incredible creatures
...and where to find (or avoid) them.
Arthur’s Seat to look over ‘ The metropolis, the German Ocean (North Sea), the course of the Forth, the Grampian mountains, and a large portion of the most populous and best cultivated part of the kingdom... a landscape at once beautiful and sublime.’
Divorce tourism to Scotland was on the rise with couples staging episodes in flagrante precisely like this and Sarah had to swear an Oath of Calumny that she had not colluded with William. The perjury troubled her deeply, as did rows with William over money and arrangements for their son.
Walking was her only escape and during a lull in proceedings she caught the steamboat to Stirling and set off on that 170-mile, week-long tour through the Trossachs. She delighted in the ‘secluded and romantic beauties’ of Bracklinn Bridge near Callander, and said of Loch Lomond: ‘everything is mild, soothing, and delicious to the feelings. You are lulled into a dream of happy sensations.’ Loch Katrine was a highlight, and she gave ‘many a lingering look behind as I quitted scenes of such sublime magnificence’.
Sarah trekked up to 32 miles each day although she was always matter of fact about it, as if walking until 10pm was hardly worth note. But this woman on her solo tour was a curiosity to all she met: ‘How far are ye come the day? An whaur are ye gaun? An what for did ye come to this countra? An how do ye like this?’ She wrote that everyone was ‘universally civil and obliging, and, as far as they had the means, hospitable’, and she adopted local cures, rubbing whisky into a sore ankle and knee.
Not all was sweet sailing, as she found in remote terrain between Lochs Katrine and Lomond: ‘in crossing the most dreary, swampy, and pathless part of it, a heavy storm came on. There was not the least shelter, and the heat in climbing such an ascent, together with the fear of losing myself in such a lonely place, almost overcame me; but I guided myself by the direction of the loch as well as I could, and at last, to my great joy, regained a track.’
And as she walked back into Edinburgh she wrote of the agony and the glory that anyone who has walked long distances knows: ‘it was with some pain and difficulty that I finished my jaunt, though I had been much, very much gratified by the variety of beautiful scenery I had met, and I was very glad to get into my own lodgings, and literally wash the dust from my feet. Indeed, I made a thorough ablution, and the comfort of that, and clean clothes, after being choked with dust, is more refreshing than can be imagined by those who have not undergone the previous ordeal.’
Sarah’s divorce ordeal continued, thanks to a judge she described as ‘a prodigious grave Ass’; ongoing tension with William; and a tirade from the agent Mr Bell, who said it was her ‘own fault that Mr. Hazlitt could not be happy with me; that he wondered what could ever have attracted him in me; that he thought my face very ugly, with a particularly bad expression.’
And so in June she set off on foot again, this time from Burntisland on the north shore of the Forth, to Dunkeld and back to Stirling via Crieff,
walking 112-miles in five days through Fife, Kinross and Perthshire. Sometimes the wind was so powerful across a hilltop she couldn’t stand; at others the sun was broiling. In Edinburgh she felt anxious and ill, but out here in the countryside she found strength, pausing to note the deliciousness of the evening even while suffering a head-cold and a wrenched knee. She absorbed it all – ‘the sight, the smell, and the hearing, were all abundantly gratified’ – and wrote: ‘ These walks always make me more religious and more happy, more sensibly alive to the benevolence and love of the Creator than any books or church.’
Divorce proceedings finally concluded and Sarah left Edinburgh in July. The journal of her walking tours of Scotland was first published as Mrs Hazlitt’s Diary 72 years later – as an appendix to William’s thinly fictionalised account of his hopeless obsession with his landlady’s daughter, Liber Amoris. Husband and wife had long died, and Sarah may not have liked this final union in a book, for in her last diary entry she wrote: ‘I was now Miss Stoddart, and was not I glad of that?’
WALK HERE: Much of Sarah’s route is now road, but both of her treks would make great guiding inspiration for your own expeditions through the surrounding hills. Or you can tread in her footsteps on day walks at Arthur’s Seat, Stirling, Loch Katrine, New Lanark & Falls of Clyde, and Birnam & The Hermitage: download detailed guides with maps for all these routes at www.lfto.com/ bonusroutes