THE VALLEY OF ST. JOHN,
SHOWING TRIERMAIN CASTLE ROCK
We set out in quest of the mysterious phantom castle and found the drive through the narrow valley a delightful one. Nearly everybody who visits the English Lakes drives over the hills from Ambleside to Keswick. After passing Dunmailraise and skirting the shores of Thirlmere Lake beneath the shadows of Helvellyn, we turned off the main road near the mouth of St. John's Beck, one of the many pretty brooks that are found everywhere in the neighbourhood. A huge pile of rocks, projecting curiously from the side of a green-coated hill, is called, from the poem, Triermain Castle Rock. Following the course of the streamlet, upward, we found a view much like that which appeared to King Arthur, after the goblet with its liquid fire had disenchanted him.
The monarch, breathless and amazed,
Back on the fatal castle gazed—
Nor tower nor donjon could he spy,
Darkening against the morning sky;
But on the spot where once they frowned,
The lonely streamlet brawled around
A tufted knoll, where dimly shone
Fragments of rock and rifted stone.
As we proceeded up the valley, looking back time and again for a last view of the rock, it was easy to fancy that what we saw in the distance might well be a castle and that under certain atmospheric conditions the illusion might be heightened.
CHAPTER VII
THE LORD OF THE ISLES
'The Lord of the Isles,' was another effort to deceive the critics. A long poem acknowledged by Walter Scott, following soon after 'Waverley' and only a month preceding 'Guy Mannering,' was calculated to 'throw off' those who were trying to identify the mysterious author of the Waverley Novels with the well-known poet. It was the result of a vacation journey of about six weeks in a lighthouse yacht, made in the summer of 1814 in the company of a party of congenial friends. The chief of the expedition was Robert Stevenson, a distinguished civil engineer in charge of the lighthouse service on the north coast of Scotland, and the grandfather of Robert Louis Stevenson. After circling the Shetland and Orkney Islands they came down into the Minch or channel which separates the west coast of Scotland from the Hebrides, and stopped at Dunvegan, on the Isle of Skye, to see the ancient castle. Two days later they stopped to examine Loch Corriskin, which made a profound impression upon the poet's mind. 'We were surrounded,' he said in his Diary of the expedition, 'by hills of the boldest and most precipitous character and on the margin of a lake which seemed to have sustained the constant ravages of torrents from these rude neighbours. The shores consist of huge layers of naked granite, here and there intermixed with bogs and heaps of gravel and sand, marking the course of torrents. Vegetation there was little or none, and the mountains rose so perpendicularly from the water's edge that Borrowdale is a jest to them. We proceeded about one mile and a half up this deep, dark, and solitary lake, which is about two miles long, half a mile broad, and, as we learned, of extreme depth.... It is as exquisite as a savage scene, as Loch Katrine is as a scene of stern beauty.' In the poem he gives a little more vivid description:—