The Highlands and Islands of Scotland 1906

“TO THE HIGHLANDS BOUND”

Highlands and Islands, as we Scots chuckle to ourselves, is the one phrase which an Englishman cannot mispronounce. I read lately a book of Scottish travel by an American, who made my countrymen leave out their h’s like any Cockney; then I at once laid aside this writer’s observations as vain. The humblest Scot never drops an h, unless in words like hospital, which the Southron painfully aspirates in his anxiety not to be judged vulgar, as in living memory he has tacked this test of breeding on to humour and humble. More fairly we may be charged with overdoing the h sound; and there are two or three words in which we insert it: huz, for instance, said in some parts for “us.” In the game of anglicé “touch” or “tag,” my childish conception of the formula “who’s hit?” made it a participle meaning “struck” or “touched,” till I heard German children crying in like case “Ich bin es!” when I did not know how hit is the old English pronoun, 


preserved by Scots dialects, which are the truest copies of our national tongue.

Once, indeed—it was in Derbyshire—I came across a man speaking with a strong West Highland accent, yet misusing the letter h. This seemed such a prodigy that I made a point of getting it explained. It turned out that he was the son of a Yorkshire shepherd, who had taken service on the Isle of Mull. There the boy came to be most at home in Gaelic, while what English he had was on a bad model—the reverse of lingua Toscana in bocca Romana. His younger brothers, he told me, grew up hardly speaking English at all, and he, the bilingual member of the family, had often to interpret between them and their mother, who could never get her tongue round the strange speech. We speak of a mother-tongue; but it is from their play-fellows that active lads seem to learn fastest. The Italian author De Amicis relates an experience like that of this Yorkshire family: transplanted at the age of two from a Genoese to a Piedmontese town, he picked up the Piedmontese dialect so readily that his own mother could not always understand him when once he got loose from her apron-strings.

In the far Highlands and Islands can still be found countrymen of ours who speak no language but Gaelic, these hardly, indeed, unless among older people, the rising generation being schooled into the dominant tongue, in their case often a stiff book English, spangled with Lowland idioms and native constructions. Distrust the author who reports true Highlanders talking 


broad Scots after the school of Stratford-atte-Bow. This remark does not fully apply to the Central and Inner Highlands, where some generations have passed since people living a mile off spoke tongues foreign to each other, as may still happen on the borders of Wales. In the Highlands best known to tourists, the blending of blood, language, and customs has gone so far that a stranger may be excused for confounding a Perthshire strath with the true kailyard scenery. Beyond the Great Glen, still more markedly beyond the sounds, firths, and minches of the west coast, we find Highlanders less touched by the spirit of a practical age, whose first breath sets them shivering and drawing their tartans about them as they wake from fond dreams of a romantic past. All Scotland, alas! has been too much overrun by the alien clan of MacMillion, who, as one of its most eloquent sons complains, go on cutting it up into “moors” and “forests,” and its rivers into “beats.” Sheep farming on a large scale and other industries have here and there brought Saxon sojourners, like my Derbyshire acquaintance, to the western wilds. The aristocracy are much Anglified, even in these “Highlands of the Highlands.” But the mass of their human life is still Celtic, or at least Gaelic, if language can be trusted, with an old blend of Teuton infused both by sea and land, through Norse, Norman, and Saxon invaders, and with touches of Spanish Armada or other shipwrecked blood surmisable here and there among waifs and strays all going to make up a stock that may have absorbed who knows what prehistoric 


elements. The controversy between Thwackum and Square is not more famous than that hot debate between Mr. Jonathan Oldbuck and Sir Arthur Wardour, which stands as warning to a modest writer not to quarrel with any readers, at least at an early stage of his book, by taking sides on certain much-vexed ethnological and philological questions.

To reach those rain-bitten and wave-carved coasts where the true Highlander mainly holds his own, we have various ways now made smooth by arts which go on sapping his seclusion. It does not much matter which way the stranger takes, for he can hardly go wrong, to understand how right Gray was when he told his mole-eyed generation, “the Lowlands were worth seeing once, but the mountains are ecstatic, and ought to be visited in pilgrimage once a year.” All roads to the Inner Highlands lead through the Outer Highlands, more fully described in Bonnie Scotland.

For leisurely tourists the choice road is still by water, down the Clyde from Glasgow. If the name of this river be derived, as is said, from a Celtic word meaning clean, that title has become a mockery, since its banks from Glasgow to Greenock sucked together the most industrious life of Scotland. “Come, bright Improvement, on the Car of Time!” sang Glasgow’s youthful poet, but lived to exclaim against the questionable shape in which came a spirit he had invoked so hopefully:

And call they this Improvement?—to have changed,

My native Clyde, thy once romantic shore,


Where Nature’s face is banished and estranged,

And Heaven reflected in thy wave no more;

Whose banks, that sweetened May-day’s breath before,

Lie sere and leafless now in summer’s beam,

With sooty exhalations covered o’er;

And for the daisied green-sward, down thy stream

Unsightly brick-lanes smoke, and clanking engines gleam.