A Walk from London to John O'Groat's / With Notes by the Way

by Elihu Burritt

The growth of the little bull-headed mites, after being turned into the river-pasture, is wonderful—more rapid than that of lambs of the Southdown breed. The keeper had marked some of them, on letting them out, by clipping the dorsal fin. On being caught six or eight months afterward, they weighed from five to seven pounds against half a pound each when sent forth to take care of themselves. The proprietors of the fisheries defray the expense of this breeding establishment, being taxed only twopence in the pound of their rental. This, of course, they get back with large interest and profit from the tenant-farmers of the river. As a proof of the enhanced production of the Tay fisheries under this cultivation the fact will suffice, that they now rent for £14,000 a year against £11,000 under the old system.

Salmon-breeding is doubtless destined to rank with sheep-culture and cattle-culture in the future. The remotest colonies of Great Britain are moving in the matter with vigor and almost enthusiasm. Vessels have been constructed on purpose to convey this fair and mottled stock of British rivers to those of Australia and New Zealand. In France, fish-farming has become a large and lucrative occupation. I hope our own countrymen, who plume themselves on going ahead in utilitarian enterprises, will show the world what they can do in this. Surely our New England men, who claim to lead in American industries and ingenuities, will not suffer half a million acres of river-pasturage to run to waste for another half century, when it would fold and feed millions of salmon. Once they herded in the Connecticut in such multitudes that a special stipulation was inserted in the indentures of apprentices in the vicinity of the river, that they should not be obliged to eat salmon more than a certain number of times in a week. Now, if a salmon is caught between the mouth and source of the river, it is blazoned forth in the newspapers as a very extraordinary and unnatural event. There is no earthly reason why the Connecticut should not breed and supply as great a number of these excellent and beautiful fish as the Tay. Its waters are equally pure and quiet as those of the Scotch river. Every acre of the Connecticut, from the northernmost bridge that spans it in Vermont to its debouchment at Saybrook, might be made productive of as great a value as any onion-garden acre at Wethersfield.

The salmon-shepherd at Stormontfields, having fully explained the labors and duties of his charge, rowed me across the Tay, and I continued my walk highly gratified in having seen one of the new industries which this age is adding to the different cultures provided for the sustentation and comfort of human life. The whole way to Dunkeld was full of interest, nature and history making every mile a scene to delight the eye and exhilarate the mind. The first considerable village I passed through was Stanley, which gives the name to that old family of British peers known in history by the battle-cry of a badly-pressed sovereign, “On, Stanley, on!” Murthley Castle, the seat of Sir William Stewart, and the beautiful grounds which front and surround it, will excite the admiration of the traveller and pay him well for a moment’s pause to peruse its illuminated pages opened to his view. The baronet is regarded as an eccentric man, perhaps chiefly because he has built a splendid Roman Catholic chapel quite near to his mansion and supports a priest of that order mostly for his own spiritual good. Near Dunkeld, Birnam Hill lifts its round, dark, bushy head to the height of over 1,500 feet, grand and grim, as if it wore the bonnet of Macbeth and hid his dagger beneath its tartan cloak of firs. “Birnam Wood,” which Shakespeare’s genius has made one of the immortals among earthly localities, was the setting of that hill in his day, and perhaps centuries before it. Crossing the Tay by a magnificent bridge, you are in the famous old city and capital of ancient Caledonia, Dunkeld. Here centre some of the richest rivulets of Scotch history, ecclesiastical and military, of church and state, cowl and crown. Walled in here, on the upper waters of the Tay, by dark and heavily-wooded mountains, it was just the place for the earliest monks to select as the site of one of their cloistered communities. The two best saints ever produced by these islands, St. Columba and St. Cuthbert, are said to have been connected with the religious foundations of this little sequestered city. The old cathedral, having been knocked about like other Roman Catholic edifices in the sledge-hammer crusades of the Reformation, was ruined very picturesquely, as a tourist, with one of Murray’s red-book guides in his hand, would be likely to say. But the choir was rebuilt and fitted up for worship by the late Duke of Atholl at the expense of about £5,000.

Of this duke I must say a few words, for he has left the greenest monument to his memory that a man ever planted over his grave. He did something more and better than roofing the choir of a ruined cathedral. He roofed a hundred hills and valleys with a larch-and-fir work that will make them as glorious and beautiful as Lebanon forever. One of the most illustrious and eloquent of the Iroquois aristocracy was a chief called Corn-planter. This Duke of Atholl should be named and known for evermore as the great Tree-planter of Christendom. We have already dwelt upon the benefaction that such a man leaves to coming generations. This Scotch nobleman virtually founded a new order of knighthood far more useful and honorable than the Order of the Garter. To talk of garters!—why, he not only put the cold, ragged shivering hills of Scotland into garters, but into stockings waist high, and doublets and bonnets and shoes of beautifully green and thick fir-plaid. He planted 11,000 square acres with the larch alone; and thousands of these acres stood up edgewise against mountains and hills so steep that the planters must have spaded the holes with ropes around their waists to keep them from falling down the precipice. It is stated that he had twenty-seven millions of the larch alone planted on his mountainous estates, besides several millions of other trees. Now, it is doubtful if the whole region thus dibbled with this tree-crop yielded an average rental of one English shilling per acre as a pasturage for sheep. On passing through miles and miles of this magnificent wood-grain and taking an estimate of its value, I put it at 10s., or $2 40c. per tree. Of the twenty-seven millions of larches thus planted, ten must be worth that sum; making alone, without counting the rest, £5,000,000, or $24,000,000. It is quite probable that the larches, firs and other trees now covering the Atholl estates, would sell for £10,000,000 if brought to the hammer. But he was not only the greatest arboriculturist in the world, but the founder of tree-farming as a productive industry as well as a decorative art. Already it has transformed the Highlands of Scotland and trebled their value, as well as clothed them with a new and beautiful scenery. What we call the Scotch larch was not originally a native of that country. Close to the cathedral in Dunkeld stand the two patriarchs of the family, first introduced into Scotland from Switzerland in 1737.

Having remained the best part of two days in Dunkeld, I held on northward, through heavily-shaded and winding glen and valley to Blair Atholl. For the whole distance of twenty miles the country is quite Alpine, wild and grand, with mountains larched or firred to the utmost reach and tenure of soil for roots; deep, dark gorges pouring down into the narrowing river their foamy, dashing streams; mansions planted here and there on sloping lawns showing sunnily through groves and parks; now a hamlet of cottages set in the side of a lofty hill, now a larger village opening suddenly upon you at the turning of the turnpike road. I reached Blair Atholl at about dark, and lodged at the largest hotel I slept in between London and John O’Groat’s. It is virtually the tourist’s inn; for this is the centre of some of the most interesting and striking sceneries and localities in Scotland. Glens, waterfalls, stream, torrent, mountain and valley, with their romantic histories, make this a very attractive region to thousands of summer travellers from England and other countries. The railway from Perth to Inverness via Dunkeld and Blair Atholl, has just opened up this secluded Scotch Switzerland to multitudes who never would have seen it without the help of the Iron Horse. A month previous, this point had been the most distant in Scotland from steam-routes of transportation and travel. Now southern sportsmen were hiring up “the shooting” for many miles on both sides of the line, making the hills and glens echo with their fusillades. Blair Castle, the duke’s mansion, is a very ordinary building in appearance, looking from the public road like a large four-story factory painted white, with small, old-fashioned windows. He himself was lying in a very painful and precarious condition, with a cancer in the throat, from which it was the general impression that he never would recover. The day preceding, the Queen had visited him, while en route for Balmoral, having gone sixty miles out of her way to comfort him with such an expression of her sympathy.

The next day I reached the northern boundary of the Duke of Atholl’s estates, having walked for full forty miles continuously through it. Passed over a very bleak, treeless, barren waste of mountain and moorland, most of it too rocky or soilless for even heather. The dashing, flashing, little Garry, which I had followed for a day or two, thinned and narrowed down to a noisy brook as I ascended towards its source. For a long distance the country was exceedingly wild and desolate. Terrible must be the condition of a man benighted therein, especially in winter. There were standing beacons all along the road for miles, to indicate the track when it was buried in drifting snow. These were painted posts, about six or eight feet high, planted on the rocky, river side of the road, at a few rods interval, to guide the traveller and keep him from dashing over the concealed precipices. About the middle of the afternoon I reached the summit of the two watersheds, where a horse’s hoof might so dam a balancing stream as to send it southward into the Tay or northward into the Moray Firth. Soon a rivulet welled out in the latter direction with a decided current. It was the Spey. A few miles brought me suddenly into a little, glorious world of beauty. The change of theatrical sceneries could hardly have produced a more sudden and striking contrast than this presented to the wild, cold, dark waste through which I had been travelling for a day. It was Strathspey; and I doubt if there is another view in Scotland, of the same dimensions, to equal it. It was indescribably grand and beautiful, if you could blend the meaning of these two commonly-coupled adjectives into one qualification, as you can blend two colors on the easel. To get the full enjoyment of the scene at one draught, you should enter it first from the south, after having travelled for twenty miles without seeing a sheaf of wheat or patch of vegetation tilled by the hand of man. I know nothing in America to compare it with or to help the American reader to an approximate idea of it. Imagine a land-lake, apparently shut in completely by a circular wall of mountains of every stature, the tallest looking over the shoulders of the lower hills, like grand giants standing in steel helmets and green doublets and gilded corselets, to see the soft and quiet beauty of the valley sleeping under their watch and ward. As the sun-bursts from the strath-skies above darted out of their shifting cloud-walls and flashed a flush of light upon the solemn brows of these majestic apostles of nature one by one, they stood haloed, like the favored saints in Scripture in the overflow of the Transfiguration. It was just the kind of day to make the scene glorious indescribably. The clouds and sky were in the happiest disposition for the brilliant plays and pictures of light and shade, and dissolving views of fascinating splendor succeeded and surpassed each other at a minute’s interval. Now, the great land-lake, on whose bosom floated in the sunlight a thousand islands oat-and-barley-gilded, and rimmed with the green and purple verdure of the turnip and rutabaga, was all set a-glow by a luminous flood from the opening clouds above. The next moment they closed this disparted seam in their drapery, and opened a side one upon the still, grave faces of the surrounding mountains; and, for a few minutes, the smile went round from one to the other, and the great centurions of the hills looked happy and almost human in the gleam. Then shade’s turn came in the play, and it played its part as perfectly as light. It put in the touch of the old Italian masters, giving an everchanging background to all the sublime pictures of the panorama.

I was not alone in the enjoyment of this scenery. For the first time in this Walk I had a companion for a day. A clergyman from near Edinburgh joined me at Kingussie, with whom I shared the luxury of one of the most splendid views to be found in Scotland. Indeed, few minds are so constituted as to prefer to see such natural pictures alone. After a day’s walk among these sceneries, we came to the small village of Aviemore in the dusk of the evening. Here we found that the only inn had been closed and turned into a private residence, and that it was doubtful if a bed could be had for love or money in the place. The railway through it to Inverness had just been opened, and the navvies seemed still to constitute the largest portion of the population. Neither of us had eaten any dinner, and we were hungry as well as tired. Seeing a little, low cottage near the railroad, with the sign of something for the public good over the door, we went to it, and found that it had two rooms, one a kind of rough, stone-floored shed, the other an apartment full ten feet square, with two beds in it, which occupied half the entire space. But, small as it was, the good man and woman made the most of it in the way of entertainment, getting up a tea occasionally for persons stopping over in the village at a meal-time, also selling small articles of grocery to the laborers. Everything was brought from a distance, even their bread, bacon and butter. Their stock of these fundamentals was exhausted, so that they could not give us anything with our tea until the arrival of the train from the north, which we all watched with common interest. In the course of half an hour it came, and soon our cabin-landlord brought in a large basket full of the simplest necessaries of life, which we were quite prepared to enjoy as its best luxuries. Soon a wood fire blazed for us in the double-bedded parlor, and the unpainted deal table was spread in the fire-light with a repast we relished with a pleasant appreciation.

My companion was bound northward by the next train in that direction, and was sure to find good quarters for the night; but as there was not an inn for ten miles on the route I was to travel, and as it was now quite night and the road mostly houseless and lonely, I felt some anxiety about my own lodging. But on inquiry I was very glad to find that one of the two beds in the room was unoccupied and at my disposal. So, having accompanied my fellow-traveller to the station and seen him off with mutual good wishes, I returned to the cottage, and the mistress replenished the fire with a new supply of chips and faggots, and I had two or three hours of rare enjoyment, enhanced by some interesting books I found on a shelf by the window. And this is a fact worthy of note and full of good meaning. You will seldom find a cottage in Scotland, however poor and small, without a shelf of books in it. I retired rather earlier than usual; but before I fell asleep, the two regular lodgers, who occupied the other bed, came in softly, and spoke in a suppressed tone, as if reluctant to awaken me. And here I was much impressed with another fact affiliated with the one I have mentioned—that of praying as well as reading in the Scotch cottage. After a little conversation just above a whisper, the elder of the two—and he not twenty, while the other was apparently only sixteen—first read, with full Scotch accent, one of the hard-rhymed psalms used in the Scotch service. Then, after a short pause, he read with a low, solemn voice a chapter in the Bible. A few minutes of silence succeeded, as if a wordless prayer was going upward upon the still wings of thought, which made no audible beating in their flight. It was very impressive; an incident that I shall ever hold among the most interesting of all I met with on my walk. They were not brothers evidently, but most likely strangers thrown together on the railroad. They doubtless came from different directions, but, from Highlands or Lowlands, they came from Bible-lighted homes, whose “voices of the night” were blended with the breathings of religious life and instruction. Separated from such homes, they had agreed to make this one after the same spiritual pattern, barring the parental presence and teaching.

The next day after breakfast, took leave of my kind cottage hosts, exchanging good wishes for mutual happiness. Went out of the amphitheatre of Strathspey by a gateway into another, surrounded by mountains less lofty and entirely covered with heather. For several miles beyond Carr Bridge I passed over the wildest moorland. The road was marked by posts about ten feet high, painted white within two feet of the top and black above. These are planted about fifteen rods apart, to guide the traveller in the drifting and blinding snows of winter. The road over this cold, desolate waste exceeded anything I ever saw in America, even in the most fashionable suburbs of New York and Boston. It was as smooth and hard as a cement floor. Here on this treeless wild, I met several men at work trimming the edges of the road by a line, with as much precision and care as if they were laying out an aisle in a flower garden. After a walk of about seventeen miles, I reached Freeburn Inn about the middle of the afternoon, and as it began to rain and to threaten bad weather for walking, I concluded to stop there for the night, and found good quarters.

The rain continued in showers, and I feared I should be unable to reach Inverness to spend the Sabbath. There was a cattle fair at the inn, and a considerable number of farmers and dealers came together notwithstanding the weather. Indeed, there were nearly as many men and boys as animals on the ground. A score or more had come in, each leading or driving a single cow or calf. The cattle generally were evidently of the Gaelic origin and antecedents—little, chubby, scraggy creatures, of all colors, but mostly black, with wide-branching horns longer than their fore-legs. Their hair is long and as coarse as a polar seal’s, and they look as if they knew no more of housing against snow, rain and wintry winds, or of a littered bed, than the buffaloes beyond the upper waters of the Missouri. One would be inclined to think they had lived from calf-hood on nothing but heather or gorse, and that the prickly fodder had penetrated through their hides and covered them with a growth midway between hair and bristles. They will not average over 350 lbs. when dressed; still they seem to hold their own among other breeds which have attracted so much attention. This is probably because they can browse out a living where the Durham and Devon would starve.