Scotland [antikvár]

Scotland Introduction From a distance, Scotland is as much a romantic idea as a place on the map. The first 'leisure' travellers who began touring the country in the early nineteenth century (many taking their cue from George IV's extravagant visit to Edinburgh, which turned the traditional dress of the Highlands into a fashion statement) packed their bags with high expectations. Imaginations fired by the historical novels of Sir Walter Scott, souls stirred by the love poems of Robert Burns, these early tourists arrived with the presumption that 'brave Caledonia' would fulfil all their fantasies about 'the land of mountain and the flood'. Some, inevitably, were disappointed. Any experience of Scotland is bound to be prejudiced by its shifty, sometimes sour weather, and perhaps Sydney Smith saw little but rain and the insides of rank hostelries when he judged it 'the knuckle-end of England - that land of Calvin, oat-cakes and sulphur'. Others, including Charlotte Brontë, praised it, saving their most feverish imagery for Edinburgh. 'Do not think I blaspheme', wrote the novelist to a London correspondent, 'when I tell you that your great London, as compared to Dun-Edin, "mine own romantic town", is as prose compared to THE CAIRNGORM MOUNTAINS and Loch an Eilein, Rothiemurchns, Strathspey. EILEAN DONAN CASTLE (opposite) The castle's sentinel site at the conflnence of Loch Dnich, Loch Alsh and Loch Long has reinforced its reputation as Scotland's most familiar fortress. In fact, the castle's impregnable appearance is deceptive. In the early days of the Jacobite wars Eilean Donan was demolished by the guns of a Hanoverian warship, and was left in rains until its restoration in the nineteenth century. 3