The Highlands and Islands of Scotland

by A. R. Hope Moncrieff

BEN NEVIS

At the foot of Ben Nevis lies Fort-William, a town once dubbed Gordonsburgh, and before that Maryburgh, in honour of Dutch William’s consort; but its old name was Inverlochy, famed by Montrose’s dashing victory over Argyll, as by a former battle between the forces of James I. and his troublesome vassal, the Lord of the Isles. Cloudier history would have it an ancient royal seat of Scotland, where King Achaius is fondly believed to have made a treaty with Charlemagne, first seal of that league between two kingdoms often united in enmity to England. These are ticklish subjects: MacCulloch the geologist was hereabouts turned away from even Highland hospitality because he could not believe that Fingal made the parallel roads of Glenroy, in which Nature seems so artfully to have copied the works of man.

Legendary chroniclers have placed at Inverlochy the site of a great commercial city in the Highland golden age; but the only trace of such antiquity is, not far off, one of those “vitrified forts,” puzzling savants as to whether their ramparts were turned to slag by accident or design. There is a painful suspicion that the old castle, at one time held by the Comyns, may have been the work of an English king, three centuries before James VI. tried to found a town about it as civilising agent for the Highlands. It was certainly General Monk who began the modern fort that in William’s time became strengthened to hold out against ill-equipped besiegers. This work, impregnable in 1745, has now yielded to the railway company, whose station takes its place. Before the railway came here, Marshal Wade’s roads and Telford’s Canal had bridled the wild Highlandman as effectually as that chain of military posts hence reaching up to the Moray Firth by Kil-Comyn, the modern Fort-Augustus, and by Castle Urquhart on the banks of Loch Ness. This was another fortress of the Black Comyns, then of the Grants, taken by Edward I.’s soldiers, and assailed by many a fierce foe, till it gracefully surrendered to the shafts of time.

The Earth builds on the Earth

Castles and towers;

The Earth says to the Earth,

All shall be ours.

From Ben Nevis we look over that great cleft in which Loch Linnhe, running up from the Firth of Lorne, is continued by the lakes of Glenmore, a natural boundary-line for the Inner Highlands. The so-called Highland line formed by the face of the Grampians running obliquely from the Clyde across the Forth and Tay, then beside Strathmore to Aberdeenshire, walls in the Outer Highlands, in the main long mastered by stranger lords, who, indeed, soon fell under the Celtic charm and brought themselves to be as Gaelic as the born Gaels, not the less demonstratively as Saxon speech and Lowland customs crept in by the mountain passes. It is across that central cleft we must look for the Bretagne bretonnante of Scotland, among secluded lochs and glens where the people were longer sheltered from outside influences. The noblest summits and the most famous scenes are to the east of the Great Glen; perhaps the grandest mountain mass is the block of the Cairngorms in the north-east, below which Balmoral basks in the sunshine of royal favour; but to the west rather lingers the soul of the Highlands. This is particularly true of the Inverness bens, glens, and lochs between Ben Nevis and Skye, a region that has for its proper name “The Rough Bounds” (Garbh Crioch), while it made part of old Argyll, “coast of the Gael,” a name once extending as far up as Loch Broom.

Glenmore is a highway of civilisation well trodden by tourist generations. Of late years the extension of the West Highland line to the coast has opened up further romantic wilds, thick set with ruined strongholds and shrines, with crosses and cairns, and with monuments of less-forgotten history. One column marks the spot where Charles Edward raised his standard in Glenfinnan; another commemorates the Lochiel Cameron who died at Quatre Bras, as loyal to King George as his fathers to Charles and James. In those cloudy recesses, beyond the forts of the Great Glen, gathered silently the storm of 1745 to whirl far over Britain. Here Macdonalds and Camerons only half-welcomed their rash prince, the old chiefs too prudent not to see the risks of his enterprise, yet too proud to hold back from it when hot young heads panted to meet the Lowlands in battle array. The first encounter was on the Spean, by whose valley a branch line now holds up the Great Glen to Fort-Augustus. The main line winds round the head of Loch Shiel, and on to the deep fiords near Arisaig, where the adventurer reached the mainland, and whence he made his perilous escape. From Arisaig, looking out on the picturesque islands Eigg, Rum, and Muck, the railway follows the coast to Mallaig, opposite the southern end of Skye, a region hitherto almost beyond the waterproofed tourist’s ken, if not the sportsman’s, now plying his expensive pastime among the lonely graves of clans who, for all their pride and valour, went down before the disciplined stranger because they could not keep their swords off one another.