acquaintance with Strathearn and Strath Tay. But in my case there were hindrances that may not have presented themselves to the begetter of Waverley. To him this choice country might not be so much shut up by high park walls, or by enclosures of the rich strath lands. And in my day there were toll bars on the roads, when a schoolboy’s pocket-money was scrimper than seems to be the lot of this generation. One could not ride a dozen miles in any direction without counting the cost. The cheapest roads were twopenny ones, which thus became the most familiar. On one or two, the charge for my small steed was threepence, which required more consideration. One forbidding highway proudly demanded fourpence, though on it you could trot a couple of miles before reaching the expensive barrier. And when one had treated oneself to a fourpenny scamper along it, there came a second lion on that path. For more than a mile a railway ran beside the road, on the same level, separated only by a hedge, as alarming to inexperienced Highland shelties as the broad bridge on which another railway crossed another road askew, so as to form a miniature Grotto of Prosilippo, where overhead might come rumbling an invisible thunderstorm as one sped through its gloomy pass. Once, having paid my fourpence, I had pushed on almost to the end of the perilous stretch, when a train puffed and rattled up to meet me, which my horsemanship failed to make the pony face in a philosophic spirit. For all I could do, it swerved round and took to racing the engine along the flat road, for a time keeping company with its bogy. On that highway race, John Gilpin would not have been in it. If I had no wig to fly away, and no stone bottles swinging by my side, what bothered me was having an open knife in my hand, with which I had been cutting a switch from the hedgerow, as the monster came upon us from round a corner. Our headlong course was at last stopped by a gipsy or such-like wayfarer, as shamefaced guerdon for whom I had only twopence in my pocket, nearly drained by that unconscionable toll. Such trivial reminiscences I set down partly to please myself, partly to explain how my familiarity with this region is oddly incomplete, as in the case of a student who knew all about Africa, America, and Asia, but had stopped subscribing to the Encyclopædia before it touched on Europe. Yet the reader must take fair notice that there are few roads hereabouts upon which I may not be tempted to trot out my own early memories; and if, belike, he likes not this mood of anecdotage, let him turn to the article on Strathearn in some ponderous cyclopædia or plodding guide-book.
Mr. Hall, for his part, did not despise the trout-fishing for which the Farg was notable in my youth; and he had a good day’s sport, when so few strangers sought its shady course that he found some difficulty in getting his host to make out a bill, that for two days’ entertainment of man and beast, including a bottle of wine and other beverages, came to less than ten shillings. By Culfargie, the little Farg runs into the Earn, here a goodly river of smooth channels and deep pools, meandering through a rich valley between the wooded bluffs of Moncrieff Hill and the green slopes of the Ochils. Except for its craggy walls, there is nothing Highland about this part of the strath, as thickly set with mansions, farms, and woods as any snug scene of England. Of it, I have already spoken in Bonnie Scotland; and will only add that Mr. Hall was scandalised at the numbers of old bachelors he found resorting to the Spa of Pitkeathly, then as frequented as “St. Ronan’s Well,” where it appears that bachelors, young and old, were very apt to get into mischief.
Above the Bridge of Earn, over which goes the high road to Perth, the river is crossed by the two converging railway lines that tunnel through Moncrieff Hill to burst into daylight on the Tay. It is the next reaches of the winding Earn that are hardly known to strangers, unless in glimpses from the train; yet here it flows by scenes of as much historic interest as beauty. Forgandenny is a picturesque village, beside which an old mansion, destroyed by fire, has been replaced by a new one, notable for its fine gardens, like so many other seats in the neighbourhood. Forteviot, a little higher up, has come down from the rank of an ancient royal seat. Here died Kenneth McAlpine, 860, after hammering the Picts into a new kingdom; and for three centuries later shadowy Scottish kings are seen flitting through a royal stronghold that stood on the tongue of land between the Earn and its tributary the May.
The May, one of the merriest and sweetest of Ochil streams, trips down by the park of Invermay and the “birks” sung before Burns. As “Endermay,” this spot inspired the Earn-born poet, David Mallet or Malloch, whom Dr. Johnson belittled, but he filled a considerable place in London literary life of his generation. Opposite Invermay, on the northern slope of the Earn, stands Dupplin Castle, seat of Lord Kinnoull, whose richly wooded grounds are now renowned, and the gardens nursing exotics such as an araucaria thought to be the largest in the kingdom.—“Oh, Dr. Johnson, Dr. Johnson, oh!” But these noble avenues stand on what was once Dupplin Moor, where in 1332 Edward Balliol and his English allies made such a slaughter among the Scots “that the dead stood as high from the ground as the full length of a spear,” and the work of Bannockburn was for a time undone; indeed the boy king David’s crown might have been wholly lost, had not Edward of England’s hands been then too full, grasping at the lilies of France as well as the Scottish thistle that so often proved a sore handful.
Above Dupplin comes Gask, home of the Oliphants, one of whom was to win victories of sentiment for the lost Jacobite cause dear to this family. Carolina, Lady Nairne, the “Flower of Strathearn,” had as warm a heart for her native stream as for memories of Prince Charlie.
Fair shone the rising sky,
The dewdrops clad wi’ many a dye,
Larks lilting pibrochs high
To welcome day’s returning.
The spreading hills, the shading trees,
High waving in the morning breeze,
The wee Scots rose that sweetly blows
Earn’s vale adorning!
The ruins of Gascon Hall beside the river claim to have made a refuge for William Wallace, when, hunted by a sleuth-hound through Gask wood, he struck off the head of his flagging comrade Fawdon, then could not so easily lay that traitor’s or hinderer’s ghost. The present mansion is the third or fourth worn out here by the Nairne family. It stands on the site of a Roman camp, with a Roman road beside it, one of many bits of way still locally known as “street roads.” At Gask we look over to the mouth of Strathallan, the pass between the Ochils and the foothills of the Grampians, that must often have echoed the clank of Roman arms. Across the moor of Orchill, with Wade’s military road running beside it, the Ardoch Camp is best preserved of such Roman fortresses in Britain, and one of the largest, laid out to contain an army of 25,000 men. And hereabouts, in Celtic stones and place-names, there are thick traces of still older history, overgrown by the plantations and steadings of a race enriched from regions where the Cæsars’ eagles never flew.
Ardoch stands out of the Earn basin, and the Allan flows to the Forth. From the end of the Ochils, the Ruthven Water is their last tributary to the Earn, whose next affluent comes off Highland moors. Strathallan Castle seems to belie its name in being on the north side of the pass by which the Caledonian railway debouches on a plain studded with notable names. Here is Tullibardine, cradle of the Atholl Murrays; Kincardine Castle shows how Montrose’s ancestral home was ruined by Argyll in their tit-for-tat warfare; and the gallant Grahames had Aberuthven for their burial-ground.