Glenfarg (place)

A glen in Perthshire, which Ruskin mentions in Praeterita (Works, 35:16) and describes in the poems, “Glen of Glenfarg” (“Glen of Glenfarg thy beauteous rill”) (1826 or 1827) and “Glenfarg” and “Glen of Glenfarg” (“Papa how pretty those icicles are”) (1828).

The glen is a deep wooded valley traversed by the River Farg (or Farg Water). As described in an early twentieth-century guidebook, the glen “commences about one mile [north] from the village”, which was known “in olden times”—the time of Ruskinʼs youth—as Damhead but changed to Glenfarg in 1890 with the advent of a rail line. At this time, the village was described as situated five miles north of Milnathort (a village on the north bank of Loch Leven), six and a half miles south of the Bridge of Earn (crossing the River Earn), and ten miles south of Perth–the Ruskinsʼ destination when visiting John Jamesʼs sister, Jessie Richardson and her family, prior to Jessieʼs death in 1828 (Jack, Glenfarg and District Past and Present, 7th ed., n.d., 12).

The River Farg, which descends from the Ochils and turns north‐northeast at the village of Glenfarg and thence into the glen, marks the meeting of three county boundaries—the counties of Perth, Fife, and Kinross. In an account of the parish Arngask, prepared for The New Statistical Account of Scotland (1845), the Farg is described as “a small stream which rises near the western extremity of the parish, and, for upwards of a mile, separates it from that of Forgandenny. It then flows through the parish, separating, till it reaches Damhead, the county of Kinross from that of Perth. Then it begins to separate the county of Perth from that of Fife, and continues to form the boundary between these counties till it arrives at the point where it leaves the parish, about the middle of the romantic and beautifully wooded glen [i.e., Glenfarg] to which it communicates its name, and which travellers so much admire” (Burt, “Parish of Arngask”, in The New Statistical Account of Scotland, 10:883). Through the glen, the river “extends three miles downward till it opens out into Strathearn” on its north end—that is, the valley of the River Earn, into which the Fargempties, and which flows eastward from Loch Earn to River Tay (Jack, Glenfarg and District Past and Present, 4th ed., 1908, 12). (In the The New Statistical Account of Scotland, Glenfarg is most clearly identified on the northwest corner of the map of Fife and Kinross counties that is published with volume 9 of the series. A detailed map is also available in Jack, Glenfarg and District Past and Present.)

The growing fame of the picturesque attraction can be traced in successive guidebooks. In the 1820s, when Ruskin composed his poems, Glenfarg rated a brief mention in one of the “short, portable” guidebooks that Kathleen Grenier says appeared in this decade to lead “readers on a series of tours” through Scotland (Tourism and Identity in Scotland, 66). In The Scottish Tourist (1825), the traveler coming south from Perth is alerted to the glen as “a romantic little valley embosomed by the Ochils”. These hills are characterized as “dwarfish when compared with the lofty Grampians” to the north; yet, because the Ochils “present a smooth surface, and are clothed to their summits with the deepest verdure, possessing also a pastoral serenity and softness”, the scene imparts “a new and pleasurable tone to the mind of the tourist, who returns from contemplating the magnificence of Highland scenery” (The Scottish Tourist, and Itinerary [3d ed., 1830], 125).

In later accounts, rather than being regarded as easing the spectator down from the grandeur of the Highlands, the glen takes on its own share of the sublime. When approached from the south, riding north from the Firth of Forth—the direction traveled by the Ruskins when first encountering Glenfarg during a tour—the glen presented “certainly the finest portion of the journey, and perhaps the only bit of grand scenery that is to be met with on the road between Queensferry and the Bridge of Earn”, according to a travel writer in the 1880s. Prior to reaching the glen, in this writerʼs experience, the landscape traversed by the “Great North Road between Kinross and Damhead [i.e., the village of Glenfarg], after leaving Milnathort and losing sight of Loch Leven”, was “of a very dreary character, being bleak and solitary, without any of those grander features which often impart an interest to a wild and unfrequented country”. Beyond Damhead, however, “the Great North Road skirts the Farg”, the road “descend[ing alongside the river] between the wood‐clad sides of the magnificent glen” (Beveridge, Between the Ochils and Forth, 95, 94).

By the early twentieth century, when Ruskinʼs poems about Glenfarg had become available in print, a guidebook devoted specifically to “the famous glen” and its environs, Glenfarg and District Past and Present, touted how the route had been highlighted by northbound celebrity travelers, ranging from Ruskin to Prince Leopold of Saxe‐Coburg, the future king of Belgium to Queen Victoria. In the 1908 edition of the guidebook, the glen is credited with having drawn forth the young Ruskinʼs “descriptive powers” when he passed through the valley “on a winterʼs day when the rocks were hung with icicles”. This allusion to Ruskinʼs poem, is expanded in a later edition of the guidebook (ca. 1930s), quoting at length from “Glenfarg” and “Glen of Glenfarg” (“Papa how pretty those icicles are”). For royal testimonials to the beauty of the glen, the guidebook quotes Leopold of Saxe‐Coburg, who, in 1819 while on a tour of Scotland following the death of his spouse, Princess Charlotte, declared the beauties of the glen superior even to the romantic vales of Germany; and Queen Victoria is quoted, remarking on the “really lovely” views of Glenfarg while on her first journey to Scotland, in 1842 (Jack, Glenfarg and District Past and Present, 4th ed. [1908], 12; Jack, Glenfarg and District Past and Present, 7th ed. [n.d.], 12–13).

These two visits to North Britain by British royalty were significant occasions for Scots, but Victoriaʼs remarks about Glenfarg were not published until 1868 in Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands. Leopoldʼs tour in August–September of the year of Ruskinʼs birth predated the better‐known visit to Scotland by George IV in 1822—the first by a British monarch since Charles II—and the role of master of ceremonies in Edinburgh, which on the later occasion was entrusted to Walter Scott, was in 1819 bestowed on James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, who would later become acquainted with the Ruskins and an admirer of Johnʼs youthful talents. Leopold also enjoyed a public reception in Perth. However, while the prince was “said to have often expressed himself in glowing terms of admiration” of “the endless diversity of sublime, picturesque, and romantic scenery which enriches the route by which he approached the Highlands”, his compliments on the beauties of Glenfarg in particular may have been preserved as only a local tradition, supposedly shared with the landlord of the Bein Inn “while the horses were feeding” at this posthouse situated midway in the glen (, 275; Jack, Glenfarg and District Past and Present, 4th ed. [1908], 12; and see Desmarest, “Prince Leopold of Saxe‐Coburgʼs Entry into Edinburgh, 1819”).

The Bein Inn “in the old coaching days” presented “the third and last stage on the road from Queensferry to Perth”, although “the building which then formed the inn” was said to stand “a little farther down the hill than the . . . caravanserai” that presently stands (Beveridge, Between the Ochils and Forth, 95). The coaches came from Kinross via Milnathort, Middleton, Newhill and Langside; and in the village, horses were changed at the Punch Bowl Inn (Jack, Glenfarg and District Past and Present, 7th ed. [n.d.], 12). Despite these services, the condition of the road that the Ruskins would have followed along the Farg in the 1820s is unclear, for although “the Great North [Road] . . . from Edinburgh to Aberdeen was engineered in 1808–1810, . . . the part south to Milnathort [near Loch Leven, just below Glenfarg] was not completed till 1832”. In any case, the route through the village formed a section of “the old coaching‐ro andad from Queensferry to Perth. . . . Beyond the glen, the road led to a pass over the Ochils known as the Wicks of Baiglie, which was associated with a prospect of Perth as described in Walter Scottʼs The Fair Maid of Perth, although the exact situation of this view and of the area named the Wicks became matters of speculation (see Beveridge, Between the Ochils and Forth, 96–101; Jack, Glenfarg and District Past and Present, 7th ed. [n.d.], 22–24).

In his poems about Glenfarg, Ruskin took note of a local industry, mentioning “floury mills” (“Glen of Glenfarg” [“Glen of Glenfarg thy beauteous rill”]) and “the water wheel that turns slowly round / Grinding the corn” (“Glenfarg” and “Glen of Glenfarg” (“Papa how pretty those icicles are”)). In 1869, when he printed the latter poem in Queen of the Air, Ruskin annotated the line describing the water mill, “Political Economy of the Future!” (Ruskin, Works, 19:396–97). In the 1840s, the Farg valley was still active with four mills for grinding corn, twenty‐two thrashing mills, and a sawmill; however, as the century advanced, the local industry declined. According to the 1908 edition of the Glenfarg guidebook, local mills were undercut by cheap imported flour, which even “after paying all carriage dues, could be sold at the millerʼs door for less price than he could produce it”. The meal and flour mills are described as having long been closed, their “decaying walls” along the Farg “now silent as the grave, save when the winds sigh eerily” through them; and whereas the 1908 edition of the guidebook could still point to “old people . . . in our parish” who remembered the mills, the 1930s edition concluded that “no one now lives who was familiar with these meal mills in our parish” (Jack, Glenfarg and District Past and Present, 4th ed. [1908], 8–10; Jack, Glenfarg and District Past and Present,, 7th ed. [n.d.], 8–9).

While the perception that local goods were undersold by mass production was partly true, however, the causes of the decline were more complex. “From the Industrial Revolution through the nineteenth century, demand increased for a whiter wheaten loaf at the expense of wholemeal wheat, barley, or rye bread”—the more refined bread believed at the time to be healthier. Simultaneously, changes in technology displaced stone mills with more efficient “roller” mills, which favored “harder imported wheat” over the “British‐grown softer grains” that ground well by stone. Bakers also preferred imported “strong North American, Eastern European, and Russian flours“ since these “produced a well‐risen loaf with less flour”, increasing bakersʼ profits. Researchers of this history appreciate the “irony in considering the late‐nineteenth‐century revolution in milling with its attendant transformation in consumption patterns when, a century later, a reversal in consumption is taking with an increasing demand for stone‐ground wholemeal flour, some of it produced in restored country water mills” (Tann and Jones, “Technology and Transformation”, 66–67). Ruskin would likewise have appreciated the irony—and approved the reversal.

Ruskin would also have regretted the transformation of Glenfarg brought about by the rail line laid through the glen. The early twentieth‐century guidebooks to Glenfarg were designed to vest the future economy of the region in “developing into a healthy, attractive summer resort”, supported by rail service and other new amenities (Jack, Glenfarg and District Past and Present, 4th ed. [1908], 4). Dismal as he would have considered that prospect, Ruskinʼs early poems do at least confirm the guidebooksʼ claim that “the air” of Glenfarg “is generally clear and dry, when Strathearn and Perth are enveloped in mist and dampness”. In “On Scotland”, he traces the “dreary way” from Perth to River Earn, whereas in the Glenfarg poems he directs the spectator from the “grassy hills” to the clear and “starry” sky (“Glen of Glenfarg” [“Glen of Glenfarg thy beauteous rill”]), and from the “icicles . . . so near” to the “trees . . . waving upon the rocks side” to the “mountains at a distance seen” (“Glenfarg” and “Glen of Glenfarg” [“Papa how pretty those icicles are”]). As the later guidebook boasts, promoting the resort: “Being surrounded by hills”, the village “has thus the double advantage of having a dry, wholesome, pure air, such as cannnot be found in low‐lying places, and of being well sheltered from violent winds, or cold inclement blasts” (Jack, Glenfarg and District Past and Present, 7th ed. [n.d.], 3).