The Cairngorms

Ghost River

'Though actually I have one small idea - I intend to walk a certain river to its source.'

Neil M. Gunn, Highland River.

In late July 1829, a high-pressure system situated in the Atlantic Ocean, between southern Iceland and northern Scotland, retreated south-westwards. In its wake, a chain of atmospheric events began to unfold. Cold air swept south from the Norwegian Arctic, through Scandinavia and the Baltic Sea, and by 1 August a substantial depression had begun to make its ways southwards from Iceland, gaining momentum as it travelled.

Weather conditions on land would have begun to deteriorate correspondingly, but for the people of north-east Scotland, blissfully unaware of the extraordinary meteorological changes that were taking place at sea, daily life continued as normal. Little could anyone have known that within days, one of the most cataclysmic natural events ever recorded in Britain would take place.

On 3 August 1829 the full force of the Atlantic depression eventually reached mainland Scotland. As the cold weather systems from the north collided with existing cyclonic systems from the south, a massive, unstable air mass formed, unleashing torrential rain as it passed slowly across the uplands of the Moray Firth and the Grampian Mountains. The result was a catastrophic flood of Biblical proportions.

The 'Muckle Spate', literally meaning 'large flood', of 1829 remains historically unparalleled in its destructive force. Thousands of people across the northeast of Scotland were rendered destitute by the rising water. Farms were swept away and vast tracts of fertile land were ruined. In one district alone, thirteen bridges and three sawmills were destroyed by the swollen rivers. Elsewhere, roads were inundated and whole communities left stranded. Eight people lost their lives and many more had their livelihoods obliterated. Within a matter of hours, the rivers that had been the lifeblood of the region had become the conduits of its destruction.

It was hardly surprising. The rivers of north-east Scotland possess a latent ferocity. They are mountain rivers, capable of rapid and violent transformation, falling further and faster than anywhere else in the country: rivers such as the Spey and the Avon whose waters rise disparately in the Cairngorm and Monadhliath mountains; and the River Dee whose headwaters on top of the Braeriach plateau have the highest and most enigmatic river source in Britain.

I once idly traced the backwards course of the River Dee, letting my finger run gradually northwards and upwards along its representation on the Ordnance Survey map. The river's depiction on the map steadily changed the further my finger moved against its downward flow, tapering from fat blue curves, looping and bending across the map, through green forestry and salmon-pink villages, to a narrow line, split thinner and thinner at each V-shaped confluence.

Eventually the river became a slender cobalt filament surrounded by the compressed orange of merging contour lines and the black symbolism of cliffs. I followed the blue strand on the map until it could divide no further, to the river's ultimate source, in the middle of the Cairngorm Mountains.

A few small blue circles were scattered at the place where my finger finally rested, too small to be lochans or tarns, but large enough to make it onto the map. Next to them was a name in the same blue typeface, 'The Wells of Dee'. I was immediately intrigued. Every other river that I could see on the map eventually subdivided backwards into obscurity. The River Dee was different. I was able to follow its headwaters back to one of the highest points on the map.

Not only that, its source had a name. It made the starting point of the river seem almost official. The inclusion of the triangle of blue circles on the map hinted at a sense of permanence, a geographical feature present year after year, a constant supply of water. But from where? There was no higher ground from which rainwater could drain, and to my knowledge the plateau summit was a hard, boulder-strewn landscape, not a marshland. The 'Wells' had to be wellsprings, the source of the river flowing from within the very mountain itself.

Years later, there now seemed to be an exploratory logic to walking the course I had once plotted with my finger. Travelling upstream, back to the source of the Dee, meant moving within the landscape, and understanding something of the water's anarchic progression to lower ground. It would also be an unravelling of the river, witnessing its life-history unfolding in reverse.

The Linn of Dee is the furthest place upstream on the River Dee that you can reach by public road. The Linn, from the Gaelic meaning a pool or a cascade of water, is a 300-metre-long chasm cleaved deep into the bedrock where the Dee suddenly converges from a broad-spanning river to a raging torrent just a couple of metres wide. It is spectacular, but concealed until you are close by, hidden amongst thick stands of larch and lodgepole pine. It was dusk when I arrived and the place was deserted. The air was still warm and smelt strongly of pine resin.

A small stone bridge spanned the gorge, arching above a narrow channel of spluttering white-water. The bridge's wooden predecessor was one of first significant victims of the Muckle Spate, pulled apart despite being ten metres above the water. Other bridges further downstream suffered similar fates during the deluge. Not even the engineering prowess of Thomas Telford could have foreseen the destructive power of the 1829 flood. His huge, newly-built stone bridge at Ballater was completely dismantled by the rising waters.

I peered down into the gorge, leaning over the cliff edge, hearing the water before I could see it. On the underside of the bridge the Dee fell in a series of cascades. Recesses had been carved into the rocks in wide curves and scoops that suggested dramatic movement and indicated much higher water levels.

Remarkably the Linn had once been challenged, and tamed. In an act of incredible athleticism but utter recklessness, the celebrated English climber, John Menlove Edwards, swam the length of the falls in 1935. The river was in full spate at the time, but Edwards astonishingly survived the feat and later went on to be at the forefront of British climbing in the 1930s and '40s, pioneering many routes previously thought of as unclimbable. Edwards's life story was not a happy one, though. The apparently self-destructive compulsion that led him to swim the Linn of Dee perhaps underpinned his complex, troubled personality. He later committed suicide in 1958.

Twilight gathered quickly. The sky was cloudless and shifting from blue to purple. I walked westwards, leaving the forestry and moving out into the grassy moorland of Glen Dee, keen to cover as much ground as possible before full darkness. My route ran parallel with the river, separated from it by a floodplain that held some of the largest Scots pines I had ever seen. The trees were colossal and stately: russet-tinged branches and huge blue-green crowns, each with its own wide circumference of territory.

My eyes began to refocus as I walked, adjusting to the grainy half-light. I caught outlines and patterns instead of close detail. Then, several kilometres in, I noticed something partially covered amongst the heather: linear profiles that in their configuration and placement somehow seemed out of place. The track swung close to the shapes, and I paced across the moorland to see them.

I found rows of small boulders, linked at right angles and half hidden by moss and turf that had grafted on top of them: the architectural footprints of a long-deserted building. This was once a homestead, a place of family life and part of a succession of dwellings scattered along the plains of the Dee: to the south of the river, the farmsteads of Dalvor and Dubrach; to the north, Tonnagaoithe and the ruins of Tomnamoine in which I stood. In the darkness, the building's remains seemed poignant, ghostly: distinct archaeological signifiers of one of the most shameful periods of social upheaval in Scotland's history.

By the early nineteenth century the agricultural landscape of Scotland was rapidly changing. Influenced in part by the erosion of the clan system and the gradual agrarian change that had already occurred in England, farming communities that had lived for centuries in Glen Dee and across the Highlands of Scotland swiftly began to vanish. The landowners and large estates of Highland Scotland no longer believed their tenant farmers represented a commercially viable proposition. The old systems of croft and enclosure were rapidly beginning to disappear.

Wholesale clearances took place, swiftly and efficiently depopulating the Highland landscape. Communities were comprehensively eradicated; tens of thousands were removed from their homes by systematic violence and deception. Men, women and children faced starvation, destitution and death as the land they had worked for generations was given up to the rearing of sheep, and in the case of Glen Dee, the servicing of wealthy sporting parties.

There is little direct evidence to suggest that the tenants of Glen Dee experienced the same cruel regimes of clearance witnessed in other parts of Scotland. Instead, the eviction of the glen's farmsteads appears to have happened relatively gradually.

The first two settlements of Tomnagaoithe and Dalvorar to be cleared in 1829 could also have been prompted in no small part by the events of the Muckle Spate.

Sir Thomas Dick Lauder's meticulous chronicle of the floods details the effects of the River Dee's rising flood waters on some of the...