Page:A Companion and Useful Guide to the Beauties of Scotland.djvu/256

238 of General Wade, which must have cost his men infinite labour. From the foot of the lake to General's Hut (so called from Wade), the road runs through an almost uninterrupted wood of young oaks, birch, pine, mountain ash, &c. climbing from the water's edge to the very summits of the boldest rocks. Indeed the wood wants to be thinned, as it screens the beauties of the lake far too much. The road sometimes descends to the margin of the lake, and again rises to a high shelf, winding round and up very steep masses of projecting rock, blown up for the purpose of making the road, whose towering fragments, huge and solid, hang over the narrow way just the width of a carriage. At about fifteen miles from Inverness, I came within sight of the Black Rock, and it seemed as if it were impossible to pass by it; In truth, it does require courage and steady horses to perform it, it being a narrow shelf blown out of the rocks; and to get upon it is by a road almost as steep as the ridge of a house, winding round a huge projecting mass, that looks as if it were ready to crush the bold adventurer who dares come under its brow; for it actually hangs over part of the carriage in passing it. Trees branching, shrubs and bushes bending over and