Nothing could well be more wild and desolate than the top of Ben Venue. You may be there and not hear or have heard anything, not even the melody of birds, or the bleating of sheep, or the cry of a shepherd, or the barking of his dog, since you heard the whirr of the partridge in the valley below. At one time the eagle was to be seen here sitting in lonely majesty or sailing through the air, but it is now banished. The heron, however, still stalks among the reeds on the side of the lake in search of his prey, and the wild ducks still gambol on the water, or dive beneath the surface. You look down on the most romantic part of the lake, with the Otter Island, and the “Rob Roy” sailing into the picturesque pier which is hidden by the western end of “Roderick Dhu’s lookout,” where nature is shown to best advantage, where mountains and rocks, which appear to have been thrown around in the rudest forms, are covered with trees and shrubs that give variety and grace and beauty to the scenery.
There are some who connect the word Katrine with Cateran, the wild and lawless freebooters who infested its shores; but it is called Ketturn, or Keturin, by the natives; and the latter part of the word when thus pronounced is like the name of many a place in the Highlands whose appearance is specially wild and savage. For example, we have in Inverness-shire Loch Urn or Urrin, which means the Lake of Hell; and in Cowal Glen Urrin, or Hell’s Glen. The loch is the receptacle of a hundred streams, which after rain foam down their rugged sides as white as “the snowy charger’s tail,” and after falling into Loch Achray, and from that into Vennachar, it finds its way, under the name of the Teith, into the Forth 3 miles from Stirling.
At the base of the mountain you have Coir-nan-Uriskin, the cave of the Goblins (best got at by a boat from the Trossachs Pier), a place rendered venerable by Highland tradition and superstition, overlooking the lake in solemn grandeur. It is a deep circular hole of at least 600 yards in length at the top, gradually narrowing towards the bottom, surrounded on all sides with steep rocks, and overshaded with birch trees which shut out the sun. On the south and west it is bordered by the shoulder of the hill to the height of 500 feet; and on the east the rocks appear to have fallen down, scattering the whole slope with fragments, that shelter the fox, the wild cat, and the badger. It is said that the solemn and staid meetings of the Urisks, from whom it got its name, and who are supposed to be scattered all over the Highlands, were held here. “Those,” according to Dr. Graham, “were a kind of lubberly supernaturals, who, like the brownie, perform the drudgery of the farm, and it was believed that many of the families of the Highlands had one of them attached to it.” Sir Walter Scott tells us that tradition has ascribed to the Urisk a figure between a goat and a man; in short, however much the classical reader may be startled, precisely that of the “Grecian satyr.” Behind the precipitous ground above this cave, at a height of about 800 feet, is the magnificent glen, overhung with birch trees, called Bealach-nam-Bo, or, the Pass of the Cattle, through which the animals carried away in a foray in the Lowlands were driven to the shelter of the Trossachs (rough places). It looks like an avenue from our nether world to another and a higher sphere. Not far from the cave is the island to which one of Cromwell’s soldiers swam to get a boat, and met his doom in the manner described in the “Lady of the Lake,” at the hand of a woman. With one sweep of her dirk the Highland amazon is said to have severed his head from his body.
Opposite you is the steep and pyramidal mount Ben A’an, 1851 feet high, with the Trossachs Hotel at its left base, which is built on a spot called Anacheanoch-rochan, a name unpronounceable by any but a Celtic tongue. A little farther on, at the end of the lovely Achray (the Loch of the Level Field), is the Brig of Turk (the Brig of the Boar), where Fitz-James discovered that he had outstripped all his followers. Behind that you have the Forest of Glenfinlas, once a royal forest; and behind that rises Ben Ledi (the Hill of God) to 2875 feet. Farther on you have Loch Vennachar (the Lake of the Fair Valley), with its islands, and the Ford of Coilantogle at the far end of it, to which Roderick promised to lead the king in safety, and where the fight took place—“the Gael above, Fitz-James below.” Still further off is Callander, looking bright and fair under the influence of Old Sol, and nestling at the base of Uam-Var. Looking south, you have immediately before you Glen Reoch and Ben Reoch (the Brandered or Striped Glen and Ben). Over this you see the long, flat, and fertile carse of the Forth, with the Kippen and Gargunnock hills on its south, and Stirling Castle, and Dunmyat above Menstrie, and even Ben Cleugh above Tillicoultry. Due south you can see Buchlyvie, a much more hospitable place now than it must have been found to be by the writer of the ancient ballad, who described it as a
toon
Where there’s neither horse meat, nor
Man’s meat, nor a chair to sit doon.
Farther south is the Strathblane and Kilpatrick hills, while to the west and south you have, notwithstanding that the mighty Ben Lomond is now in front of you, a good view of the hills near the foot of Loch Lomond, and around Loch Eck and Loch Goil. Due west you have the Duke of Argyll’s Bowling Green, made up of such tidy little mountains as the Cobbler and his two neighbours to the right of him—Ben More and Ben Vane—both a little higher in life than himself, he being only a cobbler. In the north you see Ben More (3845 feet high), to the west of it Ben Lui (3708), and away in the far west Ben Cruachan (3611), and many others too numerous to mention.
If you have read the “Lady of the Lake,” as all should do who propose to make this excursion, you will have been able to follow “the windings of the chase,” and to have taken a mental picture of a district which, before the days of Scott, were almost as unknown to the Lowlander as the interior of Africa, and into which, when they did go, it was with the apprehensions of Andrew Fairservice, “that to gang into Rob Roy’s country is a mere tempting of providence.”
It is no part of our plan to describe that wilderness of beauty, “all in the Trossachs Glen,” which attracts so many tourists from all parts of the world year after year. But if our hill climber has got any superfluous energy after he has gone up and come down, it would be a pity to be so near the Trossachs without actually seeing the famed and fabled spot.