Bonnie Scotland: Painted by Sutton Palmer; Described by A.R. Hope MoncrieffMoncrieff, A. R. Hope (Ascott Robert Hope)
History
Bonnie Scotland: Painted by Sutton Palmer; Described by A.R. Hope Moncrieff
Moncrieff, A. R. Hope (Ascott Robert Hope)
Scotland -- Description and travel
Many a stranger comes and goes at Perth without guessing what charming
prospects may be sought out on its environing heights. But half an
hour’s stroll through the streets must make him aware of those Inches
that prompt a hoary jest concerning the size of the Fair City. The North
and South Inches, between which it lies, properly islands, green flats
beside the Tay, are in their humble way its Hyde Park and Regent’s Park.
The South Inch, close below the station, is the less extensive, once
the grounds of a great Carthusian monastery, then site of a strong fort
built by Cromwell, now notable mainly for the avenue through which the
road from Edinburgh comes in over it, and for the wharf at its side that
forms a port for small vessels and excursion steamers plying by leave of
the tide. On the landward side, beyond the station, Perth is spreading
itself up the broomy slopes of Craigie Hill, which still offers pleasant
rambles. Beyond the farther end stands a gloomy building once well known
to evil-doers as the General Prison for Scotland; but of late years its
character has undergone some change; and I am not sure how far the old
story may still keep its point that represents an inmate set loose from
these walls, when hailed by a friendly wayfarer as “honest man,” giving
back glumly “None of your dry remarks!”
A more cheerful sight is the golf links on Moncrieff Island, above which
crosses the railway to Dundee. This neighbour has long surpassed Perth,
grown on jute and linen to be the third city of Scotland, its name
perhaps most familiar through the marmalade which used to be
manufactured, I understand, in the Channel Islands, when wicked wit
declared its maker to have a contract for sweeping out the Dundee
theatre. Northern undergraduates at Oxford and Cambridge are believed to
have spread to southern breakfasts the use of this confection in the
form so well known now that its materials are so cheap. The name has a
Greek ancestry, and the thing seems to have come to us as
quince-preserve, through the Portuguese _marmelo_, in time transferred
and restricted to another fruit. Oranges, indeed, could not have been
as plentiful as blackberries in Britain, when the Euphuist Lyly
compared life without love to a meal without marmalade.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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