Lowlands of Scotland

“ The chief scene of Scottish history, with its art, architecture, commercial prosperity, and general likeness to Christendom, is in the Lowlands. Here are almost all her great cities, industries, and monuments. In this region, and not in the Highlands, Scotland’s two greatest, or at least most famous, men were born and reared, and here are the cities, which are “the hope of democracy.” In fact, the Celtic Scots never produced a distinct civilization of their own. The Celts, with all their charming traits and bold achievements, have nowhere brought to perfection this composite flower of history. ”

“ All Scotland, indeed, has now, in one sense, been "rent by the Saxon" from the Celt. "Let no one doubt the civilization of these islands," wrote Dr. Johnson, in Skye, "for Portree possesses a jail." The Highlands and islands have been the last portions of Scotland to succumb to Anglo-Saxon influences; that the Lowlands formed an earlier victim does not prove that their racial complexion is different. The incident of which we have now to speak has frequently been quoted as a crowning proof of the difference between the Lowlanders and the "true Scots". ”

“ But let us suppose for the moment that England and Scotland are wilderness—without “made” roads, without mason-built houses or cottages—and all England covered with scrub-wood of a great sameness, wherein, concealed among the foliage, a few natives have settlements of primeval gipsy kind, while Scotland, we picture, in fancy, as a mountain-land of barren rock, with lowlands of desert sand, and almost no inhabitants at all. ”

“ Who can observe without a feeling of sadness how the last feeble remnants of Scotland’s ancient masters, after having been expelled from the glorious Lowlands, cannot even now find rest among the barren rocks, and in the few arable valleys of the Highlands, but are obliged, year after year, in increasing numbers, to seek another home farther west, in the new world beyond the Atlantic? ”

“ Nevertheless the natural features of Scotland are in their way no less beautiful than those of the Scandinavian Peninsula. The sea, which indents the coasts on all sides; the well-cultivated, and partly also well-wooded plains, which, particularly towards the mountain districts, undulate in hill and dale; and lastly the Highland itself, with its many streams, waterfalls, firths, and lakes, afford the richest and most magnificent variety. To these features may be added a milder climate, and in the Lowlands a far richer fertility, than in Norway and Sweden ”

“ But the whole of the country is not of the same nature. The northern part is so nearly cut off from the rest of Britain by the two great Firths of Forth and Clyde as to form almost a separate island, and this peninsula is again divided into Highlands and Lowlands. Speaking roughly, we may say that all the west is Highland and the east Lowland. A range of mountains sweeping in a semicircle from the Firth of Clyde to the mouth of the Dee, known as Drumalbyn or the Mount, may be taken as the line of separation, though the Lowlands extend still further north along the eastern coast. ”

“ In a prolonged struggle, it is resources that tell. Wars are not ended by battle, but by manifest reserves, with power to follow up victory.
It was western Scotland, of azoic rock, a far-off corner of Europe, that had the singular fortune of166 sheltering the last vestiges of the Celts—that early race of people who, once placed upon the centre of the ancient continent, were gradually driven to its western extremities.
A notion, held tenaciously by the Highlanders, was that the Lowlands had originally been their birthright. ”

“ In other words, one would suppose from the map that the people dwelling on the rather flat lowlands would be of one race and with one kind66 of civilization, while the inhabitants of the hills would greatly differ. In the Highlands, defence would be easy and offence would be hard, strongholds would be more numerous, general communication impracticable, social improvement slow, and common feeling with the Lowlanders be a long time coming. The Celtic clansmen of the hills, usually living and dying in the same glen, were not famed as travellers. “All travel has its advantages,” says Dr. Johnson. ”

“ Caithness offers415 one of the most singular pieces of topography in Scotland. Looking at the map, one would naturally regard it as a continuation of the highlands of Sutherland, and expect its population to be also Gaelic. But in actual fact, it belongs not to the mountains, but to the lowlands, and has been for many centuries in possession of the Scandinavian stock. It consists of a flat platform or tableland, in places not more than 100 feet above the sea, into which it descends in an almost continuous line of abrupt precipices. ”

“ For, whilst they were spreading themselves over the rich plains of the north of England, a foreign, though nearly related, Celtic people, the Scots from Ireland, had taken possession of their south-western frontier districts. Hence they spread themselves to such a degree over the Lowlands that both these and the Highlands, though the latter were almost entirely independent of the Scottish sovereigns, were called by one name, Scotland. After many battles the older Pictish inhabitants were, about the year 900, entirely amalgamated with the Scots in the Lowlands. ”

“ In our days the various tribes of the Highland and Lowland populations live in peaceful union under one and the same government. But during several centuries Scotland was the theatre of the most sanguinary contests between the Celtic Highlanders and the Teutonic Lowlanders. The former, who were animated with an inveterate hatred of the Lowlanders, continually made hostile incursions into the Lowlands, and, after burning and ravaging the country, retired with cattle and other booty to their mountains, whither they knew well the Lowlanders durst not follow them. ”

“ Gilderoy was a celebrated and most daring highwayman, who roamed far, and was well-known all over Scotland and indeed in London. His death inspired a very striking ballad, but this is hardly a Border Lowland ballad, but refers chiefly to another Border district, namely, that between the Lowlands and Highlands. Just as the Scottish Lowlanders thought the English their legitimate quarry, so the Highlanders in turn looked upon the Lowlanders as created to supply them with all they lacked. ”

“ The hardy Highland Scots, a great part of whom do not understand, or at all events do not speak English, but still commonly use the Celtic or Gaelic tongue, live here thinly scattered in poor and low peat cabins, which it is often difficult to distinguish from the surrounding rocks. The Highlanders in the districts farthest towards the west and north have preserved their language and other national characteristics purest; for farther towards the Lowlands, a more modern civilization has gradually forced its way forwards, in spite of the mountains. ”

“ One can hardly explain, on the assumption of race superiority alone, the wonderful potentiality of the Scottish Lowlands, the birthplace of so many who have been distinguished for personal attainments, for the East Coast Englishman is of the same blood as the Lowlander, and the division between England and [128] Scotland is by no means an ethnological one, it is rather a political division of the old kingdom of Northumberland. ”

“ The essential differences between these remain markedly distinguishable after centuries of peaceful intercourse, and a common interchange of rights and privileges. The Scottish Gael, though by no means to be now regarded as sprung from a pure Celtic stock, scarcely differs more widely in language than in moral and intellectual characteristics from the race that peoples the fertile Lowlands. Yet the names of the most remarkable Lowland localities prove their possession by a Celtic race, whom therefore we cannot doubt to have been the prior, if not the aboriginal, occupants of the soil. ”

“ 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. ”

“ They had won themselves renown as soldiers or traders in nearly all the countries of the Old world, but they had not as yet any colony of their own in the New one. Hitherto these emigrants, though they were called Scots, had been chiefly Saxons from the Lowlands, but in the beginning of this reign bodies of Celts had gone back to the original Scotia, and in Ulster, their old home, they won back settlements from the kindred Celtic race who now looked on them as intruders. But while some of the wanderers thus went back to the old country, others were founding a New Scotland beyond the sea. ”

“ The wine is all imported; the horses are mostly small ambling nags, only a few being preserved entire for propagation; and neither curry-combs nor reins are used. From Scotland are imported into Flanders hides, wool, salt, fish, and pearls. Nothing gives the Scots more pleasure than to hear the English dispraised. The country is divided into two parts, the cultivated lowlands, and the region where agriculture is not used. The wild Scots have a different language, and sometimes eat the bark of trees. There are no wolves. ”

“ Andrew Little, Langholm, dated Salop, 30th November, 1799.
CHAPTER VIII. HIGHLAND ROADS AND BRIDGES. In an early chapter of this volume we have given a rapid survey of the state of Scotland about the middle of last century. We found a country without roads, fields lying uncultivated, mines unexplored, and all branches of industry languishing, in the midst of an idle, miserable, and haggard population. Fifty years passed, and the state of the Lowlands had become completely changed. Roads had been made, canals dug, coal-mines opened up, ironworks established ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The vrouw takes the long candles from the shrank (cupboard) , and leaves wooer and wooed to sit up together till the grey dawn breaks, a custom which, in one form or another, rural Scotland long looked on kindly. The envied fair one, who has many of such vrijers, may have to sit up four or five nights a week till the eventful choice is made.
There is abundant evidence in language to prove that the ancient Northumbria—that is, Lowland Scotland from Tay to Humber—was a Frisian or Dutch settlement. ”

“ 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! ”

“ STRATHEARN One of the most beautiful of Scottish rivers is the Earn, half Highland and half Lowland, winding through all the varieties of Perthshire scenery, past hoary monuments of Scotland’s struggles for birth as a nation, and among misty traditions of her saints and heroes. Yet guide-books, one observes, pass over the greater part of this strath as hurriedly as the express trains dashing across its lower end; and strangers seldom visit any but the upper reach, which enters into a regular tourist round. ”

“ It consists, generally, of fertile and gently undulating land, which is employed almost entirely for tillage, and is but little visited by tourists or travellers.
The northern part of Scotland is, however, of a very different character; being wild, mountainous [Pg 43] and waste, and filled every where with the most grand and sublime scenery. The eastern portion of this part of the island is more level, and there are several large and flourishing towns on or near the shores of it, such as Inverness, Aberdeen, Dundee, Perth, and others. ”