Dunblane is notable for one of the few Gothic cathedrals still used in Scotland as a parish church. Sympathetically restored, it has even become the scene of forms of worship which scandalised true-blue Presbyterians, while on the other hand I once came across an Anglican lady much shocked to find how “actually there was a Presbyterian service going on!” Carved screen, stalls, and communion table make ornaments seldom seen in the bareness of a northern kirk, this one admirable in its proportions and mouldings, if without the elaborate decoration of Melrose. It has a valuable legacy in the library of a divine well known in both countries, the tolerant Archbishop Leighton.
Among Scotsmen, Dunblane enjoys a modest repute as a place of villeggiatura; to tourists it is perhaps best known as junction of the Caledonian line to Oban, which brings them to Callander, a few miles from the Trossachs. This line at first follows the course of the Teith, “daughter of three mighty lakes,” past Doune Castle, not Burns’s “Bonnie Doon,” but an imposing monument of feudal struggles and crimes, that has housed many a royal guest, if not, as one of its parish ministers gravely declares for unquestionable, Fitz-James himself on the night before his adventurous chase. So late as 1745,
Home, the author of Douglas, had an adventure here, confined as prisoner of war in a Jacobite dungeon, from which he escaped, with five fellow-captives, in quite romantic style; and this, we know, was one of the stages of Captain Edward Waverley’s journey. Farther up the river, another place of note is Cambusmore, where Scott spent the youthful holidays that made him familiar with the Trossachs country. Callander he does not mention, its name not fitting into his metre, whereas its neighbour Dunblane’s amenity to rhyme brought to be planted there a flower of song at the hands of a writer who perhaps knew it only by name. But Callander has grown into a snug little town of hotels and lodging-houses below most lovely scenery, little spoiled by the chain of lakes above being harnessed as water-works for thirsty Glasgow, whose Bailie Nicol Jarvies now lord it over the country of Rob Roy and Roderick Dhu.
Another way to the Trossachs is by “the varied realms of fair Menteith,” through which a railway joins the banks of the Forth and the Clyde. The name of Menteith has an ugly association to Scottish ears through Sir John Menteith, a son of its earl, who betrayed Wallace to the English; the signal for these Philistines’ onrush was given by his turning a loaf upside down, and so to handle bread was long an insult to any man of the execrated name. Sir John afterwards fought under Bruce; but however Scottish nobles might change sides in the game of feudal allegiance, the Commons were always true to patriotic resentment; and no services of that house have quite wiped out the memory of a traitor remembered as Gan among the peers of Charlemagne or Simon Girty on the backwoods frontier of America. And fortune seems to have concurred in the popular verdict, for till even the shadow of it died out in a wandering beggar, little luck went with the title of Menteith, least of all in a claim to legitimate heirship of the Crown; then this earldom seemed doubly cursed when transferred to the Grahams, one of whom was ringleader in the murder of James I.
Menteith, one of the chief provinces of old Scotland, has shrunk to the name of a district described in a witty booklet by a son of the soil, far travelled in other lands.[A] “A kind of sea of moss and heath, a bristly country (Trossachs is said to mean the bristled land) shut in by hills on every side,” in which “nearly every hill and strath has had its battles between the Grahams and the Macgregors”; but now “over the Fingalian path, where once the red-shank trotted on his Highland garron, the bicyclist, the incarnation of the age, looks to a sign-post and sees This hill is dangerous.” Its stony fields and lochans lying between hummocks are horizoned by grand mountains, among which Ben Lomond, to the west, is the dominating feature, “in winter, a vast white sugar-loaf; in summer, a prismatic cone of yellow and amethyst and opal lights; in spring, a grey, gloomy, stony pile of rocks; in autumn, a weather indicator; for when the mist curls down its sides, and hangs in heavy wreaths from its double summit ‘it has to rain,’ as the Spaniards say.”