The river Auldgrande, after pursuing a winding course through the mountainous parish of Kiltearn for about six miles, falls into the upper part of the Firth of Cromarty. For a considerable distance it runs through a precipitous gulf of great depth, and so near do the sides approach each other, that herd-boys have been known to climb across on the trees, which, jutting out on either edge, interweave their branches over the centre. In many places the river is wholly invisible: its voice, however, is ever lifted up in a wild, sepulchral wailing, that seems the lament of an imprisoned spirit. In one part there is a bridge of undressed logs thrown over the chasm. “And here,” says the late Dr. Robertson in his statistical account of the parish, “the observer, if he can look down on the gulf below without any uneasy sensation, will be gratified by a view equally awful and astonishing. The wildness of the steep and rugged rocks--the gloomy horror of the cliffs and caverns, inaccessible to mortal tread, and where the genial rays of the sun never yet penetrated--the waterfalls, which are heard pouring down in different places of the precipice, with sounds various in proportion to their distances--the hoarse and hollow murmuring of the river, which runs at the depth of one hundred and thirty feet below the surface of the earth--the fine groves of pines, which majestically climb the sides of a beautiful eminence that rises immediately from the brink of the chasm--all these objects cannot be contemplated without exciting emotions of wonder and admiration in the mind of every beholder.” [Sidenote: THE LADY OF BALCONIE.]