In her there was already that new appreciation of the natural beauty which her brother was to do so much to encourage in all. Her description of the Trossachs, after they had landed, clearly shows this: “Above and below us, to the right and to the left, were rocks, knolls, and hills, which, whenever anything could grow—and that was everywhere between the rocks—were covered with trees and heather. The trees did not in any place grow so thick as an ordinary wood, yet I think there was never a bare space of twenty yards; it was more like a natural forest, where the trees grow in groups or singly, not hiding the surface of the ground, which, instead of being green and mossy, was of the richest purple. The heather was indeed the most luxuriant I ever saw; it was so tall that a child of ten years old struggling through it would often have been buried head and shoulders, and the exquisite beauty of the colour, near or at a distance, seen under the trees is not to be conceived.”
And as it was then so it is now: a better description of the peculiar scenery of the Trossachs could hardly be given, especially if we add the detail that bog-myrtle and birches grow abundantly, adding to the fragrance and poetry of the place. Winding round to the right runs the road to the Silver Strand, now much covered by the rising of the water owing to the precautions taken by the Glasgow Waterworks, which gets its supply from Loch Katrine. Here Fitz-James is supposed to have stood. Right in front is Ellen’s Isle, thickly wooded; behind it rises the vast shoulder of Ben Venue, and away to the right stretches westward the full length of the lake, broken by promontories,
Where, gleaming with the setting sun,
One burnish’d sheet of living gold,
Loch Katrine lay beneath him roll’d;
In all her length far winding lay,
With promontory, creek and bay,
And islands that, empurpled bright,
Floated amid the livelier light;