Along the waterside for miles below Douglas extend the magnificent woods and gardens and “policies” of Lord Home’s estate, enclosing the grand castellated mansion of Douglas Castle—although this is but a fraction of the vast edifice begun by the last Duke of Douglas; the vestiges of the old “Tower Perilous”; the three artificial lakes, and spots that speak so plainly of the wars of old and of the rough deeds of the Douglases as the “Bloody Sykes,” the “Bottomless Mire,” and the artificial mound of the “Boncastle.”
Just where it meets the Douglas Water, the Clyde makes a sharp and momentous turn. It reaches the romantic crisis in its career, and tumbles headlong over the Falls of Clyde. It leaves its youth behind it as it passes the turning-point, and makes its plunge over Bonnington Linn. Hitherto its flow has been placid or rippling; it has been the clear-flowing Clyde Water of song and ballad, winding among lone places of the hills, washing the bases of Roman camps or feudal peels, or skirting leisurely the edges of fertile meadows or rough pastures, browsed by sheep and cattle. The sound and stir of labour have not greatly disturbed it; there have been no busy seats of industry near its banks. But from its great ordeal it comes forth a stream with a changed character and destiny; not less attractive in itself and its surroundings—for a time, indeed, it gains in beauty—but with the sober pace and growing burden of middle life upon it, gathering, as it moves seaward, more and more of the stains and defilements of human toil—the black trickles from the Lanarkshire coalfield, and the sewage of busy towns and villages—until it becomes a muddy and ill-smelling current, flowing between ranks of tenements and ranges of factory chimneys.
In the three miles and three-quarters of its course beginning at Bonnington, the Clyde descends a depth of 260 feet, leaping again and again, and yet again, over sheer walls of rock, boiling in pools and pot-holes, and brawling over boulder and shingle bed, between mural cliffs of old red sandstone or high banks clothed with wood or diversified by parks and orchards. In the remaining forty or fifty miles of its journey, before it becomes finally merged in the salt water, its fall is only 170 feet.
Photo: A. Brown & Co., Lanark.
CORRA LINN.
Clyde’s first plunge, at the Bonnington, or Boniton, Linn, is the least deep and impressive of the three; and by comparison with the scenes below, the surroundings of the spot where the river takes its leap are open and bare. The water falls sheer over a precipice into a deep cauldron 30 feet below, and is broken in its descent only by a projecting rock in the middle. Thence it churns and eddies and boils between the lofty walls of sandstone overhung by wood, and draped wherever there is hold for root and fibre by trees and undergrowth, to meet a greater catastrophe at Corra Linn. At this the grandest of Scotland’s waterfalls—“Clyde’s most majestic daughter”—the stream flings itself down from a height of 84 feet, in a tumultuous white mass of foam, the falling body of water being broken and torn in its descent by many sharp ledges and points of rock. In time of spate, especially when the sun shines and wreathes rainbows in the smoke of mist and spray that rises from the fall, the scene is indescribably grand. The deafening roar of the angry waters, the loveliness of the rock and sylvan scenery in which they are set, deepen beyond measure the impression which these Falls of Clyde make on the mind and imagination. The wealth of foliage—bracken, broom, sloe, and wild flowers of many kinds, as well as tall forest trees—drapes what would otherwise be the savage nakedness of the spot with hues and forms of beauty; and there is no lack of the shady “ell-wide walks” which Wordsworth so much appreciated, winding from one to another coign of vantage on the riverside. Nor is there wanting the charm of romantic and historical association:—
“The deeds