THE RIVER FINDHORN.
ARIVER, more than any other natural feature of a country, has a personality of its own. Mountains can inspire a sense of personal being; trees set themselves in the mind as individuals ; landmarks of trees or hills guard and beckon like friends. But a river is a more living thing than trees or hills. A river itself can kill or make alive ; a river can quicken to fertility or devastate and destroy. A river can bring wealth to cities or send out death to an enemy ; rivers may be barriers or highways ; they may join or divide. But, above all, a river has the power of inspiring personal affec- tion. A river has movement and spirit; it has moods of quiet and haste, changes from violence to stillness ; it can be sunny and sparkling, or dark and cruel ; it has a voice, and it can give the fullest knowledge of itself to the sense of touch—a sense, indeed, of embrace rather than mere contact. A man may wade in a river, or swim in it and feel it fold round him, or drink and get fresh life from it. He may watch it from one day to another, be may find it his constant companion through the year, and year after year, and he comes in the end, per- haps, to writing its history. A stream may, indeed, in a very real sense be a guide and a fellow traveller. " Follow Dart and he'll lead you down" said a Dartmoor shepherd—not Mr. Winston Churchill's variety—to the present writer, and a charming leader he proved till he drank salt water and became, "not one who wears upon his forehead clear the free- dom of a mountaineer," but an inlet of the ocean.
It is the sense of personal affection which underlies the
work of such a writer as Mr. George Bain, whose book, " The River Findhorn from Source to Sea," has recently been published at the office of the Nairnshire Telegraph, Nairn. To him the Findhorn is what it was to the late Master of Balliol. "The Findhornl—it is the most beautiful river in Great Britain!" Its beauty comes in part from the sheer contrasts of the scenery through which it runs. It starts from the source through corries and glens, "for the most part over a thick bed of gravel, studded with granite boulders and fragments of quartzite rock, and bordered by beautiful greensward. It is almost entirely destitute of
trees and shrubs. You feel that you are in the very heart of a vast and dreary wilderness—a solitude abandoned by man." Lower down its course come the heather, juniper, and birch, but the chief feature of the scenery is the "enormous gravel banks" through which the river has cut its way. The solitude of the mountain gives way to the quiet of a well-tilled Highland etrath, and in turn the peaceful husbandry gives way to the rushing of a torrent through a rocky ravine. "At Dulsie it strikes the angle of the granite cliff forming Dulsie Hill and recoils upon itself, surging in froth and spray as it thunders through a narrow chasm into the dark, deep, sullen pools below." Here it has scooped its way through granite, and after the granite comes the sand- stone. The channel of the river broadens. "Lofty red cliffs of sandstone, like the gigantic walls of some ancient fortress, appear, crowned with magnificent firs, stately oaks, and wide- spreading beeches, with a great wealth of underwood, of shrub and fern, ivies and grasses "; and then, finally, the river wins its way through a rich and fertile valley to the sea. But there is much more for the historian of the Findhorn to describe than the scenery, however beautiful, of the river. If only for the feuds of the clansmen which it has witnessed, the Findhorn would find its own place in Scottish local history. It was on a small tributary of the Findhorn, which runs through Loch Moy, that the Cummings attempted the destruction of Moy Castle. They dammed back the waters of Loch Moy at its outlet, with the object of flooding the island in the loch on which the castle stands. One of the Mackintosh clansmen, however, stole down on a raft by night to the wooden barrier made by the Cummings, bored a number of holes in the barrier with an auger, plugged each hole, tied a string to each plug and the whole set of strings to a rope, and then, choosing his moment, pulled out all the plugs. The dammed-up water rushed out, tore down the turf bank behind the barrier, and carried away the whole army of Cummings encamped under it. Not less remarkable is another story of the victory of the few over the many. Not long after the battle of Selkirk, Charles Edward Stuart was on his way to Strathdearn to thank Lady Mackintosh for her share in his victory; she had fitted out a force of 700 or 800 clansmen. On his way an attempt was made to capture him by Lord Loudon, who sent 1,500 Hanoverian troops from Inverness. Lady Mac- kintosh had instructed Donald Fraser, the Mop blacksmith, and four of his men to be on the watch and to warn her of the approach of troops. He, however, on discovering the advance of the enemy, instead of returning to Lady Mackintosh, posted his men in the pass near Craig-an-Eoin, and by shouting commands to imaginary Camerons and Macdoualds, and firing off muskets, made the enemy believe that he was at the head of a largo body of troops. The Hanoverians fled back to Inverness, and the army of five wore left in possession of the field.
The records of the clans, indeed, naturally enough, consist chiefly o2 fighting. One of the typical stories of exceptional skill with the bow belongs to " Little John " Macandrew of Dalnahaitnich, who won a famous fight for the Mackintoshes against the Camerons by his marvellous shooting. A party of the Camerons in revenge broke into his house by night, intending to kill him, but "Little John," slipping out by a back door, climbed a tree and shot dead his assailants one by one as they came out of the house. Life for the Mackintoshes in those days was either fighting or guarding against sur- prise. The custom of eating the beef before the broth, which is said still to survive in Strathdearn, is believed to have originated in the fear of the Lochabermen robbing the pot. Other ancient customs which have less to do with fighting still survive along the banks of the Findhorn. One belongs to funerals. In the churchyard of Delarossie there is a curious semicircle of low turf walls which occasionally puzzles visitors. These walls or seats, however, were not built, as might be supposed, for open-air services, but in order that mourners at funerals might with fitting comfort be served with whisky. Another survival is the use of stilts, with which both men and women cross the river in the upper valley when the water is low. Here and there only a ruin remains as a record of history or superstition. The Macqueens of Pollochaig during their long tenure had a name, not only for strength and courage, but as being the favourites of the fairies. It was a Macqueen who killed the last wolf in Strathdearn; so much is history. Other records of the house of Pollochaig are vaguer. The Macqueens possessed three magic candles, the gift of the fairies, and a talisman of great virtue, and it was parting with this talisman which brought ruin on the house. The beautiful wife of Mackintosh of Daviot was stolen by the fairies, and was believed to be hidden in the fairies' banqueting chamber. The wise man of the country declared that the only way of entering this chamber was by means of Macqueen's magic' candles, and he very reluctantly was persuaded to give them up. The lady was thereupon restored to her husband, but Macqueen paid the penalty he expected. He bad parted with a gift of the fairies, misfortune after misfortune overtook him, and his house, witness to his inevitable doom, stands now in ruins for all to see.
Like other Highland rivers the Findhorn looks back to an extraordinary flood. An account of it has been written by Sir Thomas Dick Lauder, which, as Mr. Bain remarks, is in its way a classic. It began, after an exceptional period of drought, with a cloud. On August 1st "a huge black cloud was noticed whirling strangely in the Moray Firth." It took the form "of an immense column, its base resting on the sea and its top reaching to the sky." It lifted for some hours, and then struck the highest peaks of the mountains in which the Findhorn rises, and for three days and three nights there was incessant rain. The Fiudhorn and its tributaries rose and carried all before them down the valley. The level of Loch Moy was raised thirteen feet. Bridges, farms, crops, were swept away ; at Randolph's Leap, where the stream is checked by a narrow passage, the flood went up forty-six feet to the top of the rocks and four feet more above the top—a rise of fifty feet in all. A hill of a hundred feet high was carried like an island from the side of the river seventy yards down stream, whore part of it now remains. Finally the flood carried away the Bridge of Findhorn, a three-arched structure not thirty years old, and having reached the plain expanded until it had inundated an area of more than twenty square miles. But perhaps even this flood, devastating though it was, is not in some ways so remarkable as a flood of another kind which in 1694 robbed the Laird of Culbin of the whole of his property in land. In that year " a stream of sand, two miles broad, came suddenly out of the west." Apparently it was sand which bad been caught up by a storm of wind from the dunes on the sea margin along the coast from Nairn. This sand caught up and drove other accumu- lations of sand with it, until the whole stream poured steadily over the fields of Culbin, overwhelmed the mansion house, and by the following night had obliterated every house and field in the neighbourhood, so that nothing was visible but a vast sea of sand lying in great billows over what was once pasture and plough. This sea remains to-day, in its centre, just as it lay the day after it came. Sometimes the levels shift; once the old mansion house, like a spectre, stood np for a few months above the level, but was engulfed again ; once, an old man who died only fifty years ago used to relate, an apple tree emerged from the site of the old orchard, bore blossom, and was buried again. But the sand, though it is fought by planting it with bents and in other ways, remains to-day as powerful and as terrible as over. A photograph in Mr. Bain's book gives a picture of a huge sandhill, each grain of it dead, but the whole of it moving like a living thing : it is described as " Mavistown Sandhill entering Low Wood."
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