FALLS OF BRUAR
You hear the water long before you see it. It is a rumour in the air, a vibration that travels through the soles of your boots and up into the bones of your legs. On a day of summer spate, after a week of rain has saturated the high tops of the Atholl deer forest, the Bruar Water is not the clear, sparkling thing of postcards. It is a muscular, peat-brown torrent, an artery of the hills pulsing with wild energy. The path that winds up the gorge is a civilised affair, laid out for the appreciation of a landscape famously curated by the words of a poet, but the water itself obeys no such niceties. It is all roar and rush, a thing of pure momentum.
The climb alongside the main falls is a journey into sound. The gorge, clad in larch and Scots pine, acts as a vast resonance chamber. The roar of the cataracts is not merely heard but felt, a physical pressure against the chest. Spray, atomised and cold, drifts through the trees, carrying the scent of wet stone and pine needles. In the cauldrons below the falls, the water is the colour of strong tea, churning itself into a frenzy of white foam. You watch as whole trees, swept down from the upper reaches, are tossed and splintered in the linn. It is a landscape in motion, beautiful but brutal, a reminder that the picturesque is always underwritten by power.
Higher up, beyond the last of the main bridges and the steepest drops, the character of the burn changes. The gorge relaxes its grip, and the water, though still swift, spreads itself over great, glacier-scoured slabs of granite. Here, the path becomes a suggestion rather than a command. I left it, drawn to the water’s edge, clambering over rock that was slick with rain and algae. The noise subsided to a continuous, complex music of a thousand small cascades flowing into one another. This was the water in its own place, away from the curated viewpoints, a long, sinuous body of movement making its way to the sea.
I saw a line of stones that offered a precarious route to the burn’s centre. I took it. The cold of the water, when my foot slipped, was a galvanic shock. I found my balance on a large, flat stone in the very heart of the flow. The current split around my ankles, a living thing. For a minute I stood there, a fulcrum in the river’s story. Then I lifted my right foot. There on the grey stone was the dark, wet print of my foot, a perfect, transient glyph. It was my own brief petroglyph, a mark of passage, a signature written in water on stone. It was there, and then it was fading, the edges blurring as the thin film of moisture was reclaimed by the air and the river’s spray.
Stepping back to the bank, the feeling of the current lingered, a ghost-pressure on my legs. I looked back at the central stone. The footprint was gone, entirely erased. The water, which had allowed the mark to be made, had also washed it away. There was no trace that I had ever been there. And that felt right. The burn keeps its own counsel, and its memory is held not in fleeting surface marks, but in the slow, patient shaping of the rock over which it flows, and flows, and flows.