THE RUINS OF THE HOUSE AT ANOCH.
THATCHED HOUSE.
[Anoch to Glenelg (September 1).]
It was a long and heavy journey that this day lay before our travellers, so that they rose in good time and started about eight o’clock. Boswell, who had awakened very early, had been a little scared by the thought that “their landlord, being about to emigrate, might murder them to get their money, and lay it upon the soldiers in the barn.” “When I got up,” he adds, “I found Dr. Johnson asleep in his miserable stye, as I may call it, with a coloured handkerchief round his head. With difficulty could I awaken him.” So miserable had their beds looked that “we had some difficulty,” writes Johnson, “in persuading ourselves to lie down in them. At last we ventured, and I slept very soundly in the vale of Glenmorison amidst the rocks and mountains.” The road which they were to follow is but little traversed at the present day, for tourists either keep to the south by the Caledonian Canal, or to the north by the railway to Strome Ferry. THE HAPPY VALLEY. They thereby miss, to use Boswell’s words, “a scene of as wild nature as one could see.” To this part of my tour I had long looked forward. It is many a year since I first formed the wish to visit that “narrow valley not very flowery, but sufficiently verdant,” where Johnson planned the history of his tour.
“I sat down on a bank (he says) such as a writer of romance might have delighted to feign. I had indeed no trees to whisper over my head, but a clear rivulet streamed at my feet. The day was calm, the air was soft, and all was rudeness, silence, and solitude. Before me and on either side were high hills, which by hindering the eye from ranging, forced the mind to find entertainment for itself. Whether I spent the hour well I know not, for here I first conceived the thought of this narration.”
In a letter to Mrs. Thrale he describes the same scene, but makes no mention of the book which he had in mind.
“I sat down to take notes on a green bank, with a small stream running at my feet, in the midst of savage solitude, with mountains before me, and on either hand covered with heath. I looked around me, and wondered that I was not more affected, but the mind is not at all times equally ready to be put in motion. If my mistress and master, and Queeney[601] had been there, we should have produced some reflections among us either poetical or philosophical, for though solitude be the nurse of woe,[602] conversation is often the parent of remarks and discoveries.”
My hopes of finding this classical rivulet were great. A kind correspondent, the Rev. Alexander Matheson, minister of Glen Shiel, had been told by some old people of the neighbourhood that they knew by tradition the exact spot. Though he had nearly twenty miles to come, he undertook to show me it. I arrived at the little inn at Clunie earlier than he had expected, and there meeting him found to my disappointment that I had passed the spot some six or seven miles. Both horses and travellers were too weary to retrace their steps. The tradition of the old people had on further investigation proved to be worthless. Like myself he had been at first misled by Boswell’s narrative, which places this happy valley at the western end of Glen Shiel. But on looking at Johnson’s account, aided too by his own knowledge of the locality, he had detected the error. The rivulet by which they had made their noonday halt must have been in Glen Clunie, near the eastern end of the loch, for Johnson describes how after their rest “they continued their journey along the side of a loch which at last ended in a river broad and shallow. Beyond it is a valley called Glen Shiel.” For my disappointment there was some consolation to be found. The long drought of nearly two months which had preceded my tour had dried up those rivulets which Johnson crossed, running, as he describes them, “with a clear, shallow stream over a hard, pebbly bottom.” The main river had still water in it; but we saw few indeed of “the streams rushing down the steep” which fed it. In that part of the narrow valley where he reposed we should have had only a choice of dried-up watercourses, had we tried to select the bank on which he sat. YARROW UNVISITED. For me Yarrow still remains unvisited. I have still to see
“Its silvery current flow