The Recreations of a Country ParsonBoyd, Andrew Kennedy Hutchison
General
The Recreations of a Country Parson
Boyd, Andrew Kennedy Hutchison
Clergy -- Anecdotes; Country life -- England; Rural clergy -- England
We are going to Dunoon. Leaving the ship-yards of Greenock echoing
with multitudinous hammerings, and rounding a point covered with
houses, we see before us Gourock, the nearest to Greenock of the
places 'down the water.' It is a dirty little village on the left
side of the Frith. A row of neat houses, quite distinct from the
dirty village, stretches for two miles along the water's edge.
The hills rise immediately behind these. The Frith is here about
three miles in breadth. It is Renfrewshire on the left hand; a few
miles on, and it will be Ayrshire. On the right are the hills of
Argyleshire. And now, for many miles on either side, the shores of
the Frith, and the shores of the long arms of the sea that run up
among those Argyleshire mountains, are fringed with villas, castles,
and cottages--the retreats of Glasgow men and their families. It
is not, perhaps, saying much for Glasgow to state that one of its
greatest advantages is the facility with which one can get away
from it, and the beauty of the places to which one can get. But
true it is, that there is hardly a great city in the world which
is so well off in this respect. For six-pence, the artisan of
Bridgeton or Calton can travel forty miles in the purest air, over
as blue a sea, and amid as noble hills, as can be found in Britain.
The Clyde is a great highway: a highway traversed, indeed, by a
merchant navy scarcely anywhere surpassed in extent; but a highway,
too, whose gracious breezes, through the summer and autumn time,
are ever ready to revive the heart of the pale weaver, with his
thin wife and child, arid to fan the cheek of the poor consumptive
needlewoman into the glow of something like country health and
strength.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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