54 RARER FLOWERS OF EAST RENFREWSHIRE. 



Libo gives the meaning of the word as the "loch of the fairies;" 

 and verily no more befitting spot could be conceived of as a 

 favourite haunt of these little people than this same Loch Libo. 

 Look at it for a moment and note some of its outstanding beauties. 

 The situation, sweet, delightful, and refreshing in its calm seclu- 

 sion; the banks rising high from the very lips of the loch, and 

 richly clad in a mantle of varied wildwood; at the loch's head a 

 tiny belt or bank of silvery sand washed down from a source 

 hidden high up on the sylvan braes, and upon which mimic 

 billows, with motion gentle as the measured heave of sleeping 

 Zephyr's fiexuous breast, lap with murmuring sound and low; the 

 water itself glittering in sunlight and lying within its girdle of hills 

 like the teeming lap of the benignant goddess of nature herself; 

 the typha, proudest of the gentle offspring of a gentle mother, 

 standing on guard, erect and tall, yet nodding its graceful head 

 and dark chestnut locks with easy motion timed to the yEolian 

 music of the low-voiced winds ; the floral pleasure-boats of snowy 

 white — the skiffs of golden yellow; the rounded leafy platforms 

 moored beside the boats and skiffs inviting, by the glossy smooth- 

 ness of their tiny circles, to trip it on the lightest and most 

 fantastic of elfin toes under the cool silvery beams of the summer 

 moon : these are a few, and only a few, of the allurements 

 which Loch Libo had to offer to the good folks. No wonder that 

 they chose as they did! No wonder that Loch Libo became the 

 home of fairies ! 



Corkindale Law. — The hill behind Loch Libo is Corkindale 

 Law ("hill of the marshy valley"), famous for its fine view and its 

 moonworts. Indeed, all the district we have been traversing from 

 Corkindale Law here, over by the Pad, to Hairlaw Dam, abounds 

 both in adder's-tongue and moonwort ferns. 



And now we must stop — our excursion has been long enough. 

 We have done on a more extensive scale what Burns did long ago 

 when he pu'd the posy to his ain dear May — we have culled the 

 blossoms of spring, summer, and autumn into one handful. But 

 through it all I claim to have proved that so far as Renfrewshire 

 is concerned every nook and corner of it is worth a more 

 thorough search from botanists than it has yet received. 





