quarters with the mountains, where it winds up to a rugged face of woods
and grouse moors, then under Rohallion joins the river and the railway
in the pass of Birnam, guarded by the village city of Dunkeld. Here we
leave the valley of Strathmore to enter one of the famous Highland
gates, at the mouth of which a watery hollow called the Stare-dam was
long a place of dread to wild mountaineers, for whom its “Hanged Men’s
Trees” made such a warning as did the “kind gallows” of Crieff.
Of Dunkeld, the Highland border town, I gave account in _Bonnie
Scotland_, so that here I will rather repeat what has been said about it
by others. The Rev. Prebendary Gilpin, that original of _Dr. Syntax in
search of the Picturesque_, who had found Arthur’s Seat “odd, misshapen
and uncouth,” unpleasing from every point of view, except that the
streets of London had been paved out of its quarries, this severe critic
is more gracious to Dunkeld, where “the wild unshapely desert begins to
separate into parts, and form itself into hills, hung with wood and
broken with rock.” He can find no fault with the Tay, here “broad, deep
and silent,” nor with “the grand screen of mountains” encircling it; and
our generation is not much concerned with his criticism that it will
take a century for the woods to grow up so as “to give a proper degree
of sylvan richness to the scene.” Since then the woods have had time to
clothe this fine amphitheatre, some inaccessible crag faces having been
planted by the device of firing canisters filled with seeds against them
from a cannon. Mr. Gilpin goes so far as to applaud Nature’s efforts in
the side ravine of the Braan, though he shakes his head over the duke’s
“improvements,” such as often caused so much division of opinion among
those pundits of the picturesque. He agrees with our taste in condemning
the “Claud Lorraine glasses” and other optical devices with which the
Hermitage at the Falls of Braan was furnished, being “apt to believe
that Nature has given us a better apparatus for viewing objects in a
picturesque light than any the optician can furnish.” Also he shows very
proper disgust on coming, among the sights of this demesne, upon a
hollow in the rock with an inscription recording the names of a set of
gentlemen who, on such and such a date, had drunk it full of punch.
But when from Dunkeld he takes his way on up Strath Tay, this
Aristarchus almost forgets to be critical of scenes that “call aloud for
the pencil.” The poet Gray, one of the earliest appreciative visitors to
the Highlands, was not less admiring, though he gives a more
matter-of-fact account of a “road winding through beautiful woods, with
the Tay almost always in full view to the right, being here from three
to four hundred feet over. The Strath-Tay, from a mile to three miles or
more wide, covered with corn and spotted with groups of people then in
the midst of their harvest. On either hand a vast chain of rocky
mountains, that changed their face and opened something new every
hundred yards, as the way turned or the cloud passed: in short,
altogether it was one of the most pleasing days I have passed these many
years.” Then, before leaving Atholl, he would exclaim, “Since I saw the
Alps, I have seen nothing sublime till now!” And of the Highlands in
general this precursor of the next century exclaims: “A fig for your
poets, painters, gardeners and clergymen that have not been among them;
their imagination can be made up of nothing but bowling-greens,
flowering shrubs, horse-ponds, Fleet ditches, shell-grottoes and Chinese
rails!”
Many a visitor of our day, weather permitting, gets here from coach or
rail a general impression of “nothing but sunshine and fresh breezes,
and bleating lambs, and clean tartans.” To go behind this fair scenery,
set as if for the joy of poets and painters, we might turn up some burn
into the rough background, and look through Ruskin’s eyes at nooks
easily coloured by his “pathetic fallacy”; he knew the Highlands as not
all filled by tourists, sportsmen, and prosperous sheep-farmers.
A Highland scene is, beyond dispute, pleasant enough in its own
way; but, looked close at, has its shadows. Here, for instance, is
the very fact of one, as pretty as I can remember--having seen
many. It is a little valley of soft turf, enclosed in its narrow
oval by jutting rocks and broad flakes of nodding fern. From one
side of it to the other winds, serpentine, a clear brown stream,
dropping into quicker ripple as it reaches the end of the oval
field, and then, first islanding a purple and white rock with an
amber pool, it dashes away into a narrow fall of foam under a
thicket of mountain-ash and alder. The autumn sun, low, but clear,
shines on the scarlet ash-berries and on the golden birch-leaves,
which, fallen here and there, when the breeze has not caught them,
rest quiet in the crannies of the purple rock. Beside the rock, in
the hollow under the thicket, the carcass of a ewe, drowned in the
last flood, lies nearly bare to the bone, its white ribs protruding
through the skin, raven-torn; and the rags of its wool still
flickering from the branches that first stayed it as the stream
swept it down. A little lower, the current plunges, roaring, into a
circular chasm like a well, surrounded on three sides by a
chimney-like hollowness of polished rock, down which the foam slips
in detached snowflakes. Round the edges of the pool beneath, the
water circles slowly, like black oil; a little butterfly lies on
its back, its wings glued to one of the eddies, its limbs feebly
quivering; a fish rises and it is gone. Lower down the stream, I
can just see, over a knoll, the green and damp turf roofs of four
or five hovels, built at the edge of a morass, which is trodden by
the cattle into a black Slough of Despond at their doors, and
traversed by a few ill-set stepping-stones, with here and there a
flat slab on the tops, where they have sunk out of sight; and at
the turn of the brook I see a man fishing, with a boy and a dog--a
picturesque and pretty group enough certainly, if they had not been
there all day starving.
From Dunkeld up to Logierait, the river runs south, when its eastward
course has been joined by the full swollen Tummel, that, coming down
straight from Pitlochrie, seems here to be the parent stream. At
Logierait Wordsworth could still see the remains of the Duke of Atholl’s
court-house and the prison--said to be now represented by an
inn-stable--from which Rob Roy made one of his daring escapes. He did
well to escape, when his ducal captor had not yet lost the power of pit
and gallows, who about the same time wrote to the Provost of Perth for
the loan of an executioner. There was no lack of gallows in those days,
yet apparently a short supply of hangmen, for we find the Fair City, in
turn, borrowing the Drummonds’ executioner, to be returned when
required; then again Lord Breadalbane’s, on an undertaking by the
magistrates “to give the Earl the use of him at all times.” Perth had
then three gallows of its own, while each of the great noblemen about it
could hang or imprison his vassals; and even the Baron of Bradwardine is
recorded as having once exercised his hereditary privilege by putting
“two poachers in the dungeon of the old tower of Tully Veolan, where
they were sorely frightened by ghosts, and almost eaten by rats.”
On the other side of the confluence, Ballinluig railway junction marks
the forking of two routes of travel. The main line leads up into Atholl
by Pitlochrie and Killiecrankie, “the Caledonian Thermopylae.” From
this, we turn for the present to follow Strath Tay, adorned with a
succession of mansions and policies, chief of them the restored Castle
of Grandtully, for which is claimed that it was the Tully Veolan of
_Waverley_. Other candidates for the honour are Craig Hall, above
Blairgowrie, and Traquair House, near Innerleithen. The contention
between these mansions makes for the Scottish newspapers what the great
gooseberry and the sea serpent used to be in the South; but of course
the truth is, as Scott says, who ought to know, that he took a composite
picture from several models, getting some features from old mansions
about Edinburgh--Ravelston, Dean House, and Warrender House beside
Bruntsfield Links--while he seems to point out Grandtully as the best
prototype of the Baron’s seat. As for the geography of the tale, that
baffles all inquiry, the only thing clear being that Waverley, at the
farthest point of his wanderings, had got well behind the Pass of
“Ballybrough,” which must be Killiecrankie.
[Illustration: A HIGHLAND COTTAGE]
The branch line up the Tay soon ends at Aberfeldy, famous for the Falls
of Moness in a wooded glen, where arises a question as to whether its
“Birks of Aberfeldy” were not a mere poetic ornament of a poet’s fancy,
copied from older songs such as the “Birks of Endermay.” At all events,
birches are not now prominent among the rich foliage; and, of course,
Burns, no more than Scott, would “swear to the truth of a song.”
Aberfeldy, thriving on a small manufacture of Highland tweed, has an
historic note as the place where the Black Watch regiment was embodied
out of its looser organisation as independent companies; this is
recorded by a monument set up on a cairn where nature and art join hands
for striking effect. It is also notable for the first bridge, above
Perth, over the Tay, built by the road-making General Wade. Another name
that has been connected with Aberfeldy is Andrea Ferrara’s, a foreigner
of infuscated _habitat_, who made so many blades for Scotland that
tradition has represented him as working a forge here. A rival legend
places his workshop in Menteith, where Doune was a more authentic
arsenal of firearms for the Highlanders, specially notable for the
making of steel pistols.
Aberfeldy Bridge leads us across to Weem, said to be so called from
Picts’ houses burrowed in the womb of earth; to Castle Menzies in its
park of ancient trees; to Dull, with its memories of a monastery and a
hermitage of St. Cuthbert. The whole district is full of moving
traditions and traces of forgotten faith and history older than the
saints who have left misty relics here, as, for instance, the stone
circle at Croft Moraig, “field of Mary,” and the Cave of Weem that has
a legend recalling that of Hamelin, as to a child being saved by
slipping off a malignant water-horse when it carried away her companions
to be drowned in the loch above, with which this cave was believed to
communicate. And hereabouts, as elsewhere, there is a legend of hunted
Macgregors taking refuge in a tree that was cut down to hurl them to
destruction. As to the beauties of the valley, let the Rev. Hugh
Macmillan speak, as a son of its soil:--
Westward of the old glacial barricade, to the neighbourhood of
Aberfeldy, the Strath, with its numerous farms and small crofts, is
a patch-work, a “quilted landscape,” with corn and potato fields
and meadows stitched in squares, or rather, to use an image more
appropriate to the locality, a continuous web of large-checked
tartan laid along the bottom and slopes of the valley. Eastward,
beyond Cluny, the Strath is a vast green cup filled to the brim
with beauty. There the warm sun, in sheltered nooks, woos the
primroses and violets out of the soil earlier than anywhere else.
The hillsides are musical with freckled burns, alive with trout;
and the copses that line their course are filled with hazel nuts
and wild rasps and brambles, which would make a feast for Pan
himself, while patriarchal trees linger on many an ancestral farm,
and link the generations together, each of them a towering mass of
verdant leafage, under whose cool shadow you can sit in the fervid
noon with a sigh of relief, and gaze upwards as into the heights of
an emerald heaven. On the wide uplands hangs nature’s own tapestry
of bell-heather and broom, the purple of the one and the glowing
gold of the other mixed in harmonious splendour; and here and there
a little tarn--the largest, Loch Derculich, a lonely heron-haunted
loch, held close to the heart of the moorland--lifts its blue eye
to catch the smile of heaven.
If we are to visit every part of Perthshire, we must tear ourselves away
from this characteristic antechamber of Highland scenery, to the sides
of which open Atholl and Breadalbane. So let us take leave of the Tay,
under its own name, by passing up the last reach of avenue-like road
from Aberfeldy to the policies of Taymouth, where it breaks full-born
from its lake reservoir. Should we have come from Logierait by road or
rail on the south side, we may well be tempted to turn back by the north
bank of the noble river, a way which leads us on the rough edges of
Atholl.
III
ATHOLL
The Atholl monument at the confluence of the Tay and the Tummel reminds
us how we are fairly in Atholl, which indeed comes down to Dunkeld. One
can hardly fix the precise bounds of this old province, at one time of
such importance that it became an estate of the Crown; its name, too, is
said to come from a Pictish king. It may be roughly defined as the
northern part of Highland Perthshire, the glen basins on the Tay’s left
bank, lying below a stretch of the Grampians by which it is shut off
from Braemar and Deeside. Its central valley is Glengarry, up which runs
the Highland Railway, till, at the height of nearly 1500 feet, passing
from Perth into Inverness, this main stream of traffic dips by the Boar
of Badenoch and the Sow of Atholl down the basin of the Spey, where
Badenoch was once as signalised a name as Atholl.
This maze of mountains, glens and waters, studded with spots of delight
and scenes of fame, may be called the heart of the show Highlands, or at
least one lobe of its heart, for tourist circulation, the other being
the Trossachs and Loch Lomond neighbourhood, where also hotels and
hydropathics are now more common than castles and clachans. Dunkeld is
its city of old renown; Blair Atholl is the Versailles of its duke; but
the present-day capital of the tourist domain seems to be Pitlochrie, a
smart young town that was an offshoot of Moulin, whose Black Castle
stands in ruin, haunted by dim memories as the Wolf of Badenoch’s lair,
and by a more gloomy tradition that it once served as a plague-house, so
that its infected stones escaped the fate of being used as a quarry. All
the lions about Pitlochrie are so familiar to guide-books and their
patrons, that I need hardly even name them: the pyramid of Ben Vrackie,
with its grand and easily won prospects; the Pass of Killiecrankie,
where in a few minutes of fierce onset the Protestant succession in
Scotland had nearly been throttled; the wooded and parked sides of Glen
Garry; the ducal demesne of Blair; the Falls of Bruar, glorified by
Burns; the dark ravines of Glen Tilt leading up to the guarded wilds of
the Great Atholl Deer Forest; with many a fall and spout and foaming
chasm, more or less renowned, unless for the want of public access and
of a sacred bard less discreet than he who kept the secrets of
“picture-like beauty, seclusion sublime.”
There is a stream,--(I name not its name, lest inquisitive tourist
Hunt it, and make it a lion, and get it at last into guide-books,)
Springing far off from a loch unexplored in the folds of great mountains,
Falling two miles through rowan and stunted alder, enveloped
Then for four more in a forest of pine ... attaining a basin
Ten feet wide and eighteen long, with whiteness and fury
Occupied partly, but mostly pellucid, pure, a mirror;
Beautiful there for the colour derived from green rocks under;
Beautiful, most of all, where beads of foam uprising
Mingle their clouds of white with the delicate hue of the stillness.
Cliff over cliff for its sides, with rowan and pendent birch-boughs,
Here it lies, unthought of above at the bridge and pathway,
Still more concealed from below by wood and rocky projection,
You are shut in, left alone with yourself and perfection of water,
Hid on all sides, left alone with yourself and the goddess of bathing.
Clough, who sets his heroes to “verify Black,” leaves his own principal
scene not clearly identified, which one guesses at as somewhere on the
western edge of Atholl. The _Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich_ itself lay far
in the Western Highlands; but was it not in Rannoch that Philip met his
first charmer? Towards this region we turn on the other side of
Pitlochrie, where open the softer scenes of the Tummel, its Falls that
pour over almost the central boss of Scotland, its lovely swelling into
a lake, the thinning and roughening of its valley below the head of
Schiehallion, as it rises to Loch Rannoch, a long sheet of water
darkening under fragments of the Black Wood, and reaching up to the
barren moor of Rannoch, most desolate region in Britain. This was once
shaded by that great Caledonian Forest, of gloomy renown in mediæval
romance, where Ariosto brings one of his heroes, following tracks of
Arthur, Lancelot and Gawaine--
In those woods he might be sure
Many and strange adventures would be found,
But deeds, there wrought, were, like the place, obscure,
And, for the greater part, not bruited round.
Here meet the borders of Perth, Argyll, and Inverness; and this
wilderness must often have been wet by the blood of plaided warriors if
not of mailed knight-errants. In our time, I am told, a lad fishing in
one of the Rannoch lochs brought up a rusty sword to confirm the local
legend of a meeting between Atholl and Lochiel to discuss a boundary
dispute. Each chief was to come unattended; but each, like Roderick Dhu,
had a force of clansmen hidden close at hand. When they got to hot
words, Atholl first gave the signal, at which--
Instant from copse and heath, arose,
Bonnets and spears and bended bows.
“These are Atholl wethers!” was their proud chief’s explanation, to
which Lochiel replied by whistling up a troop of Camerons, whom he
introduced as “Lochaber dogs.” But before it went beyond showing teeth
the rivals drew upon that Caledonian prudence often found mingled with
hot Highland blood. They agreed to settle their difference peacefully,
in token whereof their claymores were hurled together, like Excalibur,
into the dark waters of the mere.
In my own youth, this region still seemed a hunting-ground for
adventurous experience. It is nearly half a century ago that I started
out to walk through Atholl with some vague idea of roaming farther. From
morn to eve I tramped on from Stanley, and got the length of Blair, some
ten leagues. But a boy’s will, one knows, is the wind’s will: I found a
train due at Blair, and took it home, I no longer remember why, unless
that the day was hot and dusty, as it may well be on this sunny side of
the Grampians, where, as a local guide-book puts it, the rain-clouds are
apt to “have the bottom knocked out of them by the mountain peaks”
fencing Atholl towards the Atlantic. But that fiasco of a walking tour I
turned to account by writing a description, which I had the temerity to
send to a London magazine. Strange to say, it found favour with the
editor, perhaps because--heaven forgive me!--it was spiced by an
affectation of Cockney jocularity as the point of view; and so appeared
my first magazine article, which now, after many years, strikes me with
shame and confusion. How many sympathetic authors might tell the same
tale of callow efforts that filled them with pride to appear in print,
but the day came when they would gladly have repaid tenfold that once
welcome cheque, could they but cancel those pages, which at least may
have the luck to blush unseen in some cobwebbed volume!
Coming back to Atholl after many days, my pen hopes to be guided in
writing its name consistently. In my spelling days, it would be rather
_Athole_ and _Argyle_; but the ducal lords of these regions seem to have
set a fashion for the double _ll_. Also, by the light of nature, I
pronounce the first syllable long and broad, as _Aw_tholl, whereas those
of more picked speech say _Ah_tholl, which is easier to say than to
sing. As to the spelling, Wordsworth appears to follow an older form--
Among the hills of _Athol_ was he born.
Was he, though? The poet makes no doubt of it. “The Boy of whom I
speak,” came from a “native glen” among “Garry’s hills,” where his
parents, though “exceeding poor,” had a “small hereditary farm.” This
son of an Atholl bonnet-laird had duly gone “equipped
[Illustration: THE TROSSACHS]
with satchel to a school,” and so well improved his opportunities of
elementary education that in old age he was able “with an eye of scorn”
to turn over the leaves of Voltaire in the original. He had a thorough
Caledonian respect for the Sabbath, and for
Those godly men
Who swept from Scotland, in a flame of zeal,
Shrine, altar, image.
He even refused “wine and stouter cheer,” when offered by a fellow
Atholman, who must have unlearned the native teetotalism while serving
abroad--
Chaplain to a military troop
Cheered by the Highland bagpipe, as they marched
In plaided vest.
It may be more by good luck than good guidance that the poet does not
try for a stroke of local colour in letting his abstinent hero sit down
to a supper of “Atholl Brose.” The above hints of character, which will
be recognised by patient Excursionists, go to show how Daddy Wordsworth,
though he had the advantage of a visit to the Atholl Highlands, made the
common English mistake about their inhabitants. John Bull will not
understand how Scotland is inhabited by two different stocks, whose
differences were much less blended in that Wanderer’s youth. It could
then be said that the Sabbath had not yet got above the Pass of
Killiecrankie; and it will be remembered how the Captain of Knockdunder
proposed to deal with any “sincere professor” who scrupled to join in a
unanimous call to whatever pastor pleased the duke and his deputy. Even
in the poet’s day nobody seems to have rebuked him when he drove his
poor beast along Highland roads on Sunday. An Atholl man’s clearest
memory of Covenanters would be the check given to the victors of
Killiecrankie when Cleland’s Cameronians held Dunkeld against those
ex-oppressors of “godly” Whigs. The most “moderate” Presbyterian
ministers had sometimes to be inducted by force in the Highlands, where
still many of the people cling to the old faith. The Sandemanians sent
missionaries into Atholl, who were received with indifference or
ridicule; it was only two generations later that such evangelical
gospellers as J. A. Haldane and Rowland Hill succeeded in blowing up,
through the far North, a new flame of Calvinist enthusiasm, which in our
time has turned this end of Scotland into a sanctuary for strict
Sabbatarianism, much relaxed among city folk and even among the
descendants of westland Whigs.
The Highlanders of the old dispensation had virtues of their own, but
the poet was much left to himself when he conceived Glengarry as cradle
for his idealised Scot, brought up among such a good Presbyterian family
as would be more at home in the _Cottar’s Saturday Night_ upon the
Carrick border--a picture quoted in full by Gilpin as an illustration of
Highland manners!
Pure livers were they all, austere and grave,
And fearing God, the very children taught
Stern self-respect, a reverence for God’s word,
And an habitual piety, maintained
With strictness scarcely known on English ground.