Welcome to Travel Saturday. Are you ever inspired to travel by literary or dramatic art? Last weekend I was in Scotland looking on the scenes that inspired the novelist Sir Walter Scott.
“Where gleaming with the setting sun, one burnished sheet of living gold, Loch Katrine lay beneath him rolled.”
When Scott wrote his epic poem The Lady of the Lake in 1810 there is no doubt that this landscape, in the heart of the Trossachs region of Scotland was his inspiration.
It is a gorgeous part of the world and Scott enjoyed it many, many times from his holiday cottage on the shores of Loch Katrine. His experiences here had a perhaps unintended effect. The Lady of the Lake was a worldwide hit, selling over 25,000 copies in a year.
The poem brought the romance and majesty of this region to the attention of the world and could even be said to have changed the way people look at landscape. Countless visitors followed in his footsteps, including Queen Victoria and painter JMW Turner. And so Scottish tourism was born!
Here are some photos from the Loch Katrine area in the Trossachs – from a boat, from a bike and from the top of nearby Ben Venue. It’s no wonder Sir Walter Scott was carried away by the scenery.
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Natasha von Geldern is a travel writer, editor, and blogger who is passionate about making the pages of the atlas real by traveling the world. She is a contributor to Travel Wire Asia, Wild Junket Magazine, Yahoo! Total Travel, and Travelbite. You can find her on her travel website and blog, WorldWanderingKiwi.
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