XVII The Secret of the High Hills
“I shall never forget that day, or the self-sacrifice and bravery of those men in that Brigade.” The speaker was a chaplain attached to one of the Highland Brigades which had been fighting in France. “We were told that a particular position had to be taken, and the work was allotted to certain of the Highland regiments. My work was to attend the dying after the attack was over and the position carried at the point of the bayonet. Amongst them was a piper who had shown extraordinary bravery in the assault, and who, though wounded three times, had persisted in carrying on and playing his pipes until he fell mortally wounded just as the assault, after very heavy fighting, was proving successful. He knew he was dying, and gave me messages for his wife and family. He was evidently a man of strong faith, and had no fear of death. Just before his valiant spirit passed away, he whispered, ‘Oh, if I could only see the high hills again before I die.’ His words deeply impressed me, and I have often thought of them since.”
This story of the dying piper, told to me in such simple and touching language, set me thinking and wondering. I could not help feeling that those last words of the gallant Highlander would strike a sympathetic chord in the hearts not only of those whose most cherished and sacred memories are bound up with the Highlands of Scotland, but of countless numbers of others who also love that country. In the days of peace I had often pondered over the irresistible fascination of this call from the North.
The Highlands of Scotland! Is there any one who has ever seen them, or who knows even slightly something of their romantic and enchanting history, who can fail to understand the passionate devotion of any one with Highland blood in his veins to that wonderful land?
“All the world over the sons of the heather and the mist, in however distant or alien lands they may be, feel always, as they steer their way through life, that there is a pole-star by which they set their compass; and that some day, perhaps, they or their children may steer the boat to a haven on some rocky shore, where the whaup calls shrilly on the moors above the loch, and the heather grows strong and tough on the hill-side, and the peat reek rises almost like the incense of an evening prayer against a grey, soft sky in the land of the north.”35
From the lone shieling on the misty island
Mountains divide us, and a waste of seas.
Yet still the blood is strong, the heart is highland,
And we in dreams behold the Hebrides.36
How many a man at the end of July or the beginning of August, worn out with his work in Parliament, or the Law Courts, or elsewhere, turns his face and his thoughts to the North, and finds even in his anticipations and dreams of the days to come refreshment and solace! In most things in this life the anticipation is far greater than the reality, but not so in this case. In the hearts of how many men and women do the words of Aytoun find a responsive echo:
Give me but one hour of Scotland,
Southern gales are not for me;
Though the glens are white with winter,
Place me there and set me free.
Why is it that so many persons, young and old, and of such different character, habits, and classes, are fascinated and held by the spell of this country? What is the motive which is common to them all, if there is one? No doubt with some it is the longing for rest and change of scene, or the opportunity of meeting old friends or relatives in the far North, with others the desire for sport or the gratification of artistic tastes, and with others the ardent yearning to hear again the old familiar sounds, familiar since their early childhood—the sound of the rushing burn, the breaking of the sea on the rock-bound shore, the call of the sea-birds—and to see once more the high hills and silvery lochs and scent again the fragrant heather. But underlying all these, and perhaps more often than not quite unconsciously, there is one dominant governing motive which is surely spiritual rather than material—the desire for the environment which will uplift and ennoble, and with it bring a sense of being nearer to the pure—nearer to the things that are unseen and eternal—removed from all that is coarse and material.
I well remember on one occasion discussing the question of the future world with a Highland keeper, and the emphatic way in which he said, “One thing is certain, and that is, that no one could be an atheist if he spent his life on the mountains.” I also remember that, curiously enough, the same observation was made by one Cambridge undergraduate to another, the speaker having been in the habit of spending days and nights camping out on the mountains in his father’s Highland property.
It is not inappropriate that in the Gaelic language the words used to signify “death” and “died” are not the same when used in reference to a human being as the words which are used in reference to an animal, the former words, caochladh (substantive), chaochail (verb), signifying a change or passing from one state of life into another, the latter bas (substantive), bhasaich (verb), extinction or annihilation.
On the sea coast, at the mouth of one of the sea lochs on the west coast of Ross-shire, I have often waited for the dawn, looking up the loch towards the high hills in the distance, and, whilst I waited, there would come into my mind those impressive words of the prophet Isaiah, “Watchman, what of the night?” The watchman said, “The morning cometh.” No one who has had this experience and seen the sun rise in its splendour over the high hills, flooding the surface of the sea with brilliant crimson light, will ever forget the scene, or the uplifting of spirit and sense of abiding peace which it imparted.
Footnotes
1 “The Death of the Wye,” Images and Meditations, a Book of Poems, by Mary Duclaux. T. Fisher Unwin, Ltd., London.
2 It is singular that this poem was written and published in 1849, and that Tennyson’s In Memoriam, which contained the famous lines:
“’T is better to have loved and lost,
Than never to have loved at all,”
was written in 1834 but not published until 1850, and then anonymously. This is surely very remarkable, for it is impossible to believe that a man of the high and noble character of Clough would have consciously plagiarised any other poet.
3 After the publication of these verses in the above article, as it originally appeared in the issue of Country Life for August 6, 1921, their authorship was discovered through the kindness of some of the readers of that journal and the enterprise of its editor. In a letter in Country Life for August 27, 1921, Bishop G. F. Browne, late Lord Bishop of Bristol, thus describes their origin. “The first three stanzas were composed at Lowick Rectory, Northants, by the rector, J. S. Watson, his daughter Betty, and Dean Ingram of Peterborough. The authors felt that there ought to be a concluding stanza, ambiguously stating a final result. I told the story to Father Waggett on our way from Bournemouth to Clouds, and he suggested ’booked it’ as the point of a last stanza. On that hint I wrote the stanza. In my book I remark that its tendency would be unjust to any real fisherman’s imaginative powers.”
4 December 11, 18, 25, 1921.
5 January 28, February 4, 11, 18, 1922.
6 Field, February 18, 1922, p. 233.
7 “Velocity of Flight among Birds,” by Colonel R. Meinertzhagen, D.S.O., in the Ibis for April 1921, pp. 237-238.
8 Field, February 18, 1922, p. 234.
9 Wild Sports of the Highlands, chap. x. p. 135.
10 Field, February 18, 1922, pp. 233-234.
11 Ibis, April 1921, p. 234.
12 Wild Sports and Natural History of the Highlands, by Charles St. John, ch. x. p. 131.
13 See also the letter of Mr. H. G. Hurrell in the Field for March 8, 1923.
14 This is a very considerable warning—H. F.
15 Pp. 258-259 (Witherby & Co., London, 1914).
16 Pp. 35, 36.
17 Manual of British Birds, by Howard Saunders, 2nd ed. (Gurney & Jackson, London), pp. 264, 266.
18 History of the Birds of Europe, by Henry E. Dresser, F.L.S., F.Z.S. (1871-1881), vol. iv. p. 617.
19 A Practical Handbook of British Birds, edited by H. F. Witherby, vol. ii. pp. 7, 9. Witherby & Co., London, 1920.
20 Handbook to the Birds of Australia, by John Gould, F.R.S. (1865), vol. i. p. 104. London.
21 Vol. ii. p. 305, Porter, 6 Tenterden Street, W.; Dulau & Co., Soho Square, W., 1884.
22 Avicultural Magazine, Third Series, vol. x. No. 4, February 1919, pp. 73-74.
23 Vol. iv. p. 616.
24 British Birds Magazine, vol. xvi. No. 1 (June 1, 1922), p. 31.
25 The Fauna of British India including Ceylon and Burma Birds, vol. iii. p. 173. Published under the authority of the Secretary of State for India in Council. Taylor & Francis, London, 1895.
26 Ibid. p. 174.
27 March 15, 1923.
28 Ornithological Dictionary of Birds, by Col. G. Montagu: 2nd edition by James Rennie, London, 1831.
29 Rough Shooting, by Richard Clapham, ch. vii. pp. 125-126. Heath Cranton, Ltd., London, 1922.
30 In One Hundred Years in the Highlands, p. 132 (Edward Arnold, London, 1921), Mr. Osgood Mackenzie quotes an extract from a diary of his uncle, Dr. John Mackenzie of Eileanach, in which an incident of this kind is described as having occurred in Kinlochewe Forest.
31 Adam & Charles Black, London, 1910.
32 See, for instance, the opinions of Mr. F. M. Halford in The Dry-Fly Man’s Handbook, p. 395 (George Routledge & Sons, Ltd., London); Mr. P. D. Malloch at p. 179 in the work previously cited; Mr. J. J. Armistead in An Angler’s Paradise, and how to obtain it; and Mr. Tom Speedy in The Natural History of Sport in Scotland with Rod and Gun (William Blackwood & Sons, Edinburgh and London, 1920).
33 Martin Secker, London, 1917.
34 The Dry-Fly Man’s Handbook, p. 319 (George Routledge & Sons, Ltd., London).
35 A Lame Dog’s Diary, by S. Macnaughtan, pp. 239, 240 (John Murray, London, 1915).
36 “Canadian Boat Song,” St. Andrew’s Treasury of Scottish Verse, by Mrs. Alexander Lawson and Alexander Lawson, pp. 133, 134 (A. & C. Black, Ltd., London, 1920).