Days in the The Trossachs

A long, long time ago, when I and the world were much younger, I read a Jules Verne story The Child of the Cavern, about  an underground city.  I can’t remember much about it except that it was set in Scotland and was all about a mining community. Somehow I had got it into my head that it was in Fife, a mining area with a history of much digging.
 (Blog April 1st 2014 )

A recent trip to the Trossachs dispelled my misconceptions.  It was Aberfoyle that Verne had in mind with the underground city beneath Loch Katrine.
There never has been any coal mining in Aberfoyle but the man who could conceive of a descent down an extinct volcano to the centre of the Earth, of a giant gun to fire a manned projectile to the Moon or, most famously, of a submarine powered by electricity extracted from seawater, wasn’t going to be put off by a mere geological detail.

Loch Katrine is also the setting for Sir Walter Scott’s Lady of the Lake.   
In the first Canto,the hunted stag seeks refuge...
  
 "By far Lochard or Aberfoyle.
But nearer was the copsewood gray
That waved and wept on Loch Achray,
And mingled with the pine-trees blue
On the bold cliffs of Benvenue".

Ben Venue

In the early nineteenth century  the Trossachs were the just the place for the new Romantic era of Wordsworth and Scott.  Here the literati could revel in the delights of landscape and nature, of mountains and waterfalls, lochs and bens, within easy reach of civilisation in Glasgow, Stirling or Edinburgh and where most people spoke English.
An easy-access Highlands without the dreadful roads, bleak moors, lack of comfort and native Gaelic speakers that would have been the case for most of the country north of the Highland line in Scott’s day.

Scott stayed at Ledard farm and used it  as a setting in Waverley and  Rob Roy, particularly the waterfall above the farm cascading  into what is now called Helen’s Pool.

Ledard farmhouse

 Climbing up the side of Ben Venue to reach the linn, I wondered how Scott, lame from childhood, had managed it, then it dawned on me.  He was a guest at Ledard and, no doubt, would have probably have ridden a garron led by a farm servant up the boggy track.






In Waverley, the beautiful Fiona, seated by the pool below the falls, sings of the clans rising to support the ill-fated Stuart cause.

“Tis the summons for heroes for conquest or death
When the banners are blazing on mountain and heath”

Scott was so impressed with the linn that he used the setting again in Rob Roy  when the narrator, a literary device Scott used to allow him to write in the first person, meets Helen MacGregor, the hero’s wife.

The area abounds in spectacular views.

 Loch Ard like a mirror

"Farewell to the land where the clouds love to rest
Like the shroud of the dead on the mountain’s cold breast
To the cataracts roar where the eagles reply
And the lake her long bosom expands to the sky"

 Another waterfall, the Falls of Arklet at Inversnaid was apparently used as a backdrop in the Kenneth More version of The Thirty Nine Steps

 The Trossachs was the  model for what became the world view of Scotland thanks to Scott and the other Romantics.
It remains a place of great beauty and an inspiration to write …however poor one’s pen.