VIKINGS sailed up it, and one winter it was home to a humpback whale, but despite being dubbed Scotland’s Amazon, few books have been written about the mighty River Tay.
Living beside it, Rupert Williams was struck by this, as well as the lack of travel books about Scotland, and decided to fill the gap by travelling on foot along its length to its source.
His new book about the journey, Meandering Sweet: Walking Up The River Tay, is due out this month and he hopes it will inspire others to explore their local areas. For Scots, this is made easier because of the Right to Roam.
Williams points out that following a river along its banks to its source might be more difficult in England or many other places in Europe.
“Every time I’ve gone walking in England, I’ve seen these ‘permissive path’ and ‘private property, keep out’ signs, whereas here you don’t have to think twice about doing what I did and sleeping wherever you want to sleep,” he told the Sunday National.
“There were one or two places where there’s lots of fishing beats on the Tay and it’s not private property exactly but they do look at you as if you’re a poacher or something. But no-one told me I shouldn’t be there at any point. The Right to Roam is a great thing about Scotland.”
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Having moved back to Scotland in 2019 after 10 years away, Williams was living near Dundee at the river mouth when he began to daydream about walking to its source.
He decided to turn the dream into reality when he discovered there were hardly any books written about the river and certainly no travel books.
“I’d read a lot of books about people walking up the River Thames or the River Yangtze and all these other rivers and I couldn’t figure out why there wasn’t a travel book about pretty much any Scottish river,” he said. “The Tay is the longest river in Scotland, so why is there not more about it when there’s so much literature and travel writing about other rivers?”
He added: “We’re spoiled for choice in Scotland because there are so many rivers but the Tay is the longest, so it seemed like a significant river to focus on for a book like this.”
Williams believes people probably paid more attention to the Tay in the past when the salmon industry thrived and before the road replaced the ferries.
“Nowadays you zoom across the Tay Road Bridge and you barely notice the river is there, so I think there was probably more of a relationship with the water in the past in lots of different ways which has maybe been lost a little bit,” he said.
Although it is a travel book, Williams does include some of the river’s fascinating history such as the Tay Bridge disaster and the story of the humpback whale that swam up the river in the late 19th century when the Dundee whaling industry was at its peak.
“It was in the off-season, so all the whalers were sitting in the Dundee pubs waiting to head up to the Arctic to catch the whales and there was this humpback literally rubbing up against their ships in the harbour,” said Williams.
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Centuries earlier in the Bronze Age, the river was used for log boats sailing the 60 miles from the crannogs on Loch Tay to pick up goods that had come overseas from Europe.
“The Tay was a thoroughfare even then and a connection with Europe because everyone was travelling by boat at that time,” said Williams. “The whole of Scotland was a huge forest that was full of aurochs, bears and wolves, so it was safer and easier to travel by water.”
Later, the Vikings used the river to travel as far as Dunkeld in their intimidating dragon ships.
“When you’re walking by the river all day, you start imagining these fierce-looking Viking boats sailing up through Perth and then all the way up into the hinterland, where you’d think you’d be relatively safe from marine incursions,” Williams said.
After 10 days of walking and camping, he arrived at the source, which a survey team in 2008 agreed was near Ben Lui in the southern Highlands.
It was a beautiful day and he felt a sense of achievement as well as gratefulness for the opportunity to explore the river thoroughly.
“What I am trying to get across in the book is the joy of simple pleasures,” Williams said. “I hope that sense of joy comes through and inspires others to explore their local areas,” he said.
“It doesn’t have to be an extreme physical challenge – it’s just meant to be a normal type of adventure on a person’s own terms, whether it’s walking up a river or walking to a park.
“Hopefully it will inspire people to pick up on little daydreams and maybe act on them.”
Meandering Sweet: Walking up the River Tay will be available on Amazon and at selected booksellers across Tayside. Click here for more information and updates.
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