The Spell Of Scotland - free ebook by Keith Clark

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The Spell Of Scotland

Keith Clark

36 chapters

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36 chapters

The Spell of Scotland BY Keith Clark Author of "The Spell of Spain," etc.

The Spell of Scotland BY Keith Clark Author of "The Spell of Spain," etc.

" A Traveller may lee wi authority. " ( Scotch Proverb ) ILLUSTRATED BOSTON THE PAGE COMPANY MDCCCCXVI Copyright, 1916, by The Page Company All rights reserved First Impression, November, 1916 THE COLONIAL PRESS C. H. SIMONDS COMPANY, BOSTON, U. S. A. TO THE LORD MARISCHAL...

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Berwick

Berwick

The voyager enters Berwick with a curious feeling. It is because of the voyagers who have preceded him that this town is singular among all the towns of the Empire. It is of the Empire, it is of Britain; but battled round about, and battled for as it has been since ambitious time began, it is of neither England nor Scotland. "Our town of Berwick-upon-Tweed," as the phrase still runs in the acts of Parliament, and in the royal proclamations; not England's, not Scotland's. Our town, the King's tow

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Flodden

Flodden

You may go westward from here, by train and coach, and carriage and on foot, to visit this country where every field has been a battlefield, where ruined peel towers finally keep the peace, where castles are in ruins, and a few stately modern homes proclaim the permanence of Scottish nobility; and where there is no bird and no flower unsung by Scottish minstrelsy, or by Scott. Scott is, of course, the poet and prose laureate of the Border. "Marmion" is the lay, almost the guide-book. It should b

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Melrose

Melrose

I remember on my first visit to Melrose, of course during my first visit to Scotland, I scheduled my going so as to arrive there in the evening of a night when the moon would be at the full. I had seen it shine gloriously on the front of York, splendidly on the towers of Durham. What would it not be on fair Melrose, viewed aright? I hurried northward, entered Edinburgh only to convey my baggage, and then closing my eyes resolutely to all the glory and the memory that lay about, I went southward

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Abbotsford

Abbotsford

If "Scott restored Scotland," he built the "keep" which centers all the Scott-land of the Border side. Two miles above Melrose, a charming walk leads to Abbotsford; redeemed out of a swamp into at least the most memory-filled mansion of all the land. Scott, like the monks, could not leave the silver wash of the Tweed; and, more loving than those who dwelt at Melrose and Dryburgh, he placed his Abbot's House where the rippling sound was within a stone's throw. The Tweed is such a storied stream t

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Dryburgh

Dryburgh

Five days after they carried him to rest in the Abbey—rival certainly in this instance of The Abbey of England, where is stored so much precious personal dust. The time had become thrawn; dark skies hung over the Cheviots and the Eildon, and over the haughs of Ettrick and Yarrow; the silver Tweed ran leaden, and moaned in its going; there was a keening in the wind. The road from Abbotsford past Melrose to Dryburgh is—perhaps—the loveliest walk in the United Kingdom; unless it be the road from Co

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Kelso

Kelso

t is a very great little country which lies all about Melrose, with never a bend of the river or a turn of the highway or a shoulder of the hill, nay, scarce the shadow of any hazel bush or the piping of any wee bird but has its history, but serves to recall what once was; and because the countryside is so teeming seems to make yesterday one with to-day. The distances are very short, even between the places the well-read traveler knows; with many places that are new along the way, each haunted w

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Jedburgh

Jedburgh

From Kelso I took train to the Border town which even the Baedeker admits has had "a stormy past," and where the past still lingers; nay, not lingers, but is; there is no present in Jedburgh. It is but ten miles to the Border; more I think that at any other point in all the blue line of the Cheviot, is one conscious of the Border; consciousness of antiquity and of geography hangs over Jedburgh. It lies, a hill town, on the banks of the Jed; "sylvan Jed" said Thomson, "crystal Jed" said Burns; a

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Selkirk

Selkirk

The sentimental journeymen—with whom I count myself openly—may hesitate to visit Yarrow. It lies so near the Melrose country, and is so much a part of that, in song and story, that it would seem like leaving out the fragrance of the region to omit Yarrow. And yet—. One has read "Yarrow Unvisited," one of the loveliest of Wordsworth's poems. And one has read "Yarrow Visited." And the conclusion is too easy that if the unvisitings and visitings differ as much as the poems it surely were better not

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St. Mary's

St. Mary's

And soon we are at St. Mary's Loch—which we have come to see. To one who comes from a land of lakes, from the Land of the Sky Blue Water, there must be at first a sudden rush of disappointment. This is merely a lake, merely a stretch of water. The hills about are all barren, rising clear and round against the sky. They fold and infold as though they would shield the lake bereft of trees, as though they would shut out the world. Here and there, but very infrequent, is a cluster of trees; for the

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The Castle

The Castle

And there is the castle. Nowhere in all the world is castle more strategically set to guard the city and to guard the memories of the city and the beauty. For the castle is Edinburgh. It stood there, stalwart in the plain, thousands and thousands of years ago, this castle hill which invited a castle as soon as man began to fortify himself. It has stood here a thousand years as the bulwark of man against man. Certain it will stand there a thousand years to come. And after—after man has destroyed

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High Street

High Street

If the Baedeker with a cautious reservation, declares Princes Street "Perhaps" the handsomest in Europe, there is no reservation in the guide-book report of Taylor, the "Water Poet," who wrote of the High Street in the early Sixteen Hundreds, "the fairest and goodliest streete that ever my eyes beheld." Surely it was then the most impressive street in the world. Who can escape a sharp impression to-day? It was then the most curious street in the world, and it has lost none of its power to evoke

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Holyrood

Holyrood

Holyrood, ruined as it is, empty as it is, spurious as it is, still can house the Stewarts. Nowhere else are they so completely and splendidly Stewart. It is the royalest race which ever played at being sovereign; in sharp contrast with the heavier, more successful Tudors; crafty but less crafty than the Medici; amorous but more loyal than the Bourbons. Never did kings claim sovereignty through a more divine right—and only one (whisper sometimes intimates that he was not Stewart, but substitute;

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Princes Gardens

Princes Gardens

There are certain public places of beauty where the beauty is so enveloping that the place seems one's very own, seems possessed. That, I take it, is the great democratic triumph, in that it has made beauty a common possession and places of beauty as free to the people as is the air. Chief of these is Princes Street Gardens. I could, in truth I have, spent there days and half-days, and twilights that I would willingly have lengthened to midnights, since the northern night never quite descends, b

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Calton Hill

Calton Hill

Perhaps the best view of Edinburgh—only perhaps, for each view differs, and you have not seen the whole city unless you have seen it from the various vantage points—is that from the Calton Hill. For a very good reason. The Hill itself is negligible enough, although it is impossible to understand Edinburgh, to understand Scotland, unless you have looked on the architectural remnants on this Hill, and considered them philosophically. But, as Stevenson said—"Of all places for a view, the Calton Hil

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Kirkcaldy

Kirkcaldy

If Kirkcaldy was a "lang toun" in the olden days, it is longer to-day, stretching from Linktown to Dysart, and broadening inland to Gallatown, where they make the famous Wemyss pottery. To-day Kirkcaldy makes linoleum and jute and engineering works, and it is the center of a string of fishing villages, a "metropolitan borough system," hundreds of boats fishing the North Sea with KY marked as their home port, when their sailor men make home in any of these picturesque and smelling villages, St. M

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St. Andrews

St. Andrews

Past Kirkcaldy the road leaves the sea and runs northward through meadows between fields which have the look of centuries-old cultivation, at peace like the fields and villages of the English Midland, to St. Andrews. "St. Andrews by the Northern Sea, A haunted town it is to me! A little city, worn and gray, The gray North Ocean girds it round; And o'er the rocks, and up the bay, The long sea-rollers surge and sound; And still the thin and biting spray Drives down the melancholy street, And still

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Dunfermline

Dunfermline

"The King sits in Dunfermline toun Drinking the blude-red wine." Because of such lines as these I would cross far seas, merely to have been, if far lonely destructive centuries after, in the very place of their being. For Dunfermline is surely a very kingly name for a king's town, and "blude-red" wine is of such a difference from mere red, or blood-red wine. What wonder that Alexander III, of whom it is written, went to his death over at Kinghorn in such a tragic way! But the king who forever si

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Loch Leven

Loch Leven

And on to Loch Leven. I cannot think that any one can come upon this castle without emotion. Or he should never come to Scotland. It is a famous fishing lake, a peculiar kind of trout are abundant, twenty-five thousand taken from it each year; rather I have given the round numbers, but an exact toll of the fish taken is required by law, and for the past year it was, with Scottish accuracy, something more or something less than twenty-five thousand. The lake is controlled altogether by an anglers

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Perth

Perth

Perth may be the Fair City, but it is scarce fair among cities, and is chiefly regarded even by itself as a point of departure, the Gate of the Highlands. The railway platform is at least a third of a mile long, and very bewildering to the unsuspecting visitor who thought he was merely coming to the ancient Celtic capital. For, very far backward, this was the chief city of the kingdom, before Scotland had spread down to the Forth, and down to the Border. Even so recently (?) as the time of James

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Braemar

Braemar

And then the sight of Braemar, and a consciousness that if you are about to spend more money at the Fife Arms or the Invercauld than any but royalty has a right to spend—royalty not having earned it—the adventure has been worth it. And to have forgotten but as the coach flashes by to read the tablet— "Here Robert Louis Stevenson lived in the summer of 1881, and wrote 'Treasure Island.'" this is to be home again. Of course our first pilgrimage was to the Invercauld Arms, where we again set up the

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Aberdeen

Aberdeen

There is no city in Scotland which seems to me to have more personality, a more distinct personality, than Aberdeen. It is plainly a self-sufficient city, and both in politics and in religion it thinks for itself, mindless if its thinking is not that of the rest of the kingdom. Its provost cannot leave its borders; once he attended a battle, many and many a year ago, nineteen miles from the city at Harlow, and sad to say, he was killed. So now the provost remains in the city, he cannot leave it

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Dunnottar

Dunnottar

The rocks which were my goal were those just below Stonehaven. At Stonehaven the French had landed supplies for the Forty Five—as from Montrose, a few miles farther down the coast, King James had sailed after the failure of the Fifteen. Fishing vessels lay idly in the narrow harbour, their tall masts no doubt come "frae Norroway o'er the faem," since the trees on the east coast have not increased from that day when Dr. Johnson found the sight of a tree here equal to that of a horse in Venice. Du

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Peterhead

Peterhead

One brief journey I made along the bleak coast up to the town of Peterhead, which looks nearest to Norroway across the foam, and has a most uncompromising aspect. Peterhead is a penal town to-day; and it is one of a string of fishing villages, picturesque as fishing villages are, except to the nose, "that despised poet of the senses"; and not picturesque to the people, who lack the colour of fisherfolk in Brittany. But I wished to see with mine own eyes the ruins of Inverugie. It is one of the c

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Cawdor

Cawdor

As we neared one of the last of the Northern stations, we turned to each other and asked, "How far is't called to Forres?" And suddenly all was night and witch dance and omen and foretelling. For it is here in the palace that Banquo's ghost appeared and foretold all that history we have been meeting as we came northward. And next is the town of Nairn, which has become something of a city since Boswell found it "a miserable place"; it is still long and narrow, stretching to the sea with its fishe

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Inverness

Inverness

The four chief cities of Scotland are arranged like a diamond for excursion and for history. Always Scotland, unlike Gaul, has been divided into four parts. Places of pilgrimage were Scone, Dundee, Paisley, Melrose. Places for the quartering of Montrose were Glasgow, Perth, Aberdeen, Stirling. And now four places are rivals; in trade somewhat, but Glasgow leads in beauty, but Edinburgh, after all, is unique in dignity, but Aberdeen is un bending; in the picturesque there remains Inverness. The c

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The Orkneys

The Orkneys

Scotland is divided by a deep geologic cleft. Glenmore, the Great Glen, runs southwesterly from Inverness to Fort William and Oban, cutting the country into two parts. One is Scotland; the other is the West, the Highlands and the Islands. One is known, the other unknown. One has been prosperous, royal, noble; the other has been wild, independent, chief and clans holding together. To-day, if the East is strangely quiet, the West is strangely silent. In the East you know things have happened; remn

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The Caledonian Canal

The Caledonian Canal

The Great Glen itself is a necessary journey, even though no side trips be made. I must believe that every one who has ever taken it and written account, journeyed down this waterway in a Scotch mist; which, of course, is not a mist at all, but something finite and tangible. I, myself, went my ways that way. And, of course, those who had come north the day before me, and those who came south the day after, came through magnificent clearness, and marvels of marvels, Ben Nevis cleared of mists to

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Oban

Oban

here is something theatrical about Oban, artificial, and therefore among Scottish towns Oban is a contrast. It is as uncovenanted as—joy! And it is very beautiful, "the gay and generous port of Oban," as William Winter calls it, set in its amphitheater of high hills, and stretching about its harbour, between confining water and hill. An embankment holds it in, and at twilight the scimeter drawn from the scabbard of night flashes with light, artificial, but as wonderful at Oban as at Monte Carlo.

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Iona

Iona

There is no pilgrimage which can be taken to any shrine excelling pilgrimage to Iona. And all the pilgrim way is lined with memory and paved with beauty. On almost every promontory stand ruined castles, not so frequent as the watch towers on the Mediterranean heights, and therefore not so monotonous. One knows that each of these, as of those, has had its history, and here one ponders that history, perhaps tries to remember it, or, tries to evoke it. Dunolly which we visited in the day's drift fr

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The Trossachs

The Trossachs

To write a guide to the Trossachs—that has been done and done more than once; done with much minutiæ, with mathematics, with measurement; to-day it is possible to follow the stag at eve, and all the rest of it, in all its footsteps; to follow much more accurately than did even Sir Walter; to follow vastly more accurately than did James Fitz James. For, in the first place, the world is not so stupendous a place as it was in the days of Fitz James, or of Sir Walter. The Rockies and the Andes have

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Stirling

Stirling

Stirling stands up boldly—in the midst of Scotland. That is the feeling I had in coming on it by train from the West. Highlanders coming on it from the North, English coming on it from the South, must have seen even more conclusively that Stirling rises out of the midst of Scotland. I should have preferred to approach it on foot. But then, this is the only conquering way in which to make one's descent on any corner of the world one seeks to possess; either on one's own valiant two feet or on the

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Glasgow

Glasgow

cannot think why, in a book to be called deliberately "The Spell of Scotland," there should be a chapter on Glasgow. I remember that in his "Picturesque Notes," to the second edition Robert Louis Stevenson added a foot-note in rebuke to the Glaswegians who had taken to themselves much pleasure at the reservations of Stevenson's praise of Edinburgh—"But remember I have not yet written a book on Glasgow." He never did. And did any one ever write "Picturesque Notes on Glasgow"? I remember that thir

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Ayr

Ayr

Always the West is the democratic corner of a country; or, let me say almost always, if you have data wherewith to dispute a wholesale assertion. Sparta was west of Athens, La Rochelle was west of Paris, Switzerland was west of Gesler; Norway is west of Sweden, the American West is west of the American East. And Galloway and Ayrshire are the west Lowlands of Scotland. The West is newer always, freer, more open, more space and more lure for independence. The West is never feudal, until the West m

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Dumfries

Dumfries

It is a proud little city, more than a bit self-satisfied. It realizes that its possession of the mortal remains of Burns gives it large claim in his immortality, and the Burns monument is quite the center of the town. Yet Dumfries is well satisfied from other argument. Historically, it goes back to Bruce and Comyn, and even to a Roman beyond. But there is nothing left of old Greyfriars where the killing of Comyn took place. Dumfries had its moment in the Forty Five, for the Bonnie Prince was he

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Allardyce, A. : Balmoral. F. (For Deeside and Dunnottar.) Anderson : Guide to the Highlands, 3 vols. Armstrong, Sir Walter : Raeburn. Barr, Robert : A Prince of Good Fellows. F. (James V.) Barrie, James : Auld Licht Idylls. F. — Little Minister. F. Barrington, Michael : The Knight of the Golden Sword. F. (Claverhouse.) Baxter, J. Dowling : The Meeting of the Ways. F. (The Roman Wall.) Bell, J. J. : Wee Macgreegor. F. Black, William : Wild Eelin. F. (Inverness.) — MacLeod of Dare. F. Mull. — Stra

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