Cattle Droving Quotes

“Highlanders, driving their "creagh" toward Balquhidder, passed, their moccasin-clad feet leaving as little impress on the mist as they had left in life upon the tussocks of bent-grass. They urged the shadowy cattle with the ponts of their Lochaber axes; and last of all, wrapped in his plaid, his thick hair curling close about his hard-lined features, passed one I knew at once by his great length of arm and red beard, on which the damp hung in a frosty dew, just as it hung upon the coats of the West Highland kyloes that he drove before him on the rode. Though for two hundred years he had slept well in the lone graveyard of the deserted church beside Loch Voil, he seemed to know the road as perfectly as he had known it in his old foraying days. As he passed he moved his target forward and his hand stole to his sword, as if he recognised one of his ancient foes. Then he was swallowed up by the same mist that had protected him so often in his life.”
― R.B. Cunninghame Graham, Faith

“Seek in Glen Massan no emotions of terror and the wild sublime, but a softer sentiment, roused by the forgotten Gaelic bard who sung the sorrows of the sons of Usnach; and in Tarsuinn, Garrachra and Glen Lean, I would restore, in fancy, shepherds and hunters on the grass-grown drove-road and the abandoned hill. The Clyde has drained those glens, not of their waters only, but of men, and melancholy broods among the shadows of Benmore as if it, too, remembered lonefully the unreturning generations.”
― Neil Munro, The Clyde, River and Firth