Oh, ye’ll tak’ the high road an’ I’ll tak’ the low road,
An’ I’ll be in Scotland before ye;
But me and my true love will never meet again,
On the bonnie, bonnie banks o’ Loch Lomond.

These lines are from the traditional Scottish song “Loch Lomond,” commonly associated with Jacobite memory after the 1745 Rising. In the song’s usual framing, two comrades part after defeat and captivity: one will return by the “high road” (the ordinary route of the living), while the other—fated to die—will take the “low road,” a folkloric path by which the dead travel home more swiftly. The refrain’s setting on the banks of Loch Lomond anchors the lament in a specific Highland landscape, while the speaker’s separation from “my true love” gives the political-historical backdrop an intimate, elegiac focus. The song circulated orally and in print in the 19th century and became a staple of Scottish popular repertoire.

The stanza contrasts two kinds of return: physical travel versus the metaphysical journey of death. “I’ll be in Scotland before ye” is not bravado but a grim consolation—death brings the speaker “home” sooner, yet at the cost of earthly reunion. The final couplet turns the landscape into a memorial space: Loch Lomond is “bonnie,” but its beauty intensifies the tragedy that love and companionship cannot be restored “again.” The song’s power lies in how it fuses national loss (often heard as Jacobite defeat and exile) with personal bereavement, making the “high/low road” a metaphor for the boundary between life and death and for the irreversibility of certain historical and emotional endings.

1) “O ye’ll tak’ the high road, and I’ll tak’ the low road” (common spelling/punctuation variant)
2) “And I’ll be in Scotland afore ye” (Scots “afore” for “before”)
3) “But me and my true love will never meet again / On the bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lomond” (“of” for “o’”)