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THE Highlands of
Scotland, like many greater things in the world,. may be said to be
unknown, yet well-known. Thousands of summer tourists every year, and
from every part of the civilised world, gaze on the romantic beauties of
the Trosaclls and Loch Lomond, skirt the Hebrides from the Firth of
Clyde to Oban, trundle through the wild gorge of Glencoe, chatter among
the ruins of Iona, scramble over the wonders of Staffa, sail along the
magnificent line of lakes to Inverness, reach the sombre Coolins, or
disturb the silence of Coruisg. Pedestrians also, with stick and
knapsack, search the more solitary wildernesses and glens of the
mainland, from the Grampians to Ross-shire and Caithness. Sportsmen,
too, have their summer quarters dotted over the moors, or scattered on
the hill-sides and beside clear streams, with all the irregularity of
the boulders of the great northern drift, but furnished with most of the
luxuries of an English home. All these, it must be admitted, know
something of the Highlands.
Tourists know the names
of steamers, coaches, and hotels; and how they were cheated by boatmen,
porters, and guides. They have a vague impression of misty mountains,
stormy seas, heavy rains, difficult roads, crowded inns, unpronounceable
Gaelic names, with brighter remembrances of landscapes whose grandeur
they have probably never seen surpassed.
Pedestrians can recall
lonely and unfrequented paths across broken moorlands undulating far
away, like brown shoreless seas, through unploughed and untrodden
valleys, where the bark of a shepherd's dog, and much more the sight of
a shepherd's hut, were dearly welcomed. They can also recall panoramas
from hill-tops or from rocky promontories, of lake and river, moor and
forest, sea and island, of lonely keeps and ruined homesteads, and of
infinite sheep-walks and silent glens which seemed to end in chaos. And
these remembrances will flit before them like holy days of youth, and
"hang about the beatings of the heart," refreshing and sanctifying it,
amidst the din and worry of a city life.
Sportsmen, when they
visit old shootings, hail from afar the well-known, hill-sides and
familiar "ground." They can tell many miles off where the birds are
scarce, or where, according to the state of the weather, they can be
found. They have waded up to the shoulders in Highland lakes, nothing
visible but hat swathed with flie, and hand wielding the lithe rod and
line. They have trodden the banks and tried the pools of every famous
stream, until the very salmon that are left know their features and
their flies, and tremble for their cunning temptations. The whole
scenery is associated in their memory with the braces that have been
bagged, the stags which have been killed, or—oh, horrid memory!—missed,
"when the herd was coming right towards us, and all from that blockhead
Charlie, who would look if they were within shot." [The following are
two authentic anecdotes of the manner in which such misses are sometimes
brought about. A young English gentleman was very recently stationed on
a good pass, while a crowd of gillics, with the usual unnatural shouting
and screaming, "beat" the wood for his special benefit. An antlered
monarch soon made for the pass. The young gentleman, by way of being
very cool, lighted a cigar. The stag soon snuffed the tainted gale, and
retreated to his covert—as a certain excellent Dean would do to his
deanery—whence he refused again to issue forth. Another, a Highlander, a
keen, perhaps a too keen sportsman, was stationed on a pass; a stag was
speeding towards him, when a friend on the opposite edge of the corrie,
wishing to give him (Inc warning, shouted out, "There he is near you!"
"Where! where?" roared out the sportsman, in greatest excitement. Of
course, while echo answered "where," he saw no more of the stag.] The
keepers, and gillies, and beaters, and the whole tribe of expectants,
are also well-known, as such ; and every furrowed face is to these
sportsmen a very poem, an epic, a heroic ballad, a history of the past
season of happiness, as well as a prophecy of the morrow, hoped for with
a beating heart, which blames the night and -urges on the morn.
There are others, too,
who may be expected to know something of the Highlands. Low-country
sheep-farmers, redolent of wool; English proprietors, who, as summer
visitants, occupy the old castle of some extinct patriarchal chief;
Highland lairds, who are absentees save during the grouse season;
geologists, who have explored the physical features of the land; and
antiquaries, who have dipped into, or even studied profoundly, its civil
and ecclesiastical antiquities.
Nevertheless, to all
such, the Highlands may be as unknown in their real life and spirit as
the scent of the wild bog-myrtle is to the accomplished gentleman who
has no sense of smell; or as a Gaelic boat-song is to a Hindoo pundit.
Some readers may very
naturally be disposed to ask, with a sneer of contempt, what precise
loss any human being incurs from want of this knowledge? The opinion may
be most reasonably held and expressed that the summer tourist, the
wandering pedestrian, or the autumnal sportsman, have probably taken out
of the Northern wilderness all that was worth bringing into the Southern
Canaan of civilised life; and that as much gratitude, at least, is due
for what is forgotten as for what is remembered.
Perhaps those readers may be right. And if so, then, for their own
comfort as well as for mine, I warn them that if they have been foolish
enough to accompany me thus far, they should pity me, hid inc farewell,
and wish inc a safe deliverance from the mountains.
Is there any one, let me ask, who reads
these lines, and yet dislikes peat-reek? any one who puts his fingers in
his ears when he hears the bagpipe—the real war-pipe—begin a real
pibroch? any one who dislikes the kilt, the Gaelic, the clans, and who
does not believe in Ossian? any one who has a prejudice to the Mac, or
who cannot compreIiend why one Mac should prefer a Mac of his own clan
to the Mac of any other clan? any one who smiles at the ignorance of a
Highland parson who never reads a London review, who never heard about
one in ten of the "schools of modern thought," and who believes, without
any mental suffering, that two and two make four? any one who puts his
glass to his eye during prayer in a Highland church, and looks at his
fellow-traveller with a sneer while the peasants sing their psalms? any
one who, when gazing on a Highland landscape, descants to his local
admirers upon some hackneyed Swiss scene they never saw, or enumerates a
dozen Swiss Horns, the Wetter Horn, Schreckhorn, or any other horn which
has penetrated into his brain? Forbid that any such terribly clever and
well-informed cosmopolitans should "lose ten tickings of their watch" in
reading these reminiscences!
One other class sometimes found in society,
I would especially beseech to depart; I mean Highlanders ashamed of
their country. Cockneys are bad enough, but they are sincere and honest
in their idolatry of the Great Babylon. Young Oxonians or young
barristers, even when they become slashing London critics, are more
harmless than they themselves imagine, and after all inspire less awe
than Ben Nevis, or than the celebrated agriculturist who proposed to
decompose the mountain with acids, and scatter the debris as a
fertiliser over the Lochaber moss. But a Highlander, who was nurtured on
oatmeal porridge and oatmeal cakes; who in his youth wore home-spun
cloth, and was innocent of shoes and stockings; who blushed in his first
attempts to speak the English language; who never saw a nobler building
for years than the little church in the glen; and who owes all that
makes him tolerable in society to the Celtic blood which flows in spite
of him through his veins;—for this man to be proud of his English
accent, to sneer at the ever-lasting hills, the old church and its
simple worship, and to despise the race which has never disgraced him—faubh
I Peat-reek is frankincense in comparison with him; let him not be
distracted by any of my reminiscences of the old country. "Leave them, I
beseech of thee!" I
ask not how old or how young those are who remain; I care not what their
theory of political economy or their school of modern philosophy may be;
I am indifferent as to their evening employment, whether it be darning
stockings, sitting idle round the winter fire in the enjoyment of
repose, or occupying, as Sinvalids, their bed or their chair. If only
they are charitable souls, who hope all things, and are not easily
provoked; who would like to get a peep into forms of society, and to
hear about customs differing greatly from what they have hitherto been
acquainted with, or to have an easy chat about a country less known,
perhaps, than any other in Europe,--then shall I gladly unfold to them
my reminiscences of a people worth knowing about and loving, and of a
period in history that is passing, if, indeed, it has not already passed
away. And now, by
way of further preamble to my reminiscences, let me take a bird's-eye
view of the parish. It is not included, by Highland ecclesiastical
statists, among what are called the large parishes. I have no correct
knowledge of the number of square miles, of arable acres, or of waste
land, which it contains; but science and the trigonometrical survey
will, it is presumed, give those details in due time. When viewed, as
passing tourists view it, from the sea, it has nothing remarkable about
it; and if it is pronounced by these same tourists to be uninteresting,
and "just the sort of scenery one would like to pass when dining or
sleeping," I won't censure the judgment. A castled promontory, a range
of dark precipices supporting the upland pastures, and streaked with
white waterfalls, which are lost in the copse at their base, form a
picture not very imposing when compared with "what one sees everywhere."
A long ridge of hill rising some two thousand feet above the sea, its
brown sides, up to a certain height, chequered with green stripes and
patches of cultivation; brown heather-thatched cottages, with white
walls; here and there a mansion, whose chimneys are seen above the trees
which shelter it:---these are the chief features along its seaboard of
many miles. But how different is the whole scene when one lands! New
beauties reveal themselves, and every object seems to change its size,
appearance, and relative position. A rocky wall of wondrous beauty, the
rampart of the old upraised beach which girdles Scotland, runs along the
shore ; the natural wild wood of ash, oak, and birch, with the hazel
copse, clothes the lower hills and shelters the herds of wandering
cattle; lonely sequestered bays are everywhere scooped out into
beautiful harbours; points and promontories seem to grow out of the
land, and huge dykes of whinstone fashion to themselves the most
picturesque outlines; clear streams everywhere hasten on to the sea;
small glens, perfect gems of beauty, open up entrances into deep dark
pools, hemmed in by steep banks hanging with ivy, honeysuckle,
rowan-trees, and ferns; while on the hill-sides scattered cottages,
small farms, and shepherds' huts, the signs of culture and industry,
give life to the whole scene. Ruins there are too, which show us that
whatever faults belonged to the Church before the Reformation, she
excelled the Church of the present day in the greater number and the
greater beauty of her parish churches. [Since writing the above I have
been struck by a sarcastic and pithy remark in Dr Johnson's tour:—"It
has been, for many years, popular to talk of the lazy devotion of the
Romish clergy, and the sleepy laziness of men that erected churches. We
may indulge our superiority with a new triumph by comparing it with the
fervid activity of those who suffer them to fall." A great change has
happily come over the Highlands since the time when these words were
written—a period when, as the doctor informs us, there were some
parishes in the far north without churches, and the people had to
assemble in private houses for worship, owing to the selfish greed of
those who appropriated the lands belonging to the old Church, and cared
nothing for the new. No such cases can now be found!] There are few
sights which more rebuke the vulgar Church parsimony of these later
days, or which imbue us with more grateful and generous feelings towards
the missionaries of an earlier and more difficult time, than the faith
and love which reared so many chapels on distant islands, and so many
beautiful and costly fabrics in savage wildernesses, among a people who
were too rude to appreciate such works, or the spirit which originated
them. These old Highland Church extensionists were not stimulated by
party rivalry, public meetings, or newspaper articles. Their praise
could not have been from men. How they got the means and money we know
not, but this we believe, that
"They dreamt not of a perishable home
Who thus could build!"
But to view the parish in all its outward
aspect, we must ascend to the top of
"I name not its name, lest inquisitive
tourist
Hunt it, and make it a lion, and get it at last into guide-books."
The upward path soon leaves the cultivated
settlements, passes several streams, winds across tracks of moorland,
and at last reaches the shielings of Corrie Borodale. One cannot imagine
a sweeter spot than this in which to repose before attempting the ascent
of the hill proper. A stream, clear as a diamond, and singing its
hill-song, takes a sweep, and folds within its embrace a bay of emerald
grass, surrounded with blooming heather. Here and there appear small
groups of ruins, mere gatherings of stones, to mark where man once built
his temporary home. Before sheep-farming was introduced generally into
the Highlands, about seventy or eighty years ago, the young cattle
ranged at large over the hills, clambering as far up as any grass grew,
and at mid-summer the milch-cows also were removed to the upland
pastures, as is still the habit in Norway, and probably in other
mountainbus countries. The .greenest, grassiest, and most sheltered
nooks were always chosen for these summer residences, or shielings, as
they were called. Bothies, rude but substantial, were built for the
family, and various enclosures for calves, lambs, and kids surrounded
them. Each family had such a number of sheep as sufficed for their own
need as to food and clothing. The whole household flitted to the
shieling with great glee. The men, however, remained there only for a
few days, to see that bothy and pen were all right and tight. They
returned to the strath, or homestead, to attend to the crops and to the
peats, to thatch the houses, to set matters generally in order for the
winter season. The women and the young folks remained at the shieling
for a period of twelve or fourteen weeks, their chief care being to
gather as much butter and cheese as could be effected without starving
the calves or lambs; and the housewife who succeeded in combining the
"filling of the milk-pail" with the "rearing of the calf," was
celebrated in song and story. The never-failing distaff filled up the
intervals of unemployed time with the aged; but the young had abundant
leisure, which they seem to have bestowed on mirth and enjoyment; and
among the comparatively few songs of the Gaelic Muse which are truly
blithe and joyous —for generally she is in sad and sombre mood—the
shieling songs occupy a prominent place. They depict a life of simple
and genuine happiness. Thus it is that when one rests in such a green
oasis, his fancy again peoples the waste with the herd-lads "calling the
cattle home," and with the blithe girls at the milking ; he sees again
the life among the huts, and hears the milking songs and innocent glee;
and when awakened from his reverie by bleating sheep—the only living
tenants of the pastures—he is not disposed to admit the present time to
he an improvement on the past.
But let us up to that green spot beside the
ravine; then to the left along the rocks, then to the right till past
the deep "peat-bogs," and finally straight up to the Cairn. When we have
taken breath, let us look around. This is the very high altar of the
parish, and I maintain that all the glories which can be seen from a
parish rightfully belong to the parish itself, and are a part of its own
rich inheritance.
Let us first look northward. Almost at our feet is a chain of small
lakes, round whose green shores, unseen from the Cairn, because
immediately beneath it, a prosperous tenantry once lived, of whom no
trace remains, except those patches of ruins which mark their once happy
homesteads.
Opposite to the spectator, and rising abruptly from the valley, is a
range of hills, broken into wild scaurs and clothed with copse; while
beyond these, ridge on ridge rise, like a mighty ocean sea, heaving in
gigantic billows onward towards Ben Reshiepol, until lost to sight
beyond the head of Loch Shiel and among the braes of Lochaber.
Sweeping the eye from the north to the west,
what a glorious spectacle! The chain of lakes beneath ends in the lovely
Loch Sunart, with its beauteous bays and wooded islets. Over its farther
shore, and above picturesque hills, the more distant Hebrides rear their
heads out of the ocean.
Along the horizon northwards are seen the
Scur of Eigg lifting its gigantic pillar, and the dark lines of Rum;
westwards the islands of Coll and Tiree, with gleams of the ocean
between. The long dark moorland ascent by which we have reached the
hill-top, now carries the eye down to the sea; that sea is a strait,
worming itself for more than twenty miles between the mainland where we
stand, and the island of Mull, which gathers up its hills into a cluster
of noble peaks about its centre, with Bentealbh (Bentalve) and Benmore
towering over all. A low isthmus right opposite, opens up an arm of the
sea beyond Mull, with noble headlands, beneath which the man who would
see Staffa aright should himself sail out to the ocean with only a
Highland crew; for not from crowded steamer can he fully understand that
pillared island and its cathedral cave.
Let us glance to the east—the eye following
the Sound of Mull—and our panorama is completed. How nobly the Sound,
dotted with vessels, opens up past Ardtornish and Duart Castles, ere it
mingles with the broader waters that sweep in eddying tides past the
Slate Isles, past Jura, Scarba, on to Islay, until they finally spread
out into the roll and roar of the shoreless Atlantic! In that eastern
distance may be seen some white smoke that marks Oban, and over it Ben
Cruachan, the most beautiful of our west Highland mountains, accompanied
by its gray companions, "the shepherds of Etive Glen."
I back this view from the highest hill in
the parish, for extent and varied beauty, against any view in Europe! It
is the Righi of Argyle-shire; and, given only—what, alas! is not easily
obtained—a good day, good with "gorgeous cloud-land," good with lights
and shadows, the bright blue of the northern sky; (more intense than
that of the Italian,) mingling with the sombre dark of the northern
hills, dark even when relieved in autumn by the glow of the purple
heather—given all this, and I know not where to find a more magnificent
outlook over God's fair earth. No reminiscences of the outer world so
haunt my memory as those so often treasured up from that gray cairn; and
however frequently I have returned from beholding other and more famous
scenes, this one has ever appeared like a first love, more beautiful
than them all. As
we descend from the hill, the minister—how oft has he gone with me
there'.—tells us stories worth hearing, and as he alone can tell them,
stories of a pastor's life, "from perils in the wilderness, and perils
of waters, and perils of the sea;" stories of character, such as the
lonely hills and misty moors alone can mould; stories of combats among
the wild and primitive inhabitants of the olden time; and stories, too,
of the early invaders of the land from Denmark and Norway, sea-kings, or
pirates rather, whose names yet linger where they fell in battle, as at
Corrie Borrodale, Corrie Lundie, and Eas Stangadale.
But we have reached "the manse;" and from
thence I must start with my "Reminiscences of a Highland Parish." |
