Highlands (Scotland)

“ Foreigners who expect to find all Scotland lit by a sunset of romance, are disappointed in the paucity of kilts and plaids as touches of human colour upon the Highland scenery. The tartan, indeed, has gone out faster than some picturesque costumes of continental mountaineers. It was when forbidden to wear it that the thrawn Highlander clung fondly to his ancestral garb; now that he has his choice, though he may keep a kilt and gay trappings to match for occasional display, he submits to the hodden grey breeches of the Saxon for work-a-day wear. ”

“ During this time the history of the Highlands is still to a great extent the history of Scotland, and it was not till about the 12th century that the Highlanders became, strictly speaking, a peculiar people, confined to the territory whose boundaries were indicated in the first chapter, having for their neighbours on the east and south a population of undoubtedly Teutonic origin. The Norse invasions not only kept Scotland in continual commotion at the time, but must have exercised an important influence on its whole history, and contributed a new and vigorous element to its population. ”

“ Grander and more rugged, however, is the scenery, for the mountains are here higher, even as the water is deeper, than in Iroquois land. The Scottish Highlands are the fragments of the earliest land that emerged above the prehistoric oceans. For centuries they formed a boundary in ethnology, politics, and religion, even as in the æons of geology they form a frontier of chronology. ”

“ But there is an older use of this name, for the irregular line along which the Highlands fall in a broken wave upon the richer country, a zone pointed out by Scott and other writers as the most charming part of Scotland. The austere spirit of mountain solitudes is not so easily caught as the varied charms of a debateable land, where “the rivers find their way out of the mountainous region by the wildest leaps, and through the most romantic passes,” and Nature’s rugged features straggle down among good roads and inns, the practical and the picturesque throwing each other into alternate relief. ”

“ The Lowlands are well watered and fertile, and the people who lived there were peaceable and industrious, and both on the seaboard and inland there is early notice of the existence of populous and thriving towns. The Highlands, on the contrary, are made up of lakes, moors, and barren hills, whose rocky summits are well-nigh inaccessible, and whose heath-clad sides are of little use even as pasture. Even in the glens between the mountains, where alone any arable land is to be found, the crops are poor, the harvest late and uncertain, and vegetation of any kind very scanty. ”

“ Above all, the difference lies in the rise of burghs in the Lowlands. Speech follows trade. Every small town on the east coast was a school of English language. Should commerce ever reach the Highlands, should the abomination of desolation overtake the waterfalls and the valleys, and other temples of nature share the degradation of the Falls of Foyers, we may then look for the disappearance of the Gaelic tongue.
Be all this as it may, it is undeniable that there has been in the Highlands, since 1745, a change of civilization without a displacement of race. ”

“ That hugest mountain is indeed the centre from which all the vales irregularly diverge; the whole circumjacent region may be traversed in a week; and though no other district of equal extent contains such variety of the sublime and beautiful, yet the beautiful is so prevalent that we feel its presence, even in places where it is overpowered; and on leaving “The Lakes,” our imagination is haunted and possessed with images, not of dread, but of delight.
We have sometimes been asked, whether the north of England or the Highlands of Scotland should be visited first ”

“ The Highlands extend themselves from the Firth of Clyde to the north-west and north; whilst the Lowlands take a direction from the Firth of Forth along the eastern border of the Highlands, and by the coasts of the North Sea. To the Firth of Tay, and northwards to the Grampian Hills, the Lowlands are not very broad or extensive, whilst the Highland mountains nearly approach the seashore. It is not till we have crossed the Grampian Hills that those large level plains open upon us which comprehend the north-easternmost part of Scotland, particularly the present Aberdeenshire. ”

“ They who have large houses generally happen to have small fortunes, and among the few who have adequate means, there is scarcely one who could accommodate one half of the royal suite. In Scotland, everything worthy of being seen lies in a ring-fence. The Highlands comprise all that is remarkable in the country; and thus the tour of them presents a quick succession of picturesque beauty without the interval of even half a day's journey devoid of interest. ”

“ We have watched the last light of day fade far away over the Atlantic behind the islands of the west; and although we may have disagreed in many things, yet we have always acknowledged that for wild beauty, for colour, for atmospheric effects and lonely grandeur, we know of no country that is equal to the Highlands of Scotland. ”

“ The only concession I ever noticed a Highlander make is now and then to take off his cap, if the water is trickling from it down his neck, and to wring the rain out of it before putting it on again. As an illustration of how strong and persistent this national trait is, it may be mentioned that about the middle of the eighteenth century a Highlander from the forest of Mam More emigrated to Canada, where after some years he was visited by an old friend from Scotland who, when the man was out of the way, asked his wife and daughters whether he ever talked of the Highlands. ”

“ No part of the United Kingdom has of late years attracted a greater portion of public attention than the Highlands of Scotland. Formerly isolated as the inhabitants were from their fellow subjects, by a different language and separate interests, their character was but little known and less admired. Devoted to their chiefs and feudal institutions, they entertained a sovereign contempt for their neighbours ”

“ The fact is undeniable that the Highlands of Scotland were far more populous a century ago than they are now. The poorer inhabitants have been driven to Canada and other colonies; their small farms have been changed into deer-parks or sheep-walks; the landlords have increased their rentals, but the [83] country has lost an important class and reaped no adequate advantage in return. ”

“ Of course the number of different Highland excursions which a tourist can plan is infinite. Most visitors to Scotland are, however, satisfied with a short tour among these mountains, on account of the great uncertainty of the weather. Indeed, as it rains here more than half the time, the chance is always in favor of bad weather; and the really pleasant days are very few.
The valley by which tourists from Glasgow most frequently go into the Highlands is the valley of Loch Lomond. The lower end of this lake comes to within about ten miles of the Clyde. ”

“ The western coast is cut up into numberless islets, and the coast-line is constantly broken by steep jagged promontories jutting out seaward, or cut by long lochs, up which the sea runs far into the land between hills rising almost as bare and straight as walls on either side. In the Highlands even in the present day there are no towns of any importance, for the difficulty of access by land and the dangers of the coast have made commerce well-nigh impossible. ”

“ He that sees beforehand his trip to the hills, should beforehand have all in readiness: he who on a summer ramble is smitten with a sudden desire of grouse-shooting, must however, do the best he can.
When you pass into Scotland, the signals of the time grow more conspicuous. In the newspapers, you see everywhere advertisements of Highland tracts to be let as shooting-grounds. When you get into the Highlands themselves, you find in all the inns maps of the neighbouring estates, divided into shooting-grounds for letting. ”

“ Another isolated area of volcanic hills forms the picturesque district of the Lakes. But it is in Scotland that this type is displayed on the largest scale and in the most varied diversity. The Scottish Highlands are built up of the most ancient rocks of the British Islands, and possess a geological structure of extraordinary complexity. They include a vast variety of materials which, rising to the highest elevations in the country, and exposed to [Pg 112] the severest climate, have impressed their individual characters upon the landscapes. ”

“ It does not much matter which way the stranger takes, for he can hardly go wrong, to understand how right Gray was when he told his mole-eyed generation, “the Lowlands were worth seeing once, but the mountains are ecstatic, and ought to be visited in pilgrimage once a year.” All roads to the Inner Highlands lead through the Outer Highlands, more fully described in Bonnie Scotland.
For leisurely tourists the choice road is still by water, down the Clyde from Glasgow. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ It was not till after the Rebellion of 1745 that the spirit of industry first began to animate the people. But the Highlands remained for some time in a very bad state. The spirit of the people was broken, and the severe climate, barren soil, and lack of minerals left them no resource but the fisheries. The Highland Society, founded in 1784, did much to improve the state of agriculture, by reclaiming the waste districts; and latterly great numbers of the people have emigrated. At the time of the Union Scotland was without agriculture, manufactures, or trade ”

“ As would naturally be expected, the houses and other buildings of the Highlanders were quite in keeping with their agricultural implements and general mode of life. Even the tacksmen or gentlemen of the clan, the relations of the chief, lived in huts or hovels, that the poorest farmer in most parts of Scotland at the present day, would shudder to house his cattle in. In most cases they appear to have been pretty much the same as those of the small farmers or cottars, only perhaps a little larger. ”

“ I use the word Highlands, in the common, though improper, sense of including all Scotland from the Pentland Firth to the beginning of the mountains, a few miles north of Glasgow, Stirling, Perth, and Dundee. All such distinctions are necessarily somewhat vague, because the boundaries of nature are never clearly marked. Compare Macky's Scotland, p. 124, London, 1732, with Anderson's Guide to the Highlands, Edinburgh, 1847, pp. ”

“ Isolated from the Lowlands by a mountain barrier which prevented almost any intercourse between them and their southern neighbours, they happily kept free from the contagion of that religious fanaticism which spread over the Lowlands of Scotland, in consequence of the unconstitutional attempts of the government to force episcopacy upon the people. Had the Highlanders been imbued with the same spirit which actuated the Scottish whigs, the government might have found it a difficult task to have suppressed them ”

“ In the Old Statistical Account of Scotland, this assertion is being constantly repeated by the various Highland ministers who report upon the state of their parishes. In the case of many Highland districts, one could conceive of nothing more hopeless and discouraging than the attempt to force from them a crop of grain. That there are spots in the Highlands as susceptible of high culture as some of the best in the lowlands cannot be denied; but these bear but a small proportion to the great quantity of ground that is fitted only to yield a sustenance to cattle and sheep. ”

“ As the traveller drives or cycles along the roads, he now and again gets such impressive vistas of long-stretching waterways, wooded to the brink with graceful trees, as grave themselves on the memory for evermore. For rock, crag, and dashing linn, the northern Highlands are supreme; but in the green Borderland, there is a more sedate and proportioned beauty. Nature is none the less attractive for losing somewhat of her wildness and austerity.{102}
TARBOLTON.
In the agricultural lowlands of Scotland it is not rare to come upon little villages that seem entirely left behind by modern progress. ”

“ The student of eugenics will note that among the tea-bibbing islanders of the west the teeth of the natives are poor. My experience tends to show that the best teeth in Scotland are to be found in Aberdeenshire. When a Buchan audience laughs, there is a gleam of polished ivory that is very impressive; but rural Aberdeen has deviated less into slops than any other part of Britain.
[6] "There are probably now more persons of Highland descent in the Lowlands than in the Highlands themselves."—Scotland of To-Day, by Henderson and Watt, p. ”