Page:A Companion and Useful Guide to the Beauties of Scotland.djvu/306

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288
A DESCRIPTION OF

and I was glad when the threatening danger was over.

Close to Kinloch is a very curious torrent, which in hard rains must have a very uncommon appearance. It falls between two bare mountains, in an irregular channel, narrow at the top, but spreads, as it descends, on large flat stages of redish smooth stones. I never beheld so singular a cataract; but I did not see it in perfection, there being but little water in it when I walked up its side. Some brush-wood, and a few shrubs and rushes hang about the broken pieces of rocks, forming a kind of irregular weirs, between the broad stages that come, step by step, from the top of the high mountain to the bottom, over which the water, in dry weather, slides in the oddest shapes imaginable; and in a flood, by the violent bounds, from one flat stage to another, the water forms a chain of semicircular spouts all the way down the channel.

At Kinloch, I crossed the Tumel just after it quits Loch Rannoch, over a very good bridge, and then wound round the foot of the lake, and proceeded on its southern margin, by a road truly beautiful; and were it not so rough, it would be a drive of fifteen miles that few can equal. There