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Updated: May 28, 2025
While Irish labour, notwithstanding the improvement which has taken place in Ireland, is only paid at the rate of about 1s. a day, while in the straths and glens of Scotland there are hundreds of shepherd families whose whole food almost consists of oatmeal porridge from day to day, and from week to week; while these things continue, I say that we have no reason to be self-satisfied and contented with our position; but that we who are in Parliament and are more directly responsible for affairs, and you who are also responsible though in a lower degree, are bound by the sacred duty which we owe our country to examine why it is that with all this trade, all this industry, and all this personal freedom, there is still so much that is unsound at the base of our social fabric?
These straths are numerous in Scotland, and constitute the great productive centres of the mountain sections. They are generally cultivated to the highest perfection of agricultural science and economy and are devoted mostly to grain.
On a sunny day it is an inland home, with wide billowy straths of grass around, inestimable silence broken only by the placid bleating of sheep, and the long rolling ridges of the Solway hills in front. But in the "winter wind," girt by drifts of snow, no post or apothecary within fifteen miles, it may be dreary enough.
But we were never such thieves and marauders, caterans bloody and unashamed, as the Galloway kerns and the Northmen, and in all my time we had plenty to do to fend our straths against reivers and cattle-drovers from the bad clans round about us. We lift no cattle in all Campbell country.
They had been brought up together from their infancy; had a thousand times together climbed the heights of Cruagh Moran, and as often swam across the deep, dark waters of Loch Uisk, which lay just before their doors. Their parents were next door neighbours in the little village of Ardvortan, situated in one of the most beautiful straths in the West of Scotland.
A long low hill, rough with boulders and feathery with woods, lay across the mouth of these valleys; and we had to go round it on the west, and return along the fertile vale which divides it from the high Alps, whose straths and gorges form the dwellings of the Waldenses. A dream it seemed to be, walking thus within the shadow of the Vaudois hills.
They are alive with men, at least as compared with the solitude which our Scottish Highlands present. I had brought thither my notions of a valley taken from the narrow winding and infertile straths of Scotland, capable of feeding only a few scores of inhabitants. Here I found that a valley might be a country, and contain almost a nation in its bosom.
The Highlanders, from different islands, glens, and straths, eyed each other at a distance with looks of emulation, inquisitive curiosity, or hostile malevolence; but the most astounding part of the assembly, at least to a Lowland ear, was the rival performance of the bagpipers.
So many were the discouragements that one might forgive him if at this juncture he had flung his colonizing scheme to the winds as a lost venture. The lord of St Mary's Isle did not, however, abandon hope; he was a persistent man and not easily turned aside from his purpose. Now he went in person to the straths and glens of Sutherlandshire to recruit more settlers.
And this is the alphabet, which, if you learn by heart, you will learn to understand how Madam How uses her great ice-plough to plough down her old mountains, and spread the stuff of them about the valleys to make rich straths of fertile soil.
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