Western Highlands

“ The disposition of land and water on this coast suggests the idea that the Western Highlands, from the line in the interior, whence the rivers descend to the Atlantic, with the islands beyond to the outer Hebrides, are all parts of one great mountainous plane, inclined slantways into the sea. ”

“ The remnants of old-time people and ways in the western Highlands and the Hebrides are nevertheless interesting and important from several points of view; they preserve valuable elements of traditional civilization, and possibly even distinctive spiritual faculties, which our industrial civilization seems to kill, or at any rate to damp down. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ To those whose paths lie in more civilised and inhabited regions, this enthusiasm about wild and desolate mountains may seem unwarranted, may, perhaps, even savour of an elevation of fancy, a vain belief of private revelation founded neither on reason nor common sense. They probably will agree with Dr. Johnson, who writes of the Western Highlands of Scotland: 'It will readily occur that this uniformity of barrenness can afford little amusement to the traveller ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Agriculture is as good, the Highland sheep and cattle are famous, the people are about as comfortable as lowlanders in the same circumstances; education is well diffused; churches of all sects are plentiful, and ere long, doubtless, so far as outward circumstances are concerned, there will be no difference between the Highlands and Lowlands. How the universal improvement of the Highlands is mainly to be accomplished, we shall state in the words of Sir John M’Neill. ”

“ But if the future of the Highlands be left to Donald himself, the lovers of the unspoilt charms of the mountains may console themselves with the belief that these charms will remain much as they still are for many a long day to come.
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CHAPTER IX.
Highland ferries and coaches. The charms of Iona. How to see Staffa. The Outer Hebrides. Stones of Callernish. St. Kilda. Sound of Harris. The Cave-massacre in Eigg. Skeleton from a clan fight still unburied in Jura. The hermit of Jura. Peculiar charms of the Western Isles. Influence of the clergy on the cheerfulness of the Highlanders. ”

“ The English coast appeared terribly flat. Lord Aberdeen was quite touched when I told him I was so attached to the dear, dear Highlands and missed the fine hills so much. There is a great peculiarity about the Highlands and Highlanders; and they are such a chivalrous, fine, active people. Our stay among them was so delightful. Independently of the beautiful scenery, there was a quiet, a retirement, a wildness, a liberty, and a solitude that had such a charm for us. ”

“ They show none of the grandeur and ruggedness of the Highlands. The hills, on the whole, have smooth, rounded outlines, save here and there, where some crag of grey rock protrudes from the pervading mantle of green bent and purple heath. Yet the topography is sufficiently varied not to become monotonous, while the slopes in every season of the year glow with colour, spread over them like a delicate sheet of enamel. There is beauty enough in the landscape of itself to please, and even here and there to fascinate. ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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. ”

“ A traveller, familiar with the low grounds of England, when he first enters the northern lowlands is at once impressed by their much more limited extent. He finds them to occupy comparatively restricted spaces between uplands and highlands, their largest expanse lying in the broad depression between the southern border of the Highland mountains and the great tract of high pastoral land in the southern counties. Another considerable area of them intervenes between these southern uplands and the flanks of the Cheviot Hills. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Highlands, with their beautiful mountains and lakes, their clan life, their thrilling traditions and stories of but recently past conflicts, bloodshed, and sorrow;—their striking costume, their pipers blowing strains that, amid the rocks, and forests, and dark heather of that romantic region, kindled even in the heart of the stranger a strange enthusiasm,—all was to him full of the fire of poetry, and of a romance too large, with all its quick and passionate characters, and its vivid details, for poetry itself. ”

“ A subsequent excursion to the Trosachs, Loch Katrine, Loch Long, and the Clyde, afforded me a better opportunity of judging, yet it all seemed tame and commonplace [404] compared with the scenery of California and Norway. If I enjoyed a fair specimen of the climate—rain, wind, and fog, varied by sickly gleams of sunshine—it strikes me it would be a congenial country for snails and frogs to reside in. The Highlands are like all other wild places within the limits of Europe, very gentle in their wildness compared with the rugged slopes of the Sierra Nevada. ”

“ 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 ”

“ The grandeur and gloom of the Highland mountains, the spectral mists that sweep round the crags, the roar of the torrents, the gleam of sunlight on moor and lake, the wail of the breeze among the cairns of the dead, the unspeakable sadness that seems to brood over the landscape whether the sky be clear or clouded—these features of West Highland scenery were first revealed by Macpherson to the modern world. ”

“ Every account we have of the Highlands during the earlier part of the 18th century, agrees in the fact that the Highlands were over-peopled and over-stocked, that it was impossible for the land to yield sufficient to support the men and beasts who lived upon it. Hence, this drafting off of a considerable portion of the population gave that which remained breathing-room; fewer people were left to support, and it is to be supposed that the condition of these would be improved. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Swayed by the example of the godly among them, and away from the influences by which less sequestered localities were corrupted, the body of the people in the Highlands became distinguished as the most peaceable and virtuous peasantry in Britain. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”