Footsteps of Dr. Johnson (Scotland)/Chapter 12
Anoch to Glenelg (September 1).
It was a long and heavy journey that this day lay before our travellers, so that they rose in good time and started about eight o'clock. Boswell, who had awakened very early, had been a little scared by the thought that "their landlord, being about to emigrate, might murder them to get their money, and lay it upon the soldiers in the barn." "When I got up," he adds, "I found Dr. Johnson asleep in his miserable stye, as I may call it, with a coloured handkerchief round his head. With difficulty could I awaken him." So miserable had their beds looked that "we had some difficulty," writes Johnson, "in persuading ourselves to lie down in them. At last we ventured, and I slept very soundly in the vale of Glenmorison amidst the rocks and mountains." The road which they were to follow is but little traversed at the present day, for tourists either keep to the south by the Caledonian Canal, or to the north by the railway to Strome Ferry. They thereby miss, to use Boswell's words, "a scene of as wild nature as one could see." To this part of my tour I had long looked forward. It is many a year since I first formed the wish to visit that "narrow valley not very flowery, but sufficiently verdant," where Johnson planned the history of his tour.
"I sat down on a bank (he says) such as a writer of romance might have delighted to feign. I had indeed no trees to whisper over my head, but a clear rivulet streamed at my feet. The day was calm, the air was soft, and all was rudeness, silence, and solitude. Before me and on either side were high hills, which by hindering the eye from ranging, forced the mind to find entertainment for itself. Whether I spent the hour well I know not, for here I first conceived the thought of this narration."
In a letter to Mrs. Thrale he describes the same scene, but makes no mention of the book which he had in mind.
"I sat down to take notes on a green bank, with a small stream running at my feet, in the midst of savage solitude, with mountains before me, and on either hand covered with heath. I looked around me, and wondered that I was not more affected, but the mind is not at all times equally ready to be put in motion. If my mistress and master, and Queeney[1] had been there, we should have produced some reflections among us either poetical or philosophical, for though solitude be the nurse of woe,[2] conversation is often the parent of remarks and discoveries."
My hopes of finding this classical rivulet were great. A kind correspondent, the Rev. Alexander Matheson, minister of Glen Shiel, had been told by some old people of the neighbourhood that they knew by tradition the exact spot. Though he had nearly twenty miles to come, he undertook to show me it. I arrived at the little inn at Clunie earlier than he had expected, and there meeting him found to my disappointment that I had passed the spot some six or seven miles. Both horses and travellers were too weary to retrace their steps. The tradition of the old people had on further investigation proved to be worthless. Like myself he had been at first misled by Boswell's narrative, which places this happy valley at the western end of Glen Shiel. But on looking at Johnson's account, aided too by his own knowledge of the locality, he had detected the error. The rivulet by which they had made their noonday halt must have been in Glen Clunie, near the eastern end of the loch, for Johnson describes how after their rest "they continued their journey along the side of a loch which at last ended in a river broad and shallow. Beyond it is a valley called Glen Shiel." For my disappointment there was some consolation to be found. The long drought of nearly two months which had preceded my tour had dried up those rivulets which Johnson crossed, running, as he describes them, "with a clear, shallow stream over a hard, pebbly bottom."
CLUNIE.
The main river had still water in it; but we saw few indeed of "the streams rushing down the steep" which fed it. In that part of the narrow valley where he reposed we should have had only a choice of dried-up watercourses, had we tried to select the bank on which he sat. For me Yarrow still remains unvisited. I have still to see
"Its silvery current flow
With uncontrolled meanderings."
Passing through Glen Clunie, which now boasts of a little inn where the traveller can find clean, if homely lodgings, they reached Glen Shiel. It is worth notice that though the word Glen is in Johnson's Dictionary, so unfamiliar was it at this time to English ears, that using it in the letter in which he describes this day's journey, he adds, "so they call a valley." In Glen Shiel, writes Boswell, they saw "where the battle was fought in 1719." It was in the second and last of the Spanish invasions of our island that this fight took place. An armament of ten ships of war and transports, having on board 6,000 regular troops with arms for 12,000 men, had sailed from Cadiz under the command of the Duke of Ormond, in the hope of restoring the Stuarts to that throne which they had forfeited by their tyranny and their folly. The winds and waves fought for us, as they had fought long before in the time of the Great Armada. Two ships only succeeded in reaching the coast of Scotland. They landed their troops near Eilan Donan Castle on Loch Duich, the seat of the chief of the Mackenzies. Four years earlier the fighting men of
EILAN DONAN.
this clan had gone off to join the forces of the Earl of Mar, and had taken part in the battle of Sheriffmuir. The grandfather of the present minister of the parish in which Eilan Donan stands, had known an aged parishioner, who had seen the clansmen dance on the leads of the castle the evening before they started on their expedition. There were among them four chieftans, each bearing the name of John, and known as "the four Johns of Scotland." They all danced at Eilan Donan, and all fell at Sheriffmuir. I was told also of a tradition which still exists among the people, that at Glen Shiel the clansmen had sent their women and children to wave flags on the hills as if they were a fresh body of men. Deceived by this appearance, the regular troops had at first retreated. The battle with the Spaniards was fought at a spot where on both sides the mountains draw close, and the valley narrows to a ravine through which the river when swollen by the rains rushes foaming along in fine cascades. Along the right bank the rocks were so steep that till the present road was cut no passage was possible; on the left bank there was a narrow opening beneath a precipitous crag. A little above the uppermost of the waterfalls the country folks still point out "the black colonel's grave" some swarthy Spaniard, perhaps, who fell that day far from the cork-groves of Southern Spain. They tell too how the Spanish soldiers who surrendered themselves as prisoners of war first cast their arms into the deep pool below.
GLEN SHIEL BATTLE-FIELD.
A dreadful story has been recorded by an Englishman who lived for many years at Inverness. "He had been assured," he writes, "by several officers who were in the battle, that some of the English soldiers who were dangerously wounded were left behind for three or four hours. When parties were sent to them with hurdles made to serve as litters, they were all found stabbed with dirks in twenty places."[3] The story may not be true. If it is, the clansmen were as savage after Glen Shiel, as were the regular troops twenty-seven years later after Culloden.
In the warm sunshine of a day in June we sat on a bank above the dark pool beneath whose eddying waters some of the arms perhaps still lie. There was a gentle breeze, the larks were singing over our heads, the water was sparkling and splashing, the sides of the torrent were overhung with the mountain ash and were green with ferns, but below us and in front lay a scene of wild desolation. Far off to the west was the mountain which Boswell had pointed out to Johnson as being like a cone. "No, Sir," said Johnson.
Faochag.
"It would be called so in a book, and when a man comes to look at it, he sees it is not so. It is indeed pointed at the top; but one side of it is larger than the other." Its Gaelic name, Faochag, which signifies whelk, shows that though Johnson's objection may have been a proof of his "perceptive quickness," yet Boswell's description was quite accurate enough for two men out on a tour. We tried in vain to distinguish which among the mountains was "the considerable protuberance." Perhaps the Johnson Club may not disdain to appoint a committee who shall be instructed to bid farewell for a time to the delights of Fleet Street and visit Glen Shiel, with full powers to come to a final decision in this important matter. A long drive down the steep pass brought us to the place which Boswell said was "a rich green valley, comparatively speaking." A little way beyond it lay the twenty huts which formed the village of Auchnasheal. "One of them," says Johnson, "was built of loose stones, piled up with great thickness into a strong, though not solid wall. From this house we obtained some great pails of milk, and having brought bread with us were very liberally regaled." The curious scene which they witnessed here is thus described by Boswell:—
"We sat down on a green turf-seat at the end of a house; they brought us out two wooden dishes of milk,[4] which we tasted. One of them was frothed like a syllabub. I saw a woman preparing it with such a slick as is used for chocolate and in the same manner. We had a considerable circle about us, men, women, and children, all McCraas, Lord Seaforth's people. Not one of them could speak English. I observed to Dr. Johnson, it was much the same as being with a tribe of Indians. Johnson: 'Yes, sir, but not so terrifying.' I gave all who chose it snuff and tobacco. Governor Trapaud had made us buy a quantity at Fort Augustus, and put them up in small parcels. I also gave each person a piece of wheat bread, which they had never tasted before. 1 then gave a penny apiece to each child. I told Dr. Johnson of this: upon which he called to Joseph and our guides, for change for a shilling, and declared that he would distribute among the children. Upon this being announced in Erse, there was a great stir: not only did some children come running down from neighbouring huts, but I observed one black-haired man, who had been with us all along, had gone off, and returned, bringing a very young child. My fellow-traveller then ordered the children to be drawn up in a row, and he dealt about his copper, and made them and their parents all happy."
"It was the best day the McCraas declared they had seen since the time of the old laird of Macleod." He, no doubt, had made a halt in their valley on his way to or from Skye. The snuff and tobacco must have won their hearts more even than the money. "Nothing," Johnson was told, "gratified the Highlanders so much." Knox recorded a few years later that "any stranger who cannot take a pinch of snuff or give one is looked upon with an evil eye."[5] So uncommon was wheaten bread even a quarter of a century later, that Dr. Garnett, after leaving Inverary, tasted none till he reached Inverness.[6] At present it can be had in most places, being brought by the steamers in large boxes from Glasgow, and transported inland in the country carts. The way in which the villagers had gathered round the travellers had startled even Johnson, stout-hearted though he was. "I believe," he says, "they were without any evil intention, but they had a very savage wildness of aspect and manner." My friend, the minister of Glen Shiel, pointed out to me that it was no doubt mere curiosity which brought them round him. Johnson was as strange a sight to them as they were to Johnson. An earlier traveller in the Hebrides has expressed this very well. "Every man and thing I met with," he writes, "seemed a novelty. I thought myself entering upon a new scene of nature, but nature rough and unpolished. Men, manners, habits, buildings, everything different from our own; and if we thought them rude and barbarous, no doubt the people had the same opinion of what belonged to us, and the wonder was mutual."[7]
Auchnasheal has been swept away; nothing of it is left but a few banks of earth and the foundations of the one stone house. The same fate has befallen it which befell that other village near Fort Augustus where Coleridge heard a Highland widow mourn over the desolation of the land:
"Within this space,' she said, 'how short a time back! there lived a hundred and seventy-three persons, and now there is only a shepherd and an underling or two. Yes, Sir! One hundred and seventy-three Christian souls, man, woman, boy, girl, and babe, and in almost every home an old man by the fire-side, who would tell you of the troubles before our roads were made; and many a brave youth among them who loved the birthplace of his forefathers, yet would swing about his broad-sword, and want but a word to march off to the battles over sea; aye, Sir, and many a good lass who had a respect for herself. Well, but they are gone, and with them the bristled bear [barley] and the pink haver [oats], and the potato plot that looked as gay as any flower-garden with its blossoms! I sometimes fancy that the very birds are gone—all but the crows and the gleads [kites]. Well, and what then? Instead of us all, there is one shepherd man, and it may be a pair of small lads—and a many, many sheep! And do you think, Sir, that God allows of such proceedings?'"[8]
The desolation had already begun even at the time of our travellers' visit. Their host of the evening before was following seventy of the dalesmen to America, whither they had been driven by a rack-renting landlord. "I asked, him," writes Johnson, "whether they would stay at home if they were well-treated. He answered with indignation, that no man willingly left his native country."
Taking leave of these inoffensive, if wild-looking people, our travellers rode on, much refreshed by their repast. They had, as Johnson complained, "very little entertainment, as they travelled either for the eye or ear. There are, I fancy," he adds, "no singing birds in the Highlands." It is odd that he should have looked for singing-birds on the 1st of September. Had it been earlier in the summer he would have found melody enough. Nowhere have I heard the thrushes sing more sweetly than at Glenelg. Wesley, visiting Inverness on an early day of May, "heard abundance of birds welcoming the return of spring."[9] If so late in the summer there was no music for the ear, the eye surely should have been something more than entertained, when in the evening light the first sight was caught of Loch Duich and the waters of the Atlantic, and the barrier of mountains which so nobly encloses them. Yet they are passed over in silence by both our travellers. So fine is the scenery here that I longed to make a stay in the comfortable inn at Shiel, near the head of the loch. But we were forced to press on, having first witnessed, however, sheep-shearing on a large scale on a farm close by. In front of a storing-house for wool fifteen men were seated all hard at work with their shears, their dogs lying at their feet. They wore coloured jerseys in which the shades of blue and green were all the pleasanter to the eye because they were somewhat faded. Young lads were bringing up the sheep from the fold. The forelegs of each animal were tied, it was then lifted on to a narrow bank of turf which had been raised in front of each shepherd, thrown on its back, and in a moment the busy shears were at work. In the long summer day a quick hand could finish eighty, we were told. As soon as the fleece fell loose, an old woman came forward, folded it up tight, and carried it into the store-house; while a boy, dipping the branding-iron into boiling pitch, scored the side of each sheep with a deep black mark. From time to time the farmer went round with a bottle and a small glass, and gave each man a dram of pure whisky. Not far from here on the banks of the loch was an old house where it was said that Johnson made a halt. It is so pleasant a place, with its grove of trees and its garden of roses, and so kindly was I welcomed, that I would willingly believe the tradition. I could wish, however, that he and Boswell had not treated it with the same neglect as they did the view. Had their reception been as kind as mine they would certainly have expressed their gratitude. It was here that I was told of the address which he made to the mountain at the foot of which the house stands, and up which he was now to climb. "Good-bye, Mam Rattakin, I hope never to see your face again."[10] They did not reach it till late in the afternoon. Both Johnson and the horses were weary, and they had "a terrible steep to climb." Going down was almost worse than going up, for his horse now and then stumbled beneath his great weight. On the edge of one of the precipices he was, he thought, in real danger. He grew fretful with fatigue, and was not comforted by the absurd attempt made by his guide to amuse him.
"Having heard him, in the forenoon, express a pastoral pleasure on seeing the goats browsing, just when the doctor was uttering his displeasure, the fellow cried, with a very Highland accent, 'See, such pretty goats!' Then he whistled whu! and made them jump. Little did he conceive what Dr. Johnson was. Here now was a common ignorant Highland clown imagining that he could divert, as one does a child, Dr. Samuel Johnson! The ludicrousness, absurdity, and extraordinary contrast between what the fellow fancied, and the reality, was truly comic."
At the bottom of the mountain a dreary ride of six or seven long miles through a flat and uninteresting country still awaited them. They were too tired even for talk. Boswell urged on his horse so that some preparation might be made for the great man at the inn at Glenelg.
"He called me back," he writes, "with a tremendous shout, and was really in a passion with me for leaving him. I told him my intentions, but he was not satisfied, and said, 'Do you know, I should as soon have thought of picking a pocket, as doing so.' Boswell. 'I am diverted with you, Sir.' Johnson. 'Sir, I could never be diverted with incivility. Doing such a thing makes one lose confidence in him who has done it, as one cannot tell what he may do next.'"
Even after he had reached the inn his violence continued. "Sir," he said, "had you gone on, I was thinking that I should have returned with you to Edinburgh, and then have parted from you,
and never spoken to you more." The next morning "he owned that he had spoken in passion; that he would not have done what he threatened; and that if he had, he should have been ten times worse than I; and he added, 'Let's think no more on't.'" As we drove down the mountain on a summer afternoon the peacefulness of the pastoral scene, the sheep dotted about quietly nibbling the grass, with their lambs by their side, the hazy air on the hills, all seemed to contrast strangely with the violence of his passion. To an old man, however, tired with a long day's ride over rough ways, and in want of his dinner, something must be forgiven. He is not 
the only tourist who, in his need of rest and food, has relieved his feelings by quarrelling with his companion.
When they were not far from the end of their ride they passed the barracks at Bernera. "I looked at them wistfully," writes Boswell; "as soldiers have always everything in the best order; but there was only a sergeant and a few men there." Pennant, who had visited them a year earlier, describes them as "handsome and capacious, designed to hold two hundred men; at present occupied only by a corporal and six soldiers. The country lament this neglect. They arc now quite sensible of the good effects of the military, by introducing peace and security; they fear lest the evil days should return, and the ancient thefts be renewed as soon as the banditti find this protection of the people removed."[11] The banditti were the Highlanders of this district in general. Less than thirty years earlier "the whole country between Loch Ness and the sea to the west had been," he says, "a den of thieves. The constant petition at grace of the old Highland chieftains was delivered with great fervour in these terms: 'Lord, turn the world upside down, that Christians may make bread out of it.'"[12]
The country had to lament a loss of trade as well as of security. The cottagers who had been drawn together to supply the wants of the soldiers are described by Knox, a few years later, as being in the utmost poverty. The barracks had fallen into so ruinous a state, that it justified the report that the building of them had been "a notorious job." Even the sergeant and his six soldiers had been removed. "I was entertained," says Knox, "by the commanding officer and his whole garrison. The former was an old corporal, and the latter was the corporal's wife: the entertainment snuff and whisky."[13]
When at length our travellers, "weary and disgusted," reached Glenelg, "our humour," writes Johnson, "was not much mended by our inn, which, though it was built of lime and slate, the Highlander's description of a house which he thinks magnificent, had neither wine, bread, eggs, nor anything that we could eat or drink. When we were taken upstairs a dirty fellow bounced out of the bed where one of us was to lie. Boswell blustered, but nothing could be got. At last a gentleman in the neighbourhood, who heard of our arrival, sent us rum and white sugar. Boswell was now provided fur in part, and the landlord prepared some mutton chops which we could not eat, and killed two hens, of which Boswell made his servant broil a limb, with what effect I know not. We had a lemon and a piece of bread, which supplied me with my supper." Boswell's account of the place is no less dismal. "There was no provender for our horses; so they were sent to grass with a man to watch them. A maid showed us upstairs into a room damp and dirty, with bare walls, a variety of bad smells, a coarse black greasy fir table, and forms of the same kind; and out of a
SKYE, FROM GLENELG.
wretched bed started a fellow from his sleep, like Edgar in King Lear, 'Poor Tom's a cold.'" Johnson slept in his clothes and great coat, on a bed of hay; "Boswell laid sheets upon his bed which he had brought from home, and reposed in linen like a gentleman."
Here, again, was I struck by the contrast between the past and the present. Of the old inn, with all its magnificence of lime and slate, not even the site is known. In its place stands a roomy and comfortable hotel. It was on the 21st of June when we visited 
it, and we found it halt-asleep and almost empty, for the season had not yet begun. At the most delightful time of the year, when the days were at their longest and no candles were burnt, there was scarcely a single stranger to enjoy the quiet and the beauty. There were woods and flowering shrubs, rhododendrons and the Portugal laurel, and close to the water's edge the laburnum in full bloom. There were all the sights of peaceful country life the cocks crowing, the sheep answering with their bleats their bleating lambs, the cows with their calves in the noonday heat seeking the shade of the tall and wide-spreading trees. The waves lapped gently on the shore, and in the distance, below the rocky coast of Skye, the waters were whitened by the countless sea-birds. We drove up a beautiful valley to the Pictish forts, and saw an eagle hovering high above us.
- ↑ He means Mr. and Mrs. Thrale and their eldest daughter.
- ↑ Johnson is quoting Parnell's Hymn to Contentment. Pope, in Donne's Satires Versified (iv. 185), calls "solitude the nurse of sense."
- ↑ Letters from a Gentleman in the North of Scotland, ii. 179.
- ↑ Johnson calls them pails. In his time pails were only made of wood, if we can trust his definition of the word in his Dictionary.
- ↑ J. Knox's Tour through the Highlands in 1786, p. 255.
- ↑ T. Garnett's Observations, &c., ii. 12.
- ↑ W. Sacheverell's Account of the Isle of Man, &c.,
- ↑ Lay Sermon, ed. 1870, p. 427.
- ↑ Wesley's Journal, iv. 275.
- ↑ See ante, p. 2. Boswell calls the mountain Rattakin, Johnson Ratiken. Its name I was told is properly written Rattagan.
- ↑ Voyage to the Hebrides, ed. 1774, p. 336.
- ↑ Ib., p. 345.
- ↑ Tour through the Highlands in 1786, pp. cxx, 103. I do not know whether an earlier instance can be found of the expression "notorious job" than the above.