The Heart of Scotland

A HIGHLAND STRATH

many-havened coast was the nursery of the Scottish navy and commerce. The most famous national product, next to flesh and blood and whisky, is golf, whose headquarters are in the East Neuk of this choice shire. When we consider the many towns of Fife, its wealth in horn and corn, and coal and fish, its output of textile fabrics, and remember its past history, should we not allow that this and not Perthshire is truly the heart of Scotland? It has even a Wales in Kinross, whose craving for separate status might one day raise a troublesome question. Nor does it want a classic bard to invoke for it the trumpet of fame:

Gentle reader, can you guess what standard poet I quote? Je vous le donne en cent. The most hackneyed citation, it seems, ought nowadays to be labelled, for when in Bonnie Scotland I aired a verse beginning, "Fairshon had a son who married Noah's daughter," a certain Caledonian newspaper critic was moved to applaud by calling for the author. Such be the proficient patriots who scunner at King Edward's title as Seventh across the Tweed, and at other bawbeeworths of offence to Scottish nationality!

After this fling by the way, I fall back into my jogtrot. It seems claimable for Fife, then, that its county council be glorified as a parliament sitting by turns at Cupar, Dunfermline, and Kirkcaldy; or, at least, that in a revived Scottish parliament its representatives shall assert their old privilege of voting first, before that presumptuous Perthshire. The sovereign's title raises some difficulty. Edward VII., of course, is out of the question. But it has to be admitted that Edward I. of England received the homage of Fife at Dunfermline, so his present Majesty might justly be styled Edward II. qua King of Fife. There being, indeed, a doubt as to how far Edward Baliol made his reign a fait accompli in Fife, some precisians propose to meet the case by treating our king locally as the second and a half Edward. In the army, of course, it is not to be borne that the Fife contingent shall be lumped together with English forces. In future, one or more British regiments must be equipped and distinguished as Fifers. The epithet Fifeish should come into more constant use; but as misconception might arise from vulgar misuse, Fifeian may be coined as an untarnished adjective, the old one to be applied to the less admirable or more commonplace features of the county, its distilleries, railway junctions, colliery villages, east winds, and so forth, while a discrimination is to be made in quoting those qualities and achievements that have made Fife the noblest member of the greatest empire in the world, whose style shall forthwith run, at least in local acts, The Kingdom of Fife, with the adjacent kingdoms of Scotland, England, and Ireland, and the rest of the British dominions, etc., etc.

For Perthshire, I make no such pretensions to isolated dignity, only for having set a pattern to all Scotland, and thus exhibiting some title to be taken as hub of the universe. But in rambling over its hills and glens, I hope to let it show for itself the truth of Scott's estimate, justified by his reference to other writers, such as might be quoted by the hundred, all in the same tale of due admiration.

It is long since Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, with that excellent taste which characterises her writings, expressed her opinion that the most interesting district of every country, and that which exhibits the varied beauties of natural scenery in greatest perfection, is that where the mountains sink down upon the champaign, or more level land. The most picturesque, if not the highest hills, are also to be found in the county of Perth. The rivers find their way out of the mountainous region by the wildest leaps, and through the most romantic passes connecting the Highlands with the Lowlands. Above, the vegetation of a happier climate and soil is mingled with the magnificent characteristics of mountain-scenery; and woods, groves, and thickets in profusion, clothe the base of the hills, ascend up the ravines, and mingle with the precipices. It is in such favoured regions that the traveller finds what the poet Gray, or some one else, has termed, Beauty lying in the lap of Terror.

II

TAYSIDE

I see that certain critics accuse me of being flippant, discursive, garrulous, gossiping, everything that your gravely plodding writers are not, and they no doubt find readers to their mind. It must be confessed that as a model of style I have an eye rather on the upper waters of the Tay, with its swirls and eddies and ripples, than on its broad and placid flow by the fat Carse of Gowrie. All I can say for myself is that I keep my course amid windings and tumblings, and that my foaming shallows may sweep along the same silt as loads drumlier currents lower down. Yet one loves to please all tastes, within reason, so for once let me try to be as steady and slow as the mill-lead at Perth, which, if all traditions be true, began as a Roman aqueduct, and so may give itself airs of classical authority.

The Tay, then, is the principal river of Scotland, which discharges into the North Sea a larger volume of water than any other in Britain. Its head-streams rise upon the borders of Argyll, but only after issuing from Loch Tay does it assume a name apparently derived from a Celtic word for quiet-flowing water, in other parts of the kingdom taking such forms as Taw and Tavy. The Tay has its course of 120 miles almost entirely in Perthshire, receiving many tributaries from the mountains on either side, and thus draining a basin of some 2400 square miles. At Perth it becomes navigable for small vessels, and debouches at the thriving port of Dundee, where its estuary separates the shires of Forfar and Fife. For further details, see any geographical work.

There now! no Aristarchus can find fault with that paragraph, in which I have not broken into a single anecdote or metaphor, though tempted to say en passant that the basin of the Tay only needs flattening out to over-measure that of the Thames. But this formal style sits on me as uneasily as Saul's armour upon David, so I leave it to rust in the works of reference; and as a stone for my scrip, snatch up a well-worn quotation already slung by a mightier hand:

Scots are not in the way of belittling their own advantages; but a certain Italian writer gravely comments on this statement by giving an estimate as to the depth of the Tiber at Rome, whereas he himself has seen a bare-legged boy wading the Tay above Perth bridge to pick up pebbles. Being unable to refute his main contention, I would have him know that this laddie was probably risking wet breeks at low tide, not in search of pebbles, but of pearls, sometimes picked up here; that a bridge would naturally be built near a ford; and that a mile higher up, beyond the tide-flow, the Tay is deep enough to drown boys in its treacherous pools, and might make Julius Caesar himself call for help if he tried swimming across it in spate. If classic poets are to be trusted, yellow is the best epithet of the Tiber, while Ruskin admiringly tells us how the pools of the Tay glint brown and blue among black swirls and rippling shallows. In the matter of climate, at all events, we are not going to let any foreigner over-brag us, for as the local poet, Alexander Glas, exclaims beside the Tay:

This bard, perhaps, was not aware that the snow lies longer on Soracte than on Kinnoull Hill; nor does he confess that for two or three months in the year the happy Caledonian swain may now and then welcome Italian ice-cream merchants; and in fair prose he ought to own his ocean breezes for east winds on this side of the country. The city of Perth, indeed, stands hardly a score of miles back from the sea, and made a thriving port in days when it was an advantage to unload goods up-country, well out of the way of attack. Its mariners carried on not only a coasting trade, but sailed to the Hanse ports, and took a turn at fighting with their English rivals when competition would sometimes be pushed to the point of piracy. It appears that trading craft plied as far up as Scone, below which a row-boat is now apt to stick in shallow rapids.

Through the international war-time flourished at Perth a notable line of Mercers, who appear as wealthy traders, magistrates, and benefactors of their native city, sometimes rising to higher posts in the state, coming to make noble alliances through which their head branch is now engrafted in the Lansdowne title. The old staple trade of the Fair City was glove-making; its skinners became an important corporation, and tanning held out to our day, but has been...