Things seen in the Scottish Highlands

Chapter One: The land and the people

BEFORE we start upon our survey of the beauties and grimnesses of this land of dim romance and stern reality, the home of lost causes and unlucky heroes, it will be as well for us to define the limits of the land, and to touch, however briefly, upon its characteristics and those of its people.

To our average visitor from the South, the Highlands is a term which is apt to include all of Scotland beyond the Forth and Stirling Bridge; but, while the old by-word, "Forth bridles the wild Highandman" may seem to lend countenance to such a vague impression, it by no means represents the facts of the case. Actually the Highlands begin at a point much farther south than Stirling, at the Mull of Kintyre, which is practically in the same latitude as Girvan, in Ayrshire and Moffat, in Dumfries-shire, and is actually a little south of the Cheviot. Thence they stretch diagonally in a north-easterly direction across Scotland, by the foot of Loch Lomond, Callander, Crieff and Dunkeld, reaching their most easterly point, and their nearest to the east coast in Mount Battock, which is almost due west from Stonehaven. The line of Highland ground is thence drawn almost due north to Huntly, whence it turns westwards to Inverness. Beyond the Moray Firth it includes the great bulk of the area of the far north, with some notable exceptions, such as the most of the county of Caithness.

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Thus the Highlands do not include within their area much of the agricultural land of Scotland, while they have no place, for reasons which the wanderer will quickly appreciate, for the developments of commerce and manufacture, save in the modern instances where their water-power is now being harnessed. They remain, as they have always been, outside the current of the busy national life as represented by the Lowlands and the east coast, and dream their dreams in the solitude of their great hills, which are still almost as inviolate as they were two centuries ago. In the old days this detachment was periodically corrected by those raids on the fat Lowlands by means of which the Highlander adjusted the unequal balance of Fortune. Nowadays, such a solace has been long denied him. In the comparatively few cases in which he stays at home, he makes up for the lack of the foray on the Sassenach by inviting him to come to the hills and valleys of the north, where he becomes an easy prey. Otherwise he goes forth to the busy centres, and displaying there an energy which he seldom showed among his native hills, proves himself as skilful as ever were his ancestors in the great world-game of "Beggar-my-neighbour," albeit it may now be played with weapons and laws.

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THE OLD BRIDGE OF STIRLING. The most famous bridge in Scotland. It was the first stone bridge over the Forth and for years the gateway between the Highlands and Lowlands. The battle of Stirling (1297) was fought nearby.

And thus the Highlands are left tragically bare of the one product which, in ancient days, was always their pride - a race of men who never feared to speak with their enemy in the gate. You will find it scattered all over the world, and everywhere honoured and prosperous; but the Highland race is few, and growing fewer, within its own glens. Why this should be so is another story, and involves many questions economic and otherwise; but the fact is manifest and deplorable.

As a consolation, there is the memory of old romance, which, in the actual acting, must often have been, as with most romance, fierce and bloody and not at all romantic to the actors and sufferers in it, but has now come to be viewed through the golden haze which softens all harsh outlines after a certain lapse of time. There is, above all, the memory of one great loyalty, which, all unworthy as were its objects, will never cease to be regarded as one of the chief heroisms of history, and which has, strange to say, earned its constantly growing meed of honour more and more freely the more we have become thankful that it failed. And there is the abiding gift of the constant presence of a natural beauty and grandeur which can abide comparison with that of any other land in the world, and which has, for a century and a half, been finding its answer ever increasingly in the hearts and minds of all who have been privileged to see it.

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It has become the fashion of late, one supposes out of the mere spirit of contradiction, to affirm that the long-held opinion that the growth of admiration of Highland scenery (as of other mountain scenery elsewhere), and appreciation of the romantic aspect of Highland life and civilisation is almost entirely modern, a thing of not much more than a century's springing, is entirely erroneous, and that the Highlands were both known and appreciated long before the days of Sir Walter Scott, Coleridge, Keats, and the rest of the famous pilgrims who were supposed to have created the taste for beauty and romance of the Highlands. In a strictly limited sense this is true. For centuries, sporadic and daring pilgrims found their way through the wilds of the north, and were followed, in comparatively modern times, by such capable observers as Burt, Pennant, Samuel Johnson and Boswell. But anyone who has read the comments of such travellers on what they saw will look long for any appreciation of the beauties of the scenery through which they passed, and the curiosity with which they regarded the manners and customs of the Highlander would be indignantly repelled by the Celtic enthusiast of to-day as an insult, and was precisely the same sort of thing which might be bestowed upon the manners and customs of the South Sea Islanders. Johnson and Boswell between them, and especially, from the modern point of view, the latter, whose Tour to the Hebrides is a perpetual feast of good things, created indeed, considerable interest in Highland customs and character, though they showed no appreciation whatever of Highland scenery. But even they, enthusiastic admirer as at least one of them was of the old tribal spirit, scarcely appreciated the pathos and interest of the fact that what they were witnessing was almost the last surviving example of a type of civilisation which is seen in its flower in Homer, and was now sadly creeping to extinction in a civilised world of a totally different type, in which it was an anachronism.

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It was Sir Walter Scott's quick sympathy, fostered by not altogether dissimilar conditions in his own Borderland, which really first appreciated the meaning of this fact, and expressed it to the reading world. Besides, for one who read Johnson or even Boswell, to say nothing of the earlier and lesser lights, there were thousands who woke to interest in the Highlands under the spell of Sir Walter, and found in The Lady of the Lake, and The Lord of the Isles, followed by Waverley, Rob Roy and The Legend of Montrose, their first introduction to what was for them an entirely new world. That was true in the opening quarter of the nineteenth century, and in spite of all that has been written about the Highlands since then it remains substantially true to-day. A novel-writer like Mr. Neil Munro writes out of a knowledge of Highland nature and character to which Sir Walter, in spite of his wonderful intuitions, could lay no claim; nevertheless it is the older writer who is still the exponent of the Highlands to the multitude, and whose work creates the interest that brings the multitude north year by year to see what he first taught their grandfathers to see in a country and a race which had previously been sometimes a menace, sometimes a derision, always a puzzle. While, therefore, it may be pedantically true to deny that Scott was the first to create interest among the people of the rest of Britain and America with regard to the Highlands, the substantial truth is quite the opposite to such a denial, and Scott's primacy in this matter must be acknowledged, however little the acknowledgment may be palatable to pedantry.

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BEN LOMOND AND LOCH LOMOND. Ben Lomond is an easy climb yet it yields one of the most expansive views in Scotland. The Highland loch surpasses perhaps all others owing to is lovely islands, the dignity of its hills and the wooded charm of its banks.