Hall of mirrors

Perched above the Black Linn Falls, the small temple had mirrors on the walls and ceiling, reflecting the sight and sound of the Braan rushing over the boulders below. It was ‘almost dizzy and alive with waterfalls, that tumbled in all directions’ according to Dorothy Wordsworth in 1803. Her brother William wrote a poem about it in which he called it both ‘a world of wonder’ and a ‘sick man’s dream’. Despite his doubts, it was a popular stop on the Grand Highland Tour, visited also by artist JMW Turner and composer Felix Mendelssohn.

It started as a simple summerhouse for the 2nd Duke of Atholl in 1757, but the 4th duke rebuilt in 1783 and named it Ossian’s Hall, complete with a giant portrait of the ancient Gaelic bard whose work had recently been discovered and translated by James Macpherson. Ossian’s epic poems became famous around the world – US president Thomas Jefferson described him as ‘the greatest poet that ever existed’. Except he probably didn’t exist. It’s thought Macpherson wrote the poems himself, and the row got ugly. English writer Samuel Johnson called him ‘a mountebank, a liar, and a fraud’ and Scottish philosopher David Hume said he could never be convinced the poems were authentic even if ‘fifty bare-arsed Highlanders’ told him so. The argument simmers still – some think Macpherson did base his work on genuine Scots ballads – and, perhaps awkwardly, Johnson and Macpherson both now lie in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.

In 1869, Ossian’s Hall was ‘blown up in the night-time by some miscreants’, in protest at ongoing tolls on the town bridge. By the early 20th century it was derelict; now rescued by the National Trust for Scotland.