West of Scotland

“ As this is not intended to be even a bird's-eye view of Scottish history, we may have said enough by way of introducing the reader to one of the most noble and illustrious of the hereditary peerage of Scotland. Every schoolboy is more or less familiar with the annals of a race which has been identified through many ages with the interests—political, social, and commercial—of the West of Scotland. ”

“ If any of the primitive Scottish churches still exist, they must be looked for in localities less favoured by the fidelity of medieval piety or superstition.
Christianity we thus perceive was established in Scotland at a very early period, altogether apart from any contemporary intercourse which England may have maintained more directly with the converts of the neighbouring continent. Several important centres were fixed at various points, including the extreme south-west of Scotland, the remote northern, and the western Isles. ”

“ Having sailed along a good part of the coast of Europe, including Norway and the Aegean Sea, I am convinced, that for variety of form, the west coast of Scotland is unsurpassed on the Continent, while for manifold range and brilliance of colour it has no equal. One who has passed a long enough time amidst this scenery, more especially if he has made his home upon the water, sailing across firth and sound, threading the narrows of the kyles, and passing from island to island, can watch how the very forms of the hills seem to vary from hour to hour as the atmospheric conditions change. ”

“ She was abstractedly murmuring defensive things about the Scotch. "And Scotland is such a lovely place. Even round here. Dalmeny. Cramond Brig. Hawthornden. And oh, the Pentlands! Have you not been to the Pentlands yet? Oh, but they're the grandest place in the world. There are lochs hidden behind the range the way you'd never think. And waterfalls. The water comes down red with the peat. And miles and miles of heather."
"Take me there, Ellen." ”

“ South of the two great firths the Scottish name and the Scottish dominion were unknown. The south-west part of modern Scotland formed part of the Kingdom of the Strathclyde Welsh, which up to 924 was, like the Kingdom of the Scots, an independent Celtic principality. The south-eastern part of modern Scotland, Lothian in the wide sense of the word, was purely English or Danish, as in language it remains to this day. It was part of the Kingdom of Northumberland, and it had its share in all the revolutions of that Kingdom. ”

“ Scotland is divided by a deep geologic cleft. Glenmore, the Great Glen, runs southwesterly [Pg 235] from Inverness to Fort William and Oban, cutting the country into two parts. One is Scotland; the other is the West, the Highlands and the Islands. One is known, the other unknown. One has been prosperous, royal, noble; the other has been wild, independent, chief and clans holding together. To-day, if the East is strangely quiet, the West is strangely silent. ”

“ So we were soon, for Scotland. The scenes along the east coast of Ireland were no whit inferior to those on the west coast.
It did not take us long to reach Scotland, where the scenery was enchanting. Words are entirely inadequate to give one a proper idea of it. To be appreciated it must be seen and felt, for reading about it don't do much good.
Here, right before us, were the Highlands of Scotland and many a place famous in song and story.
In due course of time we reached the Firth of Clyde and anchored off Greenock. ”

“ As said above the lowlands of Scotland and the English borders were Anglian and Dane, while the coasts and islands of Scotland were everywhere Norse. The Highlands were Celtic with an admixture of Norse, Anglian, and Norman. There were also remnants of the old Mediterranean populations, probably Picts. Curiously enough these Mediterraneans contributed their dark eyes and hair color, [Pg 62] but not their short stature. The population of West Scotland has the greatest height of all the peoples of Europe. ”

“ Scotland contains within it two races, and partly because their blood is different and partly because the one race has lived in the open and fertile Lowlands, and the other in the wild and shadowy Highlands, the Celt of the North and the Scot of the south are well-nigh as distant from each other as the east from the west. ”

“ 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 the next century we see the Scottish power cut short to the north and west, but advancing towards the south and east. ♦Caithness.♦ The Northmen have settled in the northern and western islands, in those parts of the mainland to which they gave the names of Caithness and Sutherland, and even in the first Scottish land in the west. ♦Scotland acknowledges the English supremacy, 924.♦ Scotland itself has also admitted the external supremacy of the English overlord. ”

“ Nature of Scotland.—The Highlands and Lowlands.—Population.—Original
Inhabitants. None of the seas of Europe are so rough and stormy as that which washes its northern and north-western coasts. Even in Jutland the effects of the cold north-west wind which sweeps down from the icy sea between Norway, Iceland, and Scotland, are severely felt. Along its west coast, for a distance of several miles inland, there are no woods, but only low stunted oak bushes, which in many places scarcely rise above the tall heather. ”

“ It is well to stand upon this hill, before you go on to the West and the Border, or on to the North and the gray metropolis, that you may [Pg 17] appreciate both the tragedy and the triumph that is Scotland's and was Mary's. The North Sea is turning purple far out on the horizon, and white sea birds are flying across beyond sound. The long level light of the late afternoon is coming up over England. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ THE NORTHEAST COAST—ABERDEEN AND ELGIN
The northeast coast of Scotland is pacific in climate, as compared with the Atlantic storminess that rules the sea-girt land on the west.
Montrose, which has twenty places in America named after it, lying at the mouth of the river South Esk, is attractive because of its splendid golf and cricket grounds. It is historically interesting, on account of the checkered fortunes of its dukes and earls. On its face we discern a Netherlands influence, for the old architecture reminds us of Dutch towns. ”

“ It is not possible to down the Scot. The smallest drop of blood tells, and it never fails to be Scottish. Most romantic, most poetic, most reckless, most canny of people. The Highlander and the Lowlander that Mr. Morley found mixed in the character of Gladstone, and the explanation of his character, is the explanation of any Scot, and of Scotland.
Ayr
Always the West is the democratic corner of a country; or, let me say almost always, if you have data wherewith to dispute a wholesale assertion. Sparta was west of Athens, La Rochelle was west of Paris, Switzerland was west of Gesler ”

“ But after that it had seemed a very ordinary green-and-grey piece of Scotland, and he thought tenderly of her love of it as one of those happy delusions that come to the very young, who see the world suffused with beauty even as a person who looks out of half-opened eyes sees everything fringed with prismatic hues. ”

“ In philosophy, in history, in law, in science, in poetry, in romance, in the arts of life, in trade, in government, in war, in the spread of our dominions, in the consolidation of our Empire, glorious has been the part which Scotland has played. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Thus our English Universities by the beginning or the early part of the last century had sunk into such sluggish torpor that the chief intellectual benefits which our country derived were not from the wealthy English institutions, but from the poor and comparatively remote Universities of Scotland. ”

“ The sweet breeze of evening stirs the long grasses, and on many a gray stone house shakes the late pink and yellow roses and makes the ivy tremble. It is Scotland now, and as we pass through the storied Border we keep the ocean almost constantly in view,—losing it for a little while at Dunbar, but finding it again at Drem,—till, past the battlefield of Prestonpans, and past the quaint villages of Cockenzie and Musselburgh and the villas of Portobello, we come slowly to a pause in the shadow of Arthur's Seat, where the great lion crouches over the glorious city of Edinburgh. ”

“ And all the battle the next day, until King Edward rides hot-trod to Berwick, leaving half his host dead upon this pleasant green field that lies so unremembering to the south of the castle. There is no more splendid moment in human history, unless all battles seem to you too barbaric to be splendid. But it made possible a nation—and, I take it, Scotland has been necessary to the world. ”

“ Indeed, you will waste your time if you look for pleasure-making of any sort in Scotland to-day. Scotland has gone back to her ancient business of war, and she is carrying it on in the most businesslike way, sternly and relentlessly. ”

“ We cannot pretend within our scope to follow chronologically “the fightings and flockings of kites and crows,” in “a wolf-age, a war-age,” when the Northmen from all Scandinavian lands, and the Danes, who had acquired much of Ireland, were flying at the throat of England and hanging on the flanks of Scotland; while the Britons of Strathclyde struck in, and the Scottish kings again and again raided or sought to occupy the fertile region of Lothian between Forth and Tweed. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Such is a slight sketch of that important era in Scottish history; from the intrusion of the Scottish race into the Western Highlands, to the final ejectment of the Norwegians from the Scottish mainland, and the restoration of the crown to a Celtic prince at the head of a Saxon army. It is impossible to conceive of the presence of Norwegian settlers for so long a period on the mainland of Scotland without their greatly affecting the character of the native population. ”

“ From the steeple of Glasgow Cathedral Wesley surveys the country.
“A more fruitful and better cultivated plain is scarce to be seen in England. Indeed nothing is wanted but more trade (which would naturally bring more people) to make a great part of Scotland in no way inferior to the best counties in England.” ”

“ It has long been a fact familiar to geologists, that, both on the east and west coasts of the central part of Scotland, there are lines of raised beaches, containing marine shells of the same species as those now inhabiting the neighbouring sea. ”

“ Although both the external and internal history of the Highlands during this period is much better known than in the case of the Roman period, still the materials are exceedingly scanty. Scottish historians, from Fordun and Boece downwards, made it their business to fill up from their own imaginations what is wanting, so that, until the simple-minded but acute Innes put it in its true light, the early history of Scotland was a mass of fable. ”