The Trossachs 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

“When [Robert] Jamieson, the editor of the 5th edition of Burt's Letters, was in the Highlands in 1814, he met a savage-looking fellow on the top of Ben Lomond who told him that he had been a guide to the mountain for more than forty years, but now 'a Walter Scott' had spoiled his trade. 'I wish,' said he, 'I had him a ferry over Loch Lomond; I should be after sinking the boat, if I drowned myself into the bargain, for ever since he wrote his Lady of the Lake, as they call it, everybody goes to see that filthy hole, Loch Ketterine. The devil confound his ladies and his lakes!”
― John Campbell Shairp, Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland, AD 1803

“The inn near the Trossachs could, perhaps, put up a dozen, or at the very most, two dozen people; but last autumn I saw about one hundred apply for admittance, and after horrid altercations, entreaties, and efforts, about fifty or sixty were compelled to huddle together all night. They were all of the upper rank, travelling mostly in private carriages, and by far the greater number strangers. But the pigs were as comfortably accommodated. I saw thre or four English gentlemen spreading their own straw on the earthen floor of an outhouse, with a sparred door, and no fire-place or furniture. And such things occur every day here, though the ground belongs to a duke, and partly to an earl.”
― Henry Thomas Cockburn, Circuit Journeys

“Scott's description of the stag in The Lady of the Lake, is much more challenging than the image of Landseer's Monarch of the Glen. He refers to the 'antlered monarch of the waste', a far more appropriate creature of the upper reaches of Glen Artney where Canto I of The Lady of the Lake begins. The problem is that Scott and Landseer have become too closely associated; they have become a conjoined stereotype of the Highlands from which neither can escape. That is not such a problem for Landseer; indeed, without his association with Scott he would be much less known today. But it is a problem for Scott and the Highlands, because Landseer's image of The Monarch of the Glen has been visually conflated with Scott's literary work in the minds of so many.”
― Murdo MacDonald, Literary Tourism, the Trossachs and Walter Scott

“A laugh was on every face when William said we were come to see the Trossachs, no doubt they thought we had better have stayed at our own homes. William endeavoured to make it appear not so very foolish, by informing them that it was a place much celebrated in England, though perhaps little thought of by them, and that we only differed from many of our countrymen in having come the wrong way in consequence of an erroneous direction.”
― Dorothy Wordsworth, Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland, AD 1803