There is a stream,--(I name not its name, lest inquisitive tourist Hunt it, and make it a lion, and get it at last into guide-books,) Springing far off from a loch unexplored in the folds of great mountains, Falling two miles through rowan and stunted alder, enveloped Then for four more in a forest of pine ... attaining a basin Ten feet wide and eighteen long, with whiteness and fury Occupied partly, but mostly pellucid, pure, a mirror; Beautiful there for the colour derived from green rocks under; Beautiful, most of all, where beads of foam uprising Mingle their clouds of white with the delicate hue of the stillness. Cliff over cliff for its sides, with rowan and pendent birch-boughs, Here it lies, unthought of above at the bridge and pathway, Still more concealed from below by wood and rocky projection, You are shut in, left alone with yourself and perfection of water, Hid on all sides, left alone with yourself and the goddess of bathing.
Clough, who sets his heroes to “verify Black,” leaves his own principal scene not clearly identified, which one guesses at as somewhere on the western edge of Atholl. The _Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich_ itself lay far in the Western Highlands; but was it not in Rannoch that Philip met his first charmer? Towards this region we turn on the other side of Pitlochrie, where open the softer scenes of the Tummel, its Falls that pour over almost the central boss of Scotland, its lovely swelling into a lake, the thinning and roughening of its valley below the head of Schiehallion, as it rises to Loch Rannoch, a long sheet of water darkening under fragments of the Black Wood, and reaching up to the barren moor of Rannoch, most desolate region in Britain. This was once shaded by that great Caledonian Forest, of gloomy renown in mediæval romance, where Ariosto brings one of his heroes, following tracks of Arthur, Lancelot and Gawaine--
In those woods he might be sure Many and strange adventures would be found, But deeds, there wrought, were, like the place, obscure, And, for the greater part, not bruited round.
Here meet the borders of Perth, Argyll, and Inverness; and this wilderness must often have been wet by the blood of plaided warriors if not of mailed knight-errants. In our time, I am told, a lad fishing in one of the Rannoch lochs brought up a rusty sword to confirm the local legend of a meeting between Atholl and Lochiel to discuss a boundary dispute. Each chief was to come unattended; but each, like Roderick Dhu, had a force of clansmen hidden close at hand. When they got to hot words, Atholl first gave the signal, at which--