It is only fourteen miles to Dunkeld from Perth, whence houses on the Grampian slope may be made out on a clear day. Strangers here who would take the very shortest way for a peep at the Highlands may now from Strathord station reach Bankfoot on a light railway up the Ordie Burn, and over the native heath of Robert Nicoll, who, but for an early death and his consuming zeal for reforming politics, might have been better known as a Perthshire Burns.
Sae weel I lo’ed a’ things of earth—
The trees, the buds, the flowers,
The sun, the moon, the lochs and glens,
The Spring’s and Summer’s hours,—
A wither’d woodland twig would bring
The tears into my eye,
Laugh on! but there are souls of love
In laddies herding kye.
Beyond Bankfoot and its annexe Waterloo, the road comes to close quarters with the mountains, where it winds up to a rugged face of woods and grouse moors, then under Rohallion joins the river and the railway in the pass of Birnam, guarded by the village city of Dunkeld. Here we leave the valley of Strathmore to enter one of the famous Highland gates, at the mouth of which a watery hollow called the Stare-dam was long a place of dread to wild mountaineers, for whom its “Hanged Men’s Trees” made such a warning as did the “kind gallows” of Crieff.
Of Dunkeld, the Highland border town, I gave account in Bonnie Scotland, so that here I will rather repeat what has been said about it by others. The Rev. Prebendary Gilpin, that original of Dr. Syntax in search of the Picturesque, who had found Arthur’s Seat “odd, misshapen and uncouth,” unpleasing from every point of view, except that the streets of London had been paved out of its quarries, this severe critic is more gracious to Dunkeld, where “the wild unshapely desert begins to separate into parts, and form itself into hills, hung with wood and broken with rock.” He can find no fault with the Tay, here “broad, deep and silent,” nor with “the grand screen of mountains” encircling it; and our generation is not much concerned with his criticism that it will take a century for the woods to grow up so as “to give a proper degree of sylvan richness to the scene.” Since then the woods have had time to clothe this fine amphitheatre, some inaccessible crag faces having been planted by the device of firing canisters filled with seeds against them from a cannon. Mr. Gilpin goes so far as to applaud Nature’s efforts in the side ravine of the Braan, though he shakes his head over the duke’s “improvements,” such as often caused so much division of opinion among those pundits of the picturesque. He agrees with our taste in condemning the “Claud Lorraine glasses” and other optical devices with which the Hermitage at the Falls of Braan was furnished, being “apt to believe that Nature has given us a better apparatus for viewing objects in a picturesque light than any the optician can furnish.” Also he shows very proper disgust on coming, among the sights of this demesne, upon a hollow in the rock with an inscription recording the names of a set of gentlemen who, on such and such a date, had drunk it full of punch.
But when from Dunkeld he takes his way on up Strath Tay, this Aristarchus almost forgets to be critical of scenes that “call aloud for the pencil.” The poet Gray, one of the earliest appreciative visitors to the Highlands, was not less admiring, though he gives a more matter-of-fact account of a “road winding through beautiful woods, with the Tay almost always in full view to the right, being here from three to four hundred feet over. The Strath-Tay, from a mile to three miles or more wide, covered with corn and spotted with groups of people then in the midst of their harvest. On either hand a vast chain of rocky mountains, that changed their face and opened something new every hundred yards, as the way turned or the cloud passed: in short, altogether it was one of the most pleasing days I have passed these many years.” Then, before leaving Atholl, he would exclaim, “Since I saw the Alps, I have seen nothing sublime till now!” And of the Highlands in general this precursor of the next century exclaims: “A fig for your poets, painters, gardeners and clergymen that have not been among them; their imagination can be made up of nothing but bowling-greens, flowering shrubs, horse-ponds, Fleet ditches, shell-grottoes and Chinese rails!”
Many a visitor of our day, weather permitting, gets here from coach or rail a general impression of “nothing but sunshine and fresh breezes, and bleating lambs, and clean tartans.” To go behind this fair scenery, set as if for the joy of poets and painters, we might turn up some burn into the rough background, and look through Ruskin’s eyes at nooks easily coloured by his “pathetic fallacy”; he knew the Highlands as not all filled by tourists, sportsmen, and prosperous sheep-farmers.
A Highland scene is, beyond dispute, pleasant enough in its own way; but, looked close at, has its shadows. Here, for instance, is the very fact of one, as pretty as I can remember—having seen many. It is a little valley of soft turf, enclosed in its narrow oval by jutting rocks and broad flakes of nodding fern. From one side of it to the other winds, serpentine, a clear brown stream, dropping into quicker ripple as it reaches the end of the oval field, and then, first islanding a purple and white rock with an amber pool, it dashes away into a narrow fall of foam under a thicket of mountain-ash and alder. The autumn sun, low, but clear, shines on the scarlet ash-berries and on the golden birch-leaves, which, fallen here and there, when the breeze has not caught them, rest quiet in the crannies of the purple rock. Beside the rock, in the hollow under the thicket, the carcass of a ewe, drowned in the last flood, lies nearly bare to the bone, its white ribs protruding through the skin, raven-torn; and the rags of its wool still flickering from the branches that first stayed it as the stream swept it down. A little lower, the current plunges, roaring, into a circular chasm like a well, surrounded on three sides by a chimney-like hollowness of polished rock, down which the foam slips in detached snowflakes. Round the edges of the pool beneath, the water circles slowly, like black oil; a little butterfly lies on its back, its wings glued to one of the eddies, its limbs feebly quivering; a fish rises and it is gone. Lower down the stream, I can just see, over a knoll, the green and damp turf roofs of four or five hovels, built at the edge of a morass, which is trodden by the cattle into a black Slough of Despond at their doors, and traversed by a few ill-set stepping-stones, with here and there a flat slab on the tops, where they have sunk out of sight; and at the turn of the brook I see a man fishing, with a boy and a dog—a picturesque and pretty group enough certainly, if they had not been there all day starving.
From Dunkeld up to Logierait, the river runs south, when its eastward course has been joined by the full swollen Tummel, that, coming down straight from Pitlochrie, seems here to be the parent stream. At Logierait Wordsworth could still see the remains of the Duke of Atholl’s court-house and the prison—said to be now represented by an inn-stable—from which Rob Roy made one of his daring escapes. He did well to escape, when his ducal captor had not yet lost the power of pit and gallows, who about the same time wrote to the Provost of Perth for the loan of an executioner. There was no lack of gallows in those days, yet apparently a short supply of hangmen, for we find the Fair City, in turn, borrowing the Drummonds’ executioner, to be returned when required; then again Lord Breadalbane’s, on an undertaking by the magistrates “to give the Earl the use of him at all times.” Perth had then three gallows of its own, while each of the great noblemen about it could hang or imprison his vassals; and even the Baron of Bradwardine is recorded as having once exercised his hereditary privilege by putting “two poachers in the dungeon of the old tower of Tully Veolan, where they were sorely frightened by ghosts, and almost eaten by rats.”
On the other side of the confluence, Ballinluig railway junction marks the forking of two routes of travel. The main line leads up into Atholl by Pitlochrie and Killiecrankie, “the Caledonian Thermopylae.” From this, we turn for the present to follow Strath Tay, adorned with a succession of mansions and policies, chief of them the restored Castle of Grandtully, for which is claimed that it was the Tully Veolan of Waverley. Other candidates for the honour are Craig Hall, above Blairgowrie, and Traquair House, near Innerleithen. The contention between these mansions makes for the Scottish newspapers what the great gooseberry and the sea serpent used to be in the South; but of course the truth is, as Scott says, who ought to know, that he took a composite picture from several models, getting some features from old mansions about Edinburgh—Ravelston, Dean House, and Warrender House beside Bruntsfield Links—while he seems to point out Grandtully as the best prototype of the Baron’s seat. As for the geography of the tale, that baffles all inquiry, the only thing clear being that Waverley, at the farthest point of his wanderings, had got well behind the Pass of “Ballybrough,” which must be Killiecrankie.