The Rough Bounds include a dozen freshwater lochs that hitherto have had too little note in guide-books, the most renowned of them Loch Arkaig, where the Macdonalds and other clans tried to rally after Culloden, and where Prince Charlie’s treasure was hidden to be a Nibelungen hoard of contention among their leaders. One of his hiding-places here, near Lochiel’s seat, Achnacarry, was a cave in the “Dark Mile,” a scene not less deserving of fame than the Trossachs. Then the shores of this region present “one continued succession of picturesque and grand objects, in every variety that can be produced by bays, promontories, rocks, straits, and islands,” their aspects again varied by “silent calm succeeding to all the fury of a raging ocean, by the dark tempest and gale, the bright blue of the cloudless sky, and the evening and morning splendours of a lingering sun.” From Ardnamurchan, the westernmost swell of the mainland, the coast is almost equally divided between bare peninsular ridges and deeply pierced fiords, often wooded to the water’s edge, or bordered by meadows that glow greener below the savage rocks of their background, where sometimes Nature would seem to have heaped up materials for some abandoned design. The intricate inlets of Loch Moidart are succeeded by those about Arisaig, then comes the freshwater trough of Loch Morar, tumbling down to the sea under a bridge at its mouth. A narrow ridge keeps this from mingling with the tide of Nevis, “Loch of Heaven,” itself separated by the Knoidart Hills from Loch Hourn, “Loch of Hell,” indeed a place of gloom, its approach pronounced by Lord Avebury “the most desolate and savage scene” in Scotland; and it gave a congenial home to Barrisdale, that ruthless tyrant of Jacobite days, whose chivalrous varnish Mr. Andrew Lang has roughly scratched to show the Tartar beneath. Thus we come to Glenelg with its Pictish doons and its Hanoverian barracks of Bernera, for which, a quarter of a century after Culloden, a corporal and six men were garrison enough. Beyond this Skye almost touches the mainland.
The Rough Bounds are now broken in on by the line to Mallaig; but should the laudator temporis acti be scared away from that thread of iron rail, he can turn his back on such intrusion, holding down Loch Shiel or Loch Sunart to the mountainous promontory of Ardnamurchan; or southwards on the peninsula of Morven; or into the Moidart country northwards, fastnesses of the old customs, the old tongue, and the old faith. But ah!—
Deserted is the Highland glen,
And mossy cairns are o’er the men
That fought and died for Charlie!
The scattering and displacing of the clans had begun before Culloden, when the heads of the Camerons and the Macdonells were in exile with their legitimate sovereign. On the edge of the Rough Bounds the Government had settled strangers, some of whom proved but perverse agents of their civilising mission. Soon after 1715, as we learn from a story in Burt, Glengarry had already been invaded by a troop of woodcutters under leadership of an English Quaker. An industrial undertaking of a kind rare in the Highlands was the lead-mining at the head of Loch Sunart, where Strontian, famed also for a rare variety of spar, has given its name to the metal whose carbonate was first found here. Iron-smelting was another promoted industry. What with miners, woodcutters, English flunkeys, Lowland shepherds, transported gillies, rich proprietors, and sporting tenants, the population is much transmogrified since the days when each glen made a more or less happy family, as often as not on unhappy terms with its neighbours. Of all the strangers brought here upon Marshal Wade’s roads, the most effectual missionaries of the new order have been the Presbyterian clergy, ordained to scant sympathy with the line that tried in vain to dragoon them into Prelatism. Norman Macleod tells the story that when a Morven laird came to church with a pistol, threatening to shoot the minister if he prayed for the king, that undaunted divine laid two cocked pistols on the pulpit cushion, and kept both eyes wide open while performing this ticklish part of his function.
But where the Church by law established has the stipends, there are still nooks where Rome has the hearts of the people, elsewhere over the Highlands much given to the Free Church, two generations old. The best preserves of Catholicism lie here and there on this west coast, taking in some of the opposite islands, and straggling across the centre of the Highlands into Braemar. Of these oases of faith, as seen from one point of view, from another it is said that, as in Switzerland and in Baden, they can be distinguished at a glance from the Protestant districts by their aspect of greater poverty, with concomitant shortcomings. At least they have a chance to be richer in the spirit of a people once more disposed to the principles of the Royalist than to those of the Edinburgh Review. The Free Church clergy have been specially inquisitorial against old customs, fostered rather by the priests, who, so long as mass be not neglected, smile indulgently at the diversions and the memories of their flock, nor frown too sternly even at superstitious traditions. There was a time, of course, when this Church appeared as champion of the new against the old. It may be that in future generations we shall find enthusiasts as earnestly contending for “Sabbath blacks” as once for tartans, cherishing magic-lantern lectures when such have replaced Highland reels, and sighing over the beloved national strains of the hurdy-gurdy silenced by the gramophone, the diabolophone, or whatever sweetness musical invention have in store for us—so easily do new customs grow to old ones, and so soon are conservative souls set firm on their high horse of sentiment!
Yet as the bagpipes have had a long lease in the Highlands, they may be good for many lives still, in spite of clerical and artistic condemnation. Nature here sets keynotes for the fierce exultation of the pibroch and the wail of the coronach, with which are in tune the songs and stories of this people. I am not going to wake the ghost of Fingal, nor to rouse echoes of controversy over Ossian, a poet said to have been blind like Homer and Milton, if he were not of the same shadowy stuff as Thomas the Rhymer: he has been guessed as identical with the Welsh Taliesin. Fin MacCoul’s kingdom of Morven is unknown to history; but at least, for the Gael both of Albin and of Erin, such a hero lived in popular imagination as truly as Arthur and Achilles. It seems pretty well settled that the poems first published under Ossian’s name owed much to Macpherson, who thus showed truly unpoetic modesty in standing back from renown that rang through Europe, though in England, nowadays, Leslie Stephen is not the only critic to yawn over what once enchanted Goethe and Napoleon; and Macaulay speaks with his cock-surest scorn “of a story without evidence and of a book without merit.” It is also agreed that Macpherson worked upon some documents, human or written. When Dr. Johnson came hunting purblindly for evidence against a real Ossian, there were bards alive in the Highlands who could neither read nor write, yet whose poems passed as household words from one unlettered fireside to another.
In the next century scores of collections of Gaelic poetry came to be made; and still monotonous strains are murmured in the native tongue of the mountains. There are also stirring marches and choruses, like Gabhaidh sinn an rathad mòr, a tune known to Cockneys as their degraded “Kafoozlem,” that from the mouths of Appin Stewarts pealed defiance to the Macintyres, who had their own clan anthem in the grand song of Cruachan Beann. But sadness is the main note of these intricate and assonant metres, long drawn out round themes of love, war, and misfortune, like the “old unhappy things” of Ossian. In later times hymns as long as sermons have coloured the Celt’s less active life. Angry satire is another mood of his muse, and riddles seem to have had zest for his boyish mind; but he shows little taste for hearty humour. In Scotland we have a vulgar saw that it takes a surgical operation to force a joke into an Englishman’s head; and that reproach might as truly be applied to a pure Highlandman, of whom it is well said that his very language, in its weakness of a present tense, seems always looking forward to a melancholy future or back to a melancholy past.