Loch Lomond

“ The heaviness of the rain shortened our voyage, but we landed on one island planted with yew, and stocked with deer, and on another containing perhaps not more than half an acre, remarkable for the ruins of an old castle, on which the osprey builds her annual nest. Had Loch Lomond been in a happier climate, it would have been the boast of wealth and vanity to own one of the little spots which it incloses, and to have employed upon it all the arts of embellishment. But as it is, the islets, which court the gazer at a distance, disgust him at his approach, when he finds, instead of soft lawns ”

“ Loch Lomond is a sea! Along its shores might you voyage [Pg 376] in your swift schooner, with shifting breezes, all a summer's day, nor at sunset, when you dropped anchor, have seen half the beautiful wonders. It is many-isled; and some of them are in themselves little worlds, with woods and hills. Houses are seen looking out from among old trees, and children playing on the greensward that slopes safely into deep water, where in rushy havens are drawn up the boats of fishermen, or of woodcutters who go to their work on the mainland. ”

“ He has studied nature more widely and profoundly than we have; but it is out of our power to look on Loch Lomond without a feeling of perfection. The "diffusion of water" is indeed great; but in what a world it floats! At first sight of it, how our soul expands! The sudden revelation of such majestic beauty, wide as it is and extending afar, inspires us with a power of comprehending it all. Sea-like indeed it is—a Mediterranean Sea—enclosed with lofty hills and as lofty mountains—and these indeed are the Fortunate Isles! ”

“ Loch Long is indeed splendid, 15 miles in length, surrounded by grand hills, with such beautiful outlines, and very green—all so different from the eastern part of Scotland—the loch winding along most beautifully, so as to seem closed at times. Charles said it reminded him of Switzerland and the Tyrol. The finest point of Loch Long is looking towards Loch Goil. We had a very good sight of the mountain called The Cobbler; the top of which resembles a man sitting and mending his shoe! At the end of the loch we got a glimpse of Ben Lomond, and were, in fact, very near Loch Lomond. ”

“ Glen Luss and Ross-dhu, they are smoking in ruin, And the best of Loch Lomond lie dead on her side. Widow and Saxon maid Long shall lament our raid, Think of Clan-Alpine with fear and with woe; Lennox and Leven-glen Shake when they hear again, 'Roderigh Vich Alpine dhu, ho! ieroe!' Row, vassals, row, for the pride of the Highlands! Stretch to your oars for the ever-green Pine! O that the rosebud that graces yon islands Were wreathed in a garland around him to twine! O that some seedling gem, Worthy such noble stem, Honored and blessed in their shadow might grow! ”

“ LOCH LOMOND AND THE TROSSACHS
The Scotch lakes form the one element of repose in a landscape which, in almost every other feature, suggests the most terrific activities of nature. Excelling all in size, beauty, and romantic interest is Loch Lomond, in Rob Roy’s country. It is the pride of the Scottish inland waters, as Cayuga is the gem in the chain of finger lakes in central New York. ”

“ We should as soon think of penning a critique on "Milton's Paradise Lost" as on Loch Lomond. People there are in the world, doubtless, who think them both too long; but to our minds, neither the one nor the other exceeds the due measure by a leaf or a league. Toil may, if it so pleaseth you, think it, in a mist, a Mediterranean Sea. For then you behold many miles of tumbling waves, with no land beyond; and were a ship to rise up in full sail, she would seem voyaging on to some distant shore. Or you may look on it as a great arm only of the ocean, stretched out into the mountainous mainland. ”

“ We have never had a more delightful walk than this evening. Ben Lomond and the three pointed-topped mountains of Loch Lomond, which we had seen from the Garrison, were very majestic under the clear sky, the lake perfectly calm, the air sweet and mild. ”

“ Loch Lomond sat still for its picture in the morning, and after an early breakfast, we took a row-boat, with a couple of Highlanders, for Inversnade, and pulled across the lake with a kind of drowsy delightfulness in the scene and air which I have never before found out of Italy. We overshot our destination a little to look into Rob Roy’s Cave, a dark den in the face of the rock, which has the look of his vocation; and then pulling back along the shore, we were landed, in the spray of a waterfall, at a cottage occupied by the boatmen of this Highland ferry. ”

“ The first that takes possession of the imagination, dreaming of the Highlands as the region of Lochs, is the Queen of them all, Loch Lomond. A great poet has said that, "in Scotland, the proportion of diffused water is often too great, as at the Lake of Geneva, for instance, and in most of the Scottish lakes. No doubt it sounds magnificent, and flatters the imagination, to hear at a distance of masses of water, so many leagues in length and miles in width; and such ample room may be delightful to the fresh-water sailor, scudding with a lively breeze amid the rapidly-shifting scenery. ”

“ Morrison, of Carsphairn, was an annual visitor to Loch Lomond, staying a fortnight each year at the little hotel at Ardlui, a spot which her late husband had loved so well.
Though an extremely wealthy man, the summer attractions of Harrogate, Dinard, Aix, or Ostend, had never appealed to him. Bluff and hearty, he loved Loch Lomond in the days of his prosperity just as when, in his youth, he used to save his coppers to enable him to have a one-day trip from Glasgow each summer—red-letter days in his otherwise grey workaday life. ”

“ His story, one fears, must be counted with the mediæval wonders of Loch Lomond, fish without fins, waves without wind, and such a floating island as still emerges after hot summers in Derwentwater.
Dorothy Wordsworth, for one, rather belittles Loch Katrine as an “Ulswater dismantled of its grandeur and cropped of its lesser beauties,” though she compliments the upper part as “very pleasing, resembling Thirlmere below Armboth.” But no critic can carp at the fame of Loch Lomond as the most beautiful lake in Scotland ”

“ A stage coach was waiting there, which conveyed us over hills and through vales to Loch Lomond. We saw the beautiful Falls of Inversnaid, the waters foaming and rushing from a height of about 16 ft., and spreading in foams among wild masses of rocks on the shores of Loch Lomond. A steamer conveyed us to the other end of Loch Lomond in about two hours. Loch Lomond is quite as beautiful though not so wild and romantic as Loch Katrine. The shores are rich and beautiful and the green emerald isles on the bosom of the lake are passing fair ”

“ This was a place where we should have liked to have lived, and the only one we had seen near Loch Lomond. How delightful to have a little shed concealed under the branches of the fairy island! the cottages and the island might have been made for the pleasure of each other. It was but like a natural garden, the distance was so small; nay, one could not have forgiven any one living there, not compelled to daily labour, if he did not connect it with his dwelling by some feeling of domestic attachment, like what he has for the orchard where his children play. I thought, what a place for William! ”

“ The southern view, (from this shelf) , over Loch Lomond is enchanting: the vast expanse of the lake, containing at least twenty-four islands, many of them large, and enriched and beautified by wood and rocks, and every thing that can charm the sight. The mountains, the woods on the banks, and the cultivation as the mountains recede from the lake, with the high blue hills in the horizon to the south, all contribute to render this view, in point of beauty, equal to any in nature, when seen in a clear day, with a favourable light. ”

“ The scenery of its shores is not altogether so rich and lovely as I had preimagined; not equal, indeed, to the best parts of Loch Lomond,—the hills being lower and of a more ridgy shape, and exceedingly bare, at least towards the lower end. But they turn the lake aside with headland after headland, and shut it in closely, and open one vista after another, so that the eye is never weary, and, least of all, as we approach the end. ”

“ Our road now skirted the banks of Loch Lomond, the largest fresh-water lake in Scotland or England, being twenty-four miles long and five miles in width at its broadest point, and containing over twenty islands, some of which we saw. At the hotel where we called for tea it was thus described:
Loch Lomond is the paragon of Scottish lakes. ”

“ All was clamour, confusion, and uncertainty, till sunrise had somewhat dispelled the mist that had hitherto rolled its dense and silent waves over the bottom of the valley; and then one herdsman more active and intelligent than the rest, having climbed the mountain that sends forth its root to form the boundary between the enchanting mazes of the beautiful oak and birch-fringed lakes of Ballochan and the long stretch of Loch Lomond’s inland sea, and having looked up Glen Falloch, and far and wide around him to the full extent that his eyes could reach,—
“We are harried!” ”

“ Meanwhile, the sense of quiet was never lost sight of; the little peaceful lakes among the islands might make you forget that the great water, Loch Lomond, was so near; and yet are more beautiful, because you know that it is so: they have their own bays and creeks sheltered within a shelter. When we had ascended to the top of the island we had a view up to Ben Lomond, over the long, broad water without spot or rock ”

“ The Highlands have them of all sizes—and that surely is best. But here is one which, it has been truly said, is not only "incomparable in its beauty as in its dimensions, exceeding all others in variety as it does in extent and splendour, but unites in itself every style of scenery which is found in the other lakes of the Highlands." He who has studied, and understood, and felt all Loch Lomond, will be prepared at once to enjoy any other fine lake he looks on ”

“ The London citizen who, says Lockhart, 'makes Loch Lomond his wash-pot, and throws his shoe over Ben Nevis,' can with difficulty imagine a journey in the Hebrides with rainy weather, in open boats, or upon horseback over wild moorland and morasses, a journey that even to Voltaire sounded like a tour to the North Pole. ”

“ Yet Nature's wild grandeur, all artifice scorning,
Is seen 'mong our mountains so bonnie and blue.
Then away to the hills where Loch Lomond is flowing,
Where mists and where mountains in solitude lie,
And where the braw red-lipp'd heather is growing,
And cataracts foam, as they came from the sky!
Benlomond is seen in his monarch-like glory,
His foot in the sea and his head in the sky;
His broad lofty brow is majestic and hoary,
And round him, and round him the elements fly.
The winds are his music, the clouds are his clothing,
The sun is his shield, as he wheels blazing by ”

“ This takes one through a real Highland country, where at Auchnasheen goes off the coach route to Loch Maree, which some judge the finest scene in Scotland. Less smiling than Loch Lomond, it lies more wildly among naked pyramids of quartz, Ben Slioch the most conspicuous point of them, but this lake has the same beauty of wooded islets at the lower end, where a group of half-drowned hillocks “form a miniature archipelago, grey with lichened stone, and bosky with birch and hazel.” On one of these are the ruins of a chapel of the Virgin Mary, who was perhaps godmother to Loch Maree. ”

“ It is indeed a melancholy thing to see a full-grown woman thus waiting, as it were, body and soul devoted to the poor beast; yet even this is better than working in a manufactory the day through.
We came to a moorish tract; saw before us the hills of Loch Lomond, Ben Lomond and another, distinct each by itself. Not far from the roadside were some benches placed in rows in the middle of a large field, with a sort of covered shed like a sentry-box, but much more like those boxes which the Italian puppet-showmen in London use. ”

“ In one of those drear midnights so awful to travellers in the Highlands, a man, wrapped in a large coarse plaid, strode from a stone ridge, on the border of Loch Lomond, into a boat which he had drawn from its covert. ”

“ The lake is in front of the perpendicular wall, and behind, at some distance, and totally detached from it, is the continuation of the ridge of mountains which forms the vale of Loch Lomond—a magnificent temple, of which this spot is a noble Sanctum Sanctorum.
We arrived at Glenfalloch at about one or two o'clock. It is no village; there being only scattered huts in the glen, which may be four miles long, according to my remembrance: the middle of it is very green, and level, and tufted with trees. ”

“ Sir Walter has never projected an imaginary Roderick Dhu or a King errant into any of the majesty or loveliness of those empty lakes and mountains. I can imagine in what spirit the Pennells came to Loch Lomond and declared that it "looked like any other lake." Dr. Johnson was quite right, sir. "Water is the same everywhere," to those who think water is water.
Of course the traveler should not come upon the land by way of Lomond. Fitz James came from Stirling. He came to subdue the Highlands. ”

“ That a still further head may be had when wanted, the Commissioners purchased land through which they can bring a strong supply of water from Loch Lomond. There is an abundance of water in Little River for the immediate requirements of the city, but the supply can be doubled easily by tapping Loch Lomond.
The water in the Little River Reservoir is one hundred and sixty feet above high tide level; and in the Leinster Street Reservoir it is one hundred and thirty-two feet. ”