Literary parallels: on the Highlands

From Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, chapter 42:

When he awoke it was dawn. Or something like dawn. The light was watery, dim and incomparably sad. Vast, grey, gloomy hills rose up all around them and in between the hills there was a wide expanse of black bog. Stephen had never seen a landscape so calculated to reduce the onlooker to utter despair in an instant.

“This is one of your kingdoms, I suppose, sir?” he said.

“My kingdoms?” exclaimed the gentleman in surprize. “Oh, no! This is Scotland!”

From The Flight of the Heron, Part I chapter 1:

It was hot in the Great Glen, though a languid wind walked occasionally up Loch Lochy, by whose waters they were now marching. From time to time Captain Windham glanced across to its other side, and thought that he had never seen anything more forbidding. The mountain slopes, steep, green and wrinkled with headlong torrents, followed each other like a procession of elephants, and so much did they also resemble a wall rising from the lake that there did not appear to be space for even a track between them and the water. And, though it was difficult to be sure, he suspected the slopes beneath which they were marching to be very nearly as objectionable.

[...]

The sun was now getting lower, and though the other side of the glen was in full warm light, this side felt almost cold. Another peculiarity of this repulsively mountainous district. Gently swelling hills one could admire, but masses of rock, scored with useless and inconvenient torrents, had nothing to recommend them. He did not wonder at the melancholy complaints he had heard last night from the officers quartered at Fort Augustus.

(JSMN is set that much later that the Romantic view of mountainous country as beautiful and admirable has become more prominent, but I don't think there's anything especially significant in Stephen not agreeing with it here; for him it's just a matter of 'the gentleman has just dragged me off to this random place without any warning, it's cold and dark and soggy and I don't know what's going on, and I'm under a fairy enchantment that makes me horribly depressed all the time'. But it's amusing to think of him and Keith commiserating over their distaste for Scottish mountains, and also amusing to compare the Army command who oblige Keith to go to Scotland with the gentlemen who obliges Stephen to. Or to imagine Keith getting kidnapped by the gentleman!)