Smart, cheerful, and regularly built, Inverness has the air of a lowland town, spread out on a river plain, across which fragments of the Highlands have drifted from the grand mountains in view, as the Alps from Berne. The Ness has the distinction of being the shortest river in Britain, shorter even than London’s New River; but its course of only a few miles, from Loch Ness to the Moray Firth’s inner recess, is enough to make it a resort for big salmon and small shipping. Hector Boece records a former great “plenty and take of herring,” which vanished “for offence made against some Saint.” Sheltered from the winds of the east and the “weather” of the west, the district has a genial climate where, indeed, the air often “nimbly and sweetly recommends itself unto our gentle senses.” Shakespeare, not having the advantage of Black’s Guide, says little about the scenery around, which has been much described in Wild Eelin, William Black’s last and not his worst novel, though it has the deplorable fault of
bringing in real personages not less thinly disguised than Inverness is as Invernish.
The famous Castle still stands by the river-side, in its modern form serving as a court-house and prison for ungracious Duncans made both drunk and bold; while the grounds of its “pleasant seat” are a lounge for honest inhabitants, kept in memory, by a statue of Flora Macdonald, how Prince Charles Edward’s men blew up the old blood-stained walls. Opposite, across the river, is the modern Cathedral of the Episcopal Church, here a considerable body which once had a soul of Jacobite sentiment. Inverness shows several fragments of antiquity, most revered of them that palladium Clach-na-Cudain—“stone of the tubs,” now built into the base of the restored Town Cross. A little way up the river its “Islands” have been adapted as a unique “combination of public park and natural wilderness, of clear brown swirls and eddies under the overhanging hazels and alders, and open and foaming white cataracts where artificial barriers divert the broad rush of the river.” This beauty-spot of wood and water no stranger should fail to seek out; then not far beyond he may gain Tom-na-hurich, “hill of the fairies,” which makes a picturesque cemetery, commanding what a pre-Wordsworthian writer describes as “a boundless view of gentlemen’s seats, seated generally under the shelter of eminences, and surrounded by wooded plantations.” Another fine prospect can be had a mile or so behind the station from the heights called “Hut of Health,” on which have been built extensive barracks.
The hotels of Inverness are not too many to accommodate the crowds that flit through it in the tourist and shooting season. It has two annual galas, when accommodation may be hardest to find for love or money. The first is the “Character Fair” in July, so called because then some half a million changes hands over dealings in wool on the security of the dealer’s character, not a fleece being brought to market, nor even a sample, unless of human brawn and beards well displayed in the brightest of tartan and the roughest of homespun. The second is the Northern Meeting in September, gayest and smartest of those gatherings by which the old Highland games, dress, and music are kept up. But ah! this touch of local colour is too like the artificial bloom on a faded cheek. The glow of tartans here revived by what a German might call “Sunday Highlanders,” is but a Vanity Fair. The stalwart athletes, some of them “professionals,” who exert themselves to make a London holiday, have little more of Arcadian simplicity than the fine folk who look on. The clansmen forget old feuds; the chiefs no longer command the old loyalty; the greyness and greed of our practical world are settling down over the Highlands, conquered by gold, as hardly by southron steel.
If the pensive tourist seek a purer vision of the past, let him go out to the lonely station of Culloden Moor, some half a dozen miles from Inverness. From the great viaduct that here typifies modern enterprise, he may hold up the Nairn to the roughly overgrown field on which are half buried those pre-historic stones of Clava, monuments of a past beyond Scott’s ken. Then, crossing the river and mounting the heights, he comes on the commonplace road that will lead him over Drumossie, where the romantic cause fell hopelessly when Cumberland’s red-coats mowed down and bayoneted its jealous, sullen, and weary champions, more than a tenth of them dying here for the Prince who, according to one story, fled basely, but others report him as forced from the field. Fir plantations and fields have now clad the wild nakedness of this tableland; but by the roadside are seen the mounds beneath which lie each clan together, still shoulder to shoulder, and the monumental cairn that is yearly hung with votive wreaths by a certain perfervid Jacobite. If these men gave way before disciplined valour and artillery, if their own martial spirit was marred by quarrelsome ill-temper, let us remember how many of them joined or rejoined the cause when it was as good as lost, after the Jacobite squires of the south had held back from its first flush of success. The next time the Cockney be moved to his sneer about bawbees, let him consider how neither bribes, nor threats, nor torture could tempt these poor Highlanders to betray their prince in his desperate wanderings with a price set on his head. And let us all forget, if we can, the cruelty with which the victors followed up that last rout of sentimental devotion. One poor fellow took hundreds of lashes on an English ship of war, without opening his mouth to confess how he had ferried the fugitive to a safer isle. Such stories of humble fidelity are too much forgotten by historians who bear in mind how the heads of certain houses—father and son—ranked themselves on opposite sides with a politic eye to escape forfeiture, whether James or George were king. The most romantic case, if true, is that of the Macintosh in the royal ranks, said to have yielded himself prisoner to his own wife, who had taken his place at the head of the rebellious clansmen. Another family manœuvre turned out luckily for a Lowland peer who, as preparation for taking the field with the Pretender, treated himself to a foot-bath which his prudent wife made so hot that her valorous spouse could not boot nor spur for many a day, and thus was kept out of political hot water. The same story, indeed, is told of another couple, whose sympathies were divided the opposite way on.