The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

by John Galt

During the morning, he had travelled along the foot of the mountains and patches of cultivation, and here and there small knots of larches, recently planted, served to vary the prospect and enliven his journey; but as he approached the entrance to Glengael, these marks of civilization and improvement gradually became rarer. When he entered on the land that had been forfeited, they entirely disappeared, for the green spots that chequered the heath there were as the graves of a race that had been rooted out or slaughtered. They consisted of the sites of cottages which the soldiers of the Duke of Cumberland’s army had plundered and burnt in the year Forty-five.

The reflections which these monuments of fidelity awakened in the breast of the young soldier, as the guide explained to him what they were, saddened his spirit, and the scene which opened, when he entered the cliffy pass that led into Glengael, darkened it more and more. It seemed to him as if he was quitting the habitable world, and passing into the realms, not merely of desolation, but of silence and herbless sterility. A few tufts of heath and fern among the rocks, in the bottom of the glen, showed that it was not absolutely the valley of death.

The appearance of the lowering steeps, that hung their loose crags over the road, was as if some elder mountains had been crushed into fragments, and the wreck thrown in torrents, to fill up that dreary, soundless, desolate solitude, where nature appeared a famished skeleton, pining amidst poverty and horror.

But, after travelling for two or three miles through this interdicted chasm, the cliffs began to recede, and on turning a lofty projecting rock, his ears were gladdened with the sound of a small torrent that was leaping in a hundred cascades down a ravine fringed with birch and hazel. From that point verdure began to reappear, and as the stream in its course was increased by other mountain rivulets, the scenery of the glen gradually assumed a more refreshing aspect. The rocks became again shaggy with intermingled heath and brambles, and the stately crimson foxglove, in full blossom, rose so thickly along the sides of the mountains, that Walkinshaw, unconscious that it was from the effect of their appearance, began to dream in his reverie of guarded passes, and bloody battles, and picquets of red-coated soldiers bivouacking on the hills.

But his attention was soon roused from these heroical imaginings by a sudden turn of the road, laying open before him the glassy expanse of an extensive lake, and on the summit of a lofty rocky peninsula, which projected far into its bosom, the walls and turrets of Glengael.

From the desolate contrast of the pass he had travelled, it seemed to him that he had never beheld a landscape so romantic and beautiful. The mountains, from the margin of the water, were green to their summits, and a few oaks and firs around the castle enriched the picturesque appearance of the little promontory on which it stood. Beyond a distant vista of the dark hills of Ross, the sun had retired, but the clouds, in glorious masses of golden fires, rose in a prodigality of splendid forms, in which the military imagination of the young enthusiast had no difficulty in discovering the towers, and domes, and pinnacles of some airy Babylon, with burnished chariots on the walls, and brazen warriors in clusters on the battlements.

This poetical enchantment, however, was soon dissolved. The road along the skirt of the lake, as it approached the castle, was rugged and steep, and where it turned off into the peninsula, towards the gate, it literally lay on the cornice of a precipice, which, with all his valour, made Walkinshaw more than once inclined to leap from the gig. Here and there a fragment of an old wall showed that it had once been fenced, and where the rains had scooped hollows on the edge of the cliff, a few stakes had recently been put up; but there was an air of decay and negligence around, that prepared the mind of the visitor for the ruinous aspect of the castle.

Mr. Frazer, owing to his professional avocations, had seldom resided there, and he was too ambitious to raise the means to redeem the bonds he had granted for the purchase, to lay anything out in improvements. The state and appearance of the place was, in consequence, lone and dismal. Not only were the outer walls mantled with ivy, but the arch of the gateway was broken. Many of the windows in the principal edifice were rudely filled up with stones. The slates in several places had fallen from the extinguisher-less desolate roofed turrets, and patches of new lime on different places of the habitable buildings, bore testimony to the stinted funds which the proprietor allowed for repairs.