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,

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.