Climbing on the Himalaya and Other Mountain RangesCollie, Norman
History
Climbing on the Himalaya and Other Mountain Ranges
Collie, Norman
Himalaya Mountains; Mountaineering
But a new school was growing up, and Sir Walter Scott was one of the
first to insist, that a visit to the Highlands would reveal objects
more interesting than cows, waterfalls, and sea caves. People were
beginning to find in the torrents, mountains, lochs, and pine woods,
beauties they had not seen before. No longer were the hills chaotic
masses of rock, ready at any moment to fall and overwhelm the valleys,
nor were the moors and glens expanses of uniform barrenness or gloomy
mountain fastnesses. Robson, at the beginning of last century (1815),
writing of one of the most remote and wild regions of the Highlands,
namely the head of Glen Tilt, says: 'Of all the romantic scenes which
are presented to those who explore the recesses of the Grampians, none
will be found to possess a more picturesque combination of wild and
characteristic beauty than this'; and in the preface to his accurate
and delightful volume on the scenery of the Grampian mountains, he
writes: 'With the man of taste few districts in this kingdom have equal
claim to admiration.'
Robson was not a Scotchman, but a London artist; yet one has only to
look at his sketches, and read the letterpress of his book to see
how well he appreciated mountain form, and how he understood, in no
uncertain manner, that which now delights us nearly a century later
in the Highlands. His water-colour picture of Loch Coruisk[M] is an
honest attempt to accurately reproduce the wonderful colour and savage
beauty of the grandest of all Scotch lochs, and one is only sorry that
he has introduced into the foreground a fully dressed Highlander--a
legacy, no doubt, of that old feeling that made Dr. Johnson crave for
cows, and that even now survives at the present time in the pretty
sketches of Scotch hills, where the foreground is animated by Highland
cattle.
Since Robson's time, many people have been to the Highlands and to Skye
and the Coolin. Turner visited them, and the impression produced may be
seen from his drawing of Loch Coriskin. This drawing is described by
Ruskin in _Modern Painters_ as 'a perfect expression of the Inferior
Mountains,' yet any one who had really seen the Coolin would hardly
be justified in asserting that Turner's drawing (Fig. 69, vol. iv.,
_Modern Painters_) was the perfect expression of the hills round Sgurr
Dubh, even though it may be the perfect expression of an inferior
mountain.
Fortunately the Coolin are never inferior mountains, unless we measure
them by the number of feet they rise above the sea. 'Comparative bulk
and height,' says the late Sheriff Nicolson, 'are of course important
elements in mountain grandeur, but outline and features are, as with
human beings, even more important.' Clachlet at Easter, covered with
snow and seen across the moor of Rannoch at a distance of a few miles,
towers up into the heavens just as grandly as a peak five times its
altitude does in the Himalaya, when that peak is seen from a point
thirty miles away.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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