viz.

(Image credit: Jay Voss)

About a month ago I was fortunate enough to find myself outside of Ossian’s hall. I was on the banks of the River Braan in Craigvinean Forest, just to the west of Dunkeld, Scotland. Crazier still, though I’m writing a dissertation concerning the Scottish Enlightenment, I hadn’t set out that morning to find where Ossian came from. I was just in the area doing a bit of hiking (or “hill walking,” rather), and on the last day I set out for something I’d been told by a local that I just had to see. He called it “The Hermitage”. What I was to discover that morning was a pleasure garden designed in the later half of the eighteenth century for the Dukes of Atholl. So I set out from Dunkeld on a mulch path next to the strong River Tay, and about a mile and a half from town where the River Braan enters the River Tay I headed up into the hills and entered the Craigvinean Forest, which is a beautiful old-growth swath of Douglas firs. As I was soon to discover, what was crazy about the pleasure garden, and thus why I think it might be fun to present it here, was that it is a visual representation of the immediate fanfare that surrounded James Macpherson’s eighteenth-century cycle of epic poems.