Most charming are the walks by the Highland streams that at Crieff fall into the Earn; and tempting the longer excursions on which brakes carry off sociable parties from the Hydropathic. The railway takes us on up Strathearn to Comrie, a still more beautiful resort lying on a rich plain between the wooded heights of Glen Lednock and “lone Glenartney’s hazel shade,” by which one might tramp across to Callander, from the basin of the Tay into that of the Forth. A prosaic critic observes that there is no hazel shade in this glen; but the poet always declined to “swear to the truth of a song.” There is no spot in Scotland that so well unites lush Lowland charms with rugged features as Comrie; and it prides itself on being the only spot in Britain troubled by earthquakes, several slight shocks sometimes being felt in a year, which may bring a stone wall tumbling down, while scaring wild fowl, making the trout leap in the burns, fluttering the poultry yard and rattling the plates in the goodwife’s kitchen.
A few miles higher up, the Earn debouches from its Loch at St. Fillans, near which “the stag at eve had drunk his fill” before being roused by Fitz-James’s hounds. I once made his day’s course mainly on foot, but by a more arduous line over the top of Ben Voirlich, and moreover without any breakfast till I came upon a shepherd’s shanty in the afternoon; then instead of being welcomed at eve by any Lady of the Lake, I found every bed full at the Trossachs Hotel, as may often be the lot of weary wight in this much-toured district. Loch Earn, hitherto a quiet backwater in the stream of travel, has lately been thrown open by a railway, at its head bringing one to the Oban line from Callander, whose lights are now the fiery cross that “glance like lightning up Strath-Ire.”
In the other direction, a road from Crieff goes by the Sma’ Glen to Dunkeld, the gate of the mountains for the Highland Railway. This resort, as tourists know, is a kind of Perthshire Buda-Pesth, the old town of Dunkeld being on the left bank of the Tay, while the station is at Birnam on the other side. Village seems a fitter title for Dunkeld than town, yet it might claim to be a city in right of its Cathedral, whose choir is still the parish church. This is an ancient sanctuary to which in part was transplanted the influence of ruined Iona. Gavin Douglas, the translator of Virgil, was bishop here, but came to die of the plague in London. With Dunkeld also is connected the memory of Neil Gow, first of three generations of fiddlers who for Scotland’s artless tunes did what Burns, Lady Nairne, and other writers did for its songs.
The Cathedral, as well as the Falls of Braan, the Rumbling Bridge and other lions are in the grounds of the Duke of Atholl, the Duke of this part of the world. The Duke of fifty years ago was a “character” who might be styled the last of the great Highland chiefs. This generation may have forgotten the sensation caused by his trying to shut the way through Glen Tilt, and his personal encounter with two Cambridge undergraduates, who got the best of the scrimmage. Among Leech’s most effective sketches in Punch were that “Ducal Dog in the Manger” and the cartoon in which His Grace appeared playing the part of Roderick Dhu to the young Sassenachs. It was said that the Duke took his revenge on the artist by inviting him to shoot, the highest honour that can be hoped for in that part of the world; and in the end the pass was opened by a chieftain “so late dishonoured and defied.”
Since his day the champion obstructionist of this district was the veteran Sir Robert Menzies, who lately died much respected in the Rannoch country, in spite of an extraordinary itch for litigation, with his own family as well as with strangers. His most famous “ganging law plea” perhaps was with a railway company that, by the hands of half-a-dozen porters, had dragged the chieftain out of a carriage in which his ticket did not entitle him to ride. The fate of a reverend English tourist who landed from Loch Rannoch on his grounds was told with a shudder; and I must be thankful for my own escape when caught in the act of more than barefaced trespass in bounds where stranger was not always “a holy name.” With a friend of mine, in our hot youth, I had gone in to swim, when on the lake bank we heard a stern voice and looked back to see Sir Robert’s tartans waving over our clothes. Thus “at advantage ta’en,”