The Water Kingdom: Scotland’s Lochs and Burns
Stand anywhere in Scotland long enough and water will find you; from above, below, or both at once. It may arrive as a fine mist that doesn’t drench but soaks, or as a hard torrent that leaves you utterly soaked through. Scotland’s 30,000 freshwater lochs, countless burns, and ever-changing rainfall shape the country’s cadence of life and landscape. From Loch Ness to Loch Lomond; from the narrow sea-inlets of the west to the lowland bogs that keep the old weather in their peat; water defines place as much as it defines people.
Lowland wetlands range from small damp hollows to the extensive floodplain marshes at Insh near Aviemore, providing clean water, moderating floods, and adding a special dimension to the scenery. The raised bogs, fed only by rain and mist, form over thousands of years in weather that Scots call dreich; dull, grey, persistent damp. Sphagnum moss drinks and holds water twentyfold; it softens floods and feeds burns long after storms have passed. Between the steady drip and those brief lulls a traveller blesses; the land stays close and humid. As Ian Rankin put it, “In Scotland, there’s no such thing as bad weather; only the wrong clothes, in the wrong season, on the wrong day.”
James M. Mackinlay, in Folklore of Scottish Lochs and Springs (1893), caught the variety of these waters: “Scottish lochs form a striking feature in the landscape… There are moorland tarns, sullen and motionless as lakes… and lochs beautiful in themselves and gathering around them a world of beauty; their shores fringed with the tasselled larch… their placid depths mirroring the crimson gleam of the heather hills.” On messy, wet, grey days these reflections dissolve; what remains is elemental and true.
Scotland’s running waters range from torrential mountain burns to meandering lowland rivers; they carry water voles and otters, dippers and salmon, sea trout working their old roads upstream. A sharp shower driven on the wind can turn a gentle stream into a spate within minutes. There’s an old fisherman’s quip: “Never trust a Scot who says he’s just going for a paddle; he’ll come back with a salmon and a story.”
Elizabeth Isabella Spence, travelling the Highlands in 1816, wrote that “woods never appeared to me so verdant, or waters so clear, as those which met my view along this road, as glimpses of the translucent, or rushing mountain-streams, casually appeared through shades of tremulous birch.” Even in raw weather the burns ran bright. Badenoch itself—the ‘drowned land’—takes its name from the ancient flooding of the upper Spey; wide holms and peat-rich hollows keep the record of snowmelt and seasonal inundation in their pools.
The practical tie between Scots and water shows up in the old Statistical Account of Mauchline Parish (1791–99): “the only loch in the parish, called Loch Brown, would have been drained many years ago, had it not been for the sake of two corn mills which it supplies with water.” Local tradition held that Tam Samson, Robert Burns’s friend, made it his sporting rendezvous; the Garroch Burn carried its outflow as a deep lade powering the mills of Dalsangan. Water-powered industry left a quiet architecture across the Highlands. At Craigmore, Nethybridge, in 1863, Alexander Cameron set a sawmill spinning with a twelve-foot overshot wheel; at Glenbuchat the later meal mill used an undershot wheel on a long lade drawn from the Water of Buchat. Peat fires dried the grain; the turning wheel lifted sacks, cut timber, and milled oats. Asked why whisky tastes of smoke and water, a barman shrugged: “It’s liquid weather.”
Yet Scotland’s waters also show their darker face in the historical flood reports. In Laggan, Badenoch, in 1833, witnesses told how “in a thunderstorm the flood was much higher than in the memorable flood of 3 August 1829… hailstones larger than pigeons’ eggs… the water came down in a torrent seven minutes after the loudest thunder and filled a house to a depth of four feet.” At Boleskine on the east shore of Loch Ness, the glen of Aultmore was “a perfect wreck”; bridges swept away; Urquhart was “one sheet of water.” In Morayshire, “the River Lossie came down with a suddenness that exceeds all records”; houses filled to four feet seven inches; bridges carried off. Near Blair Atholl, observers noted two rain columns two miles apart; in the centre there was only a light drizzle. These are the same waters that sustain cows and trout; the same waters that can eat a road in an hour.
Hugh Miller, in The Cruise of the Betsey (1858), understood how water draws the line between land and sea and then rubs it out: “Long withdrawing valleys of the mainland, with brown mossy streams, change their character as they dip beneath sea level, becoming saltwater lochs… swept twice every tide by powerful currents… mountain-chains stand up as larger islands.” Land and sea are partners in a slow dance; on some days the sea-mist drifts in and you can hardly say where one ends and the other begins. Hence the traveller’s quip that Loch Lomond proves even Scotland’s mirrors are full of hills.
Writers who knew these mountains best treated water as the life of the land. Seton Gordon watched a July trickle grow into a November roar; deer standing high on the slope; the rain turning them to statues against the hill. W. H. Murray heard the daily thaw and freeze of corrie pools; the streams never still; cold water biting at the lip yet carrying the clean taste of snow. Andrew Greig reached a remote loch and found a surface still as poured mercury; a place that gathers stories—the melt of snow, the drift of peat, the long fall of rain. Nan Shepherd felt the mountain breathe; the water that falls from the sky the same that runs beneath the foot; herself between them. Jim Crumley listened to the October burns turning the colour of strong tea; an otter arrowing through a swirl while mist rose like river made air.
Hugh MacDiarmid answered those who think Scotland small: “Scotland small? Our multiform, our infinite Scotland small? Only as a patch of rain; as a cloud on the face of the sun.” In water—falling soft, falling hard; pausing; leaving the land drenched or merely damp—Scotland takes its measure not in size but in depth, in the stories carried from sky to loch to sea, and back again.