Doctor Johnson and South Loch Ness

Here's a poem which tries to imagine Doctor Johnson's experience of travelling along the South Loch Ness road. It's based on the account in his 'Journey to the Western Isles':

Doctor Johnson by Joshua Reynolds

After Culloden some Jacobites including Bonnie Prince Charlie fled down South Loch Ness

http://www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk/usebooks/johnson-westernisles/04-inverness-fortaugustus.html

Doctor Johnson Rides Along Loch Ness

A corpulent figure riding through sunlit birches

The brown clad moralist and his worldly disciple,

Boswell.

On Highland trails he seeks a spartan virtue

Not to be found in London or the new born Athens-

The sandstone Acropolis of enlightened Edinburgh.

This day South Loch Ness is a sunlit  Arcady

And does this fey land people the storied 

And fevered imagination of  the Sage

As he rides along Wade’s way?

Does he imagine Deidre of the sorrows

Whose fabled fort lies above

The mossy pass of Farigaig?

Or perhaps from the pages of Tacitus

The eagle bearing legionnaires
Jubilant with victory, the air full of ribald song,

Cart spoils from Mons Graupius,

Their breastplates a glitter in the sun.

Or does he see the proud massed Jacobites

Like ravening wolves rushing to take Edinburgh,

Then changed to a fleeing scattered few 

Broken on the spokes of  Fortune’s wheel-

The Redcoat’s bayonets?

But now forgetful of vain fantasy

He stoops to enter an old woman’s  home

And in the smoke reeking heath thatched dwelling

Finds one half  of Baucis and Philomen 

Whose  simple life lived in pastoral piety,

The potato patch, the life giving goats,

The tended coppice of the birch woods,

Refreshes him more than the offered whisky.

In Ovid Baucis and Philomen are spared being killed in a universal flood because of their simple piety  and unwittingly offering hospitality to the Gods Jupiter and Mercury