KILCHURN CASTLE.
Two longer excursions one must make from Oban; to Loch Awe, to Glencoe. Each is possible in a day, and yet a night in Glencoe is almost imperative if one would be played upon by its full tragic compass; and a lifetime of summers would not exhaust Loch Awe.
The Loch I would visit; because of its beauty; and because of Kilchurn Castle, which is picturesque in fact as well as in picture, on its densely wooded island with its broken outline lying against the farther mountain; because of Ardchonnel Castle, ivy covered, and "it's a far cry to Loch Awe"; because of Fraoch-Eilean (isle of heather) which is the island of Ossian's Hesperides; and because, capitally because, Innishail is the island where Philip Gilbert Hamerton established his camp through so many summers and through a number of Scottish winters.
One must belong, oh, quite to "another generation," to admit any debt of instruction or pleasure to Philip Gilbert Hamerton. I do not think that this generation knows him, hardly as a name. But when I was young, collegiately young, Hamerton was an authority on life and art, and a preceptor of beauty. And, if one read "The Intellectual Life," then, of course, one read the rest of him. And so, one came to Loch Awe before one came to Loch Awe.
To the lake I went quite shamelessly on train. But repenting half way, over-awed by Ben Cruachan, as who should not be, I left the train at the "platform" and won the memory on foot. The mountain looks as high and as mighty as a Rocky, and the white foaming threads of falls, hundreds of feet high, dashed down the sides in a true "Rocky" splendour; like those on the Cut bank or the Piegan trails in Glacier Park, yet not quite so high. I did not climb Ben Cruachan to look on the Atlantic—but I have not made my last journey to Scotland. On foot and alone, I threaded "the dark pass of Brandir," and felt in my blood and bone that something in me ancestral had been there before. Perhaps we inherit where we hero-worship. In any event, Sir William Wallace went through this defile in 1300, and King Robert Bruce in 1310, with his faithful friend Sir James Douglass, fighting John of Lorn (the dead are still heaped beneath these gray cairns), and going on to take Dunstaffnage. Sir Walter Scott came here when he sought environ for "The Highland Widow."
On one side is the sheer cliff which guards the foot of Ben Cruachan. On the other the rapid awesome dash of the River Awe. "You will not find a scene more impressive than the Brandir Pass, where the black narrowing water moves noiselessly at midnight between its barren precipices, or ripples against them when the wind wails through its gates of war."
In the Loch lies the island of Innishail, still green, and not less solitary than when Hamerton entertained travelers, unaware of his identity. It still carries old gravestones, for islands in the far days were the only safe places, safe for the dead as for the living; war and ravage would pass them by. Throughout this western land you will find island graveyards, and the procession of quiet boats carrying the dead to their rest must have been a better expression than can be had by land.
From here one sees Ben Cruachan to advantage, even as one saw it in 1859 with Hamerton.
"At this moment the picture is perfect. The sky has become an exquisite pearly green, full of gradations. There is only one lonely cloud, and that has come exactly where it ought. It has risen just beyond the summit of Cruachan and pauses there like a golden disk behind a saint's white head. But this cloud is rose-colour, with a swift gradation to dark purple-gray. Its under edge is sharply smoothed into a clearly-cut curve by the wind; the upper edge floats and melts away gradually in the pale green air. The cloud is shaped rather like a dolphin with its tail hidden behind the hill. The sunlight on all the hill, but especially towards the summit, has turned from mere warm light to a delicate, definite rose-colour; the shadows are more intensely azure, the sky of a deeper green. The lake, which is perfectly calm, reflects and reverberates all this magnificence. The islands, however, are below the level of the sunshine, and lie dark and cold, the deep green Scotch firs on the Black Isles telling strongly against the snows of Cruachan."
It was even as Hamerton had told me so long ago, a trifle different in July from what he saw it in December, but equal in magnificence, and the outlines had not changed in a half-century.