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.

As the village is to the north of the station, and Cairntable to the south, it will save time, if there is no need to pay a visit to the Black Bull or the Eglinton Arms, at once to take to the hill. On leaving the station on the south-side, turn to the left 300 yards or so, and follow a little stream a short distance beyond a lade which is in connection with the iron-work, and you will find in the second bend of the stream a curious phenomenon in the shape of a boiling (bubbling) well; the water rising up so strongly as to make the sand appear to boil over. After taking a drink, make through the moor for the middle of the wall to the left, which follow, keeping close to it. After the wall has been passed keep straight on till well up the shoulder of the hill; make then, through the heather, in a south-easterly direction for the nearest small cairn. After passing this keep in the same direction among some large stones, which were probably meant to commemorate some event, at the time considered sufficiently important, but the knowledge of which is now gone, as there are no distinguishing marks or hieroglyphs to be found on them. They are too small to have been used in Druidical worship, as some have supposed. And now you reach a very good footpath. From this the ascent is easy, the path being strewn here and there with small bits of breccia or pudding rock, which enters largely into the composition of Cairntable. Here are to be found small pieces of quartz minutely mixed with sandstone, and nearly as hard as granite. It formerly supplied for many a long year the millstones used in the parish for grinding oats.

The summit is reached in about an hour and a half, 1944 feet above the level of the sea, crowned with two immense piles of stones, and there is great need for some tradition to account for these, as in the case of the perhaps still larger cairn on the sister hill of Tinto. Would the members of the Antiquarian or ArchÆological Society please make a notice of this, and tell us if they were not meant to commemorate the defeat of some Annandale thieves who used to infest the district?

Before beginning to take in the surroundings we recall to our mind that at the end of the twelfth century all around us was a forest, as we learn from a charter granted to the monks of Melrose by the Grand Steward of Scotland; and that this was so is abundantly plain from the names of many of the farms, from the trees found in the moss (entire hazel nuts being also found in it), and from small clumps and detached trees of birch and mountain ash still to be seen on the braes and by the side of the ravines.

And looking over this wide and uneven surface, sometimes rising into considerable eminences, covered with dark heather, and presenting nothing either grand or striking except its bleakness and sterility, we cannot help thinking that this wholesale destruction of trees is a thing much to be regretted from every point of view. It sadly spoils the scenery, it deprives the district of their shelter, and their prostrate trunks, by obstructing the water and assisting in the formation of moss earth, prove injurious to the climate. From the general altitude of the district fogs are frequent, rain is abundant, and the climate cold, so that it might be said of it, as it is said of Greenock and Arrochar, which are also hydropathic, that “it doesn’t always rain, it sometimes snaws.” And yet it does not appear as if the evaporation from the moss were injurious to the health.

Looking to the south we have a perfect tableland of small mountains, the Leadhills range being a little to the east, those near Sanquhar due south, and those near Dalmellington to the west, Blackcraig and Enoch’s Hill being prominent between. Behind a small cairn to the west of the two greater ones there is a very fine spring, the waters of which, falling into the valley below, divide into two little streams. The one part, under the name of the Garpel, runs into the Firth of Clyde at Ayr, through the channel of the water of Ayr; the other, the Duneaton, runs to the Clyde at Abingdon, and joins its long-lost sister waters in the Firth, which we can see where we stand, after a most interesting and no doubt useful course of more than 100 miles. Looking east and north, we see the outline of the Lowther range, the southern Grampians, with Culter Fell, Tinto, and over Tinto the Pentlands.

Our solitude is all the more apparent by a curlew and a plover which circle round and round uttering most piteous cries, as if to say, “What strange being are you? Have you come here to rob us of the early worm?” One of the hunting spiders settles down beside us. It spins no web, and depends on its power of leaping to catch its prey, and to watch its movements is quite a study. It is a good fighter, and will fight the garden spider, though it is larger than itself. It may not be generally known that spiders have been worn in nut-shells and goose-quills round the neck to drive disease and the devil away. But we will pass from such a subject, for most people hold it in aversion, from the “little Miss Muffit,” who “sat on a tuffit,” to the cleanly housewife.

In front of us we have Hairschaw Hill to the right, then Blackhill and Middle Law, and between the latter two the road to Strathaven is seen to wind, and we recall the long walk from and to Glasgow which Edward Irving and Carlyle took one day, when the one was the popular assistant to Dr. Chalmers, and the other had not yet been able to do anything to show the stuff of which he was made. Looking north is the little and now almost extinct mining village of Glenbuck, with its two artificial lochs, the only sheets of water in the parish, constructed in 1802 to supply the works of James Finlay & Co., at Catrine, covering between them 120 acres. The Water of Ayr (smooth water) rises out of these, and flows before our eyes through the village of Muirkirk, a small stream, and then among holms and haughs through an open moor till joined by a little stream which rises near Priesthill, and by “the haunted Garpel” it becomes a large body of water. Still farther north, over Blackhill, is Priesthill, where on the 1st of May, 1685, John Brown, of saintly memory, whose house was always open to the benighted stranger or to the persecuted in the days of the Covenant, was shot before the eyes of his wife, by the bloody Claverhouse, his very soldiers refusing to do the deed. It will be long before Scotland will forget the noble answer of his wife to the brutal remark of his murderer, “What do ye think of your husband now?” “I always thought much of him, but now more than ever.” Close by at the farm of High Priesthill, during a thunderstorm, about forty years ago, a waterspout fell, washing away some 30 acres of the land.

Looking up the valley of the Douglas Water, which takes its rise at the foot of Cairntable, on the north-east side, we see the policies of Douglas Castle, the seat of the Earl of Home, and the “Castle Dangerous” of Sir Walter Scott; and we recall to our minds that we have in it a name intimately connected with the most splendid period of Scottish history. It is an open question still whether the family gave the name to the parish, or vice versa. The favourite tradition, however, is that about 767 Donald Bain the Fair took the field against the King. He was nearly victorious, when a person, with his sons and followers, flew to the help of the King and routed Donald, who was himself slain. The King thus rescued inquired to whom he owed his deliverance, when one of the officers said, “Sholto Douglasse” (there is the dark man). The King, in gratitude, gave him a tract of land and the surname Douglas, which was given to the domain and the river also. This appears to have some confirmation from the fact that Sholto is still a kind of hereditary prÆnomen among various branches of the Douglas family.

Turning to the west, and looking down the valley of the Ayr Water, we have in sight not only Aird’s Moss, a large moss extending several miles in all directions, but the monument also erected on it, about a quarter of a mile off the Cumnock Road, to the memory of one of Scotland’s worthiest sons, Richard Cameron. The utter desolation of the spot gives it a melancholy interest, and nothing fair is to be seen but Heaven above, the hope of which sustained the heart of the Covenanters in their skirmish with the dragoons there in 1686. The heather and the long grass bear no trace of the blood which must once have stained them; but no true patriot will readily forget such scenes as those. Not far off is the birthplace of Dr. John Black, a former minister of Coylton, the author of a “Life of Tasso,” and of a learned work called “Palaico Romaica,” in which he endeavoured to prove, but with more ability than success, that the New Testament was originally written in Latin, from which the Greek version was a translation.

In making the descent by the same route as that by which we reached the summit, we see Loudon Hill taking a sly peep at us over the top of the town; we think of the time not so long ago when there was not a building save the kirk in the muir, in the vicinity of the now thriving town, and of Lord Dundonald’s unfortunate coal tar manufacturing experience here. The adoption of copper for sheathing the vessels of the navy ruined the speculation, and the Earl lost heavily by it.

Coming down once more to the level ground, a good walker, who is also a painstaking hunter of flowers, will not go unrewarded. All along our course there are the yellow blossoms of the buttercup family on the harder ground, daisies in the meadows, on the moor the bluebells hanging their delicate heads, each appearing a little lonely and pale; and there are also the exquisite waxlike blossoms of the bilberry, growing quite abundantly, and looking quite as beautiful as any of the rare heaths of the conservatory.

We find our way to the station through and among some wrought-out lime quarries, the roughness of our route now reminding us of what must have been the state of the road to Sorn, a little further down the valley, when travelled on by one of our Scottish kings on his way from Glasgow, and which he found to be so disagreeable that he said, if he wished to “give the devil a job,” he would send him to Sorn in winter. What thoughts crowd upon us as we review the work of the last hour or two on our homeward journey; thoughts as to the probable, or established history of rock and plant, of mountain and moor! And what an insight do we gain into our ignorance as we have to acknowledge that to many of the problems we must subscribe ourselves “agnostic,” or without knowledge. In two and a half hours we reach the well-paved streets of Glasgow.