This is an excerpt from a poem from 1864 by Professor Shairp of St Andrews, written after he journeyed on ‘the iron horse’, for the first time on the newly opened Highland Railway from Perth to Inverness . It’s called “A Cry from Craigellachie ”. Stand fast Craigellachie," is the war-cry of the Clan Grant, a very prominent clan in Strathspey. I came across this during my research for my Badenoch The Storylands story series and it’s been sitting there waiting for the right moment to be used. It comes from and old Victorian era book by a man called Donald Shaw, under the pen name of ‘Glenmore’.

This is when I first was drawn in by the idea of the ‘Iron Horse’. There were lots of books with extravagant and exotically long titles like ‘or ‘
Memoirs of a Highland Lady by Elizabeth Grant, Glimpses of Church and Social Life in the Highlands in Olden Times and Other Papers’ by Alexander MacPherson, or ‘In the Shadows of Cairngorm Chronicles of the United Parishes of. Abernethy and Kincardine by the Rev. William Forsyth or my personal favourite, Captain Simon Fraser’s ‘Airs and Melodies peculiar to the Highlands of Scotland and the Isles from 1715 to 1745. I think this is where I get the inspiration for all my long track titles from!

There’s a few Gaelic songs that compare the steam train to a great horse, but unlike a horse it doesn’t complains, or gets tired, like your horse would. But actually that’s not true…steam engines are a pain in the arse when it comes to maintenance. You’d have an easier life with a real horse I’d say!

The poem describes how the iron Horse is taking away the wilderness and wildness of the Highlands - as the beasts arrives at these plays and makes them “a wilderness no more”. The dawn of tourism in the Victorian age saw railway village populations swell into towns, like Aviemore and Newtonmore, and he glens became more populated. You had Queen Victoria arriving in Kingussie and Aviemore on the train to great big cheering crowds of flag wavers and all that palaver and pomp and ceremony. The railways really opened things up drastically. The impact was arguably more sudden than that the coming of the great North road, or the re-routing and dualling of the A9.