[A] Notes on the District of Menteith, by R. B. Cunninghame Graham.
Menteith became a resort before Callander, when, early in the eighteenth century, we find Clerk of Penicuik taking
his family there on a “goat’s whey campaign,” for which remedy the Highland borders were often visited in his day. At an earlier day, canny Lowlanders would be shy of trusting themselves, on business or pleasure, beyond the Forth; and, even later, we know how Bailie Nicol Jarvie thought twice before venturing into the haunts of that “honest” kinsman of his. As Ben Lomond dominates this landscape, so looms out the memory of Rob Roy Macgregor, that doughty outlaw who, like Robin Hood, has taken such hold on popular imagination. Graham as he is, one suspects the above-quoted representative of the old earls to have his heart with an ancestral enemy who practised a kind of wild socialism—
To spoil the spoiler as he may,
And from the robber rend the prey.
It appears that Scott had Rob Roy in his eye as a model for Roderick Dhu, and it is the Macgregor country which he has given to his fictitious Vich Alpines. Mr. Cunninghame Graham points out how the Highland borders were always more troubled than the interior clandom, and how here especially the vicinity of a rich lowland offered constant temptation for followers of the “good old rule, the simple plan” recorded by Wordsworth. The Forth made a boundary against these predatory excursions, yet sometimes a Roderick Dhu would harry fields and farms as far as the home of “poor Blanche of Devon,” beyond Stirling. The “red soldiers” in turn came to pass the Highland line. On Ellen’s Isle women and children took refuge from Cromwell’s men; Monk marched by Aberfoyle, noting for destruction its woods that harboured rebels; and not to speak of Captain Thornton’s unlucky expedition, no less authentic a hero than Wolfe once commanded the fortress which the Georges placed at Inversnaid, near Rob Roy’s home, to bridle that broken clan of Ishmaelites.