Book: Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2

J >> John Wilson >> Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2




From a few such stations, you get an insight into the configuration of
the whole Western Highlands. By the dip of the mountains, you discover
at a glance all the openings in the panorama around you into other
regions. Follow your fancies fearlessly wherever they may lead; and if
the blue aerial haze that hangs over a pass winding eastward, tempt you
from your line of march due north, forthwith descend in that direction,
and haply an omen will confirm you--an eagle rising on the left, and
sailing away before you into that very spot of sky.

No man, however well read, should travel by book. In books you find
descriptions, and often good ones, of the most celebrated scenes, but
seldom a word about the vast tracts between; and it would seem as if
many Tourists had used their eyes only in those places where they had
been told by common fame there was something greatly to admire. Travel
in the faith, that go where you will, the cravings of your heart will be
satisfied, and you will find it so, if you be a true lover of nature.
You hope to be inspired by her spirit, that you may may read aright her
works. But such inspiration comes not from one object or another,
however great or fair, but from the whole "mighty world of eye and ear,"
and it must be supported continuously, or it perishes. You may see a
thousand sights never before seen by human eye, at every step you take,
wherever be your path; for no steps but yours have ever walked along
that same level; and moreover, never on the same spot twice rested the
same lights or shadows. Then there may be something in the air, and
more in your own heart, that invests every ordinary object with
extraordinary beauty; old images affect you with a new delight; a
grandeur grows upon your eyes in the undulations of the simplest hills;
and you feel there is sublimity in the common skies. It is thus that all
the stores of imagery are insensibly gathered, with which the minds of
men are filled, who from youth have communed with nature. And it is thus
that all those feelings have flowed into their hearts by which that
imagery is sanctified; and these are the Poets.

It is in this way that we become familiar with the mountains. Far more
than we were aware of have we trusted to the strong spirit of delight
within us, to prompt and to guide. And in such a country as the
Highlands, thus led, we cannot err. Therefore, if your desire be for the
summits, set your face thitherwards, and wind a way of your own, still
ascending and ascending, along some vast brow, that seems almost a whole
day's journey, and where it is lost from your sight, not to end, but to
go sweeping round, with undiminished grandeur into another region. You
are not yet half-way up the mountain, but you care not for the summit
now; for you find yourself among a number of green knolls--all of them
sprinkled, and some of them crowned with trees--as large almost as our
lowland hills--surrounded close to the brink with the purple
heather--and without impairing the majesty of the immense expanse,
imbuing it with pastoral and sylvan beauty;--and there, lying in a small
forest glade of the lady-fern, ambitious no longer of a throne on
Benlomond or Ben-nevis, you dream away the still hours till sunset, yet
then have no reason to weep that you have lost a day.

But the best way to view the mountains is to trace the Glens. To find
out the glens you must often scale the shoulders of mountains, and in
such journeys of discovery, you have for ever going on before your eyes
glorious transfigurations. Sometimes for a whole day one mighty mass
lowers before you unchanged; look at it after the interval of hours, and
still the giant is one and the same. It rules the region, subjecting all
other altitudes to its sway, though many of them range away to a great
distance; and at sunset retains it supremacy, blazing almost like a
volcano with fiery clouds. Your line of journey lies, perhaps, some two
thousand feet above the level of the sea, and seldom dips down to one
thousand; and these are the heights from which all above and all below
you looks most magnificent, for both regions have their full power over
you--the unscaleable cliffs, the unfathomable abysses--and you know not
which is the more sublime. The sublimity indeed is one. It is then that
you may do well to ascend to the very mountain-top. For it may happen to
be one of those heavenly days indeed, when the whole Highlands seem to
be reposing in the cloudless sky.

But we were about to speak of the Glens. And some of them are best
entered by such descents as these--perhaps at their very head--where all
at once you are in another world, how still, how gloomy, how profound!
An hour ago and the eye of the eagle had not wider command of earth,
sea, and sky, than yours--almost blinded now by the superincumbent
precipices that imprison you, and seem to shut you out from life.

"Such the grim desolation, where Ben-Hun
And Craig-na-Torr, by earthquake shatterings
Disjoined with horrid chasms prerupt, enclose
What superstition calls the Glen of Ghosts."

Or you may enter some great glen from the foot, where it widens into
vale or strath--and there are many such--and some into which you can
sail up an arm of the sea. For a while it partakes of the cultivated
beauty of the lowlands, and glen and vale seem almost one and the same;
but gradually it undergoes a strange wild change of character, and in a
few miles that similitude is lost. There is little or no arable ground
here; but the pasture is rich on the unenclosed plain--and here and
there are enclosures, near the few houses or huts standing, some of them
in the middle of the glen, quite exposed, on eminences above reach of
the floods--some more happily placed on the edge of the coppices, that
sprinkle the steep sides of the hills, yet barely mountains. But
mountains they soon become; and leaving behind you those few barren
habitations, you see before you a wide black moor. Beautiful hitherto
had been the river, for a river you had inclined to think it, long after
it had narrowed into a stream, with many a waterfall, and in one chasm a
cataract. But the torrent now has a wild mountain cry, and though there
is still beauty on its banks, they are bare of all trees, now swelling
into multitudes of low green knolls among the heather, now composed but
of heather and rocks. Through the very middle of the black moor it
flows, yet are its waters clear, for all is not moss, and it seems to
wind its way where there is nothing to pollute its purity, or tame its
lustre. 'Tis a solitary scene, but still sweet; the mountains are of
great magnitude, but they are not precipitous; vast herds of cattle are
browsing there, on heights from which fire has cleared the heather, and
wide ranges of greensward upon the lofty gloom seem to lie in perpetual
light.

The moor is crossed, and you prepare to scale the mountain in front, for
you imagine the torrent by your side flows from a tarn in yonder cove,
and forms that series of waterfalls. You have been all along well
pleased with the glen, and here at the head, though there is a want of
cliffs of the highest class, you feel nevertheless that it has a
character of grandeur. Looking westward, you are astounded to see them
ranging away on either side of another reach of the glen, terrific in
their height, but in their formation beautiful, for like the walls of
some vast temple they stand, roofed with sky. Yet are they but as a
portal or gateway of the glen. For entering in with awe, that deepens,
as you advance, almost into dread, you behold, beyond, mountains that
carry their cliffs up into the clouds, seamed with chasms, and hollowed
out into coves, where night dwells visibly by the side of day; and still
the glen seems winding on beneath a purple light, that almost looks like
gloom; such vast forms and such prodigious colours, and such utter
stillness, become oppressive to your very life, and you wish that some
human being were by, to relieve, by his mere presence, the insupportable
weight of such a solitude.

But we should never have done were we to attempt to sketch, however
slightly, the character of all the different kinds of glens. Some are
sublime in their prodigious depth and vast extent, and would be felt to
be so, even were the mountains that enclose them of no great majesty;
but these are all of the highest order, and sometimes are seen from
below to the very cairns on their summits. Now we walk along a reach,
between astonishing ranges of cliffs, among large heaps of rocks--not a
tree--scarcely a shrub--no herbage--the very heather blasted--all
lifelessness and desolation. The glen gradually grows less and less
horrid, and though its sides are seamed with clefts and chasms, in the
gloom there are places for the sunshine, and there is felt to be even
beauty in the repose. Descends suddenly on either side a steep slope of
hanging wood, and we find ourselves among verdant mounds, and knolls,
and waterfalls. We come then into what seems of old to have been a
forest. Here and there a stately pine survives, but the rest are all
skeletons; and now the glen widens, and widens, yet ceases not to be
profound, for several high mountains enclose a plain on which armies
might encamp, and castellated clouds hang round the heights of the
glorious amphitheatre, while the sky-roof is clear, and as if in its
centre, the refulgent sun. 'Tis the plain called "The Meeting of the
Glens." From the east and the west, the north and the south, they come
like rivers into the sea.

Other glens there are, as long, but not so profound, nor so grandly
composed; yet they too conduct us nobly in among the mountains, and up
their sides, and on even to their very summits. Such are the glens of
Atholl, in the neighbourhood of Ben-y-gloe. From them the heather is not
wholly banished, and the fire has left a green light without quenching
the purple colour native to the hills. We think that we almost remember
the time when those glens were in many places sprinkled with huts, and
all animated with human life. Now they are solitary; and you may walk
from sunrise till sunset without seeing a single soul. For a hundred
thousand acres have there been changed into a forest, for sake of the
pastime, indeed, which was dear of old to chieftains and kings. Vast
herds of red-deer are there, for they herd in thousands--yet may you
wander for days over the boundless waste, nor once be startled by one
stag bounding by. Yet may a herd, a thousand strong, be drawn up, as in
battle array, on the cliffs above your head. For they will long stand
motionless, at gaze, when danger is in the wind--and then their antlers
to unpractised eyes seem but boughs grotesque, or are invisible; and
when all at once, with one accord, at signal from the stag, whom they
obey, they wheel off towards the Corries, you think it but thunder, and
look up to the clouds. Fortunate if you see such a sight once in your
life. Once only have we seen it; and it was, of a sudden, all by
ourselves,

"Ere yet the hunter's startling horn was heard
Upon the golden hills."

Almost within rifle-shot, the herd occupied a position, high up indeed,
but below several ridges of rocks, running parallel for a long distance,
with slopes between of sward and heather. Standing still, they seemed to
extend about a quarter of a mile, and as with a loud clattering of hoofs
and antlers, they took more open order, the line at least doubled its
length, and the whole mountain-side seemed alive. They might not be
going at full speed, but the pace was equal to that of any charge of
cavalry; and once and again the flight passed before us, till it
overcame the ridges, and then deploying round the shoulder of the
mountain, disappeared, without dust or noise, into the blue light of
another glen.

We question, if there be in the Highlands any one glen comparable with
Borrowdale in Cumberland. But there are several that approach it, in
that combination of beauty and grandeur, which perhaps no other scene
equals in all the world. The "Gorge" of that Dale exhibits the finest
imaginable assemblage of rocks and rocky hills, all wildly wooded;
beyond them, yet before we have entered into the Dale, the Pass widens,
with noble cliffs on one side, and on the other a sylvan stream, not
without its abysses; and we see before us some lovely hills, on which--

"The smiling power of cultivation lies,"

yet leaves, with lines defined by the steeps that defy the ploughshare,
copses and groves; and thus we are brought into the Dale itself, and
soon have a vision of the whole--green and golden fields--for though
most are in pasture, almost all seem arable--sprinkled with fine single
trees--and lying in flats and levels, or swelling into mounds and
knolls, and all diversified with every kind of woods; single cottages,
with their out-buildings, standing everywhere they should stand, and
coloured like the rocks from which in some lights they are hardly to be
distinguished--strong-roofed and undilapidated, though many of them very
old; villages, apart from one another a mile--and there are three--yet
on their sites, distant and different in much though they be, all
associated together by the same spirit of beauty that pervades all the
Dale. Half way up, and in some places more, the enclosing hills and even
mountains are sylvan indeed, and though there be a few inoffensive
aliens, they are all adorned with their native trees. The mountains are
not so high as in our Highlands, but they are very majestic; and the
Passes over into Langdale, and Wastdalehead, and Buttermere, are
magnificent, and show precipices in which the Golden Eagle himself might
rejoice.

No--there is no glen in all the Highlands comparable with Borrowdale.
Yet we know of some that are felt to be kindred places, and their beauty
though less, almost as much affects us, because though contending, as it
were, with the darker spirit of the mountain, it is not overcome, but
prevails; and their beauty will increase with years. For while the rocks
continue to frown aloft for ever, and the cliffs to range along the
corries, unbroken by trees, which there the tempest will not suffer to
rise, the woods and groves below, preserved from the axe, for sake of
their needful shelter, shall become statelier, till the birch equal the
pine; reclaimed from the waste, shall many a fresh field recline among
the heather, tempering the gloom; and houses arise where now there are
but huts, and every house have its garden:--such changes are now going
on, and we have been glad to observe their progress, even though
sometimes they had removed, or were removing, objects dear from old
associations, and which, had it been possible, but it was not, we should
have loved to see preserved.

And one word on those sweet pastoral seclusions into which one often
drops unexpectedly, it may be at the close of day, and finds a night's
lodging in the only hut. Yet they lie, sometimes, embosomed in their own
green hills, among the most rugged mountains, and even among the wildest
moors. They have no features by which you can describe them; it is their
serenity that charms you, and their cheerful peace; perhaps it is wrong
to call them glens, and they are but dells. Yet one thinks of a dell as
deep, however small it may be; but these are not deep, for the hills
slope down gently upon them, and leave room perhaps between for a little
shallow loch. Often they have not any visible water at all, only a few
springs and rivulets, and you wonder to see them so very green; there is
no herbage like theirs; and to such spots of old, and sometimes yet,
the kine are led in summer, and there the lonely family live in their
shieling till the harvest moon.

We have all along used the same word, and called the places we have
spoken of--glens. A fine observer--the Editor of Gilpin's Forest
Scenery--has said: "The gradation from extreme width downwards should be
thus arranged,--strath, vale, dale, valley, glen, dell, ravine, chasm.
In the strath, vale, and dale, we may expect to find the large,
majestic, gently flowing river, or even the deeper or smaller lake. In
the glen, if the river be large, it flows more rapidly, and with greater
variety. In the dell the stream is smaller. In the ravine, we find the
mountain torrent and the waterfall. In the chasm, we find the roaring
cataract, or the rill, bursting from its haunted fountain. The chasm
discharges its small tribute into the ravine, while the ravine is
tributary to the dell, and thence to the glen; and the glen to the
dale."

These distinctions are admirably expressed, and perfectly true to
nature; yet we doubt if it would be possible to preserve them in
describing a country, and assuredly they are very often indeed confused
by common use in the naming of places. We have said nothing about
Straths--nor shall we try to describe one--but suggest to your own
imagination--as specimens--Strath-Spey, Strath-Tay, Strath-Earn. The
dominion claimed by each of those rivers, within the mountain ranges
that environ their courses, is a strath; and three noble straths they
are, from source to sea.

And now we are brought to speak of the Highland Rivers, Streams, and
Torrents; but we shall let them rush or flow, murmur or thunder in your
own ears, for you cannot fail to imagine what the waters must be in a
land of such glens and such mountains. The chief rivers possess all the
attributes essential to greatness--width--depth--clearness--rapidity--in
one word power. And some of them have long courses--rising in the
central heights, and winding round many a huge projection, against which
in flood we have seen them dashing like the sea. Highland droughts are
not of long duration; the supplies are seldom withheld at once by all
the tributaries; and one wild night among the mountains converts a calm
into a commotion--the many-murmuring voice into one roar. In flood they
are terrible to look at; and every whirlpool seems a place of torment.
Winds can make a mighty noise in swinging woods, but there is something
to our ears more appalling in that of the fall of waters. Let them be
united--and add thunder from the clouds--and we have heard in the
Highlands all three in one--and the auditor need not care that he has
never stood by Niagara. But when "though not o'erflowing full," a
Highland river is in perfection; far better do we love to see and hear
him rejoicing than raging; his attributes appear more his own in calm
and majestic manifestations, and as he glides or rolls on, without any
disturbance, we behold in him an image at once of power and peace.

Of rivers--comparatively speaking--of the second and third order--the
Highlands are full--and on some of them the sylvan scenery is beyond
compare. No need there to go hunting the waterfalls. Hundreds of
them--some tiny indeed, but others tall--are for ever dinning in the
woods; yet, at a distance from the cataract, how sweet and quiet is the
sound! It hinders you not from listening to the cushat's voice; clear
amidst the mellow murmur comes the bleating from the mountain; and all
other sound ceases, as you hearken in the sky to the bark of the
eagle--rare indeed anywhere, but sometimes to be heard as you thread the
"glimmer or the gloom" of the umbrage overhanging the Garry or the
Tummel--for he used to build in the cliffs of Ben-Brackie, and if he has
shifted his eyrie, a few minutes' waftage will bear him to Cairn-Gower.

In speaking of the glens, we but alluded to the rivers or streams, and
some of them, indeed, even the great ones, have but rivulets; while in
the greatest, the waters often flow on without a single tree, shadowed
but by rocks and clouds. Wade them, and you find they are larger than
they seem to be; for looked at along the bottom of those profound
hollows, they are but mere slips of sinuous light in the sunshine, and
in the gloom you see them not at all. We do not remember any very
impressive glen, without a stream, that would not suffer some diminution
of its power by our fancying it to have one; we may not be aware, at the
time, that the conformation of the glen prevents its having any
water-flow, but if we feel its character aright, that want is among the
causes of our feeling; just as there are some scenes of which the beauty
would not be so touching were there a single tree.

Thousands and tens of thousands there are of nameless perennial
torrents, and "in number without number numberless" those that seldom
live a week--perhaps not a day. Up among the loftiest regions you hear
nothing, even when they are all allow; yet, there is music in the sight,
and the thought of the "general dance and minstrelsy" enlivens the air,
where no insect hums. As on your descent you come within hearing of the
"liquid lapses," your heart leaps within you, so merrily do they sing;
the first torrent-rill you meet with you take for your guide, and it
leads you perhaps into some fairy dell, where it wantons awhile in
waterfalls, and then gliding along a little dale of its own with "banks
o' green bracken," finishes its short course in a stream--one of many
that meet and mingle before the current takes the name of river, which
in a mile or less becomes a small woodland lake. There are many such of
rememberable beauty; living lakes indeed, for they are but pausings of
expanded rivers, which again soon pursue their way, and the water-lilies
have ever a gentle motion there as if touched by a tide.

It used, not very long ago, to be pretty generally believed by our
southern brethren, that there were few trees in the Lowlands of
Scotland, and none at all in the Highlands. They had an obscure notion
that trees either could not or would not grow in such a soil and
climate--cold and bleak enough at times and places, heaven knows--yet
not altogether unproductive of diverse stately plants. They know better
now; nor were we ever angry with their ignorance, which was nothing more
than what was to be expected in persons living perpetually at home so
far remote. They rejoice now to visit, and sojourn, and travel here
among us, foreigners and a foreign land no more; and we rejoice to see
and receive them not as strangers, but friends, and are proud to know
they are well pleased to behold our habitation. They do us and our
country justice now, and we have sometimes thought even more than
justice; for they are lost in admiration of our cities--above all, of
Edinburgh--and speak with such raptures of our scenery, that they would
appear to prefer it even to their own. They are charmed with our bare
green hills, with our shaggy brown mountains they are astonished, our
lochs are their delight, our woods their wonder, and they hold up their
hands and clap them at our cliffs. This is generous, for we are not
blind to the fact of England being the most beautiful land on all the
earth. What are our woods to hers! To hers, what are our single trees!
We have no such glorious standards to show as her indomitable and
everlasting oaks. She is all over sylvan--Scotland but here and there;
look on England from any point in any place, and you see she is rich,
from almost any point in any place in Scotland, and you feel that
comparatively she is poor. Yet our Lowlands have long been beautifying
themselves into a resemblance of hers; as for our Highlands, though many
changes have been going on there too, and most we believe for good, they
are in their great features, and in their spirit unalterable by art,
stamped and inspired by enduring Nature.

We have spoken, slightly, of the sylvan scenery of the Highlands. In
Perthshire, especially, it is of rare and extraordinary beauty, and we
are always glad to hear of Englishmen travelling up the Tay and the
Earn. We desire that eyes familiar with all that is umbrageous should
receive their first impressions of our Scottish trees at Duneira and
Dunkeld. Nor will those impressions be weakened as they proceed towards
Blair Atholl. In that famous Pass, they will feel the power possessed by
the sweet wild monotony of the universal birch woods--broken but by grey
crags in every shape--grotesque, fantastical, majestic, magnificent, and
sublime--on the many-ridged mountains, that are loth to lose the green
light of their beloved forests, retain it as long as they can, and on
the masses of living lustre seem to look down with pride from their
skies.

An English forest, meaning thereby any one wide continuous scene of all
kinds of old English trees, with glades of pasture, and it may be of
heath between, with dells dipping down into the gloom, and hillocks
undulating in the light--ravines and chasms too, rills, and rivulets,
and a haunted stream, and not without some melancholy old ruins, and
here and there a cheerful cottage that feels not the touch of time--such
a forest there is not, and hardly can be imagined to be in Scotland. But
in the Highlands, there once were, and are still other forests of quite
a different character, and of equal grandeur. In his "Forest Scenery,"
Gilpin shows that he understood it well; all the knowledge, which as a
stranger, almost of necessity he wanted, Lauder has supplied in his
annotations; and the book should now be in the hands of every one who
cares about the woods. "The English Forest," says Gilpin, "is commonly
composed of woodland views, interspersed with extensive heaths and
lawns. Its trees are oak and beech, whose lively green corresponds
better than the gloomy pine with the nature of the scene, which seldom
assumes the dignity of a mountain one, but generally exhibits a cheerful
landscape. It aspires, indeed, to grandeur; but its grandeur does not
depend, like that of the Scottish forest, on the sublimity of the
objects, but on the vastness of the whole--the extent of its woods and
the wideness of its plains. In its inhabitants also the English forest
differs from the Scottish; instead of the stag and the roebuck, it is
frequented by cattle and fallow-deer, and exchanges the scream of the
eagle and the falcon for the crowing of pheasants, and the melody of the
nightingale. The Scottish forest, no doubt, is the sublimer scene, and
speaks to the imagination in a loftier language than the English forest
can reach. The latter, indeed, often rouses the imagination, but seldom
in so great a degree, being generally content with captivating the eye.
The scenery, too, of the Scottish forest is better calculated to last
through ages than that of the English. The woods of both are almost
destroyed. But while the English forest hath lost all its beauty with
its oaks, and becomes only a desolate waste, the rocks and the
mountains, the lakes and the torrents of the Scottish forest make it
still an interesting scene."

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