Scotland's Heartland

Today's Entry to the Highlands

Now the entry to the Highlands is scarcely noticeable. No narrow pass cuts through the hills. You can waft through Atholl in twenty minutes, sweeping down from Birnam Hill and across the Tay where the broad flood plain of the river opens out, then north, up the great strath before climbing up to the winter-blizzard swept pass of Drumochter. Through the window of car, coach, or train, you will observe the tree-covered slopes, Pitlochry, Blair Atholl, the distant hill tops, and the rivers which originally carved out these valleys leaving their jagged edges to be ground smooth by the glaciers.

Travelling thus is almost virtual reality. You can see the land as you pass but you cannot feel its geography. The modern road runs on embankment above the flood-prone haughland, marches on stilts across hillsides, and spans gorges that generations died to defend. You cannot feel the wind which brushes over the high tops, perhaps picking up the chill of the late season snow. You miss the midge which can make memorable a dull late-summer evening. You may note an osprey over the river, and the magnificence of the Atholl Palace Hotel which you think Blair Castle until you pass the real thing a few miles further on, but you'll never know of the majesty of the great trees, the tumbling burns, the tranquil lochs and mountain summits from where Scotland lies at your feet, or the deer, the grouse, pine martins and the capercaillie that still lurk in the ancient pine woods. Nor will you understand the way each corner of this country was shaped by the hand of man.

Only the structure of the landscape remains as nature intended. When the glaciers receded, trees clothed the hillsides and the flat lands were marsh. Mankind arrived, creeping up the Tay. But the plain remained a swamp eventually threaded by a track that became a great highway into the Highlands. The thousands of men-at-arms and armoured knights of Edward I's army marched through to ravage the country after the execution of William Wallace. Edward III's soldiers passed this way on their way to Blair Castle. Four centuries later, Bonnie Prince Charlie's Highlanders came south on their triumphal march to Edinburgh.