Flotsam by Robin Crawford

I have on my desk a beaver-gnawed piece of wood from the banks of the river Tay. It was given to me by a bookselling colleague when I used to work in Perth, he would sometimes commute by canoe and one day after heavy rain was investigating the flotsam washed downstream to Moncrieff Island which lies abreast of the city centre. I appreciated his gift, was glad he didn’t bring in the twisted deer carcass, antlers decorated with with autumnal leaves, plastic Irn Bru bottles and baler twine also left by the floodwaters. Beavers, which had been driven to extinction by our human ancestors, have recently been reintroduced into the Tay’s river system, to a mixed welcome.

What’s left behind by the river interests me.

The themes that ripple through my new book, The Sound of Many Waters, a Journey along the River Tay are to be expected: the river’s natural and human history, and our interdependency with it. There’s swimming (elegantly by frogs, more wildly by humans) and fishing (for salmon, of course, and, beyond its Firth, for whales), and bridges (built elegantly but also disastrously). Having spent the last six years writing it there is much that is left behind: many stories, many words, many drawings, many ideas that seeped out of the grinding by the editorial mill wheel. But that’s ok, that’s part of the book. The river, as we know, is never the same twice.

The completion of a book is a form of clearing, a cleansing. That clearing can be physical or spiritual. In the West Highlands a pool near the river’s source is named after Fillan, a Celtic holy man whose evangelising converted the people to Christianity. Baptism is one of the only two sacraments of the Church of Scotland. Christ himself was baptised in the river Jordan, so those converted by Saint Fillan mirrored this physical manifestation of a spiritual cleansing. But the pool also retains some of its pre-Christian use. It is said to have healing qualities, though ritual must be followed:

‘. . . in order that the cure should be effective, the afflicted were taken to the riverside towards the end of the moon’s first quarter. Where a rocky point projects into the river, men were plunged into the water on one side and women on the other. The patients were then required to gather nine stones from the river-bed and on coming out to go to the top of the rock, 20 feet in height, and to walk three times round three heaps of stones, the accumulations of countless dippings. It was necessary after each turn to deposit on each heap one of the stones from the river-bed. After this ceremony, the devotees proceeded to the ruins of St Fillan’s Chapel, about a mile away to the east of their immersion. Here they were tied to a great stone with a large hole it in, and the ancient bronze bell of St Fillan was placed for an instant upon their heads. The patient was left in the ruins all night long, and if in the morning he was found to be free from his bonds, a cure was deemed to have taken place.’

Kill or cure? Robert Heron, travelling through Scotland in 1792, notes if ‘the patient . . . is still bound, his cure remains doubtful. It sometimes happens that death relieves him during his confinement from the troubles of life.’

St Fillan’s Priory was destroyed by iconoclasts during the Reformation but still people held on to elements of pre-Reformation practices. The belief in curative properties of water and the clearing of evil spirits by the ringing of bells survives on the fringes of society into the modern era. While cures were gradually discovered for physical ailments, treatments for mental illness were less forthcoming. This led to traditional methods like those described above being practised and recorded.

One of the many sounds heard along the Tay has been that of generations of poor women’s feet trampling in washtubs, of their red raw hands beating laundry against river rocks, their fingers rasping on ribbed washboards. These women –  always women  – wrung out the stains of life from the clothes of those who wanted to present a ‘cleanliness next to godliness’ appearance to the outside world but who would rather not have to do the task themselves. Victorian holidaymakers to the Tay, like the family of Beatrix Potter, would pass their stained clothing to local laundresses to be washed out of sight in basement rooms, outhouses or on the riverbank. In her book Mrs.Tiggy-winkle Potter chose to depict their Tayside laundress Kitty MacDonald as a hedgehog. She is painted as a small, timid creature but with prickly defences – an eater of slugs, different from them. Kitty was not just small, she was stunted from a childhood of malnutrition and poverty.

Potter described ‘the Scotch’ as ‘tolerable savages.’  When you start to see people as being less human than you you start to treat them savagely. The Highland Clearances are a blight on the Tay’s history. All along the upland river people like the MacDonalds were savagely cleared from their ancestral homes to make way for sheep. Millenia of culture drains from the land with the people. In the ‘clearance’ box of the bookshop a remaindered copy of East Perthshire Gaelic, 50p. Throughout the nineteenth century a steady stream of Highlanders and Irish fleeing clearance and famine flowed along the river finding homes in insanitary slums and work that paid a pittance in the jute mills of Dundee at the river’s estuary. If a factory’s looms stopped spinning wages were docked, hence the most common industrial injuries were the loss of fingers amputated when trying to remove blockages from moving machinery. Out on the river the stumps of the old railway bridge that collapsed disastrously into the river- train, passengers and all at New Year 1879- are monuments to another Victorian folly.

The mills along the Tay were fed with jute harvested by sub-continental child labour at the mouth of the Ganges in savage conditions overseen by Taysiders, sometimes those cleared from their own lands. In the Arctic and Antarctic the Dundee whaling fleet harpooned and flensed whales for their oil which when mixed to the Indian jute softened it to enable it to be spun. As Victorian engineers remodelled the river’s banks constraining the river to their will, the baleen from whales was stitched into corsets, bending the female body to their warped idea of womanhood.

The wealth created along the river came at a savage cost. In his recent address to Abertay University Professor Sir Geoffrey Palmer noted: ‘During the enslavement of black people as chattel slaves by Britain, Scotland changed from a poor country to a rich country. About 30 per cent of the slave plantations in the Caribbean were owned by Scots.’ Cleared from Africa to harvest sugar, to pick cotton in America slaves were clothed in a harsh fabric called osnaburg manufactured in the river powered mills of the Tay.

If you could afford it you could drink or bathe in the curative Tayside waters at hydropathic resorts such as the one built at Crieff or go fishing for trout or, most famously salmon, like the Potters. But the overfishing, the engineering of its banks has seen the rapid decline in not only salmon but many creatures that once thrived along the river. Beavers, elk, wild ox, brown bear, lynx and wolf have all been driven from the river by humans. Today its salmon stocks are in crisis. Another species that is a bell-weather of the river’s health is the fresh water mussel. They can live to be one hundred and forty years old, and within the blackened and corroded shells of some of these geriatric bivalves very, very rarely a pearl can be found. They are so rare now, and so protected that the once lucrative market in Tay pearls has long gone.

A photograph of the last Scottish pearl fisher, Bill Abernethy of Coupar Angus, shows him by the riverside armed with a prehistoric-looking wooden spear, double-tipped for foraging on the riverbed sand and gravel for the molluscs, an open-bottomed bucket by his side, and between his spread, wader-covered legs, some opened mussel shells. He said that he could tell which contained a pearl from looking at them and extract it without killing it, skills that flowed down to him from generation upon generation, now gone. His most famous find, ‘Little Willie’, ‘the Abernethy Pearl’, perfectly round and the size of a marble, displayed in Cairncross, the jeweller’s in Perth for many years, has just been sold at auction.

In the headwaters of the Tay gold can be found. Its bright yellow glare creates avaricious lust among panners when it gleams out of the darkness of the stream-bed. This gold, smelted at high temperature in the chemical foundry of our volcanic, geological, creature-less past, has a raw elemental barrenness; it cannot be broken down into any constituent parts. Its attractions are raw and basic, however finely we humans work it. The shadowy, veiled brilliance of an out-of-focus pearl offers a different lustre. No gaudy Cellini, however skilled, can match its natural allure. River-born, nurtured and tenderly grown in the warm flesh of the mussel – like us within a soft womb of a living being, created, like Adam, from the mud – it is constructed from a multitude of elements. It forms with the tender caresses of the mollusc, touching, polishing, mothering the pearl with depths and layers of lustre and sheen. Looking on a pearl, one senses the river within it, the movement of light across its surface, the glimmer of other currents beneath, flickering suggestions of movement, indistinguishable changes of colour and texture, hints of dreamscapes in its depths. To look upon gold is to see your fish-eyed self reflected back. To gaze upon a pearl is like diving into the ever-flowing river.

The health of the mussels tell us the health of the river. While greedy, wasteful and destructive pearl-mussel poaching has in the main been deterred, the diminishing mussel population is a sign of the river struggling to cope. Filtering its waters through its hairy beard, the young mussel is susceptible to pollution from agricultural run-off, changes in water quality, bank erosion, increased river speeds and rising temperatures – all the result of human intervention. When the female mussels release their larvae at spawning time in August, their hope is that of the millions flooding the river a few will manage to adhere to the gills of a young trout or salmon and grow, eventually inhabiting the slow pools and meandering shallows, moving through the fine gravels on its singular, muscular foot. If this material is washed away or silted up, the molluscs with be deprived of habitat and starved of oxygen. These human interventions equally affect the fish population, thus the symbiotic relationship that connects human, salmon and mussel has been fractured and needs urgent repair. Tree planting to provide soil stability and shade; the removal of human obstructions and concreted embankments; allowing the river to revert to its natural course, reverse engineering; a reduction in agri-chemicals – these are all ways that the repopulation of the Tay mussel beds are being addressed.

How will the beavers fare, will our engineering of these river engineers have a positive legacy? A map of 1837 shows the spread of capercaillie reintroduced to the area around Loch Tay from where they had become extinct but two centuries later they have long disappeared again from the riverscape.

My river journey took many years and, like the Tay, takes many forms: it is never the same twice after all. What will we leave behind?

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Robin A Crawford is a bookseller and author/illustrator of Into The Peatlands, A Journey Through the Moorland Year and author of Cauld Blasts and Clishmaclavers, A Treasury of 1000 Scottish Words.

The Sound of Many Waters, A Journey Along the River Tay is published by Birlinn in July 2025

Illustration by the author.