Where were we before launching forth into such a chequered digression on the “lad wi’ the philabeg”? In the Atholl country, by Loch “Tummel and banks of the Garry.” Above the Pass of Killiecrankie, the pedestrian who does not shun a thirty-miles walk to Braemar may turn off through Glen Tilt, with its gloomy gorges and snowy falls. But the coach-road to the Cairngorm Highlands goes from Dunkeld to Blairgowrie, then northward by the Spittal of Glenshee, the highest highway in Britain, at one point over 2000 feet, whose “Spittal” was a Hospital or Hospice that made a Highland St. Bernard’s. I once sought to hire a horse at an inn on this road, but the landlord explained how it had gone off with “a man called Morell Mackenzie, who seemed in an awfu’ hurry.” That locally unknown celebrity was in haste to an illustrious patient on Deeside, an errand that would breed much bad blood in another country.
The first stage of the journey is lowland rather than highland, its chief feature being a chain of small lochs, stocked with perch, on one of which stands Cluny Castle, cradle of the “Admirable Crichton.” Blairgowrie, with Rattray for its tiny Westminster, rivals Crieff as the second town in Perthshire, but is not so much a place of resort, laying itself out rather as an understudy of Dundee by its flax-spinning mills on the Ericht; and it seems a miniature of that longest and busiest of towns, the German Elberfeld strung out along the Wupper valley. Wildly romantic still is the walk up the Ericht, whose shaded pools and rapids, above the town, come down through a grand gorge overlooked by Craighall, one of several candidates for the honour of having sat to Scott as “Tullyveolan.” From this gap in the Highland line a short branch puts us on the main line of the Caledonian Railway, which competes with the North British as route to Aberdeen.
Other Caledonian branches lead off to charming glens on the old Highland line, now facing east towards the lowlands of Forfar and Kincardine. But of Alyth, Edzell, Lochee, one need only say that they lie among sweet and noble scenes as well worth visiting as others better known to tourist fame, and that even prosaic Kirriemuir, Mr. Barrie’s “Thrums,” is a base for long moorland tramps into Deeside, over a part of the Highlands as yet innocent of railways.
CHAPTER VII
“ABERDEEN AWA’!”
THERE seems no general name to fit a part of Scotland which has a very marked character, that lowland shelf lying beyond the Grampians along the Moray Firth, where the counties of Aberdeen, Banff, Moray, and Nairn are comparatively flat on the north side, but on the south rise into grand mountains. The “back end of the Highlands” would not be a dignified title; “Moray and Mar” is not an inclusive one, nor is “Deeside and Speyside.” One seems driven to indicate this as the district of which Aberdeen is the capital, environed by the “four nations,” Angus, Mar, Buchan, and Moray, a division of local mankind copied by her university from Paris.