British Highways and Byways from a Motor Car: Being a Record of a Five Thousand Mile Tour in England, Wales and ScotlandMurphy, Thos. D. (Thomas Dowler)
History
British Highways and Byways from a Motor Car: Being a Record of a Five Thousand Mile Tour in England, Wales and Scotland
Murphy, Thos. D. (Thomas Dowler)
Great Britain -- Description and travel; Great Britain -- Maps
From Stonehaven we passed without special incident to Montrose,
following an excellent but rather uninteresting road, though an
occasional fishing-village and frequent view of the ocean broke the
monotony of the flying miles. Montrose is an ancient town delightfully
situated between the ocean and a great basin connected with the sea by a
broad strait, over which a suspension bridge five hundred feet long
carried us southward. I recall that it was at Montrose where an obliging
garage man loaned me an "accumulator"--my batteries had been giving
trouble--scouting the idea of a deposit, and I gave him no more than my
agreement to return his property when I reached Edinburgh.
At Arbroath are the ruins of the most extensive of the Scotch abbeys,
scanty indeed, but still enough to show its state and importance in the
"days of faith." Here once reigned the good abbott celebrated by Southey
in his ballad of Ralph the Rover, familiar to every schoolboy. Ten miles
off the coast is the reef where
"The abbott of Aberbrothok
Had placed a bell on the Inchcape rock.
Like a buoy in the storm it floated and swung,
And over the waves its warning rung."
And where the pirate, out of pure malice, "To vex the abbott of
Aberbrothok," cut the bell from its buoy only to be lost himself on the
reef a year later. The abbey was founded by William the Lion in 1178,
but war, fire and fanaticism have left it sadly fragmentary. Now it is
the charge of the town, but the elements continue to war upon it and the
brittle red sandstone of which it is built shows deeply the wear of the
sea wind.
Dundee, no longer the "Bonnie Dundee" of the old ballad, is a great
straggling manufacturing city, whose ancient landmarks have been almost
swept away. Its churches are modern, its one remaining gateway of
doubtful antiquity, and there is little in the city itself to detain the
tourist. If its points of interest are too few to warrant a stay, its
hotels--should the one given in the guide-book and also locally reputed
to be the best, really merit this distinction--will hardly prove an
attraction. It is a large, six-story building, fairly good-looking from
the outside, but inside dirty and dilapidated, with ill-furnished and
uncomfortable rooms. When we inquired of the manageress as to what might
be of especial interest in Dundee, she considered awhile and finally
suggested--the cemetery. From our hotel window we had a fine view of the
broad estuary of the Tay with its great bridge, said to be the longest
in the world. It recalled the previous Tay bridge, which fell in a storm
in 1879, carrying down a train, from which not a single one of the
seventy or more passengers escaped. Around Dundee is crowded much of
historic Scotland, and many excursions worth the while may be made from
the city by those whose time permits.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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