Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 15, 2025
So much for Withers. I shall have a rod in pickle for him if worth while. After sitting to Chantrey for the last time, I called on Lady Shelley, P.P.C., and was sorry to find her worse than she had been. Dined with Lady Stafford, where I met the two Lochs, John and James.
His magnificent estate lay in Argyleshire, where the mountains are fringed with lochs in the most picturesque manner. The scenery is charming. One summer evening as our ship passed along the broken coast, a sunset of surpassing beauty scattered its blending colors in rich profusion over clouds, hills, vales, and lochs. The scenery was panoramic and enchanting.
Hauling our wind, we stood through a very narrow passage, and entered Sleat Sound, a broad expanse, when once more we had Eig in sight on our starboard bow, and passed the entrance to numerous lochs, many of them, like Loch Hourn and Loch Nevish, between lofty mountains. Passing Muck and then Ardnamurchan on our port side, we entered Loch Sunart.
With a poetic appreciation of the beauties of nature, he desired no greater pleasure than to wander in perfect freedom among our lochs and hills; and his descriptions of Edinburgh, the Highlands, and Western Islands, which appeared in the Augsburg Gazette, have brought some and inspired more with the wish to visit the Switzerland of Britain.
There was the beef and mutton on the braes, the fresh and salt-water fish in the lochs, the brooks, and firth; game of every kind, from the deer to the leveret, were to be had for the killing, in the Duke's forests, moors, heaths, and mosses; and for liquor, home-brewed ale flowed as freely as water; brandy and usquebaugh both were had in those happy times without duty; even white wine and claret were got for nothing, since the Duke's extensive rights of admiralty gave him a title to all the wine in cask which is drifted ashore on the western coast and isles of Scotland, when shipping have suffered by severe weather.
Countless little lochs give sparkle and life to it. Everywhere the granite. About Doocharry, a romantic little spot, where Lord Cloncurry has a fishing-box in the heart of a glorious landscape, masses crop out of a rich red granite, finer in colour than any we had previously seen.
There are, or there were a few years ago, wild lochs and streams which are still practically free, and a man who is content with small things can pick up some very pretty sport from the highland inns, and make a good basket of memorable experiences every week. The inn at Lairg, overlooking the narrow waters of Loch Shin, was embowered in honeysuckles, and full of creature comfort.
Suddenly he would break off, and in a tone of deep melancholy, exclaim, "Ah, but those are dreams all dreams never to be realised. I am never to see bonnie Scotland again; her heathery hills, and blue, blue lochs, and my own Mary; but I've never told you of her. She's been the pole-star to me since I came to sea.
But the autumn mists shut out the "Highland hills," already receding in the background, and the Links of Forth, where the river winds like the meshes of a chain through the fertile lowlands to the sea. Soon Drummond Castle and Taymouth, with their lochs and mountains and "plaided array," would be like a wonderful dream, to be often recalled and recounted at Windsor and Buckingham Palace.
He proposed to have a few walks and drives through the neighbouring country, he said, looking at its streams and lochs with an eye to sporting possibilities, and it would be interesting to be able to recognise Keldale House if he chanced to pass near it.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking