The Rivers of Great Britain, Descriptive, Historical, Pictorial: Rivers of the East Coast. VariousЧитать онлайн книгу.
sullen black lochs, an almost total absence of vegetation, an almost unbroken solitude. Here rise Ben Macdhui, Braeriach, and Cairntoul, whose streams, running down—often hurled down—their weather-beaten sides, rapidly increase the volume of our river. Braeriach fronts Ben Macdhui on the other side of the infant Dee. It presents to the view a huge line of precipices, dark and sombre, save when the hand of Winter, powdering them with snow, changes them to masses of glittering white. Even at a good distance away you hear the splash and dash of innumerable waterfalls, caused by the burns leaping the cliffs. If you venture to wander among those wilds you must know your ground well, for however bright the day may be one hour, the next you may be shrouded in mist, or drenched with rain, or battered by hail. The mist, indeed, is rarely absent. You see it clinging round the heights and moving restlessly up and down the hillside like some uneasy and malignant spirit. As you walk you are startled at a huge figure striding along. It requires an effort to recognise a mist-picture of yourself—a sort of Scotch Spectre of the Brocken.
It was of these wild regions that an old Highlander once remarked to Hill Burton that it was “a fery fulgar place, and not fit for a young shentleman to go to at all.” Let us not scorn the ingenuous native; Virgil has said, in the Eclogues (much more elegantly, ’tis true), very much the same thing about very much the same kind of scenery. All our way by Dee will not be among views like this. Indeed, at the mouth are scenes of rich fertility. It is on the fat meadows near Aberdeen that a portion of those innumerable flocks and droves are raised which have so great a reputation in the London market. These are the two extremes, but between them there is every variety of Highland scenery. He who has seen the banks of Dee has seen, as in an epitome or abridgment, all that the north of Scotland has to show. In the midst of variety one thing is constant, whatever landscape you may be passing through: you always have the great hill masses on the horizon. Thus the Dee is a typical Highland river. Even with the sternest parts soft touches are interwoven. Thus take the Lui, which, rising in Ben Macdhui, falls into the Dee at an early point of its course. The lower part of Glen Lui is remarkable for its gentle beauty. The grass is smooth as a lawn, the water of the burn which moves gently along is transparently clear, the regular slope is covered with weeping birches. The perfect solitude of this sweet valley has its own charm, though it be the charm of melancholy. Higher up, nearer Ben Macdhui, in Glen Lui Beg, the scenery is wilder, and the water dashes down more swiftly, as if it longed to be away from its wild source. We must go with it, and bid farewell to Ben Macdhui and the sources of Dee. And for farewell, here is a mountain legend.
THE HIGHLAND DEE.
At some time or other a band of robbers who infested this region had acquired a great store of gold. One of their number, named Mackenzie, proved that there is not honour among thieves. He robbed his companions and then hid the twice-cursed pelf in a remote and well-nigh inaccessible spot far up the slope of Ben Macdhui. The work of concealment took him the best part of a short summer night, for the sun rose precisely as he finished. He noticed that as its first beam fell over the ridge to the east, it marked a long burnished line of light over the ground where the treasure lay. This seemed to him to distinguish the spot beyond the possibility of error. Before his death he confided to his sons the secret of his hidden treasure. They were poor and greedy. The rest of their lives was devoted summer after summer to the hunt; but the grim mountain kept its secret well. Often the morning mist mocked their efforts, yet they succeeded no better when, on the anniversary of the burial, the sun rose in a sky of unclouded blue. One by one, prematurely aged, they passed away, till the last died a madman, revealing in his ravings the secret and the ruin of their lives. And still, somewhere on that mountain-side, the gold hoard lies concealed.
For some time after we leave the Wells of Dee, we are still in the midst of gloom. Dark black rocks rising on either side to a great height still shut us in, whilst the stillness is only broken by the roar of the wind, the rush of the water, or the (occasional) scream of the eagle; but when we get to the Linn of Dee, near Inverary, we may fairly consider ourselves back among our kind; nay, we are within the very uncharmed circle of the tourist, whereat we may rejoice or grieve as is our liking. This linn is caused by the river rushing through a narrow channel in the rocks over into a pool very deep, and (according to local tradition) unfathomable. Some hardy spirits have jumped across the channel, but if you try, and miss, you will never come out alive. Then your epitaph will be written in a guide-book paragraph, somewhat after the fashion of the lines in Baedeker telling the horrible end of that unfortunate officer who fell into the bear-pit at Berne. Lord Byron, when a boy, had a narrow escape here. “Some heather caught in his lame foot, and he fell. Already he was rolling downwards, when the attendant luckily caught hold of him, and was but just in time to save him from being killed.”
LINN OF DEE. / LINN OF CORRIEMULZIE.
The great floods of 1829—those floods of which Sir Thomas Dick Lauder is the chronicler—wrought sad havoc here. A bridge spanned the stream at a height of thirty feet. The river, rising three feet higher, swept it away. We must turn to the annals of Strathspey to test the full havoc of the flood fiend, yet it wrought no mean ruin here. I pick out one or two cases. Near Inverey the rising water attacked six houses, destroying each in turn until all the inhabitants were huddled round the hearthstone of the last. Here the water burst in, forcing the poor people to take refuge on a knoll, where, without shelter, and in mortal terror for their lives, they crouched shivering through the night. There is a waterfall on the Quoich, near where it joins the larger river. This was spanned by a bridge so firmly bound to the rocks as to be (it was hoped) immovable. The flood struck it, and it was torn away, with tons of the adjacent rocks. It seemed, indeed, to those who lived through that terrible time, as if the very structure of the earth was breaking in pieces. The days were black with the ever-falling sheets of heavy rain; the nights were vivid with the ever-flashing lightning; whilst day and night alike the wind roared with demoniacal fury. The waters hidden in the bowels of hills and rocks burst forth, leaving great fissures and scars, which remain as a monument of the Titanic forces at work. Shocks of earthquake happened again and again. “I felt the earth hobblin’ under me,” said a peasant graphically. Many thought the end of all things was at hand. Yet it was in less sensational ravages that the flood wrought its most cruel havoc. The poor man’s cottage left a hopeless ruin, the fertile field left a sandy waste—such were the most lamentable signs of its power. Human effort was powerless against it. What could be done with a flood which rose, as was noted at Ballater, not less than one foot in ten minutes? The ravages made have long ago been repaired. At Linn of Dee there is now a handsome white granite bridge, which was opened by the Queen as long ago as the year 1857.
LOCHNAGAR.
It is odd that the poet of this essentially Highland river should be an English bard; for if we turn to see what our literature has to say of the Dee, we must turn to Byron. Yet Byron was, as he says, “half a Scot by birth, and bred a whole one.” If his ancestors on the father’s side “came over” (as he delighted to recall) with the Conqueror, he was not less proud to remember that his mother was of one of the best families of the “Gay Gordons,” and that for over three centuries her people had possessed Gight. He went to Aberdeen in 1790, when but two years old; here he stayed till 1798, and during that time he visited again and again most of the finest spots on the Dee. Those mighty hills, those clear, flowing streams, were the earliest things he remembered, and he never failed to acknowledge how deep was the impression they made on him. “From this period I date my love of mountainous countries.” Near the end of his life he sings, in “The Island”—
“The infant rapture still survived the boy,
And Lochnagar with Ida look’d o’er Troy.”
His mention of Lochnagar—“dark Lochnagar”—reminds us how peculiarly his name is connected with that Deeside mountain of which he is the laureate. Here, too, sprang the strange child-love of the precocious boy for Mary Duff, with whose beauty the beauty of