Highland culture

“ We have no such glorious standards to show as her indomitable and everlasting oaks. She is all over sylvan—Scotland but here and there; look on England from any point in any place, and you see she is rich, from almost any point in any place in Scotland, and you feel that comparatively she is poor. Yet our Lowlands have long been beautifying themselves into a resemblance of hers; as for our Highlands, though many changes have been going on there too, and most we believe for good, they are in their great features, and in their spirit unalterable by art, stamped and inspired by enduring Nature. ”

“ In too many instances the Highlands have been drained, not of their superfluity of population, but of the whole mass of the inhabitants, dispossessed by an unrelenting avarice which will one day be found to have been as short-sighted as it is selfish and unjust. Meantime, the Highlands may become the fairy ground for romance and poetry, or the subject of experiment for the professors of speculation, historical and economical. ”

“ Swayed by the example of the godly among them, and away from the influences by which less sequestered localities were corrupted, the body of the people in the Highlands became distinguished as the most peaceable and virtuous peasantry in Britain. ”

“ All the accounts we have of the Highlands from travellers and others down to the end of the 18th century, show the country in a state of commotion and confusion, resulting from the changes consequent on the rebellion, the breaking up of old relationships, and the gradual encroachment of lowland civilisation, lowland modes of life, and lowland methods of agriculture. ”

“ The Highlands now contain a considerable lowland population, and the Highlanders are scattered over the length and breadth of the land, and indeed of the world, honourably fulfilling the noble part they have to play in the world’s history. Ere long there will be neither Highlander nor Lowlander; we shall all be one people, having the best qualities of the blood of the formerly two antagonistic races running in our veins. It is, we have no doubt, with men as with other animals, the best breeds are got by judicious crossings. ”

“ There is no such climate for all kinds of beauty and grandeur as the climate of the Highlands. Here and there you meet with an old shepherd or herdsman, who has beguiled himself into a belief, in spite of many a night’s unforeseen imprisonment in the mists, that he can presage its changes from fair to foul, and can tell the hour when the long-threatening thunder will begin to mutter. The weather-wise have often perished in their plaids. ”

“ Many of these poor people, after the usual custom of the evicted Highlanders, made up little packages of earth—their native soil—-to bear it with them to the wilds of America, as a relic or memento of their country; and in the hope that, in this little handful might be the seeds of the heather-bell and other native plants and flowers. Strong, deep, and undying is this pure and noble—this holy love of home, in the Highland heart. ”

“ It is only when parents and heads of families in the Highlands are moral, happy, and contented, that they can instil sound principles into their children, who in their intercourse with the world may become what the men of Sutherland have already been, “an honourable example, worthy the imitation of all.” ”

“ Agriculture is as good, the Highland sheep and cattle are famous, the people are about as comfortable as lowlanders in the same circumstances; education is well diffused; churches of all sects are plentiful, and ere long, doubtless, so far as outward circumstances are concerned, there will be no difference between the Highlands and Lowlands. How the universal improvement of the Highlands is mainly to be accomplished, we shall state in the words of Sir John M’Neill. ”

“ None will visit the Highlands without having some knowledge of their history; and the changes that have long been taking place in the condition of the people will be affectingly recognised wherever they go, in spite even of what might have appeared the insuperable barriers of nature. ”

“ The peculiar aspect of their country, in which nature appears in its wildest and most romantic features, exhibiting at a glance sharp and rugged mountains, with dreary wastes—wide-stretched lakes, and rapid torrents, over which the thunders and lightnings, and tempests, and rains, of heaven, exhaust their terrific rage, wrought upon the creative powers of the imagination, and from these appearances, the Highlanders “were naturally led to ascribe every disaster to the influence of superior powers, in whose character the predominating feature necessarily was malignity towards the human race.” ”

“ The early history of the Highlanders presents us with a bold and hardy race of men, filled with a romantic attachment to their native mountains and glens, cherishing an exalted spirit of independence, and firmly bound together in septs or clans by the ties of kindred. Having little intercourse with the rest of the world, and pent up for many centuries within the Grampian range, the Highlanders acquired a peculiar character, and retained or adopted habits and manners differing widely from those of their lowland neighbours. ”

“ As it is generally acknowledged that the physical character of a country influences in a great degree the moral and physical character of its inhabitants, and thus to a certain extent determines their history, it may not be deemed out of place to define here the application of the term Highlands, so far as Scotland is concerned, and briefly to describe the general physical aspect of that part of our native land. ”

“ Neither, amid such profusion and diversity of all that is beautiful and sublime in nature, can the unqualified admiration of strangers, from every part of Europe, of the scenery of the Highlands fail of being easily accounted for ”

“ Scotland has become cosmopolitan, and the fastnesses of the Highlands are no longer the retreats of wild cateran clans, whose peculiar habits and primitive ideas of social life helped to bind them together with ties of family strength, and at the same time to keep them unspotted from the Lowland and outside world that knew not the Gaelic and the tartan and the pipes. ”

“ The whole of the Highlands were wild, unfrequented, and desolate, under the rude jurisdiction of the heads of the great Highland houses, whose clansmen, as savage and as desperately courageous as Sioux or Pawnees, offered their lords an almost idolatrous devotion. ”

“ We have now brought our Remarks on the Scenery of the Highlands to a close, and would fain have said a few words on the character and life of the people; but are precluded from even touching on that most interesting subject. It is impossible that the minds of travellers through those wonderful regions can be so occupied with the contemplation of mere inanimate nature, as not to give many a thought to their inhabitants, now and in the olden time. ”

“ Amongst an imaginative people like the Highlanders, who, poetic from dwelling amongst wild and romantic scenery, shut out from the world and clinging to the traditions of the past, it requires little, with fair treatment, to make them almost idolise their heritor. They would spend the last drop of their blood in his service. But this feeling of respectful attachment to the landowners, which money cannot buy, is fast passing away. ”

“ The Highlander loves his past and his native land with a passionate attachment, and the story of the great wrongs of the days of the clearances is still deeply embedded in his mind. Within the last year or two many accounts, more or less imaginary, have appeared purporting to be true stories of those terrible days in the north, and it is peculiarly appropriate that, when once again men’s minds are centred on the great problem of the land in this country as a whole, and specific attention has been directed towards the Highlands, this reprint should now appear. ”

“ We are all, therefore, under deep obligations to the public spirit and enterprize of the publishers and others who have been good enough to secure in an accessible form a reliable account of the conditions and events which at once intensified the acuteness of the land-hunger in the Highlands and constituted the blackest page in Highland history. ”

“ After what manner may his Grace the Duke of Sutherland be most effectually met in this matter, so that the case of toleration and freedom of conscience may be maintained in the extensive district which God, in his providence, has consigned to his stewardship? We are not unacquainted with the Celtic character as developed in the Highlands of Scotland. Highlanders, up to a certain point, are the most docile, patient, enduring of men ”

“ As to the Highlands, the tradition remained for a long time, and we believe does so still in many parts, that under the old regime, chiefs were always kind as fathers, and the people faithful and loving as children; the men were tall and brave, and the women fair and pure; the cattle were fat and plentiful, and the land produced abundance for man and beast ”

“ We shall take advantage of the breathing-space afforded us here, before entering upon the stirring events of the next century, in which the Highlanders played a most important part, to notice such objects connected with the ancient state of the Highlands, and the character and condition of the inhabitants in former times, as may be considered interesting either in a local or national point of view. ”

“ During the last thirty years, the patriotic labours of the various Scottish book-clubs,—The Abbotsford, The Bannatyne, The Iona, The Maitland, The Spalding Clubs—the works of the various eminent Scottish antiquaries and historians, not to mention many valuable papers and pamphlets, have not only subjected everything connected with the history of the Highlands to an unsparing and searching criticism, but have also brought to light many new facts, and opened up formerly unthought-of tracks of inquiry. ”

“ Perhaps few of us can rightly learn to love West Highland scenery who have not in youth grown familiar with every blush of heather, every skin of copse or bracken, every brown rib bared amid the turf, and all the moods of those stern features under changing lights and shadows. ”

“ Far more than we were aware of have we trusted to the strong spirit of delight within us, to prompt and to guide. And in such a country as the Highlands, thus led, we cannot err. Therefore, if your desire be for the summits, set your face thitherwards, and wind a way of your own, still ascending and ascending, along some vast brow, that seems almost a whole day’s journey, and where it is lost from your sight, not to end, but to go sweeping round, with undiminished grandeur, into another region. You are not yet half-way up the mountain, but you care not for the summit now ”

“ Scottish emigrants are admitted upon all hands to have given its backbone of moral and religious strength to the Province, and to those brought over from the Highlands in this vessel is due the honour of being in the forefront—the pioneers and vanguard. ”

“ Every writer who pretends to record facts, the result of observation, and not to draw imaginary Arcadian pictures, concurs in describing the country as being sunk in the lowest state of wretchedness. The description we have already given of the condition of the people before 1745, applies with intensified force to the greater part of the Highlands for long after that year. ”

“ Although these people may cease their scoffing and make themselves as Highland as anyone can be whom nature has not made Highland, their affection for the music and their professions of goodwill are not likely to help to preserve it. It is for real Highlanders to keep alive their own music and show scorners that it is not going to die the death, but live while there are Highlands and a Highland people. If, on the other hand, they are playing the lament for a perishing race and a dying language, it is not much wonder if neighbours chime in with an emphatic Amen. ”

“ It must not be imagined, however, that the surface of the Highlands is one universal expanse of green and brown fragrant heather; every tourist knows that in almost every glen, by the side of many lochs, streams, and bogs, patches of cultivated land are to be met with, bearing good crops of oats, barley, potatoes, and turnips. These productions chiefly belong to the large sheep farmers, and are intended for the use of themselves, their servants, and cattle, and but seldom have they any to dispose of. ”

“ But there is the Highlands and the language and the music, 365the scattered literature and half-Anglicised people, and if Highlanders with a craze for organising will but think on these things and build up some organisation that will become the natural rallying point of everything Highland, it is not yet too late to let the world see that the Scottish Highlands has a history and a literature worthy of a far higher place among the nations of the earth than the earth has yet given them. ”

“ Our main purpose is served if we succeed in showing to our fellow-countrymen, Highland and Lowland, that there are national literary treasures which have been hitherto comparatively overlooked, and which ought in an important degree to add to the already high fame of bonnie Scotland as a land whose glens and bens, whose rivers and lakes are everywhere vocal with songs of love and patriotism. ”

“ Why then should there be any lamentation over the Highlanders leaving their country more than over any other class of respectable willing men? Anything more hopelessly wretched than their position at various times from 1745 down to the present day it would be impossible to imagine. If one, however, trusted the descriptions of some poets and sentimentalists, a happier or more comfortably situated people than the Highlanders at one time were could not be found on the face of the globe. ”