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Highland Perthshire was once the Celtic earldom of Atholl and, before that, a Pictish kingdom. For a thousand years the route of the A9, which travels through it, has been the principal thoroughfare into the Highlands. Earlier, when the landscape was dominated by the great Caledonian forest, the haunt of wolves and bears, the easiest travel was by river.
The change from Lowlands to Highlands is obvious. On one side of the river Tay lies Birnam. On the opposite bank lies Dunkeld which was once the frontier between English-speaking Lowlanders and Gaelic-speaking Highlanders who emerged from the frowning hills to the north. The Tay, the largest river in Scotland, is the trunk of a dendritic drainage system – literally ‘tree-shaped’. It creates the geographic and the cultural shape of Highland Perthshire.
The river bends at Ballinluig through Strathtay whose beauty led one Victorian visitor to fall to his knees in prayer and declare it ‘fit vestibule of heaven’. The earliest bridge across the Tay lies at the thriving market town of Aberfeldy, six miles downstream from 15-mile long Loch Tay. The village of Killin lies at its west end.
The Tummel joins the Tay at Ballinluig and the A9 follows it north to Pitlochry the capital of this, the Heartland of Scotland, which has been a prime holiday destination since the days of the stagecoach.
Here another great river valley, Strathtummel, heads west through the hills on the ancient Road to the Isles, past Loch Tummel and Loch Rannoch with the little village of Kinloch Rannoch at its foot.
North on the A9 from Pitlochry, the river alongside the road is now the Garry. It passes Blair Atholl, dominated by the great wedding cake castle of Blair that has controlled this passage into the Highlands for centuries.
The road climbs to the pass of Dalnacardoch marking the border of Highland Perthshire and Inverness-shire.
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