had begun to ebb on the
haugh, and with his umbrella drove ashore and captured a fine salmon, at
an elevation of fifty feet above the ordinary level of the Findhorn.

At Randolph's bridge the opening expands as the rocks rise upwards, till
the width is about seventy or eighty feet; yet, from the sudden turn of
the river, as it enters this passage, the stream was so checked in its
progress that the flood actually rose over the very top of the rocks,
forty-six feet above the usual height, and inundated the level part that
lies over them to the depth of four feet, making a total perpendicular
rise at this point of not less than fifty feet.

The effects of the deluge of the 3d and 4th of August, remain on the
Dorbach, in a bank one hundred feet high, which rose with slopes and
terraces covered with birch and alder wood. The soil being naturally
spongy imbibed so much rain, that it became overloaded, and a mass of
about an acre in extent, with all its trees on it, gave way at once,
threw itself headlong down, and bounded across the bed of the Dorbach,
blocking up the waters, flooded and wide as they were at the time. A
farmer, who witnessed this phenomenon, told Sir Thomas Dick Lauder that
it fell "wi' a sort o' a dumb sound," while astonished and confounded he
remained gazing at it. The bottom of the valley is here some two hundred
yards or more wide, and the flood nearly filled it. The stoppage was not
so great, therefore, as altogether to arrest the progress of the stream;
but this sudden obstacle created an accumulation of water behind it,
which went on increasing for nearly an hour, till, becoming too powerful
to be longer resisted, the enormous dam began to yield, and was swept off
at once, and hurled onwards like a floating island. While the farmer
stood lost in wonder to behold his farm thus sailing off to the ocean by
acres at a time, another half acre, or more, was suddenly rent from its
native hill, and descended at once, with a whole grove of trees on it, to
the river, where it rested on its natural base. The flood immediately
assailed this, and carried off the greater part of it piecemeal. At the
time when Sir Thomas was writing, part of it remained with the trees
growing on it in the upright position, after having travelled through a
horizontal distance of sixty or seventy yards, with a perpendicular
descent of not less than sixty feet.

[Picture: The flood like--Brig of Bannock. (The dotted line sho