All this notwithstanding, the periphery of Perthshire may roughly be said to embrace all the wealth of beauty reflected in the Tay, and all the wealth of memories that mingles with its flowing current. And richly endowed is this prince of highland and lowland streams, both with beauty and associations.
The centre of the basin of the Tay is somewhere in Glenalmond, between the sweet woodland shades of the “burn-brae” of Lynedoch, under which “Bessie Bell and Mary Gray” rest, with their lover at their feet, and the bare and stilly place where “sleeps Ossian in the Narrow Glen,” and where murmurs along
“But one meek streamlet, only one,
The Song of Battles, and the breath
Of stormy war and violent death;”
while above, on the summits of the hills, the grey stones and cairns still keep watch, and, interpreted by tradition, point out to us the place where Fingal once held sway in the very heart of Perthshire and of the Caledonian Forest.
THE TAY.
Of the ancient woods that are supposed once to have clothed the country, remains may yet, perhaps, be seen in those glorious sylvan demesnes that surround Taymouth in Breadalbane and Blair in Athole; Dupplin, and Drummond Castle, in Strathearn, and Rossie Priory in the Carse of Gowrie; Scone Palace and Dunkeld, Moncrieffe and Kinnoull, overlooking the central and lower reaches of the Tay. Traces of them may also be found in the Woods of Methven, that once gave friendly shelter to Wallace, and in those ragged and giant pines that thinly dot the hillsides in Rannoch and Glenlyon, over which Bruce was once chased by the Lord of the Isles and the English invaders.
But a new forest has grown up within a century, to shade once more the waters of the Tay. Whatever may have been the case in Macbeth’s or Shakespeare’s time, “great Birnam Wood” can no longer be seen from “high Dunsinane Hill” for the growth of trees—the “moving grove”—that has risen up between. The Bruar Water and its falls are now shaded from the sun and the northern blasts, as Burns longed to see them, by “lofty firs and fragrant birks,” as well as by their craggy cliffs; and not content with thus fulfilling the poet’s wish, the Lords of Athole, from the “Planting Duke” downward, have been nobly ambitious of clothing their once bare hills with forest to the summits. Beside the pillars of ruined Dunkeld Cathedral—almost as worthy of reverence as they—stand the two “Parent Larches,” the first trees of their kind introduced into Scotland. Planted only a century and a half ago, millions of their seed and kin have now overrun Perthshire and the Highlands, proving themselves thoroughly at home in the soil and air of the Tay.
“BIRKS” OF ABERFELDY. / ABERFELDY, FROM THE WEST.
In the bleak Moor of Rannoch—the “furthest Thule” of Perthshire and of the more northern Tay sources—there are great blank spaces where the heather itself will scarce grow. There are only grey rock and black marsh—“bogs of Styx and waters of Cocytus,” with scarce a sign of human habitation or even of animal life. But the logs of oak found embedded in the peat, and the hoary fir trunks that still keep a stubborn stand by Loch Lydoch and the banks of the Guar and the Ericht, show that even in this dreary region a great forest once waved. The “Black Wood of Rannoch” still clothes the southern side of the fine loch of the name; and here, indeed, the Scots fir is to be seen in all its pride and strength, rising above the beautiful growth of oak and birch coppice, and of heather of almost arboreal proportions. Escaping from Loch Rannoch, the Tummel roars down its rocky bed under the piny slopes and crags of Dunalastair, with a halt by the way in Loch Tummel, where, from the “Queen’s View,” looking back, a magnificent prospect is had of the lovely lake embosomed in woods and hills, dominated by the lofty shape of Schiehallion, with the lonely Black Mount and the more distant Grampians closing the background. Further down, opposite Faskally, the Garry joins it, mingling the streams of Athole with the waters of Rannoch. Before the meeting, the Garry, leaving its parent lake high up near the borders of Inverness, has tumbled in white foam through leagues of the “Struan country,” between banks thinly sprinkled with birchwood and edging great tracts of moorland. Then the Erichdie, the Bruar, and the Tilt bring down their contributions from remote mountain corries visited only by the deer-stalker, through deep wild glens, gloriously wooded at their lower extremity. Where the Tilt runs into the Garry stands Blair, the Highland seat of the ducal family of Athole.
BRIDGE OF GARRY.
The date when “Blair in Athole” was first occupied as a stronghold of a powerful Highland chieftain is not told in the eventful annals of the Castle. Strategic considerations, from the points of view of war and of the chase, no doubt determined the selection of the site, inside the rugged jaws of the Pass of Killiecrankie, and on a shelf commanding the routes leading across the Grampians from the basin of the Tay to the valleys of the Spey and the Dee. The choice thus made in ruder days is thoroughly pleasing in these “piping times of peace,” when the line of the Highland Railway threads its way through the narrow defile, and keeping the main valley of the Garry, skirts the miles of woodland, opening at intervals to afford peeps of the plain, massive white front of the Castle and the broad spaces of its surrounding parks. The way through Glentilt, traversed by the clans to join the Stuart standard at Blair or on the Braes of Mar, is free now only to the deer and the gillies.
Without going back to the Athole lines of the Comyns and the Stewarts, or to the joyous hunting scenes in which Queen Mary and other of the old line of Scottish Sovereigns bore a part, Blair has been a centre of historical and social interest ever since it became the chief seat of the Murrays. Montrose assembled the Royalist clans here, and set out upon the campaign which began with the defeat of the Covenanters at Tibbermore and the capture of Perth, and ended at Philiphaugh, where, in one day, the fruits of six brilliant victories were lost. Another darling of cavalier legend, Graham of Claverhouse, Viscount Dundee, lies buried in the old church near by. In the year of the Revolution he had relieved Blair Castle, where the clansmen of Athole had held out for the Jacobite cause against their titular chief, and having enticed General Mackay through the Pass, he rushed down upon him with all his force from the slopes of the Hill of Urrard, utterly routing and sweeping back the enemy through the narrow gorge of the Garry, and himself falling, shot through the heart, at the moment the Sassenachs turned to run.
Notable events happened here also in the “’15” and in the “’45;” and, to come to the recent memories which are cherished with pride in Blair-Athole, Queen Victoria has paid repeated visits to the locality, and was entranced by the magnificent prospects of wood and stream, rugged mountain and fertile strath, that are unfolded from the top of the Hill of Tulloch, and from other points of view in this beautiful district. It is a kind of “holy ground” to fervid Jacobites, one or two of whom are supposed still to linger in Perthshire, if extinct elsewhere. It is also a favourite resort of the increasing host of pilgrims in search of Highland sport and scenery, who invade Athole through the Pass of Killiecrankie, and gaze, with a delight in which there is no longer any tempering of fear of consequences, upon the lofty and impending banks, pine-clad to their summits, and the wilderness of rock and boulder below, through which the Garry glooms and flashes in alternate pool and fall.
Pitlochrie is a charming place to halt at before, or after, clearing this “gateway of the Highlands.” The Tummel has now joined the Garry, and under the latter name the united streams have but a short way to go before they fall, at Ballinluig, into the stream which, from the place where it issues from Loch Tay, takes the name of the Tay. Were we to seek it still nearer to its sources, we should find ourselves in a district which, before the railway came to disturb its solitude, was as lone and wild as the lochans of the Black Mount or those corries of Ben Alder and Ben-y-Gloe whence the Tummel, the Ericht, and Tilt draw their springs. The line from Oban breaks into Perthshire and the basin of the Tay at Tyndrum, near the head of Strathfillan, not far from the scene