Читать книгу Our Western Hills: How to reach them; And the Views from their Summits. By a Glasgow Pedestrian онлайн

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Tinto has not much to boast of in the way of antiquities; but perhaps enough has been said to lead some of our readers to go and “do” Tinto for themselves; if so, we can only hope that they may enjoy it as much as we did. It only requires six hours in all, and the remembrance of the travel will be even pleasanter than the travel itself, for in the remembrance the little drawbacks are all forgot, and the absence of care and the blue sky, and the bright sun, &c., &c., remain.

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We remember reading, some years ago, in Punch, a paragraph headed “Strange Insanity,” and stating that a respectable tradesman in the City, in pursuit of a holiday, had positively thrown himself into a cab, driven off to the Eastern Counties Railway Station at Shoreditch, and had taken a ticket for Great Yarmouth. It is perhaps equally an act of “strange insanity” in this year of grace and desirable excursions for anyone to go to Muirkirk on a similar errand, for the line to Muirkirk—like that of the “Great Eastern,” as the Eastern Counties is now called—is not managed, to say the least, with the same expedition that, as a rule, pervades the Caledonian system. But if anyone wishes to see Cairntable, he must make up his mind to take a ticket for Muirkirk. Soon after leaving Glasgow the whole valley of the Clyde opens up to us, which is still beautiful in spite of its desecration by coalmasters. We can sympathise with the English cyclist who, having read the “Scottish Chiefs” before beginning his tour through Scotland, had his mind full of the beauties and traditions of the neighbourhood, but was disappointed to see the air thick with smoke, while far and near tall chimneys vomited flame and steam. And this continues more or less all the way till we reach the ore lands and blast furnaces of our Scotch pig-iron kings, the Bairds.