Romance works with a charm more powerful than that of History itself in attracting visitors to the head-waters of the Forth and Teith, and in enhancing the marvellous natural beauties of their lake and mountain scenery. True, few except stout pedestrians and ardent anglers follow up the Duchray Water, past ivied Duchray Castle, to the corries that seam the base of Ben Lomond. But the path from Inversnaid, that skirts Loch Chon and the more famous and more beautiful northern head-stream of the Forth that issues from it, is not so unfrequented. Further down, Loch Ard opens again, and yet again, a lovely mirror in which are reflected the changeful outlines and rich colours of its girdling hills and woods. Oak coppice, interspersed with the shining trunks of the birch and the dark green of the pines, climbs over every knoll, and clings to every crag, and even covers the little island on the lake, where Duke Robert of Albany hoped to find a refuge from his enemies. Above copse-wood and lake rise the brown slopes and grey precipices of Ben Vogrieh and of Craigmore; while the conical head and broad flanks of Ben Lomond shoulder themselves into view, and close the top of the glen.
But the enchantment of Loch Ard would not be complete did not the form of Flora McIvor yet haunt the Linn of Ledeart, in the guise of the Highland Muse, as when first she startled and threw a spell over Edward Waverley; and did not her voice—wild and plaintive as the legends of the land and the genius of its race—mingle, as of yore, with the murmur of the stream. The pass by the lake-side still seems to have the commanding figure of Helen MacGregor presiding over it, and eyeing menacingly Saxon intrusion into this refuge of a proscribed clan. The “Clachan of Aberfoyle,” now unexceptionable as a place of travellers’ entertainment, can never be disassociated from the memorable experiences of a night’s quarters at “Jeanie MacAlpine’s.” At the “Fords of Frew,” we think, more than of anything else, of Rob Roy slipping the belt-buckle in midstream, and of the moving and mysterious night interview on the neighbouring moor between Francis Osbaldistone and Di Vernon.
THE FORTH.
The “Clachan” is now all spick and span; but its surroundings are the same. The brawling waters tumble in white foam from Loch Ard, and, mixing with the Duchray, pour their deep sombre current—the Avondhu, or “Black River”—on past Gartmore to wind in labyrinthine folds through the level mosslands towards Stirling. And the natives of the Upper Forth, while they have forgotten the real history of their district, will show you, chained to the tree in front of the inn windows, the veritable “coulter” with which Bailie Nicol Jarvie did such credit to his Highland blood, and the selfsame oak-stump from which he hung suspended over the lake; nor have they wholly lost faith in the Fairy People—the Daoine Shi, or “Men of Peace”—with whom these hills and valleys have from time immemorial been favoured haunts.
From Aberfoyle, the direct road to Stirling, leaving the Forth, winds round the margin of the Lake of Menteith, overlooked by the outposts of the Grampians, and overlooking the rich beauty of a plain which rises on its southern side behind Bucklyvie and Kippen, to the lower heights and smoother outlines of the Campsie and Fintry Hills. Here, in the heart of Menteith, we are in the country of “the Graemes,” and many legends of the great House of Montrose linger about this, as about other spots in the basin of the Forth. But the Lake of Menteith has still earlier and prouder memories. The Comyns and the Stewarts—the old lords of Menteith—wielded almost regal power from their island-castle of Talla; and within bowshot is the larger isle of Inchmahone, where part of the ancient Priory still stands in the shadow of its planes and orchard trees. Mary Stuart spent part of her childhood in the “Isle of Rest”—perhaps the quietest and sweetest period of her troubled life—when it was thought wise, after the battle of Pinkie, to remove the young Queen of Scots to a place of safety.
“ELLEN’S ISLE.”
The Trossachs and Loch Katrine can be reached in a couple of hours, on foot, from Aberfoyle. More even than the Upper Forth and the banks of Lochs Ard and Menteith, these scenes at the head-waters of the Teith, immortalised in “The Lady of the Lake,” are the abodes of the spirit of Highland romance and the shrines of tourist pilgrimage. Once this “fastness of the North” was the impregnable retreat of the proscribed clan 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