste for
the picturesque in a bailie or such like of more romantic times. “He is
not likely to be thrown into ecstasies by the abruptness of a precipice
from which he is in imminent danger of falling two thousand feet
perpendicular; by the boiling waves of a torrent which suddenly whirls
away his baggage and forces him to run for his life; by the gloomy
grandeur of a pass where he finds a corpse which marauders have just
stripped and mangled; or by the screams of those eagles whose next meal
may probably be on his own eyes.” But Dr. Hume Brown (_Early Travellers
in Scotland_) shows how there were bold and not unappreciative tourists
in the Highlands before the era of return tickets. Whatever the
guide-books say, it is certainly not the case that the Trossachs were
discovered by Scott. In Dr. T. Garnett’s _Tour through the Highlands_,
published 1800, he relates a visit
[Illustration: THE RIVER TEITH, WITH LOCHS ACHRAY AND VENNACHAR,
PERTHSHIRE]
to the “Drosacks,” and speaks of the place as sought out by foreigners.
Several years before the publication of the _Lady of the Lake_,
Wordsworth, with Coleridge and his sister, on a Scottish tour, turned
aside to this beauty-spot, which they duly admired in spite of the rain;
and there they met a drawing-master from Edinburgh on the same
picturesque-hunting errand. Dorothy Wordsworth’s _Journal_ tells us how
the cottars were amused to hear of their secluded home being known in
England; how two huts had been erected by Lady Perth for the
accommodation of visitors; and how a dozen years before the minister of
Callander had published an account of the Trossachs as a scene “that
beggars all description.”
The bad weather proved too much for Coleridge, who turned back from the
tour here; and his muse seems not to have been inspired by this land of
the mountain which he found also a land of the flood. Wordsworth,
however, made several attempts to annex Scotland to his native domain.
Truth to tell, the lake poet’s harp sounds sometimes out of tune across
the Border, as witness his woeful travesty of the “Helen of Kirkconnel”
story, and the philosophic considerations which he attributes to Rob Roy
over what may have been that bold outlaw’s grave. There is one verse in
his “Highland Reaper” which seems a perfect epitome of the future
Laureate’s qualities, who, if he “uttered nothing base,” could come too
near being commonplace. “_Will no one tell me what she sings?_” is
surely in the flat tone which one irreverent critic describes as a
“bleat.” “_Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow_”--is not this the false
gallop of eighteenth-century verse, out of which Wordsworth vainly
believed that he had broken his Pegasus? But in such pinchbeck setting,
what a pearl of price--
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago!
Thus to him, too, “Caledonia stern and wild” could breathe her secret,
while to put life into the raids and combats of long ago was for another
bard who plays drum and trumpet in the orchestra of British poetry. I am
not going to string vain epithets on the Trossachs, familiar to all
readers if only from the pages of their great advertiser. But let me
hint to tourists who come duly furnished with the _Lady of the Lake_,
that Black’s _Guide to the Trossachs_ includes an excellent commentary
on the poem from what may seem an unpoetical source, the pen of an
Astronomer-Royal, Sir G. B. Airey, whose topographical analysis will be
found most instructive. These scenes appear somewhat trimmed since an
old writer described the Highlands “as a part of the creation left
undrest.” The lake edges have been smoothed off, as the “unfathomable
glades” of the Trossachs are opened up by a road, below the line of the
old pass and the hill tracks by which the Fiery Cross was sped towards
Strath-Ire.
For an account of this country as it is in our day, we may refer to a
French story by a writer named, of all names, André Laurie, whose native
heath ought to be the bonny braes of Maxwelton. This book has the
serious purpose of giving a view of English school athletics, and
pointing the moral that Frenchmen so trained would be all the fitter for
_la revanche_. The hero, sent to school in England, is, as part of his
educational course, taken by the schoolmaster on a shooting excursion in
the Highlands.
[Illustration: VEILED SUNSHINE, THE TROSSACHS, PERTHSHIRE]
They put up at the _White Heart_, one of the principal hotels of
_Glascow_, and the landlord is so interested in their bold enterprise
that he personally conducts them on the _chasse aux grouses_. Nay more,
he equips them with a pack of piebald pointers, well trained to retrieve
in water, which he had come by in a remarkable manner: a certain Lord
Stilton, breakfasting at the hotel, with true British generosity made
his host a present of these matchless hounds by way of _largesse_ for an
excellent dish of trout--a rare treat, it seems, in this part of the
world.
The first day’s proceedings of the sporting troop are most notable. They
“leave the civilised country” at Renfrew. How they get across the Clyde
does not appear; but there are no doubt stepping-stones in all Highland
streams. Having thus invaded the Lennox, they forthwith stalk its
desolate moors from Loch Lomond to Loch Katrine, where as a touch of
local colour the author is careful to point out that one must not use
the word lakes. Nine or ten strong, the company is thrown out in
skirmishing order, those who have guns marching in front behind the
dogs, while the unarmed members are invited to bring up the rear “as
simple spectators.” Scotland being such a proverbially hospitable
country, they do not judge it necessary to provide themselves with leave
or license, but their hotel-keeper for two or three shillings hires a
bare-legged shepherd in “a short petticoat” to show them where the game
lies. In spite of this liberality, towards the end of the day the bag
amounts only to three or four head, including one hare, explained to be
a _rara avis_ hereabouts, and one fierce bull which has given a spice
of danger to their sport. In the evening, however, the grouse begin to
“rise,” spring up “every instant under their feet,” and nearly two dozen
are brought down, enough to serve for supper. The question of lodging
presents more difficulty, the Trossachs being an “absolutely desert”
country without a village for six leagues round; but the whole party are
comfortably accommodated in a fisherman’s hut, fifteen to twenty feet
square, which must have been a tight fit for ten, even though there was
no furniture beyond a table, two benches and a sheepskin. With genuine
Scottish pride the fisherman refuses to accept a bawbee from his guests;
though rather too much given to “bird’s eye tobacco” and “that
abominable product of civilisation Scotch whisky,” he is a superior
person, by his parents designed for the national church, but the honour
of “wearing a surplice,” it is explained, had not seemed to him worth
the frequent birching which makes the discipline of parish schools in
the north.
Next day, for a change, the strangers give themselves up to the kindred
sport of angling; and two of them undertake the Alpine ascent of one of
the peaks above Loch Katrine, but, without a guide, come to sore grief,
and have to be rescued by a search party led by those sagacious pointers
in true Ben St. Bernard style. In such cases, our author points out “the
superiority of the savage over the civilised man, at least in the
desert.” Only to the Highland fisherman had it occurred that those
luckless adventurers might want something to eat; but he, taught by
experience, produces in the nick of time a bottle of whisky, a biscuit
and a slice of bacon; and thus
[Illustration: NEAR ARDLUI, LOCH LOMOND, DUMBARTONSHIRE]
the perishing hero’s life is saved to “dance a Scottish _gigue_”--O M.
Laurie, M. Laurie, O!
The dancing comes through a luxurious experience of Highland high-life,
when this band of youths fall in with an old schoolfellow, a Scottish
nobleman who bears what seems the exotic title of Lord Camember, but his
family name is that well-known aristocratic one of Orton. He welcomes
them to his castle, where his coming of age is being celebrated by
crowds strangely enormous for such a “desert country,” who are
entertained under tents “vast as cathedrals,” with splendid hospitality
open to all comers, fountains flowing with beer, speeches, music,
dancing, and fireworks. As _bouquet_ of the festivities, he invites the
strangers to a review of his stags, driven together “in full trot” till
their gigantic antlers “gave the illusion of the marching forest in the
Macbeth legend.” The drive past lasts more than an hour, in the course
of which are enumerated 5947 horns, so that, allowing for absentees, the
young lord estimates a round number of seven thousand as the stock of
his deer forest. There could have been no such head of game in the
district when Fitz-James galloped all the way from the Earn to Loch
Katrine after one stag, losing it as well as his way. One can’t help
feeling that our author’s excursion through the scenes of his story must
have been an equally rapid one.
The Trossachs pass leads us to that lake that gets a fair-seeming name
not from any saint, but from the Highland _Caterans_ who once infested
its banks; and it is hinted that “Ellen’s Isle” may have come to be
christened through Scott’s mistaking the Gaelic word _Eilean_ (island).
There was, indeed, a certain Helen Stuart who played a grimly fierce
part in defending this place of refuge, as related in the poem, but her
exploit was performed against Cromwell’s soldiers. In sight of the
“Silver Strand,” tourists are wont to take steamboat as far as
Stronachlachar, and there cross by coach to the “bonny, bonny banks of
Loch Lomond.” They whose “free course” moves not by “such fixed cause,”
might well hold on to the head of Loch Katrine, crossing to Loch Lomond
over the wild heights of Glengyle; or they would not find it amiss to
turn back to Aberfoyle, thence past Loch Ard and the Falls of Ledard,
following the track round Ben Lomond on which Rob Roy led Osbaldistone
and the Bailie out of his country. But one knows not how to direct
strangers to that wild region vaguely outlined by the above-mentioned
French author, where our generation may shoot grouse and bulls as they
go, and find quarters in any convenient hut or castle, when the
Trossachs hotel happens to have “not a bed for love or money.” His
story, one fears, must be counted with the mediæval wonders of Loch
Lomond, fish without fins, waves without wind, and such a floating
island as still emerges after hot summers in Derwentwater.
Dorothy Wordsworth, for one, rather belittles Loch Katrine as an
“Ulswater dismantled of its grandeur and cropped of its lesser
beauties,” though she compliments the upper part as “very pleasing,
resembling Thirlmere below Armboth.” But no critic can carp at the fame
of Loch Lomond as the most beautiful lake in Scotland; and one author
who, as a native of the Lennox, is not indeed unprejudiced, Smollett to
wit, gives it the palm over all the lakes he has seen in Italy or
Switzerland. Dr. Chalmers wondered if there would not be a Loch Lomond
in heaven.
[Illustration: THE SILVER STRAND, LOCH KATRINE, PERTHSHIRE]
“A little Mediterranean” is the style given by a seventeenth-century
English tourist, Franck, to what Scott boldly pronounces “one of the
most surprising, beautiful, and sublime spectacles in nature,” its
narrow upper fiord “lost among dusky and retreating mountains,” at the
foot opening into an archipelago of wooded islands, threaded by
steamboats, while up the western shore runs one of the best cycling
roads in the kingdom, past memorials of Stuarts and Buchanans,
Colquhouns and wild Macfarlanes. On the other side are caves associated
with the adventures of Rob Roy, and spots sung by Wordsworth. And all
this wonderland is overshadowed by Ben Lomond, its ascent easily made on
foot or pony-back by a traveller not bound to do this whole round in one
day. But let him beware of getting lost in the mist and having to spend
all night on the mountain, as was the lot of that New England Sibyl,
Margaret Fuller. Also he should not imitate a facetious friend of mine
who left his card in the cairn at the top, and two or three days later
received it enclosed in this note: “Mr. Ben Lomond presents his
compliments to Mr. ---- and begs to say that not only does his position
prevent him from returning visits, but he has no desire for Mr. ----’s
further acquaintance.”
At the foot of Loch Lomond we regain the rails that will carry us to
Edinburgh, to Glasgow, to Stirling, or to the western Highlands. The
first stage is down the Vale of Leven to Dumbarton, _arx inexpugnabilis_
of old Scotland, its name _Dunbritton_ recording the older days when it
was the stronghold of a Cumbrian kingdom. Here the literary _genius
loci_ is that not very ethereal shade Tobias Smollett, who, born on the
banks of Leven, has nothing to say of the Trossachs, but looked back on
the scene of Roderick Random’s pranks as an eighteenth-century Arcadia,
that could move him to a rare strain of sentiment in his “Ode to Leven
Water.”
Devolving from thy parent lake,
A charming maze thy waters make,
By bowers of birch, and groves of pine,
And hedges flower’d with eglantine.
Still on thy banks, so gaily green,
May numerous herds and flocks be seen,
And lasses chanting o’er the pail,
And shepherds piping in the dale,
And ancient faith that knows no guile,
And industry embrown’d with toil,
And hearts resolved, and hands prepared,
The blessings they enjoy to guard.
[Illustration: LOCH ACHRAY AND BEN VENUE, PERTHSHIRE]