THE HIGHLAND LINE
From Perth to Inverness runs the Highland Railway, that pierces through
the heart of the Grampians. Giving off a branch to Loch Tay and coach
routes to other choice nooks of the noblest northern county, this line
mounts among the wilds of Atholl, and near its highest level brings us
into Inverness-shire; then it descends to the old Badenoch Forest, down
the upper course of the Spey, past Kingussie to Aviemore, where its main
track turns over the Findhorn, and by Culloden to the capital of the
Highlands. There is not a finer railway ride in the kingdom, as the
tourist knows well enough from his programmes, so the Highland line
needs no advertisement here.
But there is an older use of this name, for the irregular line along
which the Highlands fall in a broken wave upon the richer country, a
zone pointed out by Scott and other writers as the most charming part of
Scotland. The austere spirit of mountain solitudes is not so easily
caught as the varied charms of a debateable land, where “the rivers find
their way out of the mountainous region by the wildest leaps, and
through the most romantic passes,” and Nature’s rugged features straggle
down among good roads and inns, the practical and the picturesque
throwing each other into alternate relief. This is the special
loveliness of southern and eastern Perthshire, across which the
Grampians make an oblique border, once too often marked with fire and
sword, while its straths and lake basins repeat in miniature the same
mingling of Highland and Lowland scenery, and of homes thus contrasted
by “Ian Maclaren”:--
“The lowland farm stands amid its neighbours along the highway,
with square fields, trim fences, slated houses, cultivated after
the most scientific method, and to the last inch, a very type of a
shrewd, thrifty, utilitarian people. The Highland farm is
half-a-dozen patches of as many shapes scattered along the
hillside, wherever there are fewest stones and deepest soil and no
bog, and those the crofter tills as best he can--sometimes getting
a harvest, and sometimes seeing the first snow cover his oats in
the sheaf, sometimes building a rude dyke to keep off the big,
brown, hairy cattle that come down to have a taste of the sweet
green corn, but often finding it best to let his barefooted
children be a fence by day, and at certain seasons to sit up all
night himself to guard his scanty harvest from the forays of the
red deer. Somewhere among the patches he builds his low-roofed
house, and thatches it over with straw, on which by and by, grass
with heather and wild flowers begins to grow, till it is not easy
to tell his home from the hill. His farm is but a group of tiny
islands amid a sea of heather that is ever threatening to overwhelm
them with purple spray. Anyone can understand that this man will be
unpractical, dreamy, enthusiastic, the child of the past, the hero
of hopeless causes, the seer of visions.”
We have already crossed the Highland line to the Trossachs. Now, in a
few hours’ walk by less famous scenes, let me lead the reader right up
into the Highlands
[Illustration: THE GRAMPIANS FROM BOAT OF GARTEN, INVERNESS-SHIRE]
from the North Inch of Perth. Our way shall be the green banks of the
Almond, with only now and then a turning aside on the roads which are
seldom the most pleasing features of a Scottish countryside. The name,
properly _Almaine_, as Wordsworth has it, seems of the same origin as
the Irish Bog of Allen, _Moine Almhaine_ in Celtic. There is more than
one Almond in Scotland, which has countless streams of which this is a
type, a true Highland water, now gathering into creamy pools, now
rushing over pebbly shallows, here pent in a leafy glen, there rippling
by open fields and works of man, everywhere wilful, cheerful, and eager.
At the Almond mouth, over which it straggles thinly in summer to join
the swirls of the Tay, is believed to have stood the Roman station that
may or may not have been the original Perth. The tributary’s right bank
is edged by a wide sward, up which anglers and other idlers can stroll
freely for miles, unless barred by the red flag of a rifle range that
has sent not a few marksmen to Wimbledon and Bisley. On this side stands
a fragment of Huntingtower, a castle of the Gowries, widely known by the
song founded on an obscure ballad, with the same motive as the English
“Nut-brown Maid,” in which a high-born lover--supposed to have been a
Duke of Atholl--puts his sweetheart to the test by pretending to take
leave, to be poor, to be already married; then, when nothing can shake
her fidelity, rewards her with full avowal--
Blair in Atholl’s mine, Jeanie!
Little Dunkeld is mine, lassie!
St. Johnston’s bower and Huntingtower--
And a’ that’s mine is thine, lassie!
Here the idle stream is harnessed to service in bleachworks, whose white
ware spread on green slopes makes a feature of the scenery about Perth.
Above the villages of Almondbank and Pitcairn Green, the stream, like
Simon Glover’s apprentice, throws off its industrial disguise to put on
a Highland garb of rocks and dells and bosky braes. A beautiful spot is
the Glen of Lynedoch, famed by a touching tradition which the graves of
Bessie Bell and Mary Gray attest as no mere legend. These “bonny
lasses,” as their song styles them, were bosom friends who beside the
Almond built themselves a bower as refuge from the Great Plague, raging
in Perth as in London. According to the story, they were visited by a
lover who brought them food, and with it the fatal infection. Prosaic
critics point out that such bowers were used as isolation huts for
suspected cases. At all events, the girls died in their hermitage, and
were brought to be buried at Methven Church, but the Methven folk stoned
back the bearers of contagion from the ford; then in death, as in life,
the bodies found a home by the Almond. Their fate was so well though
vaguely remembered, that both Burns and Scott came to make inquiries
about the grave, which had already been enclosed by the owner of the
property, and is now marked by a railing, beneath a clump of yews, and
by the inscription “They lived--they loved--they died.”
A more modern romance haunts this glen. Here stands in ruin the deserted
mansion of a laird driven by grief into renown. This was Thomas Graham,
who in the latter part of the eighteenth century devoted himself to such
“improvements” as were then the fashion with
[Illustration: KILLIN, PERTHSHIRE]
cultured landowners, and planted exotic growths now running wild among
the native greenery. The death of his beautiful wife, painted by
Gainsborough, struck him so deeply to heart, that, when over forty years
of age, he went to the wars, and rose to be the Lord Lynedoch who won
the battle of Barossa. He had two other Peninsular veterans as
neighbours, all three of them eyewitnesses of Sir John Moore’s burial at
dead of night, Sir George Murray, Wellington’s Quartermaster-General,
and Sir David Baird, of whom it is told that, when his mother heard how
he was among Hyder Ali’s prisoners, chained two and two, her first
remark was, “Lord pity the chiel that’s chained to oor Davie!” On either
side are scenes of battles long ago: to the south, Methven, a disaster
for Bruce, and its neighbour Ruthven, a victory for Montrose; to the
north, Luncarty, where the founder of the Hay family is said to have
turned the tide of battle against the Danes, by rushing in with his
plough coulter like a legendary Nicol Jarvie.
Glenalmond, little sought as it is by strangers, is better known to many
of Mudie’s subscribers than they may be aware, being clearly the chief
scene of “Ian Maclaren’s” popular tales, in which, while dwelling so
much on the character of the inhabitants, the author seems strangely
reticent as to natural charms, well hinted at indeed in the title
_Bonnie Brier Bush_. Drumtochty--the real name of a farm--is Logie
Almond with its Heriotsfield village; Kildrummie is Methven; and
Muirton, of course, is Perth. Some of his personages, also, appear taken
from real prototypes, touched up into very much of fancy pictures, if
neighbours are to be believed.
A little higher comes Trinity College, Glenalmond, founded as a buttress
to the Scottish Episcopal Church, on the model of English public
schools. Its first head was Dr. Charles Wordsworth, nephew of the poet,
formerly second master at Winchester, and once tutor to Mr. Gladstone,
with whom his conscientious disagreement in politics barred the
ecclesiastical promotion which he deserved as well as his brother,
Christopher of Lincoln. He never rose farther than the elective
bishopric of the diocese which it pleases Scottish Episcopalians to
style that “of St. Andrews, Dunkeld, and Dunblane”; and of late years
their prelates have taken to sign themselves by such territorial
designations, assumed by men whose legal status in the country is that
of dissenting ministers. When Dr. Wordsworth became bishop, the whole
income of himself and his score of clergy was some £2000 a year; but he
had a private endowment in “Wordsworth’s Greek Grammar,” which enabled
him without shame to give out from the pulpit, as I have heard, “It is
my dooty to announce to you that a collection will be made in this
chapel, next Sunday, for the purpose of increasing the income of the
Bishop of the diocese.” He was a learned and amiable man, but without
much knowledge of human nature, as shown by his earnest effort to preach
an Eirenicon between his exotic prelacy and Scotch Presbyterianism. In
his memoirs he states that his Glenalmond pupils were the most Christian
and gentlemanly boys he ever knew, on which let me comment that I have
reason for calling some of them arrant poachers, whom the discipline of
early days did not restrain from going fishing in the “wee short hours
ayont the twal’.” He cherishes the recollection that he
[Illustration: A MOOR NEAR KILLIN, PERTHSHIRE]
had to expel only three of them, and that these were all “schismatics.”
I take him to have been deficient in sense of humour, to judge by the
gusto with which he read aloud his great-uncle’s most droning effusions.
He would probably not have relished a story a friend of mine used to
tell of North-Western Canada. Those wilds, in early days, were the
charge of an Archbishop, who, visiting an unsophisticated part of his
diocese, put up with a Scotch Presbyterian farmer as owner of the best
house in the settlement. This hospitably entertained prelate, remarking
how a newly born baby made part of the family, delicately inquired as to
whether it had been yet baptized, and hinted that the parents might like
to take advantage of such an occasion. But the good man seemed not duly
pleased by the honour thus proffered. “I’ll just step ben, and see what
the mistress thinks,” he said awkwardly; then presently returning:
“We’re both much obliged to ye, sir--we take it kindly; we know ye mean
well; but if ye’ll no mind, the mistress would rather wait till a
regular meenister comes round.”
The attempt to root a Winchester on the Highland border did not for a
time find much deepness of earth, but the school has since flourished
under other masters. Its lordly building had the fate of being set on
fire by an unworthy pupil, son of an ex-Minister, whose connections
could not save him from being brought to justice. A more tragic scandal,
now a generation old, was when the owner of the neighbouring mansion,
the second legal dignitary of Scotland, having been convicted of
parliamentary bribery on the previous step of his career, both cut his
throat and threw himself into the Almond. This points the moral of an
abuse that has flourished more rankly in Scotland than in England,
whereby legal posts go as spoils of party victory, though indeed a
better era seems inaugurated by a Conservative Government which recently
honoured itself by giving the highest judicial office to a political
opponent as the most worthy. But we should not get far, if we are to
stop for all the stories of fire and blood that haunt the Highland line.
Glenalmond now leads us fairly into the Highlands, and by the river we
hold up through the Sma’ Glen, or as Wordsworth calls it, the Narrow
Glen, whose lion is the legendary grave of Ossian, man or myth, that had
a more congenial birthplace in the “tremendous wilds” of Glencoe
declared by Dickens “fearful in their grandeur and amazing solitude.”
In this still place, where murmurs on
But one meek streamlet, only one,
He sang of battles, and the breath
Of stormy war, and violent death;
And should, methinks, when all was past,
Have rightfully been laid at last
Where rocks were rudely heaped, and rent
As by a spirit turbulent;
Where sights were rough and sounds were wild,
And every thing unreconciled,
In some complaining, dim retreat
For fear and melancholy meet;
But this is calm; there cannot be
A more entire tranquillity.
Our half-day’s walk may be prolonged to a whole one by path up the
Almond and across to Loch Tay; but if one seek pleasant quarters not so
far off, at Newton
[Illustration: IN GLENFINLAS, PERTHSHIRE]
Bridge he may turn south by Foulford and Monzie to Crieff. This cheerful
little border town ranks as favourite _sommerfrische_ of Scots folk,
apart from those places that are more sought by tourists. Well situated,
looking south from the lowest slope of the hills, almost in the centre
of the country, it is unusually dry as well as airy and genial, not pent
in like Callander, nor too bracing for cold-blooded folk like Braemar.
So Crieff has now two railways and everything handsome about it. Its
spacious market-place proclaims it an old borough, with tolbooth, cross,
and iron “jougs” for the terror of offenders; and here once the “kind
gallows of Crieff” gave Lowlanders’ answer to that high-flown boast--
Aye, by my soul, while on yon plain
The Saxon rears one shock of grain;
While of ten thousand herds there strays,
But one along yon river’s maze,
The Gael, of plain and river heir,
Shall with strong hand redeem his share!
Why the _kind_ gallows? not even Scott can say, but he suggests the idea
of this seeming a kindred or natural doom to the Highlanders, who, it is
said, used to doff their bonnets on passing a shrine fatal to so many of
their blood. The gallows have now been well replaced by an endowed
public school on the Scottish pattern; and perhaps the most important
institution of modern Crieff is the Hydropathic, which, under the
shelter of the Knock Woods, gathers Saxon and Celt together in sober
amity. There are other such hostelries about the Highland line; but that
of Crieff, one of the earliest, is still one of the most popular.
“Hydropathics” in Scotland--nobody thinks of calling them
Establishments--do not much depend on hydropathy, which, in summer at
least, falls to the background of their sociable life. They are more
concerned with the administration of water internally. Where whisky is
devoutly worshipped, there arises a strong nonconformist party leagued
against the devil’s sacrament, hence the vogue of these big temperance
hotels, in which unhappy moral weaklings will be sometimes kept by their
families, while others, conscious of feeble will, are glad to be out of
the way of temptation. In the holiday season, the better class of
townsfolk much affect the wholesome amusements of such _pensions_, most
of them palatial and some expensive. And if strong drink be necessary
for human happiness, it is whispered how that can be enjoyed, _sub
rosa_, even within the walls of a hydropathic, with all the added zest
of a “fearful joy.” As the rigour of Maine laws does not always hinder
an American hotel guest from “seeing the striped pig” or “giving ten
cents to the baby,” so here there has been observed such a demand for
“shaving water” at various hours of the day, that one conscientious
manager made a practice of putting a piece of soap into each jug so
required. Several hydropathics, indeed, have so far relaxed their
original rules as to connive at the appearance of bottles upon the
well-spread table. Certain large ones tend to become too gay and
worldly, patronised by young swells from Glasgow and Dundee, who take
every opportunity of putting on company manners and evening dress. But
those haunts of ephemeral gaiety find their business slack off with the
holiday season; and their prosperity
[Illustration: LOOKING UP GLEN LOCHAY NEAR KILLIN, PERTHSHIRE]
has not always answered to that of others which stick to quiet ways and
moderate charges.
The Crieff Hydropathic has all along taken a stand among the latter
class, has even had a name for special austerity, due perhaps to the
fact that it is frequented by Presbyterian ministers, as one at
Harrogate is by Roman Catholic priests. But the Scottish clergy, however
formidable in the pulpit, are by no means reluctant to unbend out of it,
within the limits of becoming mirth, as we should know from Dean Ramsay;
and I don’t think I ever made one of such a jovial and friendly
congregation as was gathered in this house in the days when not only
strong drink but cards and dancing were under an interdict. One scandal
shocked the proprieties of the place. The doctor, its guiding genius and
strict censor, had gone to be married. The cat being thus engaged, the
mice took advantage of the occasion. Returning unexpectedly from his
honeymoon, our moral and medical director found the kids of his
abandoned flock capering in the drawing-room. I shall never forget the
face with which he stood at the doorway like the statue in Don Juan,
then turned away speechless from sorrow or from anger. His helpless
indignation reminded me of a carter, noted for bad language, on whom
certain graceless loons are said to have played a trick by stealthily
letting down the tilt of his cart as it tugged up a load of sand; then
they took a short cut to the hill top and disposed themselves for
listening to his remarks at a safe distance; but all he could gasp out
on discovering his loss, was, “Rin awa’ hame, laddies: I’m no equal to
the occasion!” Perhaps that new character as a bridegroom softened the
doctor’s severe rule. It is said that even Crieff has to some extent
conformed to the world, yet I doubt if its frequenters have a happier
time of it than in those Saturnian days.
One meets queer characters at such a place, “gorgons and _hydros_ and
chimæras dire,” as a humorist of the neighbourhood used to call them. A
few real invalids and some imaginary ones crop up among the crowd of
ruddy and buxom pleasure-seekers. There was one gentleman, I remember,
who gorged himself at every meal and spent most of the day in snoring
about the public rooms; but at idle intervals buttonholed all and sundry
to expatiate on his woeful lot of having lost both sleep and appetite. A
rarer hydropathic case, and a purple patch on the general tone of honest
_bourgeoisie_, was a still young ne’er-do-weel bearing more than one of
Scotland’s honoured names, who had been in, and out of, two crack
regiments, had run through two fortunes, so he boasted, and looked on
himself as heir to two or three more. Crippled by a drunken fall, his
friends kept him practically imprisoned in this uncongenial retreat. His
sole luxury was a daily carriage airing; and he liked to drive round the
grounds of a certain castle near Crieff, within which the owner, his
uncle, would not let him set foot. It was painful to hear him talk of
what he would do when he came in for the property. He died before the
uncle and the other kinsfolk from whom he had hoped to inherit, a victim
of that plague through which this country has hardly a house where there
is not one dead, soul or body.
One of the great attractions of Crieff is its being
[Illustration: BENEATH THE SLOPES OF BEN LEDI, NEAR CALLANDER,
PERTHSHIRE]
environed by noble and famous mansions, some of their parks thrown
liberally open to visitors. Close at hand on the Lowland side is
Drummond Castle with its grand woods and gardens, seat of the old family
of Perth, that has had strange vicissitudes: its representative now
unites several titles in that of the Lincolnshire Earl of Ancaster,
while the direct line of the Perth Earls was ruined by its Jacobite
loyalty. On the hills behind are the grounds of Ochtertyre, which
inspired Burns’s muse; and the often-visited Falls of Turret are, among
several cascades, within a short walk. Behind the Knock lie Ferntower,
once home of Sir David Baird, and Monzie Castle, which strangers must
remember to pronounce with its z silent. Southrons will have some
difficulty also in getting their tongues round the name of Cultoquhey,
famed by the Laird of Cultoquhey’s prayer: “From the greed of the
Campbells, from the pride of the Grahams, from the ire of the Drummonds,
and the wind of the Murrays, Good Lord deliver us!” This laird’s name
was Maxtone, which hints at his having emigrated from the Borders among
such uncongenial neighbours; but in the whirligig of time his descendant
has taken on “the pride of the Grahams,” being now Maxtone-Graham, with
Murrays and Drummonds still around him. The old laird’s familiarity with
the Litany may be explained by the fact of Muthill, a village near at
hand, having kept for itself an Episcopal chapel through all
adversities, as well as a parish church with rare relics of Catholic
antiquity. The church and castle of Innerpeffray are other points of
interest in a neighbourhood whose old families seem to have held their
own against English and American invasion; but the Grahams themselves,
Highland clan as they pass for and duly equipped with a tartan, seem to
have come from the south, where Scott puts Roland Græme’s kin in the
Border “Debateable Land.”
Of all the lairdly homes about Crieff, the best known in the world
should be Gask, through the several authors whom the Oliphant family has
produced. One daughter of this house was Lady Nairne, christened
Carolina after the unfortunate prince for whom it had suffered poverty
and exile. There was a Charles also, and George III. is said to have
been tickled to hear how, every day after dinner, the old laird would
turn to his son with “_Charles_, the king’s health!” More than any other
writer, by her Jacobite ballads and her _remaniements_ of popular songs,
“the White Rose of Gask” has inspired a tender sentiment of the lost
cause to thrill so many hearts and piano strings, long after Scottish
royalists had transferred their worship to such clay idols as George IV.
In my youth, indeed, there were still Perthshire men who spoke more or
less heartily of the Hanoverian “usurpers.” I myself was brought up in a
touch of the same sentiment, though that my father’s Jacobitism went not
very deep appeared from the gusto with which he used to tell the tale of
his translating to a lady the inscription on the monument at St. Peter’s
dedicated by King George to the “last of the Stuarts,” whereupon a
Yankee standing by put in the remark, “I guess George was right smart to
say it was the _last_ of them!” Lady Nairne’s hereditary feeling for the
Stuarts might not perhaps have endured the test of experience; she was a
devout Protestant, and in her old age showed sympathy with the Free
Church movement, which is the antipodes of Jacobitism. So modest was
she,
[Illustration: A WILD SPOT, KILLIN, PERTHSHIRE]
that for the greater part of her life, her neighbours, and her own
husband, were not aware of her hand in the songs which had crept into
wide popularity. It was taken for granted that Burns must be the author
of her noblest strain, the “Land o’ the Leal,” better known than
understood, as we remember from Mr. Gladstone’s blunder in confusing
heaven and Scotland. “The Laird o’ Cockpen,” “Caller Herrin’,” “Will ye
no come back again?” are other favourites among her songs, grave and
gay; but her most recurrent theme was that glorified memory that, like
Queen Mary’s, can wing a sentiment to pierce the joints of Scotland’s
logical armour,--
Charlie is my darling,
The young Chevalier!
Most charming are the walks by the Highland streams that at Crieff fall
into the Earn; and tempting the longer excursions on which brakes carry
off sociable parties from the Hydropathic. The railway takes us on up
Strathearn to Comrie, a still more beautiful resort lying on a rich
plain between the wooded heights of Glen Lednock and “lone Glenartney’s
hazel shade,” by which one might tramp across to Callander, from the
basin of the Tay into that of the Forth. A prosaic critic observes that
there is no hazel shade in this glen; but the poet always declined to
“swear to the truth of a song.” There is no spot in Scotland that so
well unites lush Lowland charms with rugged features as Comrie; and it
prides itself on being the only spot in Britain troubled by earthquakes,
several slight shocks sometimes being felt in a year, which may bring a
stone wall tumbling down, while scaring wild fowl, making the trout
leap in the burns, fluttering the poultry yard and rattling the plates
in the goodwife’s kitchen.
A few miles higher up, the Earn debouches from its Loch at St. Fillans,
near which “the stag at eve had drunk his fill” before being roused by
Fitz-James’s hounds. I once made his day’s course mainly on foot, but by
a more arduous line over the top of Ben Voirlich, and moreover without
any breakfast till I came upon a shepherd’s shanty in the afternoon;
then instead of being welcomed at eve by any Lady of the Lake, I found
every bed full at the Trossachs Hotel, as may often be the lot of weary
wight in this much-toured district. Loch Earn, hitherto a quiet
backwater in the stream of travel, has lately been thrown open by a
railway, at its head bringing one to the Oban line from Callander, whose
lights are now the fiery cross that “glance like lightning up
Strath-Ire.”
In the other direction, a road from Crieff goes by the Sma’ Glen to
Dunkeld, the gate of the mountains for the Highland Railway. This
resort, as tourists know, is a kind of Perthshire Buda-Pesth, the old
town of Dunkeld being on the left bank of the Tay, while the station is
at Birnam on the other side. Village seems a fitter title for Dunkeld
than town, yet it might claim to be a city in right of its Cathedral,
whose choir is still the parish church. This is an ancient sanctuary to
which in part was transplanted the influence of ruined Iona. Gavin
Douglas, the translator of Virgil, was bishop here, but came to die of
the plague in London. With Dunkeld also is connected the memory of Neil
Gow, first of three generations of fiddlers who for Scotland’s artless
tunes did what Burns, Lady Nairne, and other writers did for its
songs.
[Illustration: THE FALLS OF TUMMEL, PERTHSHIRE]
The Cathedral, as well as the Falls of Braan, the Rumbling Bridge and
other lions are in the grounds of the Duke of Atholl, _the_ Duke of this
part of the world. The Duke of fifty years ago was a “character” who
might be styled the last of the great Highland chiefs. This generation
may have forgotten the sensation caused by his trying to shut the way
through Glen Tilt, and his personal encounter with two Cambridge
undergraduates, who got the best of the scrimmage. Among Leech’s most
effective sketches in _Punch_ were that “Ducal Dog in the Manger” and
the cartoon in which His Grace appeared playing the part of Roderick Dhu
to the young Sassenachs. It was said that the Duke took his revenge on
the artist by inviting him to shoot, the highest honour that can be
hoped for in that part of the world; and in the end the pass was opened
by a chieftain “so late dishonoured and defied.”
Since his day the champion obstructionist of this district was the
veteran Sir Robert Menzies, who lately died much respected in the
Rannoch country, in spite of an extraordinary itch for litigation, with
his own family as well as with strangers. His most famous “ganging law
plea” perhaps was with a railway company that, by the hands of
half-a-dozen porters, had dragged the chieftain out of a carriage in
which his ticket did not entitle him to ride. The fate of a reverend
English tourist who landed from Loch Rannoch on his grounds was told
with a shudder; and I must be thankful for my own escape when caught in
the act of more than barefaced trespass in bounds where stranger was not
always “a holy name.” With a friend of mine, in our hot youth, I had
gone in to swim, when on the lake bank we heard a stern voice and
looked back to see Sir Robert’s tartans waving over our clothes. Thus
“at advantage ta’en,”
I dare not say that now _our_ blood
Kept on its wont and tempered flood
But the “dangerous chief,” seeing nothing in our Arcadian innocence to
chafe his mood or cloud his brow, turned off with a courteous
salutation--“Doubt not aught from mine array!”--and the sun’s next
glance shone “on bracken green and cold grey stone.”
Across the Tay from Dunkeld, in the old duke’s time, reigned an
eccentric laird, to whose taste for building are due the baronial Birnam
Hotel and other costly structures in the neighbourhood. Mrs. Oliphant
hangs the scenes of a novel about his own empty and unfinished mansion;
and the chief building among the woods of Murthly is now an Asylum. As
for Birnam Wood, that has long marched off the face of the earth, to
bear out the truth of Shakespeare’s legend; but one or two ancient trees
are pointed out as stragglers. Birnam was a favourite haunt of Millais,
a keen sportsman as well as lover of the scenery which forms oases in
the later stage of his art, when he seemed too much concerned to boil
that large pot in Palace Gate.
From Dunkeld it is easy to reach the heart of the Highlands. A dozen
miles of the high road takes us up to hill-girdled Pitlochrie, and
through that pass where Dundee was shot, as pious souls whispered, with
a silver bullet, while his claymores sheared down the Lowland soldiers,
whose prudent leader, himself from the farthest north, gained in defeat
the lesson to invent a more adaptable
[Illustration: DUNKELD AND BIRNAM FROM CRAIGIEBARNS, PERTHSHIRE]
bayonet. So terrifying seemed long this Pass of Killiecrankie that a
body of Hessian soldiers, brought over in the ’45, are said to have
flatly refused to march through it. But as usual, the victorious onrush
at Killiecrankie did not carry the tartans far. They were checked at
Dunkeld, dourly defended against them by troops of sternest temper, that
Cameronian regiment raised among the most stubborn Whigs, who here had
their baptism of fire and their chance of wreaking vengeance for bitter
memories of Claverhouse. Their colonel, Cleland, fell in this fight with
the barelegged foes he had satirised in verse bristling with scornful
hatred of the “Highland host” brought down as a scourge for the
west-country Covenanters. “They need not strip them when they whip
them!” the Presbyterian poet exclaims like any ribald Cockney, and goes
on to hint how the upper garments of such gallows-birds would not be
worth the hangman’s fees. So little love was lost between kindly Scots
of those days, on opposite sides of the Highland line!
Cleland is buried in Dunkeld Cathedral, where Sir John Steell’s modern
monument to officers of the 42nd reminds us how this Perthshire regiment
was first embodied in the Dunkeld district about half a century after
the Revolution, having its origin as the Black Watch, so called from
their dark tartans as distinguished from the _sidier roy_, red soldier.
They were originally raised to keep the peace on the Highland line, much
as Parfidio Diaz has in our day put down the brigands of Mexico by
enlisting the survivors as Rural Guards; but it would be too much to say
that such a loyal and brave corps was made out of the leavings of that
kind gallows of Crieff. Some of the private soldiers held themselves so
proudly, that when a party was brought to show their exercise before
George II. and the king ordered them to be tipped with a guinea apiece,
each man, it is told, re-bestowed this donation upon the palace porter.
Their tartan is a neutral one, forming the groundwork of several others,
for time was when no Macpherson would don the hated trappings of the
MacTavish. War Office arrangements have played havoc with this sentiment
by sometimes redistributing the territorial corps in red-tape bundles;
some years ago a Ross-shire militia battalion tacked on to the Cameron
Highlanders--not to be confused with the west-country Cameronian
regiment--was said not to have a single Cameron in the ranks, a change
from days when Sandy MacDonalds or John Campbells had to be numbered in
the kindred ranks like a long line of kings. The good discipline as well
as the prowess of Highland soldiers was remarkable in early days, men of
the same name and birthplace keeping up each other’s _esprit de corps_,
and no praise or punishment being more effectual than the thought of
what might be posted as to a man’s conduct on the door of his parish
church.
The raising of Highland regiments, indeed, was sometimes carried on
after the methods of the press-gang, or by landlords putting pressure on
tenants who might be fathers of stout sons. There is a story of
half-a-dozen brawny Celts tied neck and heels in a cart as recruits for
the Laird of Macnab’s “Volunteers”; and clansmen have been hunted down
in the mountains when they refused to follow the modern fiery cross.
There
[Illustration: A WOODED GORGE, KILLIN, PERTHSHIRE]
would be many a tragic tale of desertion like that of the “Highland
Widow,” especially when English martinets added pipe-clay to Highland
accoutrements. But active lads were seldom backward to follow chief or
laird leading them to war; then
Bring a Scotsman frae his hill,
Clap in his cheek a Highland gill,
Say, “Such is royal George’s will,
And there’s the foe!”
He has nae thought but how to kill
Twa at a blow.
As in the instance of the Cameronians, all Scottish regiments do not
wear the kilt; and of those who do, but few men are to this manner born
in our generation. Alphonse Daudet puts his little hero “Jack” into a
kilt under the title of _costume anglaise_, which is no more absurd than
the way in which English writers speak of this as the “Scottish dress.”
There are even Highland Celts whose ancestors never wore it; and in its
palmy days the kilt was the “servile dress” of clansmen, whose chiefs as
a rule went in trews. Now it is affected rather by the upper class; and
the soldiers who swagger so jauntily in tartans are more like to have
grown up in corduroy breeks. But for this fact, I should have laid down,
as warning to strangers, that the “garb of Old Gaul” cannot be donned to
advantage without youthful familiarity. The wearing of such a costume,
indeed, needs some practice. A Highland battalion of trews stationed at
Southsea became adopted into a kilted regiment some twenty years ago,
when a corporal and file of men were detached from the latter as
instructors for the neophytes how to carry their new honours
unblushingly, so as forthwith to be christened the “South Sea Islanders”
by an _h_-less populace. The London Scottish Volunteers should wear the
kilt by right of having Highland blood or Highland property; and it is
enviously whispered that their qualification in most cases may be the
possession of a tartan paper-knife.
It is, of course, the prowess of our Highland regiments that has made
their dress as dear in Scotland as once over half of it this was hated
and despised. The tartans are dyed by the blood of a hundred
battlefields, as by memories of green braes and purple moors. Crude and
_criant_ may be some of their colourings, but not more so than is the
tricolour or the Union Jack. Even if the kilt in its present form were
more or less a modern invention, it is at least older than the Stars and
Stripes, and we know what passionate loyalty that gaudy pattern can call
forth. The other day, I forgathered with a Lowland Seaforth Highlander,
fresh from South Africa, to whom I communicated a report that the War
Office thought of putting him into trousers. “They daren’t!” he cried,
his eye ablaze with all the fire of Killiecrankie, where his progenitor
might have chosen for the nonce to be equipped in the lightest running
costume.
Strange how the Celtic leaven rises in the stodgy composition of British
nature! What is this infectious quality it has? We are Saxons in
business, and well for us it is so; but in hours of ease and sentiment
we hark back to the race older on our mother earth. English settlers in
Ireland notoriously become _Hibernis Hiberniores ipsis_. English workmen
in Welsh quarries, it is said,
[Illustration: LOOKING UP THE PASS OF KILLIECRANKIE, PERTHSHIRE]
learn to speak Welsh rather than their comrades English. In the long run
the stolid Teuton grows to be proud of his lighter strain. I who write
can trace my descent with unusual clearness back to a Norman adventurer
whose progeny appears to have settled for a time in the Breadalbane
Highlands, but long ago came down to opener straths--
The mountain sheep were sweeter,
But the valley sheep were fatter.
The alliances of my kin were for generations with the English-speaking
Lowlands, where their neighbours had cause to look on the wild
Highlandmen as an American backwoodsman looked on Mohawk or Shawnee
warrior. My forebears “had no use for” kilts, if some perhaps for dirks
and claymores. I know of only one recent strain of Highland blood, and
that at second hand through England, to make me a Celtic quadroon, so to
speak. Yet there is many a Scot, with no more claim to Highland lineage
than mine, who cannot see the tartan even in a Princes Street
shop-window, or hear the pibroch wailing over forgotten graves of his
father’s foes, without a certain stir of spirit which a biological
philosopher might explain as waves of molecular disturbance propagated
through the nerve centres by vague emotional combinations organised in
the earlier experiences of the race. Boswell confessed to the same
weakness, and what had he to do with the Highlands?
Where were we before launching forth into such a chequered digression on
the “lad wi’ the philabeg”? In the Atholl country, by Loch “Tummel and
banks of the Garry.” Above the Pass of Killiecrankie, the pedestrian
who does not shun a thirty-miles walk to Braemar may turn off through
Glen Tilt, with its gloomy gorges and snowy falls. But the coach-road to
the Cairngorm Highlands goes from Dunkeld to Blairgowrie, then northward
by the Spittal of Glenshee, the highest highway in Britain, at one point
over 2000 feet, whose “Spittal” was a Hospital or Hospice that made a
Highland St. Bernard’s. I once sought to hire a horse at an inn on this
road, but the landlord explained how it had gone off with “a man called
Morell Mackenzie, who seemed in an awfu’ hurry.” That locally unknown
celebrity was in haste to an illustrious patient on Deeside, an errand
that would breed much bad blood in another country.
The first stage of the journey is lowland rather than highland, its
chief feature being a chain of small lochs, stocked with perch, on one
of which stands Cluny Castle, cradle of the “Admirable Crichton.”
Blairgowrie, with Rattray for its tiny Westminster, rivals Crieff as the
second town in Perthshire, but is not so much a place of resort, laying
itself out rather as an understudy of Dundee by its flax-spinning mills
on the Ericht; and it seems a miniature of that longest and busiest of
towns, the German Elberfeld strung out along the Wupper valley. Wildly
romantic still is the walk up the Ericht, whose shaded pools and rapids,
above the town, come down through a grand gorge overlooked by Craighall,
one of several candidates for the honour of having sat to Scott as
“Tullyveolan.” From this gap in the Highland line a short branch puts us
on the main line of the Caledonian Railway, which competes with the
North British as route to Aberdeen.
[Illustration: KILLIN, HEAD OF LOCH TAY, PERTHSHIRE]
Other Caledonian branches lead off to charming glens on the old Highland
line, now facing east towards the lowlands of Forfar and Kincardine. But
of Alyth, Edzell, Lochee, one need only say that they lie among sweet
and noble scenes as well worth visiting as others better known to
tourist fame, and that even prosaic Kirriemuir, Mr. Barrie’s “Thrums,”
is a base for long moorland tramps into Deeside, over a part of the
Highlands as yet innocent of railways.