“Hold up your left hand, palm facing away, and spread your fingers: if the Tay is the index finger, then imagine your thumb as the Isla, flowing in from the east, your middle finger the rivers Garry and Tummel from the north, and from the west the ring finger represents the Braan and the Almond, your pinkie the Earn.”
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)
“George Washington Wilson is known for his Highland travel photographs and mementoes of Scottish excursions. His training as an artist informed the composition of his landscapes in the new medium of photography. While drawings and engravings illustrated the early nineteenth century travel guides to Scotland and provided regular income for Scottish landscape painters photographs were to replace them from the middle of the century. Wilson was a leader in developing this new form, his skill not only in replicating in liquid black and white chemicals the oil and pigment glazes or watercolour washes of paintings but exploring the possibilities of this new media and at an affordable price. In ‘The Salmon Leap, on the Tilt, Blair Atholl’ or ‘Birnam Falls, Dunkeld’ c.1860 Wilson structures the images as an artist would.
In ‘Birnam Falls’ at the top of the photograph a Highland cascade pours from a tree lined gorge; the waterfall is positioned in the centre; we view it from the pool looking up giving the impression of their height; the black solidity of the rock is contrasted with the white liquidity of the water. What the new medium offers though is the feeling of, and indeed the actual capturing of, time. While the ancient rock remains immobile the impermanent water flows. The real time process of uncovering the camera’s blackened lens and allowing light to flood onto the photographic plate captures the actual movement of the water in a way that most painting could never achieve. The blurred white of the falling water has an ephemeral quality separate from everything else in the picture, not only the immemorial rock but the seasonal delicacy of the leaves on the trees. The trees for a few decades will fringe the river – their trunks and twigs a thin, black reflection of the linn’s many branches – but they will rot and die. The photograph of the waterfall I take today standing where Wilson stood a hundred and sixty years ago captures exactly the same water, the same rocks though the surrounding vegetation is different. Where the free-falling water stops in the pool at the bottom of the image it changes tone as it slows, now fading to grey, neither still nor torrent but moving gently, easing our eye out of the picture and on, like the river, beyond these moments with the course of our journey.
The sensation of movement captured in the photograph thrilled Victorian viewers and was developed further by innovations such as stereoscopic cards where double images placed side by side gave a binocular feeling of depth and space such as his ‘Fall on the Braan at the Hermitage Bridge, Dunkeld’ of 1863. By the 1880s Wilson was further experimenting, printing his images onto glass plates that were then hand coloured and could be viewed as ‘magic lantern’ slides, Wilson himself, presenting lectures to accompany a showing. By the time of his death in 1893 his photographic publishing firm was employing 40 people and accepting images from photographers from all over the world, his only rival operating on the same scale was James Valentine in Dundee.”
from ‘The Sound of Many Waters’
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My dear bookshop colleagues have started updating our ‘What We’re Reading ‘ blackboard today…
Wash. Rinse. Repeat. Beatrix Potter based ‘Mrs Tiggy-winkle’ on Kitty MacDonald, a washerwoman from Inver on the Tay. One of the many sounds along the river has been that of generations of poor women’s feet trampling in washtubs, their red raw hands beating laundry against river rocks, their fingers rasping on ribbed washboards.
Victorian holidaymakers to the Tay like Beatrix Potter would pass their stained clothing to local laundresses to be washed in its pure waters in basement rooms, outhouses or in tubs by the river. Potter dressed Kitty in 19th C. clothes but chose to depict her as a hedgehog, a small, timid creature but with prickly defences – an eater of slugs, different from them. “The Scotch,” she wrote were “tolerable savages.” Kitty was not just small, she was stunted from an orphaned childhood of malnutrition and a life of poverty.
150 years later Potter’s books are as popular as ever, what does that tell us about the attitudes to those who service the needs of tourists along the river today? Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
Image: AFrederick Warne & Co., Penguin Books.
Robin A Crawford 