The sheep in this region are chiefly the old Scotch breed, with curling horns and crocked faces and legs, such as are represented in old pictures. The black seems to be spattered upon them, and looks as if the heather would rub it off. The wool is long and coarse, giving them a goat-like appearance. They seem to predominate over any other breed in this part of Scotland, yet not necessarily nor advantageously. A large sheep farmer from England was staying at the inn, with whom I had much conversation on the subject. He said the Cheviots were equally adapted to the Highlands, and thought they would ultimately supplant the black faces. Although he lived in Northumberland, full two hundred miles to the south, he had rented a large sheep-walk, or mountain farm, in the Western Highlands, and had come to this section to buy or hire another tract. He kept about 4,000 sheep, and intended to introduce the Cheviots upon these Scotch holdings, as their bodies were much heavier and their wool worth nearly double that of the old black-faced breed. Sheep are the principal source of wealth in the whole of the North and West of Scotland. I was told that sometimes a flock of 20,000 is owned by one man. The lands on which they are pastured will not rent above one or two English shillings per acre; and a flock even of 1,000 requires a vast range, as may be indicated by the reply of a Scotch farmer to an English one, on being asked by the latter, “How many sheep do you allow to the acre?” “Ah, mon,” was the answer, “that’s nae the way we count in the Highlands; it’s how monie acres to the sheep.”
At about two p.m., the showers becoming less frequent, I set out with the hope of reaching Inverness before night. The wind was high, the road muddy, or dirty, as the English call that condition; and the rain frequently compelled me to seek shelter in some wayside cottage, or under the fir-trees that were planted in groves at narrow intervals. The walking was heavy and slow in face of the frequent showers, and a strong gale from the north-east; so that I was exceedingly glad to reach an inn within four miles of Inverness, where I promised myself comfortable lodgings for the night. It was a rather large, but comfortless-looking house, evidently concentrating all its entertainment for travellers in the tap-room. After considerable hesitation, the landlady consented to give me bed and board; and directed “the lassie” to make a fire for me in a large and very respectable room on the second floor. I soon began to feel quite at home by its side. My boots had leaked on the way and my feet were very wet and cold; and it was with a pleasant sense of comfort that I changed stockings, and warmed myself at the ruddy grate, while the storm seemed to increase without. After waiting about an hour for tea, I heard the lassie’s heavy footstep on the stairs; a knock—the door opens—now for the tray and the steaming tea-pot, and happy vision of bread, oatcake and Scotch scones! Alas! what a falling-off was there from this delicious expectation! The lassie had brought a severe and peremptory message from the master, who had just returned home. And she delivered it commiseratingly but decidedly. She was to tell me from him that there was nothing in the house to set before me; that the fair the day before had eaten out the whole stock of his provisions; in short, that I was to take my staff and walk on to Inverness. It was in vain that I remonstrated, pleaded and urged wet feet, the darkness, the wind and rain. “It is so,” said the lassie, “and can’t be otherwise.” She tried to encourage me to the journey by shortening the distance by half its actual miles, saying it was only two, when it was full four, and they of the longest kind. So I went out into the night in my wet clothes, and put the best face and foot to the head-wind and rain that I could bring to bear against them. Both were strong, beating and drenching; and it was so dark that I could hardly see the road. In the course of half an hour, I made the lassie’s two miles, and in another, the whole of the actual distance, and found comfortable quarters in one of the temperance inns of Inverness, reaching it between nine and ten at night. Here I spent a quiet Sabbath, which I greatly enjoyed.
CHAPTER XVIII.
INVERNESS—ROSS-SHIRE—TAIN—DORNOCH—GOLSPIE—PROGRESS OF RAILROADS—THE SUTHERLAND EVICTION—SEA-COAST SCENERY—CAITHNESS—WICK: HERRING FISHERIES—JOHN O’GROAT’S: WALK’S END.
Inverness is an interesting, good-sized town, with an intellectual and pleasing countenance, of somewhat aristocratic and self-complacent expression. It is considered the capital of the Highlands, and wears a decidedly metropolitan air. It is well situated on the Ness, just at its debouchement into the Moray Firth,—a river that runs with a Rhine-like current through the town and is spanned with a suspension bridge. It has streets of city-built and city-bred buildings, showing wealth and elegance. Several edifices are in process of erection that will rank with some of the best in Edinburgh and Glasgow. It has a long and pretentious history, reaching back to the Romans, and dashed with the romance of the wild ages of the country. Oliver Cromwell, or Sledgehammer II., Macbeth, Thane of Cawdor, Queen Mary, Prince Charlie, and other historical celebrities, entered their names and doings on the records of this goodly town.
On Monday, Sept. 21st, I set out with a good deal of animation on the last week-stage of my journey, which I was anxious to accomplish as soon as possible, as the weather was becoming unsettled with frequent rain. Reached Invergordon, passing through a most interesting section of country, full of very fertile straths. It was the part of Ross-shire lying on the Moray and Beauly Firths and divided by rivers dashing down through the wooded gorges of the mountains. I saw here some of the most productive land in Scotland. Hundreds of acres were studded with wheat and barley stooks, and about an equal space was covered with standing grain, though so near the month of October. Plantations, parks, gentlemens’ seats, glens deep and grand, fir-clad mountains, villages, hamlets and scattered cottages made up the features of every changing view. Indeed, one travelling for a week between Perth and Inverness comes upon such a region as this with pleasant surprise, as upon an exotic section, imported from another latitude.
The next day I held on northward, though the weather was very unfavorable and the walking heavy and fatiguing. Passed what seemed the bold and ridgy island of Cromarty, so associated with the venerated memory of Hugh Miller. The beating rain drove me frequently to the wayside cottages for shelter; and in every one of them I was received with kind words and pleasant looks. One of these was occupied by an old woman in the regular Scotch cap—a venerable old saint, with her Bible and psalm-book library on her window-sill, and her peat fire burning cheerily. When on leaving I intimated that I was from America, she followed me out into the road, asking me a hundred questions about the country and its condition. She had three sons in Montreal, and felt a mother’s interest in the very name America. The cottage was one of a long street of them by the sea-side, and I supposed it was a fishing village; but I learned from her that the people were mostly the evicted tenants of the Duke of Sutherland, who were turned out of his county some thirty years ago to make room for sheep. I made only eleven miles this day on account of the rain, and was glad to find cheery and comfortable quarters in an excellent inn kept by a widow and her three daughters in Tain. Nothing could exceed their kindness and attention, which evidently flowed more from a disposition than from a professional habit of making their guests at home for a pecuniary or business consideration. I reached their house about the middle of the afternoon, cold and wet, after several hours’ walk in the rain, and was received as one of the family; the eldest daughter, who had all the grace and intelligence of a cultivated lady, helping me off with my wet overcoat, and even offering to pull off my water-soaked boots—an office no American could accept, and which I gently declined, taking the will for the deed. A large number of Scotch navvies were at the inns of the town, making an obstreperous auroval in celebration of the monthly pay-day. They had received the day preceding a month’s wages, and they were now drinking up their money with the most reckless hilarity; swallowing the pay of five long hours at the pick in a couple of gills of whiskey. How strange that men can work in rain, cold and heat at the shovel for a whole day, then drink up the whole in two hours at the gin-shop! These pickmen pioneers of the Iron Horse, with their worst habits, are yet a kind of John-the-Baptists to the march and mission of civilization, preparing its way in the wilderness, and bringing secluded and isolated populations to its light and intercourse. It is wonderful how they are working their way northward among these bald and thick-set mountains. When I first visited Scotland, in 1846, the only piece of railroad north of the Forth was that between Dundee and Arbroath, hardly an hour long. Now the iron pathways are running in every direction, making grand junctions at points which had never felt the navvy’s pick a dozen years ago. Here is one heading towards John O’Groat’s, grubbing its way like a mole around the firths, cutting spiral gains into the rock-ribbed hills, bridging the deep and dark gorges, and holding on steadily north-poleward with a brave faith and faculty of patience that moves mountains, or as much of them as blocks its course. The progress is slow, silent, but sure. The world, busy in other doings, does not hear the pick, nor the speech of the powder when it speaks to a huge rock a-straddle the path. The world, even including the shareholders, hears but little, if anything, of the progress of the work for months, perhaps for a year. Then the consummation is announced in the form of an invitation to the public to “assist” at the opening of a railroad through towns and villages that never saw the daylight the locomotive brings in its wake. So it will be here. Some day, in the present decade, there will be an excursion train advertised to run from London to John O’Groat’s; and perhaps the lineal descendant of Sigurd, or some other old Norse jarl, will wear the conductor’s belt and cap or drive the engine.
The weather was still unsettled, with much wind and rain. Resumed my walk, and at about four miles from Tain, crossed the Dornoch Firth in a sail ferry boat, and at noon reached Dornoch, the capital of Sutherlandshire. This was one of the fourteen cities of Scotland; and its little, chubby cathedral, and the tower of the old bishop’s palace still give it a kind of Canterbury air. The Earls of Sutherland for many generations lie interred within the walls of this ancient church. After stopping here for an hour or two for dinner, I continued on to Golspie, the residence of the mighty lord of the manor, or the owner, master and human disposer of this great mountain county of Scotland. It is stated that full four-fifths of it belong to him who now holds the title, and that his other great estates, added to this territory, make him the largest landowner in Great Britain and probably in Europe. Just before reaching Golspie, a lofty, sombre mountain, with its bald head enveloped in the mist, and which I had been two hours apparently in passing, cleared away and revealed its full stature—and more. Towering up from its topmost summit, a tall column lifted a human figure in bronze skyward cloud-high and frequently higher still. I believe the brazen face that thus looks into the pure and holy skies without blushing, is a duplicate of the one worn in human flesh by His Grace, Evictor I., who unpeopled his great county of many thousands of human inhabitants, and made nearly its whole area of 18,000 square miles a sheep-walk. But I will not break the seal of that history. It was full of bitter experience to multitudes. Not for the time being was it joyous, but grievous exceedingly—surpassing endurance to many. But it is all over now. The ship-loads of evicted men and women who looked their last upon Scotland while its mountains and glens were reddened with the flames of their burning cottages, carried away with them a bitter feeling in their hearts which years of better experience did not soften. Not for their good did it seem in the motive of the transaction; but for their good it worked most blessedly. It was a rough transplanting, and the tenderest fibres of human affection broke and bled under the uptearing; but they took root in the Western World, and grew luxuriantly under the light and dew of a happier destiny. It was hard for fathers and mothers who were taking on the frostwork of age upon their brows; but for their children it was the birth of a new life; for them it was the introduction to a future which had a sun in it, rayful and radiant with the beams of hope and promise. Let those who denounce and deplore this harsh unpeopling come and stand upon the cold, bleak summit of one of these Sutherland mountains. Let them bring their compasses, or some other instrument for measuring the angles, sines and cosines of human conditions. Plant your theodolite here; wipe the telescope’s eye with your handkerchief; look your keenest in the line of the lineage of these evicted thousands. Steady, now! while the most tranquil light of the future is on the pathway of your eye. This first reach of your vision is the life-track of the fathers and mothers unhoused among these mountains. Look on beyond, over the longer life-line of their children; then farther still under the horizon of the remotest future to the track of their childrens’ children. Can you make an angle of a single degree’s subtension in the hereditary conditions of these generations, or a dozen beyond? Can you detect a point of departure by which the second generation would have diverged from the first, or the third from the second, and have attained to a higher life of comfort, intelligence, social and political position had they remained in these mountain cottages, grubbed on their cottage farms, and lived from hand to mouth on stinted rations of oatmeal and potatoes, as their ancestors had done from time immemorial? Can you see among all the hopeful possibilities of Time’s tomorrows, any such change for the better? You can sight no such prospect with your telescope in that direction. Turn it around and sweep the horizon of that other condition into which they were thrust, weeping and wrathful against their will. Follow them across the Atlantic to North America, to their homes in the States and in the Canadas. Measure the angle they made in this transposition, and the latitude and longitude of social and moral life they have reached from this Sutherland point of departure. The sons of the fathers and mothers who had their family nests stirred up so cruelly, and scattered, like those of rooks, from their holdings in the cliffs, gorges and glens of these cold mountains, are now among the most substantial and respected men of the Western World. Some of them to-day are mayors of towns of larger population than the whole county of Sutherland. Some, doubtless, are Members of Congress, representing each a constituency of one hundred thousand persons, and a vast amount of intelligence, wealth and industry. They are merchants, manufacturers, farmers, teachers and preachers, filling all the professions and occupations of the continent. Is not that an angle of promise to your telescope? Is not that a line of divergence which has conducted these evicted populations, at a small distance from this point of departure, into the better latitudes of human experience? The selling of this Scotch Joseph to America was more purely and simply a pecuniary transaction than that recorded in Scripture; for in that the unkind and jealous brothers sold the innocent boy for envy, not for the love of pelf, though the Ishmaelites bought him on speculation. But not for envy was the Sutherland lad sold and shipped to a foreign land, but rather for a contemptuous estimate of his money value. The proprietor-patriarch of the county took to a more quiet and profitable favorite—the sheep, and sent it to feed on a pasture enriched with the ashes of Joseph’s cottage. It is to be feared he meant only money; but Providence meant a blessing beyond the measurement of money to the evicted; and what Providence meant it made for him and his posterity, and they are now enjoying it.
Dunrobin Castle, the grand residence of the Duke of Sutherland, looks off upon the sea at Golspie. It is truly a magnificent edifice, ranking with the first palaces in Christendom. Nearly eight hundred years has it been in building, though, I believe, all that commands admiration for stature and style is the work of the present century. Whatever the Sutherland family may have been in local position and history in past centuries, one of the noblest women that ever ennobled the nobility of Great Britain, has given the name a celebrity and an estimation in America which all who ever wore it before never won for it. The Duchess of Sutherland, the noble and large-hearted sister of Lord Morpeth-Carlisle, has given to the coronet she wore a lustre brighter to the American eye than the light of diadems which have dazzled millions in Europe. When the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Men shall come to its high place in the hearts of nations as the crown-faith of all their creeds, what this noble woman felt, said and did for the Slave in his bonds shall be mentioned of her by the preachers of that great doctrine in years to come. When the jewels of Humanity’s memories shall be made up, she who, as it were, bent down to him in his prison-house and put her jewelled hands to the breaking of his fetters, shall stand, with women of the same sympathy, only next to her who broke her box of ointment on the Saviour’s feet.
The next day made a walk to Helmsdale, a distance of about eighteen miles. The weather was favorable, the scenery grand and varied with almost every feature that could give it interest. The finest of roads wound in and out around the mountain headlands, so that alternately I was walking upon a lofty esplanade overlooking the still expanse of the steel-blue sea, then facing inward to the gorges of the grand and solemn hills. Found comfortable quarters in one of the inns of Helmsdale, a vigorous, busy, fishing village nestling under the shadow of the mountains at the mouth of a little river of the same name. After tea, went down to the wharf or quay and had some conversation with one of the masters of the business. He cured and put up about 30,000 barrels of herrings himself in a season, employing, while it lasted, 500 persons. Their chief market is the North of Europe, especially Poland, and the business was consequently much depressed on account of the troubles in that country. The occupation of this little sea-side village illustrated the ramifications of commerce. They imported their salt from Liverpool, their staves from Norway and their hoops from London.