fume towards a wharf, and an inn, with an unpronounceable name, at
the farther end. The lake does not increase in beauty as you
proceed. All its charms are congregated at the mouth of the
Trosachs, and the upper reaches are bare, desolate, and
uninteresting. You soon reach the wharf, and after your natural rage
at a toll of twopence exacted from you on landing has subsided, and
you have had a snack of something at the inn, you start on the wild
mountain road towards Inversneyd. The aspect of the country has now
changed. The hills around are bare and sterile, brown streams gurgle
down their fissures, the long yellow ribbon of road runs away before
you, dipping out of sight sometimes, and reappearing afar. You pass
a turf hut, and your nostrils are invaded by a waft of peat reek
which sets you coughing, and brings the tears into your eyes; and the
juvenile natives eye you askance, and wear the airiest form of the
national attire. In truth, there is not a finer bit of Highland road
to be found anywhere than that which runs between the inn--which,
like the Russian heroes in "Don Juan," might be immortal if the name
of it could be pronounced by human organs--and the hotel at
Inversneyd. When you have travelled some three miles, the scenery
improves, the hills rise into nobler forms with misty wreaths about
them, and as you pursue your journey a torrent becomes your
companion. Presently, a ruin rises on the hill-side, the nettles
growing on its melancholy walls. It is the old fort of Inversneyd,
built in King William's time to awe the turbulent clans. Nothing can
be more desolate than its aspect. Sunshine seems to mock it; it is
native and endued into its element when wrapt in mist, or pelted by
the wintry rain. Passing the old stone-and-lime mendicant on the
hill-side--by the way, Tradition mumbles something about General
Wolfe having been stationed there at the beginning of his military
career--you descend rapidly on Loch Lomond and Inversneyd. The road
by this time has become another Pass of Leny: on either side the
hills approach, the torrent roars down in a chain of cataracts, and,
in a spirit of bravado, takes its proudest leap at the last. Quite
close to the fall is the hotel; and on the frail timber bridge that
overhangs the cataract, you can see groups of picturesque-hunters,
the ladies gracefully timid, the gentlemen gallant and reassuring.
Inversneyd is beautiful, and it possesses an added charm in being the
scene of one of Wordsworth's poems; and he who has stood on the crazy
bridge, and watched the flash and thunder of the stream beneath him,
and gazed on the lake surrounded by mountains, will ever after retain
the picture in remembrance, although to him there should not have
been vouchsafed the vision of the "Highland Girl." A steamer picks
you up at Inversneyd, and slides down Loch Lomond with you to Tarbet,
a village sleeping in very presence of the mighty Ben, whose forehead
is almost always bound with a cloudy handkerchief. Although the loch
is finer higher up, where it narrows toward Glen Falloch--more
magnificent lower down, where it widens, many-isled, toward
Balloch--it is by no means to be despised at Tarbet. Each bay and
promontory wears its peculiar charm; and if the scenery does not
astonish, it satisfies. Tarbet can boast, too, of an excellent inn,
in which, if the traveller be wise, he will, for one night at least,
luxuriously take his ease.
[Sidenote: The "Cobbler".]
Up betimes next morning, you are on the beautiful road which runs
between Tarbet and Arrochar, and begin, through broken, white
upstreaming mists, to make acquaintance with the "Cobbler" and some
other peaks of that rolling country to which Celtic facetiousness has
given the name of "The Duke of Argyle's Bowling-green." Escaping
from the birches that line the road, and descending on Arrochar and
Loch Long, you can leisurely inspect the proportions of the mountain
Crispin. He is a gruesome carle, and inhospitable to strangers. He
does not wish to be intruded upon--is a very hermit, in fact; for
when, after wild waste of breath and cuticle, a daring mortal climbs
up to him, anxious to be introduced, behold he has slipped his cable,
and is nowhere to be seen. And it does not improve the temper of the
climber that, when down again, and casting up his eyes, he discovers
the rocky figure sitting in his accustomed place. The Cobbler's Wife
sits a little way off--an ancient dame, to the full as withered in
appearance as her husband, and as difficult of access. They dwell in
tolerable amity the twain, but when they do quarrel it is something
tremendous! The whole county knows when a tiff is in progress. The
sky darkens above them. The Cobbler frowns black as midnight. His
Wife sits sulking in the mist. His Wife's conduct aggravates the
Cobbler--who is naturally of a peppery temper--and he gives vent to a
discontented growl. Nothing loath, and to the full as irascible as
her spouse, his Wife spits back fire upon him. The row begins. They
flash at one another in the savagest manner, scolding all the while
in the grandest Billingsgate. Everything listens to them for twenty
miles round. At last the Wife gives in, and falls to downright
weeping, the crusty old fellow sending a shot into her at intervals.
She cries, and he grumbles, into the night. Peace seems to have been
restored somehow when everybody is asleep; for next morning the
Cobbler has renewed his youth. He shines in the sun like a very
bridegroom, not a frown on the old countenance of him, and his Wife
opposite, the tears hardly dried upon her face yet, smiles upon him
through her prettiest head-dress of mist; and for the next six weeks
they enjoy as bright, unclouded weather as husband and wife can
expect in a world where everything is imperfect.
[Sidenote: Glencroe.]
You leave the little village of Arrochar, trudge round the head of
Loch Long, and proceeding downward, along the opposite shore, and
skirting the base of the Cobbler, strike for the opening of Glencroe,
on your road to Inverary. Glencoe is to the other Highland glens
what Tennyson is to contemporary British poets. If Glencoe did not
exist, Glencroe would be famous. It is several miles long, lonely,
sterile, and desolate. A stream rages down the hollow, fed by
tributary burns that dash from the receding mountain-tops. The
hill-sides are rough with boulders, as a sea-rock is rough with
limpets. Showers cross the path a dozen times during the finest day.
As you go along, the glen is dappled with cloud-shadows; you hear the
bleating of unseen sheep, and the chances are, that, in travelling
along its whole extent, opportunity will not be granted you of
bidding "good-morrow" to a single soul. If you are a murderer, you
could shout out your secret here, and no one be a bit the wiser. At
the head of the glen the road becomes exceedingly steep; and as you
pant up the incline, you hail the appearance of a stone seat bearing
the welcome motto, "Rest, and be thankful." You rest, and are
thankful. This seat was erected by General Wade while engaged in his
great work of Highland road-making; and so long as it exists the
General will be remembered--and Earl Russell too. At this point the
rough breast of a hill rises in front, dividing the road; the path to
the left runs away down into the barren and solitary Hell's Glen, in
haste to reach Loch Goil; the other to the right leads through bare
Glen Arkinglass, to St Catherine's, and the shore of Loch Fyne, at
which point you arrive after a lonely walk of two hours.
[Sidenote: John Campbell.]
The only thing likely to interest the stranger at the little hostelry
of St Catherine's is John Campbell, the proprietor of the same, and
driver of the coach from the inn to the steamboat wharf at Loch Goil.
John has a presentable person and a sagacious countenance; his gray
eyes are the homes of humour and shrewdness; and when seated on the
box, he flicks his horses and manages the ribbons to admiration. He
is a good story-teller, and he knows it. He has not started on his
journey a hundred yards when, from something or another, he finds you
occasion for a story, which is sure to produce a roar of laughter
from those alongside of, and behind, him. Encouraged by success,
John absolutely coruscates, anecdote follows anecdote as flash of
sheet-lightning succeeds flash of sheet-lightning on a summer night;
and by the time he is half-way, he is implored to desist by some
sufferer whose midriff he has convulsed. John is naturally a
humorist; and as every summer and autumn the Highlands are overrun
with tourists, he, from St Catherine's to Loch Goil, surveys mankind
with extensive view. In his time he has talked with most of our
famous men, and can reproduce their tones to perfection. It is
curious to notice how literary and political greatness picture
themselves in the eyes of a Highland coachman! The lion who
entrances the _soirées_ has his mane clipped. For John Campbell,
cliques and coteries, and the big guns of the reviews, exist not. To
him Fame speaks in Gaelic, and concerns herself mainly with sheep and
black cattle. What is the good of being a distinguished novelist if
you cannot swallow a glass of bitters of a morning? John will
distinguish between Tupper and Tennyson, and instruct you which is
the better man, but he will draw his conclusions from their "tips"
rather than from their poetry. He will agree with you that Lord
Palmerston is a distinguished individual; but while you are thinking
of the Premier's statesmanship, he is thinking of the Premier's
jauntiness on the morning he had the honour of driving him. John's
ideas of public men, although arrived at after a curious fashion, are
pretty generally correct. Every one who tarries at St Catherine's
should get himself driven across to Loch Goil by John Campbell, and
should take pains to procure a seat on the box beside him. When he
returns to the south, he can relate over again the stories he hears,
and make himself the hero of them. The thing has been done before,
and will be again.
[Sidenote: Inverary.]
A small wash-tub of a steamer carries you across Loch Fyne to
Inverary in an hour. Arriving, you find the capital of the West
Highlands a rather pretty place, with excellent inns, several
churches, a fine bay, a ducal residence, a striking conical
hill--Duniquoich the barbarous name of it--wooded to the chin, and
with an ancient watch-tower perched on its bald crown. The chief
seat of the Argyles cannot boast of much architectural beauty, being
a square building with pepper-box-looking towers stuck on the
corners. The grounds are charming, containing fine timber, winding
walks, stately avenues, gardens, and through all, spanned by several
bridges, the Airy bubbles sweetly to the sea. Scott is here. If the
"Lady of the Lake" rings in your ears at the Trosachs, the "Legend of
Montrose" haunts you at Inverary. Every footstep of ground is
hallowed by that noble romance. It is the best guide-book to the
place. No tourist should leave Inverary before he ascends
Duniquoich--no very difficult task either, for a path winds round and
round it. When you emerge from the woods beside the watch-tower on
the summit, Inverary, far beneath, has dwindled to a toy town--not a
sound is in the streets; unheard the steamer roaring at the wharf,
and urging dilatory passengers to haste by the clashes of an angry
bell. Along the shore nets stretched from pole to pole wave in the
drying wind. The great boatless blue loch stretches away flat as a
ballroom floor; and the eye wearies in its flight over endless miles
of brown moor and mountain. Turn your back on the town, and gaze
towards the north! It is still "a far cry to Loch Awe," and a
wilderness of mountain peaks tower up between you and that noblest of
Scottish lakes!--of all colours too--green with pasture, brown with
moorland, touched with the coming purple of the heather, black with a
thunder-cloud of pines. What a region to watch the sun go down upon!
But for that you cannot wait; for to-day you lunch at Cladich, dine
at Dalmally, and sleep in the neighbourhood of Kilchurn--in the
immediate presence of Ben Cruachan.
[Sidenote: Kilchurn Castle.]
A noble vision of mountains is to be obtained from the road above
Cladich. Dalmally is a very paradise of a Highland inn,--quiet,
sequestered, begirt with the majesty and the silence of mountains,--a
place where a world-weary man may soothe back into healthful motion
jarred pulse and brain; a delicious nest for a happy pair to waste
the honeymoon in. Dalmally stands on the shores of Loch Awe, and in
the immediate vicinity of Kilchurn Castle and Ben Cruachan. The
castle is picturesque enough to please the eye of the
landscape-painter, and large enough to impress the visitor with a
sense of baronial grandeur. And it is ancient enough, and fortunate
enough too--for to that age does not always attain--to have legends
growing upon its walls like the golden lichens or the darksome ivies.
The vast shell of a building looks strangely impressive standing
there, mirrored in summer waters, with the great mountain looking
down on it. It was built, it is said, by a lady in the Crusade
times, when her lord was battling with the infidel. The most prosaic
man gazing on a ruin becomes a poet for the time being. You
incontinently sit down, and think how, in the old pile, life went on
for generations--how children were born and grew up there--how brides
were brought home there, the bridal blushes yet on their cheeks--how
old men died there, and had by filial fingers their eyes closed, as
blinds are drawn down on the windows of an empty house, and the
withered hands crossed decently upon the breasts that will heave no
more with any passion. The yule fires, and the feast fires that
blazed on the old hearths have gone out now. The arrow of the foeman
seeks no longer the window slit. To day and night, to winter and
summer, Kilchurn stands empty as a skull; yet with no harshness about
it; possessed rather of a composed and decent beauty--reminding you
of a good man's grave, with the number of his ripe years, and the
catalogue of his virtues chiselled on the stone above him: telling of
work faithfully done, and of the rest that follows, for which all the
weary pine.
[Sidenote: Loch Awe.]
Ben Cruachan, if not the monarch of Scottish mountains, is, at all
events, one of the princes of the blood. He is privileged to wear a
snow-wreath in presence of the sun at his midsummer levee, and like a
prince he wears it on the rough breast of him. Ben Cruachan is seen
from afar: is difficult to climb, and slopes slowly down to the sea
level, his base being twenty miles in girth, it is said. From Ben
Cruachan and Kilchurn, Loch Awe, bedropt with wooded islands,
stretches Obanwards, presenting in its course every variety of
scenery. Now the loch spreads like a sea, now it shrinks to a rapid
river--now the banks are wooded like the Trosachs, now they are bare
as the "Screes" at Wastwater; and consider as you walk along what
freaks light and shade are playing every moment--how shadows,
hundred-armed, creep along the mountain-side--how the wet rock
sparkles like a diamond, and then goes out--how the sunbeam slides
along a belt of pines--and how, a slave to the sun, the lake quivers
in light around her islands when he is unobscured, and wears his
sable colours when a cloud is on his face. On your way to Oban there
are many places worth seeing: Loch Etive, with its immemorial pines,
beloved by Professor Wilson; Bunawe, Taynult, Connel Ferry, with its
sea view and salt-water cataract; and Dunstaffnage Castle, once a
royal residence, and from which the stone was taken which is placed
beneath the coronation chair at Westminster. And so, if the whole
journey from Inverary is performed on foot, Luna will light the
traveller into Oban.
_OBAN._
[Sidenote: Oban.]
Oban, which, during winter, is a town of deserted hotels, begins to
get busy by the end of June. Yachts skim about in the little bay;
steamers, deep-sea and coasting, are continually arriving and
departing; vehicles rattle about in the one broad, and the many
narrow streets; and in the inns, boots, chamber-maid, and waiter are
distracted with the clangour of innumerable bells. Out of doors,
Oban is not a bad representation of Vanity Fair. Every variety of
pleasure-seeker is to be found there, and every variety of costume.
Reading parties from Oxford lounge about, smoke, stare into the small
shop windows, and consult "Black's Guide." Beauty, in light attire,
perambulates the principal street, and taciturn Valour in mufti
accompanies her. Sportsmen in knickerbockers stand in groups at the
hotel doors; Frenchmen chatter and shrug their shoulders; stolid
Germans smoke curiously-curved meerschaum pipes; and individuals who
have not a drop of Highland blood in their veins flutter about in the
garb of the Gael, "a hundredweight of cairngorms throwing a prismatic
glory around their persons." All kinds of people, and all kinds of
sounds are there. From the next street the tones of the bagpipe come
on the ear; tipsy porters abuse each other in Gaelic. Round the
corner the mail comes rattling from Fort William, the passengers
clustering on its roof; from the pier the bell of the departing
steamer urges passengers to make haste; and passengers who have lost
their luggage rush about, shout, gesticulate, and not unfrequently
come into fierce personal collision with one of the tipsy porters
aforesaid. A more hurried, nervous, frenzied place than Oban, during
the summer and autumn months, it is difficult to conceive. People
seldom stay there above a night. The old familiar faces are the
resident population. The tourist no more thinks of spending a week
in Oban than he thinks of spending a week in a railway station. When
he arrives his first question is after a bedroom; his second, as to
the hour at which the steamer from the south is expected.
And the steamer, be it said, does not always arrive at a reasonable
hour. She may be detained some time at Greenock; in dirty weather
she may be "on" the Mull of Cantyre all night, buffeted by the big
Atlantic there; so that he must be a bold man, or a man gifted with
the second sight, who ventures anything but a vague guess as to the
hour of her arrival at Oban. And the weather _is_ dirty; the panes
are blurred with raindrops; outside one beholds an uncomfortable
sodden world, a spongy sky above, and midway, a gull sliding sideways
through the murky atmosphere. The streets are as empty now as they
will be some months hence. Beauty is in her own room crying over
"Enoch Arden," and Valour, taciturn as ever, is in the smoking
saloon. The Oxford reading party--which, under the circumstances,
has not the slightest interest in Plato--attempts, with no great
success, to kill the time by playing at pitch-and-toss. The
gentlemen in the Highland dress remain indoors--birds with fine
feathers do not wish to have them draggled--and the philabeg and an
umbrella would be a combination quite too ridiculous. The tipsy
porter is for the time silent; but from the next street the bagpipe
grows in volume and torture. How the sound of it pains the nervous
ear of a man half-maddened by a non-arriving steamer and a rainy day
at Oban! Heavily the hours creep on; and at last the _Clansman_ does
steam in with wet decks--thoroughly washed by Atlantic brine last
night--and her hundred and fifty passengers, two-thirds of whom are
sea-sick.
I do not, however, proceed with the _Clansman_. I am waited for at
Inverness; and so, when the weather has cleared, on a lovely morning,
I am chasing the flying dazzle of the sun up the lovely Linnhe Loch;
past hills that come out on one and recede; past shores that
continually shift and change; and am at length set down at Fort
William in the shadow of Ben Nevis.
When a man goes to Caprera, he, as a matter of course, brings a
letter of introduction to Garibaldi--when I went to Fort William, I,
equally as a matter of course, brought a letter of introduction to
Long John. This gentleman, the distiller of the place, was the
tallest man I ever beheld out of an exhibition--whence his familiar
_sobriquet_--and must, in his youth, have been of incomparable
physique. The German nation has not yet decided whether Goethe or
Schiller is the greater poet--the Highlander has not yet decided
whether "Long John" or "Talisker" is the finer spirit. I presented
my letter and was received with the hospitality and courteous grace
so characteristic of the old Gael. He is gone now, the happy-hearted
Hercules--gone like one of his own drams! His son distils in his
stead--but he must feel that he is treading in the footsteps of a
greater man. The machinery is the same, the malt is of quality as
fine, but he will never produce whisky like him who is no more. The
text is the same, but Charles Kean's Hamlet will never be like his
father's.
I saw Inverlochy Castle, and thought of the craven Argyle, the
gallant Montrose, the slaughtered Campbells. I walked up Glen Nevis;
and then, one summer morning, I drove over to Bannavie, stepped on
board a steamer, and was soon in the middle of the beautiful Loch
Lochy.
[Sidenote: Culloden.]
And what a day and what a sail that was! What a cloudless sky above!
What lights and shadows as we went! On Fort Augustus we descended by
a staircase of locks, and while there I spent half an hour in the
museum of Roualeyn Gordon-Cumming. We then entered Loch
Ness--stopped for a space to visit the Fall of Foyers, which, from
scarcity of water, looked "seedy" as a moulting peacock; saw further
on, and on the opposite shore, a promontory run out into the lake
like an arm, and the vast ruin of Castle Urquhart at the end of it
like a clenched fist--menacing all and sundry. Then we went on to
Inverness, where I found my friend Fellowes, who for some time back
had been amusing himself in that pleasant Highland town reading law.
We drove out to Culloden, and stood on the moor at sunset. Here the
butcher Cumberland trod out romance. Here one felt a Jacobite and a
Roman Catholic. The air seemed scented by the fumes of
altar-incense, by the burning of pastiles. The White Rose was torn
and scattered, but its leaves had not yet lost their odours. "I
should rather have died," I said, "like that wild chief who, when his
clan would not follow him, burst into tears at the ingratitude of his
children, and charged alone on the English bayonets, than like any
other man of whom I have read in history."
"He wore the sole pair of brogues in the possession of his tribe,"
said my companion. "I should rather have died like Salkeld at the
blowing in of the Delhi gate."
_SKYE AT LAST._