Set out again immediately after breakfast, feeling that I was drawing near to the end of my journey. I was soon in the treeless county of Caithness, so fraught with the wild romance of the Norsemen. Passed over the bleakest district I had yet seen, called Old Ord, a cold, rough, cloud-breeding region that the very heavens above seem to frown upon with a scowl of dissatisfaction. Still, the road over this dark, mountain desert, though staked on each side to keep the traveller from wandering in the blinding snows of winter, was as beautifully kept as the carriage-way in the park of Dunrobin Castle. The sending of an English queen to conciliate the Welsh, by giving birth to a son in one of their castles, was not a much better stroke of policy than that of England in perforating Scotland to the Northern Sea with this unparalleled and splendid road, constructed at first for a military purpose. I heard a man repeat a couplet, probably of unwritten poetry, in popular vogue among the Highlands, and which has quite an Irish collocation of ideas. It is spoken thus, as far as I can recollect—
Who knew these roads ere they were made
Should bless the Lord for General Wade.
I doubt if there are ten consecutive miles of carriage-road in America that could compare for excellence with that over the desert of Old Ord. I was overtaken by a heavy shower before I had made the trajet, and was glad to reach one of the most comfortable inns of the Highlands, in the beautiful, romantic and picturesque glen of Berriedale. Here, nestling between lofty mountain ridges, which warded off the blasting sea-winds sweeping across from Norway, were plantations and groves of trees, almost the only ones I saw in the county. Nothing could exceed the hospitality of the family that kept the large, white-faced hotel at the bottom of this pleasant valley; especially after I incidentally said that I had walked all the way from London to see the country and people. They admitted me into the kitchen and gave me a seat by the great peat fire, where I had a long talk with them, beginning with the mother. Having intimated that I was an American, the whole family, old and young, including the landlord, gathered around me and had a hundred questions to ask. They related many incidents about the great eviction in Sutherland, which was an event that seems to make a large stock of legendary and unwritten stories, like the old Sagas of the Northmen. When I had dried my clothes and eaten a comfortable dinner before their kitchen fire and resumed my staff, they all followed me out to the road, and then with their wishes for a good journey as long as I was in hearing distance. Continued my walk around headlands, now looking seaward, now mountainward, now ascending on heather-bound esplanades, now descending in zig-zag directions into deep glens, over massive and elegant bridges that spanned the mountain streams and their steep and jagged banks. After a walk of eighteen miles, put up at an inn a little north of the village of Dunbeath, kept by an intelligent and industrious farmer. The rain had continued most of the day, and I was obliged to seek shelter sometimes under a stunted tree which helped out the protecting power of a weather-beaten umbrella; now in the doorway of an open stable or cow-shed, and once with my back against the door of a wayside church, which kept off the rain in one direction. This being a kind of border-season between summer and autumn, there were no fires in the inns generally except in the kitchen, and I soon learned to make for that, and always found a kindly welcome to its comforts; though sometimes the good woman and her lassie would look a little flushed at having their busiest culinary operations revealed so suddenly to a stranger. Some of these kitchens are fitted for sleeping apartments; occasionally having two tiers of berths like a ship’s cabin, slightly and rudely curtained.
The family of this wayside inn, seemingly like every other family in the country, had connections in America, embracing brothers, uncles and cousins. I was shown a little paper casket of hair flower-work, sent by post! It was wrought of locks of every shade and tint, from the snow of a grandmother over one hundred years of age to the little, sunny curls of the youngest child in the circle of kindred families. The Scotch branch had collected specimens from relatives in Great Britain and forwarded them to the family in America, one of whose daughters had worked them into two bouquets of flowers, sending one of them by post to this little, white cottage on the Northern Sea, as a memento of affection. What enhanced the beauty of this interchange was the fact, that forty-eight years had elapsed since the landlord’s brother left his native land for New England, and had never seen it since. Still, the cousins, who had never seen each other’s faces, had kept up an affectionate correspondence. A son and son-in-law of the brother in America were in the Federal army, and here was a sea-divided family filled with all the sad, silent solicitude of affection for beloved ones exposed to the fearful hazards of a war sundering more ties of blood-relationship than any other ever waged on earth.
Saturday, September 27th. Resumed my walk with increased animation, feeling myself within two days’ distance of its end. The scenery softens down to an agricultural aspect, the country declining northerly toward the sea. Passed through a well-cultivated district, never unpeopled or wasted by eviction, but held by a kind of even yeomanry of proprietors. The cottages are comfortable, resembling the white houses of New England considerably. They are nearly all of one story, with a chimney at each end, broadside to the road, and a door in the middle, dividing the house into two apartments. They are built of stone, the newest ones having a slate roof. Some of them are whitewashed, others so liberally jointed with mortar as to give them a bright and cheery appearance. These, of course, are the last edition of cottages, enlarged and amended in every way. The old issues are ragged volumes, mostly bound in turf or bog grass, well corded down with ropes of heather, giving the roof a singular ribby look, rounded on the ridge. In many cases a stone is attached to each end of the rope, so as to make it hug the thatch closely. I noticed that in a considerable number of the old cottages, the stone wall only reached up a foot or two from the ground, the rest being made up of blocks of peat. Some of the oldest had no premonitory symptoms of a chimney, except a hole in the roof for the smoke. These in no way differed from the stone-and-turf cottages in Ireland.
Again occasional showers brought me into acquaintance with the people living near the road. In every case I found them kind and hospitable, giving me a pleasant welcome and the best seat by their peat-fire. I sat by one an hour while the rain fell cold and fast outside. The good woman and her daughter were busy baking barley-cakes. They were the first I had seen, and I ate them with a peculiar zest of appetite. Told them many stories about America in return for a great deal of information about the customs and condition of the working-people. They generally built their own cottages, costing from £40 to £50, not counting their own labor. I met on the road scores of fishermen returning to their homes at the conclusion of the herring season; and was struck with their appearance in every way. They are truly a stalwart race of men, broad-chested, of intelligent physiognomy, with Scandinavian features fully developed. A half dozen of them followed a horse-cart containing their nets, all done up in a round ball, like a bladder of snuff, with the number of their boat marked upon it.
At about four p.m., I came in sight of the steeples of Wick, a brave little city by the Norse Sea, which may not only be called the Wick but the Candle of Northern Scotland; lighting, like a polar star, this hyperborean shoreland of the British isle. I never entered a town with livelier pleasure. It is virtually the last and farthest on the mainland in this direction. Its history is full of interest. Its great business is full of vigor, daring and danger. Here is the great land-home of the Vikings of the nineteenth century; the indomitable men who walk the roaring and crested billows of this Northern Ocean in their black, tough sea-boats and bring ashore the hard-earned spoils of the deep. This is the great metropolis of Fishdom. Eric the Red, nor any other pre-Columbus navigator of the North American Seas, ever mustered braver crews than these sea-boats carry to their morning beats. Ten thousand of as hardy men as ever wrestled with the waves, and threw them too, are out upon that wide water-wold before the sun looks on it—half of them wearing the features of their Norse lineage, as light-haired and crisp-whiskered as the sailors of Harold the Fair-haired a thousand years ago. They come from all the coasts of Scotland, from Orkney, Shetland, the Hebrides and Lewis islands, and down out of the heart of the Highlands. It is a hard and daring industry they follow, and hundreds of graves on the shore and thousands at the bottom of the sea have been made with no names on them, as the long record of the hazards they run in the perilous occupation. But they keep their ranks full from year to year, pushing out new boats marked with higher numbers.
The harbor has been dangerous and difficult of access, but of late a great effort has been made to render it more safe and commodious. The Scotch fisheries now yield from 600,000 to 700,000 barrels of herrings annually, employing about 17,000 fishermen; Wick stands first among all the fishing ports of the kingdom. It is a thriving town, well supplied with churches, schools, hotels, banks and printing-offices. Several new buildings are now being erected which will rank high in architecture and add new features of elegance to the place. The population is a vigorous, intelligent, highly moral and well-read community, as I could not fail to notice on attending service on the Sabbath at different places of worship. Wick is honored with this distinction—it assembles a larger congregation of men to listen to the glad Evangel on Sunday than any city of the world ever musters under one roof for the same purpose. It is the out-door church of the fishermen. They sometimes number 5,000 adult men, sea-beaten and sun-burnt, gathered in from mountainous island and mainland all around the northern coasts of Scotland.
Monday, Sept. 28th. The weather was favorable, and I set out on my last day’s walk northward with a sense of satisfaction I could hardly describe. The scenery was beautiful in every direction. The road was perfect up to the last rod; as well kept as if it ran through a nobleman’s park. The country most of the way was well cultivated—oats being the principal crop. Here, almost within sight of the Orkneys, I heard the clatter of the reaping machine, which, doubtless, puts out the same utterance over and upon the sea at Land’s End. It has travelled fast and far since 1851, when it first made its appearance in Europe in the Crystal Palace, as one of the wild, impracticable “notions” of American genius. In Wick I visited a newspaper establishment, and saw in operation one of the old “Columbians,” or the American printing-press, surmounted by the eagle of the Republic. The sewing-machine is in all the towns and villages on the island. If there is not an American clock at John O’Groat’s, I hope some of my fellow townsmen will send one there, Bristol-built. They are pleasant tokens of free-labor genius. No land tilled by slaves could produce them. I saw many large and highly-cultivated farms on these last miles of my walk. The country was proportionately divided between food and fuel. Oats and barley constitute the grain-crops. The uncultivated land interspersed with the yellow fields of harvest, is reserved for peat—the poor man’s fuel and his wealth. For, were it not for the inexhaustible abundance of this cheap and accessible firing, he could hardly inhabit this region. It would seem strange to an American, who had not realised the difference of the two climates, to see fields full of reapers on the very threshold of October, as I saw them on this last day’s walk. I counted twelve women and two men in one field plying the sickle, all strongly-built and good-looking and well-dressed withal.
The sea was still and blue as a lake. A lark was soaring and warbling over it with as happy and hopeful a voice as if it were singing over the greenest acres of an English meadow. When I had made half of the seventeen miles between Wick and John O’Groat’s, I began to look with the liveliest interest for the first glimpse of the Orkneys; but projecting and ragged headlands intercepted the prospect. About three p.m., as the road emerged from behind one of them, those famous islands burst suddenly into view! There they were!—in full sight, so near that their grain-fields and white cottages and all their distinguishing features seemed within half a mile’s distance. This was the most interesting coup d’œil that I ever caught in any country. Here, then, after weeks and months of travel on foot, I was at the end of my journey. Through all the days of this period I had faced northward, and here was the Ultima Thule, the goal and termination of my tour. The road to the sea diverged from the main turnpike, which continued around the coast to Thurso. Followed this branch a couple of miles, when it ended at the door of a little, quiet, one-story inn on the very shore of the Pentland Firth. It was a moment of the liveliest enjoyment to me. When I left London, about the middle of July, I was slowly recovering from a severe indisposition, and hardly expected to be able to make more than a few miles of my projected walk. But I had gathered strength daily, and when I brought up at this little inn at the very jumping-off end of Scotland, I was fresher and more vigorous on foot than at any previous stage of the journey.