Aberfoyle, on the banks of the “infant Forth,” its nursery name the Avon Dhu, “Blackwater,” haunted like a child’s dreams by fairies of whom prudent Bailie Nicol Jarvie spoke under his breath, though he professed to hold them as “deceits of Satan.” Here the change-house of Lucky M‘Alpine has been replaced by an hotel offering all the comforts of the Saltmarket, along with golf links and fishing at Loch Ard. As Ipswich shows the very room in the White Hart occupied by Mr. Pickwick and the green gate at which Sam Weller met Job Trotter, so among the lions here are the ploughshare valiantly handled by Bailie Nicol Jarvie, nay, even the identical bough from which he swung suspended by his coat tails. Such relics let one guess why that worthy citizen would not give “the finest sight in the Hielands for the first keek o’ the Gorbals of Glasgow!” But he might have taken another view had he seen the great slate quarries that now scar the braes of Aberfoyle, or that pleasure-house on Loch Katrine set apart for Glasgow magistrates to disport themselves at the source of their city’s water supply.
From Aberfoyle or from Callander, the rest of the journey is by road to the Trossachs Hotel, which seems to represent Fitz-James’s imagination of “lordly tower” or “cloister grey”; then on through the mile of bristling pass to the foot of Loch Katrine. How many a peaceful stranger has passed this way since the Knight of Snowdoun’s steed here “stretched his stiff limbs to rise no more”! What “cost thy life, my gallant grey” would be the fact that even in the poet’s day, the path to Ellen’s Isle was more like a ladder than a road. Now the danger most to be feared is from Sassenach cycling, which caused a coach accident in the vicinity a few years ago. Umbrellas had replaced claymores so far back as Wordsworth’s time; and waterproofs are the armour most displayed, where once
Refluent through the pass of fear
The battle’s tide was pour’d;
Vanish’d the Saxon’s struggling spear,
Vanish’d the mountain-sword.
As Bracklinn’s chasm, so black and steep,
Receives her roaring linn,
As the dark caverns of the deep
Suck the wild whirlpool in,
So did the deep and darksome pass
Devour the battle’s mingled mass:
None linger now upon the plain,
Save those who ne’er shall fight again.
Macaulay, in his slap-dash style, has explained the want of taste for the picturesque in a bailie or such like of more romantic times. “He is not likely to be thrown into ecstasies by the abruptness of a precipice from which he is in imminent danger of falling two thousand feet perpendicular; by the boiling waves of a torrent which suddenly whirls away his baggage and forces him to run for his life; by the gloomy grandeur of a pass where he finds a corpse which marauders have just stripped and mangled; or by the screams of those eagles whose next meal may probably be on his own eyes.” But Dr. Hume Brown (Early Travellers in Scotland) shows how there were bold and not unappreciative tourists in the Highlands before the era of return tickets. Whatever the guide-books say, it is certainly not the case that the Trossachs were discovered by Scott. In Dr. T. Garnett’s Tour through the Highlands, published 1800, he relates a visit
to the “Drosacks,” and speaks of the place as sought out by foreigners. Several years before the publication of the Lady of the Lake, Wordsworth, with Coleridge and his sister, on a Scottish tour, turned aside to this beauty-spot, which they duly admired in spite of the rain; and there they met a drawing-master from Edinburgh on the same picturesque-hunting errand. Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journal tells us how the cottars were amused to hear of their secluded home being known in England; how two huts had been erected by Lady Perth for the accommodation of visitors; and how a dozen years before the minister of Callander had published an account of the Trossachs as a scene “that beggars all description.”