Standing here, or rather stretching ourselves along the grateful turf, we are in the very centre of Stirlingshire, and at the source of a river which nowhere is very large, and yet, than which there is none in Scotland, and probably few in the whole island, whose banks have been the stage of so many memorable transactions. When the Roman empire was in all its glory, and had its eastern frontiers upon the Euphrates, the banks of the Carron were its boundaries on the north-west; for the Wall of Antoninus, which was raised to mark the limits of that mighty empire, stood in the neighbourhood of this river, and ran parallel to it for many miles. This last fact suggests one of the probable origins of the word Carron, for there are more than one. The meaning of the word has been a puzzle to the etymologists. “Even ministers they ha’e been kenn’d” to arrive at very different conclusions on this interesting subject. Some derive it from Caraon, which means “a winding river,” and “The bonny links of Carron Water” are poetically celebrated. This expresses one feature of the stream which, in former times, before it had forced a new channel to itself in some places, and been straightened by human industry in others, made almost as many serpentine links as the Forth itself. In the valley below the river runs through the well-known Carron bog, and for 3½ miles flows in a slow serpentine course over one of the finest and most fertile tracks of natural meadow in Scotland. The Carron Company, whose works are at the other end of the river, and in summer utilise almost all its water, wished at one time to convert this bog into a great reservoir for their works, but the hay crop was found to be too valuable, the tract containing upwards of 1000 Scotch acres in one continued plain, bearing from 130 to 150 stones per acre, which is all the more valuable from the fact that the artificial crops are a little precarious from their elevated situation. From the adjoining heights as many as 20 or 30 different parties of people may be seen on it in the season making hay, and in the winter again the river is industriously led over its whole extent to fertilise it for the following crop. On the other side of the road from the bog, a little to the west of it, and close to where the infant Endrick comes down from the Kippen hills, we have the old castle of Sir John de Grahame of Dundaff, who fell at the battle of Falkirk. For courage and military skill he was reckoned next to Wallace, and was commonly called by the great hero himself his “Right Hand.” The gravestone of Sir John in the churchyard of Falkirk has the following Latin motto, with a Scotch translation:— Mente manuque potens, et vallae fidus Achates, Conditur hic Grahmos, bello interfectus ab Anglis. While some of Cromwell’s troops were stationed in Falkirk, an officer asked the parochial schoolmaster to translate the Latin. This he did in the following witty manner:—