DUNGARDIE, A VITRIFIED FORT NEAR FOYERS.

[Inverness to Anoch (August 30-31).]

WANT OF ROADS.

At Inverness Johnson bade farewell to post-chaises, which had brought him in comfort all the way from London. “This day,” writes Boswell, “we were to begin our equitation, as I said; for I would needs make a word too. We might have taken a chaise to Fort Augustus, but had we not hired horses at Inverness we should not have found them afterwards. We had three horses for Dr. Johnson, myself, and Joseph, and one which carried our portmanteaus, and two Highlanders who walked along with us.” They took but little baggage, and soon found the advantage of their moderation “in climbing crags and treading bogs. How often,” continues Johnson, “a man that has pleased himself at home with his own resolution, will in the hour of darkness and fatigue be content to leave behind him everything but himself.” After leaving the Fort they were “to enter upon a country upon which perhaps no wheel had ever rolled.” In the Commercial Map of Scotland, published by J. Knox in 1784, there is not a single road marked in any one of the Hebrides. After long wanderings, and the lapse of almost seven weeks, “Johnson’s heart was cheered by the sight of a road marked with cart-wheels as on the mainland, a thing which we had not seen for a long time. It gave us a pleasure similar to that which a traveller feels when, whilst wandering on what he fears is a desert island, he perceives the print of human feet.” It was in pleasant weather that they began their ride. THE SHORES OF LOCH NESS. “The day though bright was not hot. On the left were high and steep rocks shaded with birch and covered with fern or heath. On the right the limpid waters of Loch Ness were beating their bank and waving their surface by a gentle agitation.” In one part of the way, adds Johnson, “we had trees on both sides for perhaps half a mile. Such a length of shade, perhaps, Scotland cannot show in any other place.” Boswell, though he thought Fleet Street more delightful than Tempe, nevertheless felt the cheering powers of this delightful day. “The scene” he found “as sequestered and agreeably wild as could be desired.” Pennant, who had been there four years earlier, describes the scenery as “most romantic and beautiful.”[588] Wesley thought the neighbourhood of Inverness one of the pleasantest countries he had ever seen.[589] In striking contrast with the enjoyment of these four travellers are the feelings of those who a few years before had seen the spot when the alarms of war were still fresh. “On each side of Loch Ness,” writes Ray, “is a ridge of most terrible barren woody mountains. You travel along the banks through a road made by blowing up monstrous rocks, which in many places hang declining over passengers and higher than houses, so that ’tis frightful to pass by them.”[590] A Volunteer describes the mountains “as high and frightful as the Alps in Spain; so we had nothing pleasant to behold but the sky.”[591]

LOCH NESS.

[Click here to seee larger version of map.]

MAP OF FOYERS.

THE GENERAL’S HUT.