Rhymes and Recollections of a Hand-Loom Weaver :: :: University of Virginia Library

Dark Don, thy water's rude repulsive scowl
And frothy margin, all too well bespeak
The upland ravages, the conflict bleak
Of mountain winter; and the maddened howl
Of bruiting elements, distraught and foul,
Have ruffled thy fair course and chok'd thy braes.
Love flies affrightened at thy swollen look;

h e laverock may not hear its own sweet lays
O'er thy fierce chafings, and the timid brook
Sinks trembling amid thy surfy maze,
Thou cold remembrancer of wilder human ways!
So soiled the social tide by some curst deed
Of ancient ruffian or fool—so ages read
To weeping worlds of hearts that bled,
Of patriots and sages that have died
Ere that broad stream was half repurified.
Roll thy dark waters, Don—we yet shall see
On thy bright bosom the fair symmetry
Of vaulted heaven, when the shrill lark pours
Voluptuous melody to listening flowers,
And all of man, of earth, and air shall feel
What hate and darkness hurteth, love and light can heal!
For who so dull that may not now behold
Yon cloud-repelling light, yon moral ray
Piercing the night-born mist, the murky fold,
That erst obscured the intellectual day?
God breathes again in man—those melt, for aye,
Preparing, purifying to the sacred birth
Of virtues hitherto undared on earth.

Don rises in Strathdon and receives (besides other small rivers) Nochty, from Invernochty; Bucket, from Glenbucket; and Ury from Inverury parishes. It falls into the sea at Old Aberdeen, where it has a fair bridge of one arch, built four ages ago, about A.D. 1320, by King Robert Bruce, while this see was vacant by the flight of Bishop Cheyne—the bridge of Balgownie, celebrated by Lord Byron's reminiscences. The length of the river Don from above the kirk of Alford is twenty miles, and twenty-four miles from the said kirk to the bridge of Balgownie where Don discharges his streams in the German Ocean close by Old Aberdeen.

The mountain Benachie, rising with seven tops, on the south is precipitous and rocky, and is a sea mark. The river Ury rising in a low hill, not far from the Castle of Gartly, passing through a sterile valley, whence it struggles through the narrows of the hills, coming down upon the plain which it divides unequally, with its twisting channel, falls into the Don at the little town of Inverury. At the foot and along the whole length of Benachie, the small stream of the Gadi falls into the Ury a little above the same town.—[Robert Gordon, of Straloch—Description of Sheriffdoms of Aberdeen and Banff, 1654.]