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THE estate of Rothiemurchus
is very compact and is all comprehended within our horizon. Nearly the
whole of it may be seen at the same time from any elevated central
point. But its attractions are greatly enhanced by the estates that are
immediately contiguous to it, viz. Glenmore on the north and Kinrara on
the south. Glenmore is within the circuit of the same hills, and so also
is a part of Kinrara, whose higher points may be seen included in the
same comprehensive view. But the Ord Bàn separates between the scenery
of Rothiemurchus and the scenery of Kinrara, while it reveals Loch
Morlich and the landscapes around the shooting lodge of Glenmore lying
at the foot of Cairngorm, which are unseen from the low grounds around.
From the top of this conspicuous hill you see the horizon of
Rothiemurchus to the north, a horizon of dusky fir-forests, and the
horizon of Kinrara to the south, a horizon of graceful birch-woods,
another and altogether different world of beauty. Both Kinrara and
Glenmore belong to the Duke of Richmond and Gordon, and Rothiemurchus
comes in between them, partaking of the characters of both places,
passing gradually into the upland grandeur of Glenmore, and shading
insensibly into the quiet, soft loveliness of Kinrara.
To begin with Glenmore,
which is bounded by the same hills to the north and east as
Rothiemurchus, there are two routes by which the shooting lodge may be
reached. The first is by Coylum Bridge and Altnacaber and through the
fir-forests that line the banks of the Luineag or past the farm of
Achnahatnich. The road is a remarkably pleasant one. The open spaces at
Achnahatnich are a beautiful contrast to the dusky woods around. Before
they were broken up for cultivation they were covered exclusively with
an immense growth of heather and juniper bushes, from the latter of
which the place gets its name of the Field of the Junipers. The light
green meadows and cornfields, with the sun shining full upon them,
refresh the eye through the vistas of the dark trees, and the occasional
cottages, far separated from each other, relieve the oppression of the
solitude. The hills are not very high, but extremely picturesque,
forming one continuous line of rounded masses of nearly equal altitude,
their bases covered with pine-woods and their summits with bracken and
variegated mosses and purple heather. At the western extremity they
terminate in a steep declivity, with a red scaur running down the face
of it. On the highest point are the ruins of an ancient Celtic fort,
which commands a magnificent view, and below it is a cup-marked stone,
beside which the early defenders of the fort used to worship. This ridge
descends towards the uplands, and between it and the range of hills
beyond there is a deep depression, which is the commencement of the
Sluggan Pass, leading straight from Abernethy to Glenmore, and becoming
grander as you proceed through it. A considerable stream lies far down
at the bottom, and the sides of the defile are exceedingly steep,
covered with a rout of trees that seem to clamber up, one beyond
another, and occupy the most precarious positions. It looks more like a
scene in Switzerland or Norway than any in this country. Through the
Sluggan Pass the way opens out upon the richly-wooded plains of
Kincardine, and the valley of the Spey northward past Boat of Garten,
and the blue fields around Grantown, until the far horizon is closed by
the traditionary sharply-cut hill called Benn-na-Claidh—or the Cut of
the Sword—cleft from summit to foot by one stroke of a prehistoric
giant’s brand.
Returning to the Glenmore
route the path reveals at every turn some new aspect of landscape
loveliness. A herd of deer may often be seen quietly feeding in the open
grassy spaces at a little distance from the road, unheeding the presence
of the passer-by, if he does not shout to them. Feeding for the most
part on the low grounds, where the grass is sweeter and more abundant,
such deer seem larger than usual, and confirm a statement often made
that before our native deer had been driven by men to the higher and
poorer regions of our country, they were a larger race. In the
superficial strata of the earth, horns of at least sixteen tines have
been found; and it is a well-known fact that when a herd is confined to
the luxuriant conditions of a deer-park, it will develop larger horns
than when left wild on the hills. Midway on this route a rustic wooden
bridge crosses the river and a path over it leads to a mineral well in
the forest— which has drawn patients from far and near—and strongly
impregnates the surrounding air with the smell of sulphuretted hydrogen.
About two miles beyond, the shores of Loch Morlich come in sight, and
the drive up to the lodge is as fine as anything in this country. The
loch itself is a beautiful sheet of water, surrounded on all sides by
fir-woods, and the road passes along the edge of the water. It is about
three miles round, forming a wide circular basin, every part of which is
visible, without any bays or promontories. There are hardly any trout or
char in it, the prevalent pike having nearly extirpated them. The loch
is 1046 feet above the level of the sea; and the view, looking down its
vast area to the hills beyond, seems much more extensive than one could
believe, looking up at it from the reverse way. At the upper end there
are great banks of the smoothest white granite sand, formed by the
attrition of the waters on the rocks around, in which grow dwarf juniper
bushes and willows, spreading widely and flatly over the surface, and
knitting the particles of sand into a compact sward. The fir-trees and
alders along these banks are most magnificent specimens of their kind.
As you go round the head of the loch you come upon some giants of the
ancient forest that were spared when the Glenmore Company, a firm of
wood merchants from Hull, bought the forest from the Duke of Richmond
for about £20,000. The timber of these glorious trees was extremely
valuable, and in all Scotland the firs of Glenmore were considered by
far the grandest and oldest. The company, it is said, even with the
gross wastefulness of their mismanagement, cleared £ 70,000 of profit.
Among green and vigorous trees you come upon the wrecks of the ancient
forest, trees of enormous girth and great height, stripped by the winds
even of their bark, and like huge skeletons, holding up their bleached
bones to the pitying heavens, or, broken by the violence of the storms,
strewing the ground with the fragments of their trunks and boughs and
leaving their twisted and entangled roots with large masses of the
surface soil clinging to them high in air. The alders are equally
magnificent and venerable. They are the largest and oldest specimens I
have ever seen, their branches, tortuous by age and long resistance to
the weather, knotted into the most fantastic forms. The trunks of such
trees are often hollow, or filled with mouldering dust, and they are
frequented by the rare crested tit, the phantom bird of these old
Caledonian forests, which is oftener seen in the Glenmore woods than
anywhere else. Among the interesting plants that occur in this forest
are the Moneses grandiflora, the one-flowered winter-green, with
its delicate white fragrant blossoms crowning its lily-of-the-valley
stem. The Linnaea borealis is also somewhat frequent in flower
among the recesses of the woods. These two plants may be said to be
relics of the old Caledonian forest, whose flora and fauna were similar
to those of Norway and Sweden. From its far inland, inaccessible
position, Glenmore was less exposed to the ravages of the invading foes
than any other part of Scotland; and hence the trees were allowed to
grow age after age and generation after generation with impunity—without
risk of axe or fire—and it became the great nursery of the
pine-forests of Scotland, where we see the conditions of the old
Caledonian forests reproduced at the present day.
The road along the shores
of the loch commands an unbroken view on the opposite side of the great
wall of mountains between Cairngorm and Braeriach, which is one of the
most stupendous lines of precipices in Britain. It rivets the attention
all the way by its simple grandeur and its wide extent. This wall of
mountains is not seen from other points, being lost in the mass of
Cairngorm, which seems to form part of the mountains around the Lang
Ghru Pass. It is only as we advance that they reveal themselves along
the sky-line, forming lofty acclivities and huge precipices, and long
horizontal plateaus, rising up abruptly from the basin of the loch. The
snow lingers far on in summer among the rifts and shady recesses, and
brings out by contrast the blackness of the grim rocks, adding greatly
to the sublimity of the landscape. On a gloomy day, when the sky is
covered with dark clouds, the lofty wall of granite assumes a wild,
uniformly forbidding appearance. Very little detail is seen, and the eye
can form no true idea of the great height of the precipices. But on a
clear bright day, the sunshine illumines each scaur and cleft of the
granite rocks, and shows the great variety of their appearance, and they
gain immensely in sternness of expression and in vastness of height.
Glenmore Lodge before its recent reconstruction was a curious
conglomeration of buildings, added, one after the other, to the original
central structure. It is now a well-designed Highland lodge with a
picturesque effect which harmonises well with the character of the
surrounding scenery.
The ascent of Cairngorm
is made by the path that winds across the stream at the bottom of the
valley. The distance to the top may be about five miles by a tedious,
but not a difficult rout; a distinct path marking the gradual course to
the cairn that crowns the highest point The first part of the way leads
past a solitary farmhouse called Ricaonachan, which used to be the
shooting lodge, for two miles through a wooded defile formed by a large
burn from the southern side of Cairngorm. Crossing this burn by a rustic
wooden bridge, you climb the actual side of the hill and emerge on a
wide open moorland, from whence, by a long, gradual incline by a
deer-shooters’ zigzag path, you are brought up to the ridge, from
which the summit is soon reached. The surface of the mountain is
extremely barren, consisting mostly of rough granite gravel and boulders
with hardly any vegetation. The naked soil produces very few of the
Alpine plants that are conspicuous on other mountains of similar
elevation. Here and there a rare sedge or scale-moss gladdens the eye of
the botanist; and large tufts of a chocolate-brown Andreaa, and
patches of a snowy scalloped lichen called Cetraria nivalis, both
almost entirely confined to the Cairngorm rang; remind you of the
vegetation of the Polar regions. In the southern corrie near the top,
well-shaded from the sun, a large wreath of snow usually lingers till
August, and then melts completely away. The mountain is entirely bare of
snow for about a month or six weeks; the last relics of the past winter
almost mingling with the first fail of next winter’s new snow. The
origin of the large burn at the foot of the hill is from the melting of
the snow in this corrie. The course of the water downwards may be traced
by the tract of rich green verdure which it nourishes, and which forms a
great contrast to the barren sterility of the rest of the region. It is
this green tract of verdure that has given its name to the mountain.
A few hundred yards
beyond the crowning cairn, there is a spring of deliciously cold water
called Fuaran-a-Mharcuis or the Marquis’s well, which is often a spot
of blackness amid the snow, or entirely obliterated by it. The tourist
is not infrequently induced to go on from this point to the summit of
Ben Macdhui, which adds considerably to the arduousness of the feat.
Descending over the steep cliffs by the stream on the south-western side
of Cairngorm, you come to the shore of Loch Avon, which is unequalled
among the Scottish lochs on account of its utter loneliness and the
stern magnificence of its mountain setting. For a large part of the year
the sun cannot reach it on account of the loftiness of the rocky walls
which shut it in. The wind for the same reason does not often ruffle its
surface, and it stretches before the eye for a mile and a half a calm
mirror in which the wild solitude sees itself reflected with double
grandeur. Its waters are of a startlingly blue colour, breaking at the
shore into green and cobalt hues like the bickering colours on a peacock’s
neck. At the west end of this loch is the famous Clach Dhian or Shelter
Stone, which is an immense boulder of granite resting on other stones,
and thus forming a cave sufficient to accommodate five or six men. This
spot is often used as a sleeping-place when the tourist is overtaken by
the darkness, and it is sufficiently windproof and dry to provide
fairly. comfortable quarters for a summer night. Bearing south-east from
this well-known landmark, and climbing up by the stream to Loch
Etchachan, a foot-track leads to the top of Ben Macdhui, where an
unequalled and uninterrupted view of all the Highland hills will reward
the climber’s pluck and perseverance.
The views from Cairngorm,
notwithstanding its great elevation, are by no means remarkable — the
distant ones being too vague and indistinct to produce a deep
impression, and the near ones consisting of rolling billows of granite
mountains unbroken by bold precipice or deep ravine, and leaving little
to the imagination. But what has distinguished it more than anything
else is the peculiar crystals that are found upon it. The upward path is
strewn with large pieces of granite interspersed with veins of quartz,
which have been broken in order to find transparent gems. But in every
case the quartz has crystallised into opaque, white hexagonal crystals,
which have no beauty or value. It is very rarely that one comes upon a
perfect specimen of the gem among the debris of the mountain. The best
crystals have been found in drusic cavities in the granite, and they
vary in colour from an almost black or dark smoky hue, to a brilliant
yellow like an Oriental topaz. The largest specimen ever found is in
possession of Mr. Farquharson of Invercauld. It was picked up in 1780 on
the top of Ben Avon, and weighed 49 lbs. Invercauld gave £40 for it.
Cairngorms have been purchased at a cheap rate by the local jewellers,
but an extravagant price has been charged for them elsewhere. Very fine
specimens used to be discovered on the mountain in tolerable profusion;
but they are now comparatively scarce.
The other route by which
Glenmore Lodge is approached is more roundabout. It proceeds past
Loch-an-Eilan, the cross-road to Glen Eunach and the entrance to the
Lang Ghru Pass. The track goes through the forest, which in this place
is somewhat thin and open, and admits of the continuous luxuriant growth
of heather among the trees. It used to be much frequented by the country
people, but it has gradually fallen into desuetude, until now it has
almost ceased to be traversed. The consequence is that the heather has
grown over it, obliterating the ruts of the wheels, although still
leaving sufficiently distinct traces of the existence of the path, which
the horse has no difficulty in pursuing. It is a delightfully soft
track, freed from bumping and jerking by the elastic cushions of the
heather, although it passes over irregularities of the surface, over
heights and depths that might otherwise endanger the safety of the
vehicle. There is no forest-path in Rothiemurchus so charming as this
is. It offers at every turn far—stretching views over the forest of
the open country to the west and north and splendid glimpses of the dark
Cairngorm mountains on the right, while the vistas in the forest itself
are enchanting. To do justice to it, one ought to traverse it leisurely
on foot on a bright summer day, when every knoll and decaying old root,
covered with mystic vegetation, affords endless sources of delight. Here
and there huge moraines, covered with heather, and crowned by clumps of
fir-trees, with wooden huts on the highest points as lookout stations
for the deer, rise up on the right hand, between you and the vast wall
of mountains filling up the sky behind, and bear witness to the
destructive forces that in far past glacial times sculptured the
landscape. Marshy places and little lochans add the variety of their
black, still, shining waters, fringed with reeds and rushes, to the
whole scene, and mirror the fir-trees in their depths. I remember
vividly how on one occasion the sunset glow reddened all the pines of
this forest path, rested as an indescribable glory on the grey mountain
peaks, and filled all the air with a suffused golden sheen that made
every object which it illumined a picture. The track continues the same
to the end. It takes you to the high deer-fence which separates the
property of Glenmore from Rothiemurchus, when passing through the gate
you come to Loch Morlich. The margin of stones and sand is decked with
bright green water-mosses in great variety and with immense quantities
of sundew of unusually large size. The extraordinary profusion of the
tufts of this curious carnivorous plant or vegetable spider along the
beach is due to the great development of insect-life which is often seen
by the side of a loch, the one acting and re-acting upon the other. I
was struck by the same circumstance at Loch Gamhna near Loch-an-Elan,
where large masses of luxuriant sundews form quite a reddish-brown sward
on the margin of the loch; and at Loch Insh the shore is equally covered
with large tufts of the rarer long-leaved species, the Drosera
anglica. The road comes to a large sluice where the Luineag issues
from the western end of Loch Morlich, over which you pass on foot, while
your vehicle crosses by a shallow ford a little farther down. This
sluice was constructed to regulate the flow of the water of the loch
into the river, when floats of timber, cut in the forest, had to be sent
down into the Spey, and from thence on to the sea. The dam banked up the
waters of the loch to a higher level than the ordinary one, and all at
once the imprisoned flood was released, and carried the timber with it
over every obstruction down to the Spey with great impetuosity.
The ordinary road to
Glenmore Lodge is crowded with vehicles and bicycles during the season,
for this is one of the show places of the district, and most of the
visitors wish to ascend Cairngorm. At the lodge there gather visitors
from all parts of the world, and parties can be traced by aid of a glass
all the way up the slopes of the mountain to the top. In the afternoon
the crowd disappears, and there falls a great stillness upon the place.
It reverts then to its wonted loneliness, enhanced by the contrast of
the bustling scenes that preceded. The presence of such a multitude of
people interferes no doubt to a certain extent with one’s thorough
enjoyment of the solitude, and is apt to take away the bloom and
sentiment of romance, which requires loneliness for its development, and
to prevent the peculiar thoughts which the Alpine landscapes themselves
suggest, while it introduces alien ideas of the great world left behind.
But the scene is on so vast a scale that humanity seems to be entirely
swallowed up, and the great dumb mountains necessarily subdue the soul
to a kindred peace. The popularity of Cairngorm does not seem to scare
away the deer from their accustomed haunts in the neighbouring hills and
corries, or to destroy in the least degree the sport of the huntsmen.
There is room for all; and Nature and human nature act and re-act upon
each other, for it is to be hoped that the crowd of visitors take back
with them to the busy haunts of man the visions and inspirations that
come to them from the everlasting hills. |
