But this description of the source applies only to the “Clyde’s Burn,” whose valley the main line of the Caledonian Railway ascends, on its way by Beattock Summit into Annandale. When the Clyde’s Burn has run its half-dozen miles and met, above Elvanfoot, the Daer Water, coming from a height of over 2,000 feet, on the slopes of the Gana and Earncraig Hills, the latter has already flowed a course more than twice the length; and there are other tributaries—the Powtrail and the Elvan, for instance, draining the eastern slopes of the wild hills, veined with lead-ore, that on the other side command the valley of the Nith—which might successfully compete, as the source of the Clyde, with the modest little runlet, issuing from the shoulder of Clyde’s Law, that overlooks Tweed’s Well.
ONE OF THE SOURCES OF THE CLYDE.
A “sea of hills,” green or heather clad, is the whole of this region of Clydesdale, forming the districts of Crawford, Crawfordjohn, and adjoining parishes. It is rolled into great waves—not, however, as Sir Archibald Geikie remarks, steep and impending like those that darken the Highland glens, but rounded and smooth like the swell of the ocean subsiding after a storm. On either hand streams innumerable have hollowed out their channels—“hopes” and “gills” and “cleuchs”—in the heart of the hills; and the clear or brown waters tumble merrily over rock and shingle, or skirt the edges of peat-moss or pasture land on their way to reinforce the Clyde. Bare and bleak are these landscapes, as a rule. But there are not wanting fairylike nooks and glades, as well as scenes of sterner beauty. The watersides are often fringed with a natural growth of birch and oak and alder; and on the hillsides are thriving plantations or groups of ash and rowan, sheltering the infrequent farmhouse or shepherd’s cottage. Only at the headstreams of the Glengonnar Water, under the “Green Lowther,” have smoky industries broken in upon these pastoral and moorish solitudes of the Upper Ward: for at Leadhills, as at the neighbouring village of Wanlockhead, across the watershed, lead-ore is still worked and smelted in considerable quantity, although the gold mines of this and other parts of Crawford Moor, once the objects of kingly quest and solicitude, have long been abandoned.
THE CLYDE.
By the sites of old camps and mote-hills, by grey peels and kirkyards, and clachans and mansion-houses, past Tower Lindsay, looking across from its mound and its grove of lichened plane and oak trees to the tiny barony burgh of Crawford; past the desolate little God’s acre of St. Constantine, or Kirkton, where lies the dust of Jane Welsh Carlyle’s mother, of the gipsy kin, of the Baillies; past the woods and lawns and pretty red hamlet of Abington, runs the Water of Clyde until, beside the fragment of Lamington Tower—the heritage, if tradition may be credited, of the wife of William Wallace—it brings us fairly under the shadow of Tinto.
This “Hill of Fire” spreads its skirts through four parishes, whose boundaries meet at the huge cairn of stones on its crest—the site of old beacon fires, perhaps of Druid altars. It is the sentinel height of Upper Clydesdale. Few hills in Southern Scotland are so isolated or command so wide and glorious a prospect. Its porphyritic mass seems to be set in the very jaws of the Upper Vale; and between Lamington and the mouth of the Douglas Water—little more than six miles as the crow flies—the Clyde meanders through low-lying haughs and holmlands, by Covington and Carstairs and Hyndford Bridge, for a distance of twenty miles and more round the base of Tinto and its subject hills. From the summit, on a clear day, one can descry the Bass Rock and Goat Fell, and even the hills of Cumberland and Ireland, besides portions of nearly a score of Scottish counties.