of the MacGregors, whence they issued to harry the shores of Loch Lomond with fire and sword, and levy black-mail and empty byres in the Lennox. A century and a half ago it was still thought unsafe for peaceably disposed folk to approach the district, and in the memory of men still alive it had hardly acquired more than local fame for its beauty.
Walter Scott and his metrical and prose romances have changed all that. A stream of tourists flows steadily through the passes all the summer and autumn, and more fitfully at other seasons; and steamers, stage-coaches, and hotels have strangely altered the aspect of this “Scottish Lake Country.” But the “everlasting hills” look down on it unchanged. The crest of Ben Lomond still dominates the western end of Loch Katrine, girt in by hillsides, or opening into glens as stern and almost as solitary as when they echoed back the slogan of Roderick Dhu. Round the lower extremity of the lake the mountains take closer rank and more varied forms; and the broken and impending precipices, the winding and opening waters, the wooded shores and islands, fringed with grey rock or “silver strand,” seem, as when Fitz-James first set his foot here, an “enchanted land” over which Ben Venue and Ben An stand sentinels:—
“High on the south huge Ben Venue
Down on the lake in masses threw
Crags, knolls, and mounds confusedly hurled,
The fragments of an earlier world;
A wildering forest feathered o’er
His ruined sides and summit hoar;
While on the north through middle air
Ben An lifts up his forehead bare.”
THE TROSSACHS AND BEN VENUE.
On the cloven side of Ben Venue is the “Coir-nan-Uriskin”—the Goblin’s Cave or Hollow—deserted of its unearthly denizens since it has become an object of interest to the tourist. “Ellen’s Isle,” clad with wood to the water’s edge, seems to shelter in the shadow of the northern shore. Cromwell’s men, clambering up the pass, found that the women and children of the clan had sought refuge here; and one bold soldier swam out to the island to bring away a boat. Hardly had he touched ground when a woman—Helen Stuart—drew a dagger from below her apron and slew him. A minstrel’s music has slightly changed the name and wholly changed the associations, and the spot is dedicated to another Ellen and to the gentler fancies, not the rude facts, of the days of old.
From the “Silver Strand” opposite Ellen’s Isle you wind for a couple of miles through the “bristled territory” of the Trossachs before you reach Loch Achray, and “the copse-wood grey that waves and weeps” above the second of the chain of lakes. Ben An and Ben Venue hold the place of sentries to left and to right, and seem to have tumbled down into the narrow pass huge fragments from their splintered sides, to block the way against intruders into this old sanctuary of the Gael. In vain; their very efforts have but added to the wild impressiveness of the scene, and to the crowds that come to wonder and admire. It would be “to gild refinèd gold” to describe the beauties of the Trossachs—the scene where Nature seems to have tried to produce, within the narrowest compass, the most bewildering effects by mingling her materials of rock and foliage and falling waters. Their praises have been sung in words that linger in every memory.
Toilsome indeed must the path have been to trace when the wandering James V. came hither in pursuit of game. But a fine road now threads the depths of the ravine, and skirting Loch Achray, and passing the Trossachs Hotel and Church, brings us to Brig of Turk and the opening of “lone Glenfinlas,” the haunt of Highland deer and of Highland legend. Every green nook and cranny, every glimpse of copse-wood and tumbling water, moss-grown hut and lichened rock, is a temptation to linger by the way. But Duncraggan must be passed; then Lanrick Mead, at the west end of Loch Vennachar, the meeting-place of the Clan Alpine, summoned by the “Fiery Cross;” and by-and-bye the sounding torrent of Carchonzie, where the Vennachar “breaks in silver” from its lake, and near it Coilantogle Ford, the scene of the deadly strife between James Fitz-James and Roderick Dhu. By this time the form of Ben Ledi—the “Hill of God,” the high altar of the old Druidical worship—has lifted itself up mightily upon the left, and, furthest outpost in this direction of the higher Grampians, keeps watch over the “mouldering lines” of the Roman encampment on Bochastle, the Pass of Leny, and the modern village of Callander. It looks across to Ben Voirlich and the heathy solitudes of Uam-Var, where the “noble stag” was first started upon the eventful Chase, and abroad on a prospect which may compare, for richness, variety, and extent, with that from Ben Lomond.
Not less magnificent in its own way, and far more accessible, is the view from the bridge of Callander, where the most impressive features of the scene are Ben Ledi itself, the high crag that forms the background of the village, and the deeply wooded flanks of the pass, down which foam the waters of the Leny, coming from the “Braes of Balquhidder” and Loch Lubnaig, to hold romantic tryst here with the stream from Loch Vennachar, and between them to form the Teith. But we must downward with the Teith towards Stirling, only glancing at a few of the scenes on its banks—at the wooded glen of the Keltie, embosoming the far-famed Falls of Bracklinn; at Cambusmore, where Scott began his “Lady of the Lake;” and above all at the “bannered towers of Doune,” its huge feudal walls rising above the Teith—walls saturated from dungeon to turret with memories of grim or pathetic events in the histories of the Stewarts of Menteith and Moray, and in the lives of Mary Stuart of Montrose, and of Charles Edward. Murdoch, Duke of Albany, is thought to have built Doune, and may have planted its “Dool Tree.” When Murdoch was executed, along with his sons and adherents, on the “Heading Hill” at Stirling, it was on a spot where his eyes might fall upon the strong new castle upon which he had built his hopes of safety.
At Stirling Castle it will be convenient to take our next stand, and see “the mazy Forth unravelled.” No baronial castle on the Rhine or Danube is more romantically and commandingly placed than these “towers of Snowdoun,” or surveys a fairer scene. One can imagine the time—but yesterday in the geologist’s record—when the broad valley of the river was filled with the sea, back to the roots of the Grampians, and when Stirling Rock, with its neighbour bluffs, the Abbey Craig and Craigforth, rose as islands or peninsulas over the waters, each with its slope towards the east and its front to the west. The sea has long receded, and Stirling now dominates the green and level floor of its fertile carse. Through the middle of the landscape meanders the Forth, in immense loops and folds—“a foiled circuitous wanderer”—
“Forgetting the bright speed he had
In his high mountain cradle,”
and using, as it would seem, every circumvolution and chance of tarrying or turning back, to avoid meeting with the Teith, the Allan, and the Bannock, at the base of Stirling Rock. From where the stream debouches from the hills into Flanders Moss, to where it meets the tide-water at Stirling Bridge, there is said to be a fall of only eighteen feet in some eighteen miles, measured “as the crow flies”—a distance increased fourfold by following the intricate gyres of the dark still waters. Below the Bridge, to which vessels are able to come up from the sea, the river still continues to double and turn as far as Alloa, in those “links o’ Forth,” each of which, according to the old rhyme, is “worth an Earldom in the North.”
Flat and tame as are the immediate banks of the river, draining through ancient mosses, now turned for the most part into rich corn-bearing land, goodly sites are close at hand in the plain, on the slopes of the enclosing hills, or in the tributary valleys—among them Cardross, and Blair-Drummond, and Keir, all famous in the annals of Scottish law, agriculture, and literature; and Airth and Airthrey Castles, which carry the mind from the doughty deeds
