Category: River Book

Travel through time and space along Scotland’s longest river

Robin A Crawford’s account of walking the Tay from source to sea is like having a local show you around their home river.

In 2019, the historian and long-distance kayaker David Gange wrote a book called The Frayed Atlantic Edge, which encouraged readers to think about both the history and geography of the British Isles in a completely new way. In it, Gange tells the story of an epic kayak journey he made from Muckle Flugga at the extreme northern tip of Shetland, all the way to Seven Stones Reef in the far southwest of Cornwall, and he uses this voyage and some of the places he visits as a framework to underpin his central argument: that far from being peripheral, the Atlantic coast of these islands is in many ways the key to under – standing them.

Over the last couple of hundred years, Gange believes, we have become conditioned to think of history as something that tends to happen in major urban centres; however, as he puts it: “in the larger scheme of things, it has been just the blink of an eye since the Atlantic edge was these islands’ centre.”

I’ve always loved books like this – books that make you question or revise the map of the world you carry around in your head. Paul Richardson does something similar in his excellent Myths of Geography, published last year, particularly in the first chapter, in which he completely deconstructs the logic of continents. If we ask “even the most basic questions” about the way in which the continents as we know them are drawn, Richardson writes, “they soon start to fall apart.” And sure enough, under his laser-like analysis, they do.

In a similar vein, Rebecca Solnit’s 2010 book Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas demonstrates all the myriad ways in which a single city can be mapped. The book contains some 22 artist-drawn maps of San Francisco, each illustrating a different aspect of the city and each one accompanied by an essay by Solnit on that theme. So, in a map titled “The World in a Cup”, for example, Solnit shows all of San Francisco’s coffee shops and also all of its major water lines, sewer lines and sewage treatment plants; meanwhile, in “Right Wing of the Dove” Solnit shows how, for all its liberal credentials, Frisco is in fact a “conservative/military brain trust” by mapping all the various critical organs of the industrial military complex, from oil refineries to munitions factories to the headquarters of right-wing think tanks.

And now, strolling into this fascinating cartographical territory comes Scottish writer Robin A Crawford with his new book The Sound of Many Waters. Subtitled “A Journey Along the River Tay”, it operates in much the same way as The Frayed Atlantic Edge: just as Gange used a journey by kayak to put the western coastline of the British Isles at the centre of the story of our shared archipelago, so Crawford’s journey, mostly on foot, puts the Tay at the heart of Scotland’s.

To be clear, unlike Gange, Crawford isn’t demanding that we should all somehow redraw our mental maps of Scotland in such a way that the Tay becomes central to everything. What he does do, however, as he yomps from the source of the river at Ben Lui to the sea beyond Dundee, is show us how, time and time again, this mighty waterway – the longest river in Scotland – has played a key role in various phases of Scottish history.

So, for example, a polished stone axe head, originally from Italy, found ceremonially buried in the banks of the river Ericht, a tributary of the Tay, prompts an exploration of what life must have been like for the area’s Neolithic inhabitants, already plugged into an expansive international trading network in which rivers and seas served as the principal arteries. Similarly, a visit to the Roman remains on the Gask Ridge prompts the reflection that a key part of the Romans’ plan to subdue the tribes of Caledonia involved “blocking off access to the rich pasturage and farmlands of the Lowlands. As the Tay collects the waters of the Southern Highlands along its length, the Romans constructed forts at the junctions of its tributaries.” As in Gange’s book, the history comes interspersed with evocative passages of nature writing, but unlike Gange, who is visiting many places on his journey for the first time, Crawford has various personal connections with the Tay, to the extent that this feels less like a voyage of exploration and more like having a local show you around their home river.

And in terms of reconfiguring how readers conceptualise the geography of Scotland, way of simplifying the complex layout of the Tay and its various tributaries, he writes:

“hold up your left hand, palm facing away, and spread your fingers: if the Tay is the index finger, then imagine your thumb is the Isla flowing in from the east, your middle finger the rivers Gary and Tummel from the north, and from the west the ring finger represents the Braan and the Almond, your pinkie the Earn.” Sure, it’s a bit of an oversimplification, but to summarize much of the tangled knot of rivers and glens at the heart of Scotland in such an instantly-accessible way…. well, now thanks to Crawford we can all claim to know Scotland’s rivers like the back of our hands.

Roger Cox

Scottish Field, September 2025

The Sound of Many Waters: A Journey Along the River Tay

BY ROBIN A CRAWFORD

BIRLINN

£14.99

★★★★

This month’s crop of books has been exceptional, and Crawford’s gentle Tay travelogue represents another rewarding read. He follows the Tay from its source in the lower Highlands, where it’s fed by the snow melt which arrives via the Tummel and Garry and countless lochs, to the point where it disgorges into the sea at Dundee. His journey along this huge waterway (it has the widest catchment of any river in Britain) is never less than captivating.

Along the way, Crawford unearths stories which provide clues to its history and the many ways it has been of use to man. There are the gold panners of Connish, the Earthquake House near Comrie, a Loch Tay crannog, Beatrix Fotter holidays near Birnam which gave us Peter Rabbit, and Ossian’s Hall of Mirrors at the Hermitage. In all, this is a charming, meandering journey. (RB)