The dancing and the bagpipe-playing attract great attention, and with these the games usually conclude. At our sports to-day both are first-class.
The dancing commences with a sailor’s hornpipe in character, and right merrily several of the competitors foot it on the floor of wood that has been laid down on the grass for the purpose. Next comes the Highland fling, danced in Highland dress, to the wild “skirl” of the great Highland bagpipe. Then the reel of Tulloch to the same kind of music.
Here there are of course four Highlanders engaged at one time.
I hope, for the sake of dear auld Scotland, none of my readers will judge the music of the Highland bagpipes from the performances of the wretched specimens of ragged humanity sometimes seen in our streets. But on a lovely day like this, amidst scenery so sublime, it is really a pleasure to lie on the grass and listen to the stirring war march, the hearty strathspey or reel, the winning pibroch, or the sad wail of a lament for the dead.
Few who travel by train past the village or town of Auchterarder have the faintest notion what the place is like. “It is set on a hill,” that is all a train traveller can say, and it looks romantic enough.
But the country all round here, as seen by road, is more than romantic, it is wildly beautiful.
Here are some notes I took in my caravan just before coming to this town. My reason for giving them now will presently be seen.
“Just before coming to Auchterarder we cross over a hill, from which the view is singularly strange and lovely. Down beneath us is a wide strath or glen, rising on the other side with gentle slope far upwards to the horizon, with a bluff, bare, craggy mountain in the distance. But it is the arrangement and shape of the innumerable dark spruce and pinewoods that strike the beholder as more than curious. They look like regiments and armies in battle array—massed in corps d’armée down in the hollow, and arranged in battalions higher up; while along the ridge of yonder high hill they look like soldiers on march; on a rock they appear like a battery in position, and here, there, and everywhere between, e’en long lines of skirmishers, taking advantage of every shelter.”
It was not until Monday morning that I found out from the kindly Aberuthven farmer, in whose yard I had bivouacked over the Sunday, that I had really been describing in my notes a plan of the great battle of Waterloo. The woods have positively been planted to represent the armies in action.
Had not this farmer, whom we met at the village, invited us to his place, our bivouac over the Sunday would have been on the roadside, for at Aberuthven there was no accommodation for either horses or caravan.