INTERIOR LAND CHANGES. 



417 



tinuous rain which descended was accompanied with violent and sudden gusts of wind, 

 as well as with extraordinary thunder and lightning. Speaking of the appearance of the 

 river Don, about the old Brig of Balgownie, an eye-witness, Mr. George Tulloch, of 

 King's College, Aberdeen, remarked, that he had seen the waves of the Atlantic rolling 

 down the Pentland Frith, and wasting their gigantic strength on the bold and iron-bound 

 coasts of the north ; but even there the impression of power was less vivid than that 

 produced by the rush of the river, compared with which the united exertions of the 

 human race seemed but a feeble conception. The Don, upon the premises of Mr. Far- 

 quharson, forced a mass of four or five hundred tons of stones, many of them of great 

 size, up an inclined plane, rising six feet in ten yards ;.and one of nearly four tons weight, 



Moray Floods at the Rhymer's Hill. 



which he had long known in a deep pool of the river, was borne upwards of a hundred 

 yards from its place. Yet evidence appears of the transporting power of water having 

 been in action, at some former period, in this locality, with more gigantic energy than 

 was developed in 1829, for a block of gneiss, weighing about a hundred tons, and lying 

 below the junction of the Divie and the Dorback, upon a shelf of schistus, was not moved 

 an inch by the latter flood, which must have been translated to its present position, and 

 therefore by a more formidable inundation, as there is no rock of a similar kind for a 

 considerable distance from it. The mill at Logie, on the Findhorn, standing fifteen feet 

 above the ordinary level of the stream, was saved by the lower story being completely 

 filled up to the ceiling with sand by the flood, which prevented the water working within 

 it, though it rose in the upper story three feet deep. Sir Thomas Dick Lauder, in his 

 singularly interesting and graphic volume on this local deluge, mentions upon his own 

 estate at Relugas the loss of ten thousand points of locality, on which hung many long- 

 cherished associations, with the memory of those who can never return to sanctify the 

 new scenes resulting from the catastrophe. " On Sunday," he observes, " the 2d of 

 August, I returned from church by the river walk. The day was sultry and cloudy, and 

 a gentle shower began to fall, which hardly penetrated the canopy of leaves overhead, 

 and but added freshness to the surrounding natural objects, and especially to the roses 

 and rhododendrums that were flowering among the rocks; this was the beginning of the 

 rain, that continued without intermission all the night, and for the next two days." The 

 river walk referred to was on one of the banks of the Divie, leading down to the point 

 of its junction with the Findhorn, a pleasure-walk which had been constructed with 



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