Highlands

“ 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. ”

“ I fancy that most of my readers are acquainted more or less with the scenery of the Highlands; but in the case of by far the larger number of them, I venture to say that such acquaintance extends only to the Highlands in their summer or their autumn dress. If so, they only half know them. Brave is the tourist who ventures amid the bens and glens when rude King Boreas lords it over them; when winter’s wind roars adown the gorges of the hill, staggering the stalwart pines, mingling the withered leaves and the snowflakes in the desolate woods. ”

“ Fleetly flies upon her journey;
With her might she hastens northward,
Mountains tremble from her footsteps,
Valleys rise and heights are lowered,
Highlands soon become as lowlands,
All the hills and valleys levelled. ”

“ 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 ”

“ In the Highlands best known to tourists, the blending of blood, language, and customs has gone so far that a stranger may be excused for confounding a Perthshire strath with the true kailyard scenery. Beyond the Great Glen, still more markedly beyond the sounds, firths, and minches of the west coast, we find Highlanders less touched by the spirit of a practical age, whose first breath sets them shivering and drawing their tartans about them as they wake from fond dreams of a romantic past. All Scotland, alas! ”

“ 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. ”

“ Your line of journey lies, perhaps, some two thousand feet above the level of the sea, and seldom dips down to one thousand; and these are the heights from which all above and all below you look most magnificent, for both regions have their full power over you—the unscaleable cliffs, the unfathomable abysses—and you know not which is the more sublime. The sublimity indeed is one. It is then that you may do well to ascend to the very mountain top. For it may happen to be one of those heavenly days indeed, when the whole Highlands seem to be reposing in the cloudless sky. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We were now in the bosom of the Highlands, with full leisure to contemplate the appearance and properties of mountainous regions, such as have been, in many countries, the last shelters of national distress, and are every where the scenes of adventures, stratagems, surprises and escapes.
Mountainous countries are not passed but with difficulty, not merely from the labour of climbing; for to climb is not always necessary: but because that which is not mountain is commonly bog, through which the way must be picked with caution. ”

“ From a few such stations, you get an insight [xx] into the configuration of the whole Western Highlands. By the dip of the mountains, you discover at a glance all the openings in the panorama around you into other regions. Follow your fancies fearlessly wherever they may lead; and if the blue aërial haze that hangs over a pass winding eastward, tempt you from your line of march due north, forthwith descend in that direction, and haply an omen will confirm you—an eagle rising on the left, and sailing away before you into that very spot of sky.
No man, however well read, should travel by book. ”

“ But I have ever found the people of those border districts of the Highlands which join on to the low country, or that inhabit districts much traversed by tourists, of a comparatively inferior cast: the finer qualities of the Highland character seem easily injured: the hospitality, the simplicity, the unsuspecting honesty, disappear; and we find, instead, a people rapacious, suspicious, and unscrupulous, considerably beneath the Lowland average. ”

“ It is singular to reflect that though the mountain-world, more than any other part of the land, appeals to the imagination, by revealing all that is most impressive in form and colour, and all that is most vigorous in the elemental warfare of nature, it was the last part of the terrestrial surface to meet with due appreciation. Little more than a century has passed since men began to visit the Scottish Highlands for the pleasure of admiring their scenery. ”

“ Perhaps it would be so clear that you could see the Highlands, that circle of tremendous peaks beyond the rough brown buttes that hemmed the valley in, the high sky line that often was not visible for weeks together but, on a brilliant day like this, would spring suddenly into being, a vast wall of glittering white, with jagged summits that seemed to touch the very sky. The wind would blow down from the snow fields sharp and chill, it would lift the manes of the horses as they snorted, kicked up their heels and went galloping off down the trail. ”

“ The Highlands of Scotland were intensely attractive to me, as being a kind of sublimation of the wild northern landscape that I had already loved in my native Lancashire; but the Highlands were not well chosen as a field for self-improvement in the art of painting. A student ought not to choose the most changeful of landscapes, but the least changeful; not the Highlands or the English Lake District, but the dullest landscape he can find in the south or the east of England. ”

“ Captain Burt and others who visited the Highlands previous to the extensive introduction of sheep, indulge in none of the raptures over Highland scenery, that the most common-place and prosy tourist thinks it his duty to get into at the present day. They speak of the country almost with horror, as a black howling wilderness, full of bogs and big boulders, and almost unfit for human habitation. They could see no beauty in the country that it should be desired ”

“ III. For the purposes of our present inquiry, I would class together as Highlands all the higher, more rugged, and mountainous ground, which differs on the whole from the uplands, not only in its greater elevation, but in the more irregular rocky forms of its surface, the narrower crests of its ridges, and the more peaked shapes of its summits. The geological structure of these tracts of country is generally so complicated that it gives rise to much greater variety of outline than is to be found in either of the other types of scenery. ”

“ The prevalent character of the whole range of scenery in the region, and the general impression made by it on the eye and mind, were so vividly conveyed that no one familiar with the country can fail to recognise how faithfully the innermost soul of the West Highlands is rendered. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Highlands consist of an old dissected plateau, or block, of ancient crystalline rocks with incised valleys and lochs carved by the action of mountain streams and by ice, the resulting topography being a wide area of irregularly distributed mountains whose summits have nearly the same height above sea-level, but whose bases depend upon the amount of denudation to which the plateau has been subjected in various places. ”

“ Nowhere in Britain can such an union be beheld of picturesque mountain-form and of clear and vivid colour. Nowhere is the grandeur of a winter storm more impressive than when a south-westerly gale drives the breakers against the headlands, howls up the glens, and fills every gully with a foaming torrent.
The scenery of the western Highlands of Scotland was first brought prominently before the world by the publication in the year 1760 of what purported to be Fragments of Ancient Poetry, collected in the Highlands. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Not even the convenient distinction of highlands and lowlands will carry us very far. We must enquire into the nature of the highlands; are the mountains their prevailing feature, or are those mountains, as we see them from the floor of the lowlands, a mere buttress to a sequence of elevated plains? Penetrate the chain, and you rise by successive steps from valley to valley, while each ridge is higher than the last. Follow its extension upon the map and you will see it rising from the Mediterranean and terminating in the knot of mountains north of India. ”

“ We stay'd nine Days upon the Road, and when we came within seven or eight Leagues from the Place to which we were bound, we began to discover the Highlands, where we saw nothing scarce but Mountains, whose Tops seem'd to touch the Clouds, and dazzled our Eyes with the Whiteness of the Snow, with which they are cover'd all the Year round. ”

“ The Highlands, they say, never maintained their natural inhabitants; but the people, when they found themselves too numerous, instead of extending cultivation, provided for themselves by a more compendious method, and sought better fortune in other countries. ”

“ With few exceptions they are wanting in vegetation, and although to one accustomed to the rugged grandeur and rich variety of the northern Highlands, they may seem tame and uninteresting, there is a charm in their peaceful slopes and rounded summits which is not to be found in the stern beauty of their northern neighbours. “Their beauty is not revealed at first sight; it grows on the eye, which never tires of gazing on their grassy slopes and watching the ever-changing play of light and shade.” ”

“ The writer of 'Letters from a Gentleman in the North of Scotland' stated that "the Highlands are but little known even to the inhabitants of the low country of Scotland, for they have ever dreaded the difficulties and dangers of travelling among the mountains ”

“ 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. ”

“ But almost everywhere else, except in the fairyland of Loch Fyne, and the southern shore of Loch Etive, the Highlands are sequestered,—sinless of a town,—a semi-wilderness, where a square mile is a more convenient unit of measurement than an acre. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”