96 AUTUMNS ON THE SPEY. 



like a continuous fusillade of distant musketry, 

 while the whole scene enabled one to realize what 

 the result must he when the mighty river is in 

 earnest and rushes down in full force. 



Of all the visitations of this kind that have 

 occurred in the north of Scotland, none can com- 

 pare, for extent of area and destructive effect, 

 with the tremendous flood of the 3rd and 4th of 

 August, 1829. Ruin and misery were indeed 

 universal, not only on the Spey, hut along the 

 course of all the principal rivers in Morayshire, 

 Bauffshire, and a great part of Aberdeenshire. 

 The deluge of rain that was the immediate cause 

 of this unprecedented calamity fell chiefly on the 

 Monadhleadh mountains, between the south-east- 

 ern portion of Loch Ness and the sources of the 

 Findhorri, and on the Cairngorm range part of 

 the Grampians. The country above Kingiissie 

 would appear to have escaped, but all the culti- 

 vated ground in the neighbourhood of the Spey, 

 from thence to the sea a distance of seventy 

 miles was inundated by the waters.* 



* A most interesting account of this memorable event was com- 

 piled soon afterwards by the late Sir T. Dick Lauder, to whose 

 pages the reader is referred for a minute description of many a 

 fatal struggle, heroic rescue, and hairbreadth escape, during the 

 floods on this river and its tributaries, as well as on the Findhorn, 

 the Nairn, the Deveron, and the Dee. 



