The scenery varies, but retains the peculiarly Scotch features. Hills which we should call mountains are frequently planted with trees as far up as the soil will lie upon the precipitous sides. On passing one of great height, bald at the top, but bearded to the eyebrows with fir and larch, I asked an elderly man, a blacksmith, standing in his shop-door, if they were a natural growth. He said that he and his two boys planted them all about forty-eight years ago. They were now worth, on an average, twelve English shillings, or about three dollars a-piece.
I lodged in Kinross, a pleasant-faced, quiet and comfortable little town, done up with historical associations of special interest. Here is Loch Leven, serene and placid, like a mirror framed with wooded hills, looking at their faces in it. It is a beautiful sheet of water, taking the history out of it. But putting that in and around it, you see a picture before you that you will remember. Here is more of Mary the Unfortunate. You see reflected in the silver sheen of the lake that face which looks at you with its soft appeal for sympathy in all the galleries of Christendom. Out there, on that little islet, green and low, stands the black castle in which they prisoned her. There they made her trembling, indignant fingers write herself “a queen without a crown.” Southward there, where amateurs now fish for trout, young Douglas rowed her ashore with muffled oars so softly that they stirred no ripple at the bow. The keys of the castle they threw into the lake to bar pursuit, lay in the mud for nearly three centuries, when they were found by a lad of the village, and presented to the Earl of Morton, a representative of the Douglas family.
The next day I walked on to Perth, passing through a very interesting section, which nature and history have enriched with landscapes and manscapes manifold. It is truly a romantic region for both these qualities, with delightful views in sudden and frequent alternation. Glens deep, winding and dark, with steep mountain walls folding their tree-hands over the road; lofty hills in full Scotch uniform, in tartan heather and yellow grain plaided in various figures; chippering streams, now hidden, now coming to the light, in white flashing foam in a rocky glade of the dell; straths or savannas, like great prairie gardens, threaded by meandering rivers and studded with wheat in sheaves, shocks and ricks, seen over long reaches of unreapt harvests; villages, hamlets, white cottages nestling in the niches and green gorges of the mountains,—and all these sceneries set in romantic histories dating back to the Danes and their doings in Scotland, make up a prevista for the eye and a revista for the mind that keep both in exhilarating occupation every rod of the distance from Kinross to Perth.
The road via Glenfarg would be a luxury of the first enjoyment to any tourist with an eye to the wild, romantic and picturesque. Debouching from this long, winding, tree-arched dell, you come out upon Strathearn, or the bottom-land of the river Earn, which joins the Tay a few miles below. The term strath is peculiarly a Scottish designation which many American readers may not have fully comprehended, although it is so blended with the history and romance of this country. It is not a valley proper, as we use that term; as the Valley of the Mississippi or the Valley of the Connecticut. If the word were admissible, it might be called most descriptively the land-bay of a river, at a certain distance between its source and mouth, such for instance as the German Flats on the Mohawk, or the Oxbow on the Connecticut, at Wethersfield, in Vermont, or the great onion-growing flat on the same river at Wethersfield in Connecticut. These straths are numerous in Scotland, and constitute the great productive centres of the mountain sections. They are generally cultivated to the highest perfection of agricultural science and economy and are devoted mostly to grain. As they are always walled in by bald-headed mountains and lofty hills, cropped as high as man and horse can climb with a plough and planted with firs and larches beyond, they show beautifully to the eye, and constitute, with these surroundings, the peculiar charm of Scotch scenery. The term is always prefixed to the name of the river, as Strathearn, Strathspey, etc.
I noticed on this day’s walk the same singular habit that struck me in the north part of Yorkshire; that is, of cutting inward upon the standing grain. Several persons, frequently women and boys, follow the mowers, and pick up the swath and bind it into sheaves, using no rake at all in the process. So pertinaciously they seem to adhere to this remarkable and awkward custom, that I saw two mowers walk down a hill, a distance of full a hundred rods, with their scythes under their arms, in order to begin a new swath in the same way; four or five men and women running after them full tilt to bind the grain as it fell! Here was a loss of at least five minutes each to half a dozen hands, amounting to half an hour to a single man at the end of each swath or work. Supposing the mowers made twenty in ten hours from bottom to top of the field, here is the loss of one whole day for one man, or one sixth of the whole aggregate time applied to the harvesting of the crop, given to the mere running down that hill of six pairs of legs for no earthly purpose but to cut inward instead of outward, as we do. The grain-ricks in Scotland are nearly all round and quite small. Every one of them is rounded up at the top and fitted with a Mandarin-looking hat of straw, which sheds the rain well. A good-sized farm-house is flanked with quite a village of these little round stacks, looking like a comfortable colony of large, yellow tea-caddies in the distance.
Reached Perth a little after dark, having made a walk of nearly twenty miles after 11 a.m. Here I remained over the Sabbath, and greatly enjoyed both its rest and the devotional exercises in some of the churches of the city.
The Fair City of Perth is truly most beautifully situated at the head of navigation on the Tay, as Stirling is on the Forth. It has no mountainous eminence in its midst, castle-crowned, like Stirling, from which to look off upon such a scene as the latter commands. But Nature has erected grand and lofty observatories near by in the Moncrieffe and Kinnoull Hills, from which a splendid prospect is unrolled to the eye. There is some historical or legendary authority for the idea that the Romans contemplated this view from Moncrieffe Hill; and, as the German army, returning homeward from France, shouted with wild enthusiasm, at its first sight, Der Rhein! Der Rhein! so these soldiers of the Cæsars shouted at the view of the Tay and the Corse of Gowrie, Ecce Tiber! Ecce Compus Martius! There was more patriotism than parity in the comparison. The Italian river is a Rhine in history, but a mere Goose Creek within its actual banks compared with the Tay. In history, Perth has its full share of “love and murder,” rhyme and romance, sieges, battering and burning, royals and rebels. In the practical life of to-day, it is a progressive, thriving town, busy, intelligent, respected and honorable. The two natural features which would attract, perhaps, the most special attention of the traveller are the two Inches, North and South, divided by the city. This is a peculiar Scotch term which an untravelled American will hardly understand. It has no relation to measurement of any kind; but signifies what we should call a low, level green or common in or adjoining a town. The Inches of Perth are, to my eye, the finest in Scotland, each having about a mile and a half in circumference, and making delightful and healthy playgrounds and promenades for the whole population.
On Monday, Sept. 14th, I took staff and set out for another week-stage of my walk, or from Perth to Inverness. Crossed the Tay and proceeded northward up the east side of that fertile river. Fertile may sound at first a singular qualification for a broad, rapid stream running down out of the mountains and widening into a bay or firth at its mouth. But it may be applied in the best sense of production to the Tay; and not only that, but other terms known to practical agriculture. Up to the present moment, no river in the world has been cultivated with more science and success. None has been sown so thickly with seed-vitalities or produced more valuable crops of aquatic life. Here salmon are hatched by hand and folded and herded with a shepherd’s care. Here pisciculture, or, to use a far better and more euphonious word, fish-farming, is carried to the highest perfection in Great Britain. It is a tillage that must hereafter take its place with agriculture as a great and honored industry. If the cold, bald-headed mountains, the wild, stony reaches of poverty-stricken regions, moor, morass, steppe and prairie are made the pasturage of sheep innumerable, the thousands of rivers in both hemispheres will not be suffered to run to waste through another century. The utilitarian genius of the present age will turn them into pasturage worth more per acre than the value of the richest land on their banks. Just think of the pasturage of the Tay. It rents for £14,000 a year; and those who hire it must make it produce at least £50,000, or $240,000 annually. Let us assume that the whole length of this salmon-pasturage is fifty miles, and its average width one-eighth of a mile. Then the whole distance would contain the space of 4,000 square acres, and the annual rent for fishing would amount to over £3 13s. per acre. This would make every fish-bearing acre of the river worth £100, calculated on the land basis of interest or rent.
Having heard of the Stormontfields’ Ponds for breeding salmon, I had a great desire to see them. They are situated on the Tay, a few miles above Perth, and are well worthy of the inspection and admiration of the scientific as well as the utilitarian world. The process is as simple as it is successful and valuable. A race or canal, filled with a clear, mountain stream, and constructed many years ago to supply motive power to a corn-mill, runs parallel with the river, at the distance from it of about twenty rods. At right angles with this stream, there are twenty-five wooden boxes side by side, about fifty feet in length, placed on a slight decline. These boxes or troughs, each about two feet wide and one foot deep, are divided into partitions by cross-boards, which do not reach, within a few inches, the top of the siding, so that the water shall make a continuous surface the whole length of the trough. Each trough is filled with round river stones or pebbles washed clean, on which the spawn is laid. The water is let out of the mill-race upon these troughs through a wire-cloth filter, covering them about two inches deep above the stones. At the bottom, a lateral channel or race, running at right angles to the troughs, conducts the waste water in a rapid, bubbling stream down into the feeding-pond, which covers the space of about one-fifth of an acre, close to the river, with which it is connected by a narrow race gated also with a wire-cloth, to prevent the little living mites from being carried off before their time.
This may serve to give the reader some approximate idea of the construction of the fish-fold. The next process is the stocking it with the breeding ewes of the sea and river. The female salmon is caught in the spawning season with a net, and the ova are expressed from her by passing the hand gently down the body, when she is again put into the river to go on her way. The manager told me that they generally reckoned upon a thousand eggs to a pound of the salmon caught. Thus fourteen good-sized fish would stock the twenty-five troughs. When hatched, the little things run down into the race-way, which carries them into the feeding-pond. Here they are fed twice daily, with five pounds of beef’s liver pulverised. They remain in this water-yard from April to autumn, when the gate is raised and they are let out into the river. And it is a very singular and interesting fact that those only go which have got their sea-coats on them, or have reached the “smolt” character. The smaller fry remain in the pond until, as it has been said in higher circles of society, their beards are grown, or, in their case, until their scales are grown, to fit them for the rough and tumble of salt-water life.