The branch line up the Tay soon ends at Aberfeldy, famous for the Falls of Moness in a wooded glen, where arises a question as to whether its “Birks of Aberfeldy” were not a mere poetic ornament of a poet’s fancy, copied from older songs such as the “Birks of Endermay.” At all events, birches are not now prominent among the rich foliage; and, of course, Burns, no more than Scott, would “swear to the truth of a song.” Aberfeldy, thriving on a small manufacture of Highland tweed, has an historic note as the place where the Black Watch regiment was embodied out of its looser organisation as independent companies; this is recorded by a monument set up on a cairn where nature and art join hands for striking effect. It is also notable for the first bridge, above Perth, over the Tay, built by the road-making General Wade. Another name that has been connected with Aberfeldy is Andrea Ferrara’s, a foreigner of infuscated _habitat_, who made so many blades for Scotland that tradition has represented him as working a forge here. A rival legend places his workshop in Menteith, where Doune was a more authentic arsenal of firearms for the Highlanders, specially notable for the making of steel pistols.
Aberfeldy Bridge leads us across to Weem, said to be so called from Picts’ houses burrowed in the womb of earth; to Castle Menzies in its park of ancient trees; to Dull, with its memories of a monastery and a hermitage of St. Cuthbert. The whole district is full of moving traditions and traces of forgotten faith and history older than the saints who have left misty relics here, as, for instance, the stone circle at Croft Moraig, “field of Mary,” and the Cave of Weem that has a legend recalling that of Hamelin, as to a child being saved by slipping off a malignant water-horse when it carried away her companions to be drowned in the loch above, with which this cave was believed to communicate. And hereabouts, as elsewhere, there is a legend of hunted Macgregors taking refuge in a tree that was cut down to hurl them to destruction. As to the beauties of the valley, let the Rev. Hugh Macmillan speak, as a son of its soil:--
Westward of the old glacial barricade, to the neighbourhood of Aberfeldy, the Strath, with its numerous farms and small crofts, is a patch-work, a “quilted landscape,” with corn and potato fields and meadows stitched in squares, or rather, to use an image more appropriate to the locality, a continuous web of large-checked tartan laid along the bottom and slopes of the valley. Eastward, beyond Cluny, the Strath is a vast green cup filled to the brim with beauty. There the warm sun, in sheltered nooks, woos the primroses and violets out of the soil earlier than anywhere else. The hillsides are musical with freckled burns, alive with trout; and the copses that line their course are filled with hazel nuts and wild rasps and brambles, which would make a feast for Pan himself, while patriarchal trees linger on many an ancestral farm, and link the generations together, each of them a towering mass of verdant leafage, under whose cool shadow you can sit in the fervid noon with a sigh of relief, and gaze upwards as into the heights of an emerald heaven. On the wide uplands hangs nature’s own tapestry of bell-heather and broom, the purple of the one and the glowing gold of the other mixed in harmonious splendour; and here and there a little tarn--the largest, Loch Derculich, a lonely heron-haunted loch, held close to the heart of the moorland--lifts its blue eye to catch the smile of heaven.