On Its North
Bank Lies Lanrick Mead, A Little Grassy Level Where Scott Makes The Tribe
Of Clan Alpine Assemble At The Command Of Roderick Dhu.
At a little
distance from Vennachar lies Loch Achray, which we reached by a road
winding among shrubs and low trees, birches, and wild roses in blossom,
with which the air was fragrant.
Crossing a little stone bridge, which our
driver told us was the Bridge of Turk, we were on the edge of Loch Achray,
a little sheet of water surrounded by wild rocky hills, with here and
there an interval of level grassy margin, or a grove beside the water.
Turning from Loch Achray we reached an inn with a Gaelic name, which I
have forgotten how to spell, and which if I were to spell it, you could
not pronounce. This was on the edge of the Trosachs, and here we
breakfasted.
It is the fashion, I believe, for all tourists to pass through the
Trosachs on foot. The mob of travellers, with whom I found myself on the
occasion - there were some twenty of them - did so, to a man; even the
ladies, who made about a third of the number, walked. The distance to Loch
Katrine is about a mile and a half, between lofty mountains, along a glen
filled with masses of rock, which seem to have been shaken by some
convulsion of nature from the high steeps on either side, and in whose
shelves and crevices time had planted a thick wood of the birch and ash.
But I will not describe the Trosachs after Walter Scott. Head what he says
of them in the first canto of his poem. Loch Katrine, when we reached it,
was crisped into little waves, by a fresh wind from the northwest, and a
boat, with four brawny Highlanders, was waiting to convey us to the head
of the lake. We launched upon the dark deep water, between craggy and
shrubby steeps, the summits of which rose on every side of us; and one of
the rowers, an intelligent-looking man, took upon himself the task of
pointing out to us the places mentioned by the poet. "There," said he, as
we receded from the shore, "is the spot in the Trosachs where Fitz James
lost his gallant gray." He then repeated, in a sort of recitation,
dwelling strongly on the rhyme, the lines in the Lady of the Lake which
relate that incident. "Yonder is the island where Douglass concealed his
daughter. Under that broad oak, whose boughs almost dip into the water,
was the place where her skiff was moored. On that rock, covered with
heath, Fitz James stood and wound his bugle. Near it, but out of sight, is
the silver strand where the skiff received him on board."
Further on, he pointed out, on the south side of the lake, half way up
among the rocks of the mountain, the place of the Goblin Cave, and still
beyond it
"The wild pass, where birches wave,
Of Beal-a-nam-bo."
On the north shore, the hills had a gentler slope, and on their skirts,
which spread into something like a meadow, we saw a solitary dwelling.
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