Here a wall of unfamed Bens shuts off another basin of lakes that is the northward course of the West Highland railway. Across this rise the high tops of the Blackmount deer forest, still within the bounds of Lord Breadalbane’s domain, a wilderness of heather, only here and there broken by patches of forest in our use of the word, but homes of living men appear rarer than cairns of the forgotten dead. Westwards opens the way to ill-famed Glencoe. Southwards runs the Orchy to Loch Awe and Ben Cruachan, by a knot of green glens that seem to have been the original seat of the Macgregors, whose inveterate feuds with Macnabs and other neighbours paved a way for the conquering Campbells. But before speaking of the Macgregor country, let us turn back to the Lowlands to approach it up another Perthshire strath.
V
STRATHEARN
One of the most beautiful of Scottish rivers is the Earn, half Highland and half Lowland, winding through all the varieties of Perthshire scenery, past hoary monuments of Scotland’s struggles for birth as a nation, and among misty traditions of her saints and heroes. Yet guide-books, one observes, pass over the greater part of this strath as hurriedly as the express trains dashing across its lower end; and strangers seldom visit any but the upper reach, which enters into a regular tourist round. How such neglect is undeserved, I would fain show on an arm-chair saunter from the river’s unalluring mouth to its source in mountains of romantic fame, a distance of some forty miles as the crow flies; but a salmon has to make a much longer trip of it. Well is the Earn apostrophised by an admiring stranger, Blackwood’s first editor, Thomas Pringle, best known by his South African pictures, or by the figure he cuts in the wicked waggery of the Chaldee Manuscript.
Thou, mountain stream, whose early torrent course
Hath many a drear and distant region seen,
Windest thy downward way with slackened force,
As with the journey thou hadst wearied been;
And, all enamoured of these margins green,
Delight’st to wander with a sportive tide,
Seeming with refluent current still to glide
Around the hazel banks that o’er thee lean.
Like thee, wild stream, my wearied soul would roam
(Forgetful of life’s dark and troublous hour)
Through scenes where fancy frames her fairy bower,
And, Love enchanted, builds his cottage home:
But time and tide wait not, and I, like thee
Must go where tempests rage and wrecks bestrew the sea.
The “drear and distant regions” are now more admired than the “margins green,” through which the Earn creeps into the Tay a few miles below Perth, where the great river broadens as an estuary about its reclaimed islands. The steamer trip from Perth to Dundee makes a local ploy rather than a tourist link, so few Southrons set eyes on those fat banks backed by richly wooded hills and crags. A little above the confluence stand the ruins of Elcho Castle, which Baddeley dismisses as “commonplace,” and Black finds unworthy of any epithet; but the race it nursed still stands high among Scotland’s nobles; and in or about it was a lair of Wallace’s most daring adventures. A little below, over the Fife border, lies the old seaport of Newburgh, surrounded by outlying spurs of the Ochils that give fine prospects across the Carse of Gowrie upon the opposite amphitheatre of the Sidlaws. Tourists seldom stop at Newburgh to see the adjacent Lindores Abbey and Lindores Loch, and the site of one of Wallace’s battlefields: so much the worse for the tourist. Two or three generations ago, he could not so easily have avoided Newburgh, when it was a noted station of posting and coach traffic from Perth.
To me, the flat Rhynds about the mouth of the Earn are of special interest, since they were long the home of my forbears, edged off the Hill of Moncrieff by a junior branch of the same stock, then again taking refuge across the Tay, when their dwindled possessions here had been sold to the house of Elcho. And time was when the eyes of all Scotland turned to this now obscure corner. A mile south of the Earn’s boldest crook, about the Western Rhynd peninsula, Abernethy is still visited by antiquaries for its mysterious round tower, standing over seventy feet high beside the church that has given Dr. Butler, its incumbent, material for a goodly volume. He makes no doubt that this tower was built upon their native models by Irish ecclesiastics, refugees from rude Danish invasion of their own saintly island. The only other such structure in Scotland, left unruined, is at Brechin, both of them better built than the Irish round towers on which ’prentice hands may have been tried. Sculptured stones of still greater antiquity have here escaped iconoclastic zeal, to be broken relics of Abernethy’s former state, poor and out of the way as it stands now.