Glen Dee, 1848
This text was taken from the North British Daily Mail, published on 2 October 1848. The author is unknown. It describes a walk up into Glen Dee from the south.
No rival to Glendee exists in Britain, and yet few tourists visit its sublime scenery. A road through the glen and past the Springs of Dee would save travellers and drovers from Perthshire to Morayshire and the North, many weary miles; but it is a deer forest; and here, as in many other Highland districts, the convenience of mankind is sacrificed to the comfort of the deer family.
Gradually what was something like a road dies away; and you are now compelled to pick your way among the stones, and through the long heather, occasionally meeting with one of the small tracts worn by the deer, and used by such scanty travellers as may pass through that savage wilderness. There is a peculiar effect of loneliness you may never, perhaps, have experienced before, on entering this wilderness. The hills are at first distant, and the glen wide and hollow; but a dead stillness reigns on everything, except on the clattering river, which still flows on in no unstately bulk. Wandering on, mile after mile, the glen gradually narrows, and gets more savage in its aspect; great black rocks, which look like the stone walls of some antediluvian city of the giants, begin to to run themselves up on each side; they approach more and more towards each other, and at last the solitary spectator feels as if they impeded his breath, although they are some miles, perhaps, from each other.
It is time we should tell him exactly where he is: yonder singular looking peak, with shaggy precipitous sides, towards the west, is Cairntoul; proceeding from its side, as a wall seems to proceed from the angle of a turret, is a vast black mass of perpendicular rock; that is the Ridge of Braeriach, said, by an eminent calculator of altitudes, to have two thousand feet of sheer precipice; that two thousand feet of precipice is the object which it now almost aches your eyes to look upon — a flat black mass, streaked with snow, and sometimes intruded on by a cloud which divides the upper regions from the lower. It is probably that now, in mid-day, a hot sun gilds its black front, and mocks its streaks of snow, while a dead, unearthly silence pervades the mass.
It is not so at all times: for here is the workshop of storms — here the elements, when they prepare themselves to come down with destruction on the fruitful valleys below, exercise their strength, and do no harm; then the scene is different, from the stillness of the present: but with your leave, reader, it is a change that we do not wish to witness.
Returning to the description of our glen: right a-head, and almost protruding into it, is the well-known Cairngorum; and, towards the east, stretches the loftier Benmuichdhui, now admitted to be the highest hill in Britain; but we shall have, henceforth, to describe some of its numerous appearances. Now, after having heard the names of these mighty objects, lest us request you to indulge yourself in the feeling of striking loneliness and disconnection with the world, which everything you view seems to impose on you; and if you may not have perceived it before, you will now feel the full expressiveness of the terms in those lines by Hogg, where he says —
‘Beyond the grizzly cliffs which guard
The infant rills of Highland Dee,
Where hunter’s horn was never heard,
Nor bugle of the forest bee.
Mid wastes that dern and dreary lie,
One mountain rears its mighty form,
Disturbs the moon in passing by,
And smiles above the thunder-storm.’
Queen’s Wake, 95–6
