At the rugged-looking little stone-built town of Callander we left the train, and climbed into a sort of open wagon stagecoach, similar to those sometimes used at the White Mountains, which held sixteen of us, and had a spanking team driven by an expert English "whip;" and we were whirled away, for a ride of twenty miles or more, through the lake country and "the Trossachs" to Loch Katrine. The word "trossachs," I was told by a communicative Scotchman, signified "bristles," and the name was suggested by the species of coarse furze which abounds in the passes of this rough and hilly country. The wild mountain scenery reminded me often of our own White Mountains; and the reaches of view, though giving pretty landscape scenes, showed a country rather sterile for the husbandman—better to shoot over than plough over.
At last we reached a little sort of hollow in the hills, where Lake Vennachar narrows down to the River Teith, and came to where the stream swept round a little grassy point of land; and here our coach stopped a moment for us to look,—
"For this is Coilantogle Ford,"—
which, it will be recollected, was
"Far past Clan Alpine's outmost guard,"
and the scene of the combat between Fitz-James and Roderic Dhu. "And there," said an old Scotchman, pointing to the little grassy peninsula, is the very place where the fight took place"—a borrowed stretch of the imagination, inasmuch as the poet himself imagined the combat.
But we whirled away past Vennachar, mounted a little eminence, from whence we had a grand panoramic view of hills, lake, road, and river, with Benvenue rising in the background; and as we rattled down the hill the road swept round with a curve near to a little village that I recognized at once from the pictures in illustrated editions of Scott's poems—Duncraggan's huts, one of the points at which the bearer of the fiery cross paused on his journey to raise the clans.
"Speed, Malise, speed! the lake is past,
Duncraggan's huts appear at last."
And passing this, we soon rolled over a little single-arched bridge—the bridge of Turk.