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

8 страница из 29

A walk back to Darvel for the coach to Newmilns station will enable the traveller to reach Glasgow early in the evening.

ssss1

If any one wishes for perfect quiet, and to be well out of the way of smoke and bustle, of duns and other visitors—in fact, has a particular desire to find within 40 miles of Glasgow a place which, for all practical purposes, shall be to him or to her the world’s end—let him make up his mind to spend a day on the top of that well-known yet comparatively little climbed hill, Tinto. And for this purpose let him take a return ticket and follow us to Symington—and there is Tinto, or the Hill of Fire, before his view. There can be no mistake as to what we have come out to see. There is not much to distract our attention from the object we have in view, nothing near of a like kind to compete with it. There it stands, like a large self-contained house, all others at a respectable distance from it, not to be mistaken with any other—nay, as destitute of relations as Melchisedeck, a great porphyritic hill, dominating like a king over the Upper Ward. After leaving the station, a quarter of a mile to the south, there is a camp still to be seen covering half an acre. This takes us back in thought to that old Simon Liscard, who, in the days of Malcolm the Fourth or William the Lion, got this district as a territory, and called the settlement Symon’s Town, abbreviated into Symontown, and again corrupted or improved, according to the individual taste, into Symington.