It must be remembered that the beautiful even road which now runs through the heart of this fairyland was a work of great difficulty and cost. It has been hewn out of the side of the rock, and built up by the side of the loch in order to facilitate the constant stream of tourists. At first there were several wild pathways leading down to Loch Katrine through a perfect wilderness of boughs and undergrowth, and at the end a precipitous drop over the edge of a steep crag, only scaled by the aid of a sort of natural ladder of saplings and tendrils, and it is thus that Scott makes Fitz-James approach the loch. In the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, when Dorothy Wordsworth and her brother reached the Trossachs from Loch Katrine, a great improvement had taken place. When nearing the end of the lake, she says, they came in sight of two huts, which had been built by Lady Perth as a shelter for visitors. “The huts stand at a small distance from each other, on a high and perpendicular rock, that rises from the bed of the lake. A road, which has a very wild appearance, has been cut through the rock; yet even here, among these bold precipices, the feeling of excessive beautifulness overcomes every other.”
[Illustration: THE SILVER STRAND, LOCH KATRINE.
Where Scott describes the meeting between Fitz-James and Ellen of the Isle.]
In her there was already that new appreciation of the natural beauty which her brother was to do so much to encourage in all. Her description of the Trossachs, after they had landed, clearly shows this: “Above and below us, to the right and to the left, were rocks, knolls, and hills, which, whenever anything could grow—and that was everywhere between the rocks—were covered with trees and heather. The trees did not in any place grow so thick as an ordinary wood, yet I think there was never a bare space of twenty yards; it was more like a natural forest, where the trees grow in groups or singly, not hiding the surface of the ground, which, instead of being green and mossy, was of the richest purple. The heather was indeed the most luxuriant I ever saw; it was so tall that a child of ten years old struggling through it would often have been buried head and shoulders, and the exquisite beauty of the colour, near or at a distance, seen under the trees is not to be conceived.”