While this is not the highest waterfall in Scotland--for the
inaccessible Falls of Glomak far exceed all others--the Grey Mare's
Tail ranks as one of the most striking. We find amongst the hills at
the north-west corner of Annandale, the waters of 'dark Loch Skene,'
which find no outlet save over this breakneck descent. Far down in the
vale below lies the watering-place of Moffat, famous for its
sulphureous springs, clear, cool, and medicinal. Coaches leave this
town daily during the season to reach the other side of the hills, and
ten miles distant from Moffat this splendid natural phenomenon is
seen. The coach, in the slow ascent to the higher level, gives the
visitor ample time to find, on foot, the best vantage points from
which to see the fall.
When the stream is small, the 'tail' falls off to thin threads of
spray, dashed into films of prismatic beauty as they rush from rock to
rock. But in spate, the effect comes out in all its grandeur,
'White as the snowy charger's tail,'
and the appropriateness of the name bestowed on the waterfall
evidences itself. The entire fall is above two hundred feet at one
leap, over a dark rugged precipice, closed in on every side with sharp
rocks, and suggesting to the mind ideas of much terror and sublimity.
Attempts have been made to scale the face of the fall, occasionally
with fatal results, and the imagination can create, even if the eyes
cannot see, the fluttering of morsels of clothing that are pointed out
by the guide as horrible memorials of such foolhardy attempts. In this
wild region were enacted some of the terrible scenes of the
Covenanters' persecution. Away in those grim solitudes, 'hunted like a
partridge upon the mountains,' the dauntless upholder of the right of
private judgment would betake himself, associating with others of like
determination. On the 'Watch Hill' opposite Birkhill, the persecuted
people set sentinels to signal the approach of Claverhouse or his men,
while away in a cave, near a wild waterfall called Dobb's Linn, they
held their proscribed services, and here on one occasion the 'bloody
Clavers' shot four men, whose graves were marked in Ettrick kirkyard
not many years ago. The wild desolation of this scene befits the dark
and terrible incidents of which, at this period, it was the scene. The
farmhouse of Bodsbeck lies on the road between Moffat and the
waterfall, and has been rendered famous in literature through James
Hogg, the 'Ettrick Shepherd's' story of the _Brownie of Bodsbeck_, a
tale dealing with incidents of the persecution of the Covenanters.
From Moffat can be reached in a different direction some notable hills
and ravines, amongst which may be named Hartfell, and Queensberry
Hill, from the summit of both of which magnificent panoramas of
scenery are opened to view. A remarkable scene is that of the Earl of
Annandale's Beef Tub, otherwise called 'The Devil's Beef Tub,' a vast
semicircle of precipitous rock, down in the bosom of which many
beeves, perhaps driven from other mens' lands, could be hidden away.