[CHAPTER VI]
LOMOND AND THE MACGREGORS
Ben Lomond
Lomond is one of the two most magnificent lochs in Scotland. It is twenty-one miles long, its only rival being Loch Awe, which is three miles longer. It is of a curious wedge shape, being about five miles broad at the low end and narrowing to a point in the north. In the widest part it bears a perfect archipelago of islands, once thickly populated, but now left mostly to deer and other wild creatures. There is a tradition of a floating island, repeated by many an ancient traveller; but all trace of this phenomenon has vanished—if, indeed, it ever existed. The fishing in the loch is free, and salmon, sea-trout, lake-trout, pike, and perch are to be caught. The nearness of the great lake to Glasgow is at once an advantage and a drawback. It is an advantage for the thousands that pour out of the grimy city on every holiday, and, at half an hour from their own doors, for a trifling sum, can spend joyous days in scenery which can be classed with the most beautiful in the world. But it is certainly not an unmixed joy to the real lover of Nature, who approaches the lake in a spirit of worship, to find the shores black with people and the steamers thronged with tourists. The attractions pointed out to those who pass up or down the great sheet of water are various. Not the least is the giant Ben, who raises his proud head on the eastern side, “a sort of Scottish Vesuvius, never wholly without a cloud-cap. You cannot move a step that it does not tower over you. In winter a vast white sugar-loaf; in summer a prismatic cone of yellow and amethyst and opaline lights; in spring a grey, gloomy, stony pile of rocks; in autumn a weather indicator, for when the mist curls down its sides and hangs in heavy wreaths from its double summit, ‘it has to rain,’ as the Spaniards say.”
The mountain is 3,192 feet high, and the ascent is not difficult; by the gradually sloping way from the hotel at Rowardennan it is about five or six miles, without any very stiff climbing, and there is a choice of other routes. On a clear day, which is a rare boon, the view from the summit is superb. Sitting on its topmost pinnacle, one looks down the almost perpendicular north-eastern slope into the little valley where the River Forth may be said to take its rise. On the western side Loch Lomond stretches out in full length, and across the narrow isthmus of Tarbet is the sea-loch, Loch Long. Far away to the east and south the eye may range over the Lothians, Edinburgh, and Arthur’s Seat, and even to the distant hills of Cumberland and the Isle of Man; while farther west, backed by the Irish coast, is the whole scenery of the beautiful Clyde estuary and the nearer Hebrides. Northward, peak after peak, rise the stately masses of the Grampians.
Leaving Inversnaid, the first point to which attention is usually drawn is the cave in the corries on the east side, called Rob Roy’s Cave; much farther down the loch, amid the screes of Ben Lomond, is another hole, called Rob Roy’s Prison. The Island Vow, midway across the loch opposite Inversnaid, owes its name to a corruption of Eilean Vhow, meaning the Brownies’ Isle, a fascinating enough name to a child. On the island are some remains of the Macfarlanes’ stronghold. Wordsworth’s poem The Brownie originated with this island. On the farther shore, a little more northward, there is what is called the Pulpit Rock, a cell cut out on the face of the cliff so that it could be used for open-air preaching.
The Macfarlanes
Right opposite is Ben Voirlich, and, in its fastnesses, wild Loch Sloy, whose name formed the war-cry of the Macfarlanes.
The reputation of this clan was not far behind the Macgregors as far as desperate courage and mad savagery count. Their headquarters were at first on the Isle of Inveruglas, just near the outflow of that stream into the loch; then they moved to the Brownies’ Island, doubtless finding the near neighbourhood of their hereditary enemies, the men of Lorn, too dangerous; but subsequently, becoming bolder, they went to Tarbet, and there settled.
The name Tarbet means draw-boat, and the story goes that Haco, King of Norway, in 1263 entered Loch Long, and, sailing up it, made his men drag the long flat-bottomed boats across the isthmus, and launch them on Loch Lomond, in order that he might the more easily attack the people on its shores for plunder.