by John Prebble
… with bow, quiver and other weapons invasive, upon the 24th of June last by the break of day, and masterfully reft, spulzied and took away from the said complainer and his servants, four score head of kye, eleven horses and mares, together with the whole insight and plenishings of their houses; and also not satisfied with the said oppression committed by them as said is, struck and dang the women of the said lands and cutted the hair of their heads.
For a century and more the road which once passed by the door of Mad Colin’s dark keep has been deflected to a loop track on the northern brae. A straddling lodge-house of Arthurian design bars the old road, and when I rang its bell a decade ago I was told that casual visitors were not welcome at Meggernie Castle, wherein a tobacco magnate now lived unreft and unspulzied.
Before the end of the 18th century the Campbells were gone from Glen Lyon, their line at last extinguished by the Curse of Glencoe it was said14 They were followed by more gentle proprietors. One of these, James Menzies of Culdares, maintained their interest in arboriculture and was among the first to introduce the larch to Scotland, bringing it from Tyrol where its red-brown bark and bright green needles had solaced his years as a Jacobite exile. Seedlings from his trees were sown throughout Perthshire, and eighty years ago they developed a hybrid now known as the Dunkeld Larch. If I am asked why I am not as disapproving of the Tyrolean larch as I am of the equally alien Canadian spruce, it may be because one is less obtrusive than the other, and the spruce is not here because it once reminded an unhappy exile of the dark forests of his homeland.
There are tall stands of Dunkeld Larch on the wooded hills above Kenmore. Here the River Tay takes bright water from the loch of that name, drawing it eastward under the fine arch of a bridge that was built with the rents of forfeited Jacobite estates. Loch Tay is a majestic water, wide and long, embraced by noble hills. In the 18th and 19th centuries the Earls of Breadalbane turned its banks into broad farms and parklands, creating a tranquil landscape where there had once been a bloody amphitheatre of wasting conflict. When their Improving transformation began, the loch itself seemed to protest, the restless rock stirring below its deep basin. There were many witnesses of this phenomenon, the first being the blacksmith of Kenmore who had gone down to the lochside to wash his face and hands, early in the morning of Sunday, September 12, 1784. As he knelt and bent his back, the water suddenly receded from him, leaving the bay empty for a distance of three hundred feet. The surface wave moved westward for another hundred yards until it met a second moving east, both colliding in a foaming wall, four feet high, The ebb and flow of the waves continued for an hour and a half during which there was no wind, no disturbance of the still air, and when the water was at its lowest ebb the River Tay flowed backward under the bridge and into the loch. This strange occurence was repeated the next morning, and again on Tuesday, an hour later and to a lessening degree.
On each occasion a small, wooded island in the bay appeared to rise and fall like a ship on an ocean swell. It is Eilean nan Ban Naomh, the Island of the Holy Woman, and because I am English I have a particular affection for it. It is a reminder of the long and sometimes bitter-sweet affinity between the country of my birth and the northern land I love. Its trees, seemingly growing from the water, now hide the few remaining stones of an ancient priory and also the grave of Queen Sibylla who was buried here eight and a half centuries ago. She was the English wife of Alexander I of Scotland, and the natural daughter of Henry I of England. Alexander was perhaps more Saxon than his queen or his father-in-law, being the grandson of Edgar Atheling, king-elect of England until his reluctant submission to the Conqueror. Schooled by the example of their saintly mother Margaret, Alexander and his brothers began the anglicising of their Celtic kingdom, a slow but relentlessly inexorable process still continuing. Of the childless Sibylla little is known, her memory preserved in this quiet island and in a charter by which her husband gave it to the monks of Scone “so that a church may be built there for me, and for the soul of the Queen there deceased.”
Until the 18th century Breadalbane was a turbulent and tumultuous land, ruled by Glenorchy Campbells who took it from the MacGregors, the Stewarts and the Menzies, and held it against frequent forays by the Lochaber Men. Hoping to outmatch their cousins of Argyll, whose leadership of Clan Diarmid they enviously coveted, they rose by one leap from a baronetcy to an earldom, and then higher to a marquesate. When that line was exhausted, another branch of the teeming family came forward to claim and win the earldom. This dubious evasion of primogeniture had been made possible by the first earl, who had secured the King’s agreement that the title would not only pass to his children’s children but also to those of his collateral ancestors should his own line become extinct15 By the middle of the 19th century the second Marquis and fifth Earl of Breadalbane was as rich and powerful as the Duke of Argyll, and if he could not marry a son into the Royal Family he was determined to outmatch Inveraray in Highland hospitality to the Queen. Victoria and Albert came to Breadalbane in September, the loveliest month in Strathtay. They rode by carriage on the high road from Atholl to Aberfeldy and thence through groves of larch and oak to his lordship’s greystone castle in a horse-shoe bend of the River Tay. The original slit-eyed, black and square fortress of Balloch had been transformed by the Earl’s father into a Gothic nightmare – great rooms and great halls, great doors and a great stone stairway down which the 4th Earl could have marched his Breadalbane Fencibles six abreast, and might well have done had they not been disbanded after a riotous mutiny in Glasgow. Lance-headed windows looked out to noble braes of oak, lime, chestnut and pine. The walls of the library were elaborately and expensively panelled, and it had taken seven years to paint the ceilings of the state rooms in the style of a medieval illuminated manuscript.
Victoria was as deeply impressed by this mountain splendour (“The coup d’oeil was indescribable”) as she was by the gentry and tenantry assembled to greet her, Campbells in green tartan, Menzies in red and white, and a company of the 92nd Highlanders presenting arms in a cloud of pipe-clay dust. Cannon were fired in salute as her carriage reached the castle doors, and the cathedral transept within was lined with more kilted tenants. “Keeper,” she said to the Earl, entering into the spirit of the day, “what a quantity of fine Highlandmen you have got.” When she dined at eight that evening it was with some of the best of Scotland’s nobility, in tartan, velvet and lace. It was all grand theatre and had nothing to do with the reality of Highland life, in that year or yester-year, but the Queen’s sentimental ignorance protected her from this harsh truth. “It seemed,” she told her diary, “as if a great chieftain in olden feudal times was receiving his sovereign”. When she retired to bed, in a wing specially built for her visit, one of the Earl’s nine pipers played her to rest, beacon fires burned on Drummond Hill, and about the railings of the castle lawn a chain of lamps spelt out a glowing message Welcome Victoria – Albert. And in the morning, perhaps, the capercailzie which the Earl was successfully reintroducing to Scotland broke the dawn silence of the pine-woods with its singular but not inappropriate imitation of a cork being drawn and liquid gurgling from the neck of a bottle.
Such a world must have seemed indestructible, its people enduring in their love and loyalty. It was charming to see the surprise of a plump cottage-wife when she was given money for presenting the Queen with a handful of garden flowers. Or to watch another standing in a burn, her skirt tucked high to her knees as she bent to wash a pan of potatoes. And doubly pleasing, no doubt, to reflect that Albert was sharing such rude simplicities, wading through rough bogs below Schiehallion, and coming back to the castle with nine brace of grouse he had brought down with his fowling-piece.
Breadalbane earls no longer own a blade of grass in Strathtay, and it is more than a quarter of a century since I was sent to interview the last heir to the title, then entertaining himself and others by playing the pipes in a London public-house. Taymouth Castle is empty, abandoned now by the Government mini
stry which once occupied it, and there is a happy school and an 18-hole golf course in the grounds. The gentry who once supported the eminence of the earldom, as the base of a pyramid carries its peak, have also gone, or remain in discreet isolation within their ancient homes. The castle at Weem is no longer sustained by the fortune which one of its Menzies chiefs brought home from the West Indies. It survives as a clan museum, struggling against wood-rot and crumbling stone, and its doors are sometimes opened at the promised hour and sometimes not at all. The changes which Improvement brought to Strathtay remain perversely Anglo-Saxon. Fortingall and Kenmore were rebuilt to resemble the half-timbers or thatched roofs of an English village. The agreeable hotel at Kenmore, which was The Breadalbane Arms when there was an earl in the castle, is said to be the oldest inn in Scotland, but despite the Campbell tartan on its benches and chairs it would not be out of place in Sussex. It is no longer possible to find a window at which Dorothy Wordsworth may have sat, and looked out in happiness to “a very beautiful prospect”. Behind a protective sheet of glass in Archie’s snug there is a verse which Burns pencilled on the plaster, but he wrote it in English not Scots. It is thus no indication of his genius, and some lines are perilously close to McGonagall. Admiring Nature in her wildest grace, these northern scenes with weary feet I trace …
Victoria and Albert had come to Kenmore from Dunkeld, where Lord Glenlyon welcomed them beneath a ceremonial arch, with pipers of the Atholl Highlanders, an alfresco luncheon, sword-dances and reels. His uncle, the 5th Duke of Atholl, was then at the height of his family’s fortune and influence, comfortably lodged in his castle of Blair and enjoying the grandeur of the magnificent estate his father had created. In fifty years the 4th Duke had changed the face and nature of Atholl, replacing its wild woodlands with parkland and forests, draining river-floors, cutting roads, building farms, follies and sylvan temples, making sure that no English peer would have reason to look down his nose at the property of a Highland duke. His pride in being Am Moireach Mor, and his youthful happiness in domestic bliss, were captured by David Allan in one of Scotland’s earliest conversation-paintings. He stands on the Hill of Lude, I think, surrounded by his wife, his children, a kneeling gillie, the carcass of a twelve-pointer and sundry game-dogs. He wears a high-crowned bonnet with a curling black plume, a brown sporting-jacket and a little kilt of the tartan which Major Dalrymple had selected for the Atholl Highlanders. The Duke’s double-barrelled sporting-gun is tucked beneath his right arm-pit, and his left hand holds a splendid blackcock above the eager reach of his son and heir, a smiling cherub in a white dress and pink sash. The landscape of the painting is conventionally contrived, but is recognisable as the valley of the River Garry, and in the middle background the white block of Blair Castle holds the composition together like a linchpin. At the left of the canvas, and creating cunning perspective points, are two trees. The first is a Tyrolean larch, and the second is the most gentle and natural of all Highland trees. James Hogg thought so too. When he came here in 1802 he had expected to see a wilderness “instead of which, every opening shewed me so much more of a paradise.” He was entranced by the landscaped woodlands, tall cedars, straight-backed pines, and flourishing larch. But this one tree particularly pleased him, although his description of it barely survives his strangled syntax.
The weeping birch hangs her beautiful tresses all around her white stem in the most graceful attitude imaginable. Sure the vegetable creation cannot produce her equal, especially high in Atholl where she seems to arrive at the most perfect stature: with such an easy modesty does her small boughs descend and kiss each other, the lowest branches often reaching to the ground, the next to these, and so on to the top, while “one blast of the southland wind” causeth the most graceful sweep through all the wood. I could not help viewing her as the queen of the forest, whose modest deportment all the rest of the trees strove to imitate.
I think he was himself striving to imitate the descriptive power of Scott, to whom this was addressed, but I understand his feelings. I turned to word-painting in my youth when I realised I had no talent to be an artist, but writing is a poor way of conveying the beauty of the Highlands, and a dependence upon metaphor and simile leads to unhappy excess. If Hogg’s prose is sometimes self-destructive, its breathless fervour matched the Gothic inspiration of his time, a love of melancholy landscapes, dark mountain-heads, ruined turrets and forest glades. In the engravings and canvases that were now popularising the Highlands there was also a deliberate exaggeration of natural proportions. Mountain ranges became alpine peaks, the valleys deep canyons of mist and torrent, and the inhabitants, where they appeared at all, were tiny mannikins, crawling like insects over the monumental rocks.
The reality behind such romantic exaggeration became increasingly accessible with the building or improvement of carriage-roads, the establishment of comfortable inns and tolerable lodging-houses. The growing number of tourists, once the French wars were over, produced a steady flow of guide-books, more easily read and less cumbersome to carry than Boswell or Pennant, but inspired by their example and by the remarkable Mrs Murray who had published her account of a tour through the Highlands and Inner Hebrides “because I think my Guide will be really useful to travellers who may follow my foot-steps16 One of the first of the new guide-books was The Scottish Tour and Itinerary, rightly dedicated to Scott “whose fascinating works have spread the fame of this country far and wide.” The publishers, it said, had spared neither pains nor expense to “combine simplicity of arrangement with accuracy of detail”, and while it directed the travellers’attention to “the scenery, antiquities, and principal steam-boat tours”, the location of change-houses, the height of mountains and the depth of lochs, it also reminded them that there was more to touring than the hedonistic pursuit of enjoyment.
To the philosopher, Scotland is perhaps now more interesting than at any former period, owing to the rapid strides made in the arts and improvements of every kind; also in the acquirement of wealth, the result of the industry, the ingenuity, and enterprise of her inhabitants.
The Scottish Tour was reprinted eight times in as many years, and others more successful galloped through nineteen or twenty editions. Before the middle of the century their pot-boiling publishers had realised that the new traveller of the Industrial Age was no longer an itinerant philosopher and was less interested in arts and improvements than he was in how much he would have to pay for his northern jaunt. “The expenses necessarily attendant upon travelling,” said the eleventh edition of Black’s Picturesque Tourist of Scotland, in a mournful comment still applicable, “must be admitted to be a considerable drawback from its pleasure. Still, the evil is inevitable.” Before the reader began the first chapter of this guide (Rivers, Lakes, Mineral Produce and Springs…), he was told that a riding-horse could be hired for six shillings a day, a four-wheeled carriage for fifteen. A room in a reasonable hotel would cost him half-a-crown a night, twice that if double-bedded, and the use of a parlour was five shillings more. He should be willing to pay two shillings for his breakfast, sixpence or a shilling for lunch, from two to three shillings for dinner, and eighteenpence for supper. Whisky was ninepence per gill, brandy eighteenpence, beer, ale, and porter sixpence a bottle, and a pint of tolerable port or sherry was three shillings. “The payment of gratuities to hotel servants is a source of great annoyance to travellers,” but this too was an inevitable evil, and the Picturesque Tourist offered sympathetic guidance.
A gentleman and his wife, occupying a sitting-room and bedroom, 2s. 6d. to 3s. 6d. per night for Waiter, Chambermaid, Porter and Boots. If accompanied by sons or daughters, or other relatives, half this rate from each; but no charge for children under nine years of age. A party of four or six for one night, about 1s. 6d. each.
Any nostalgic longing these charges may excite should be tempered by the knowledge that while the Duke of Sutherland’s annual income was £300,000, lesser men lived comfortably on £250, and the miserable weekly wage of a laboure
r was counted in pence.
I sometimes take these old guide-books with me to the Highlands. Imposed upon the present, they have the charm and irony of a film twice exposed. They contain nothing that would have disturbed a 19th-century traveller’s contentment or ruffled his conscience. There is no reference in any of them to the great changes then taking place, no mention of cholera and recurrent famine, of clearance, eviction and sorrowful emigration, and only hindsight gives poignancy to one bland sentence in the Picturesque Tourist. “The extensive county of Sutherland,” wrote its anonymous author, “presents the striking peculiarity of having the whole of its 1800 square miles under sheep.” Earlier in the century, Hogg touched upon the darker side of the paradise he found in Perthshire, but having discovered it, seemed anxious to close a door upon it. The 4th Duke of Atholl, he said, “was loved by his people in general.” That qualification in general may have been added in doubt, the result of a disarming meeting with one of the Duke’s former tenants.
He was one of nineteen farmers who were removed from the Duke’s land to make way for one man, who now possessed the whole of what they, and their families, lived happily upon. On expressing my astonishment what could move his Grace to such a proceeding, he replied, “Ah! Cot pless him, hit pe nane of his doings.”