History
The area has long been a popular destination for visitors. The Wordsworths, Coleridge and Sir Walter Scott all visited the Falls. In 1802, William Wordsworth immortalised Corra Linn, the largest of the waterfalls, in verse. Corra Linn has also been painted by a number of artists, including J. M. W. Turner. The name comes from the Gaelic 'currach', a marshy place. A legend gives 'Cora' as a daughter of King Malcolm II, who lept to her death here whilst trying to escape imagined danger.
Near Corra Linn is the Pavilion, built by Sir John Carmichael of Bonnington, probably in 1708. The Pavilion had mirrors on its back wall, and when the doors were opened visitors had the illusion of standing beneath the falls. The 15th century Corra Castle is next to Corra Linn. It is now home to a family of rare bats. Corra is Gaelic for "weir", and as Corra Castle's early history is vague, some historians believe it was an early possession of the Weirs, the principle landowning family in the County after the dukes of Hamilton from the thirteenth to nineteenth centuries. Corehouse, built in 1844, the home of the Cranstoun family, is nearby. At Stonebyres Linn the ruins of 15th century Stonebyres Castle may be seen.
Read more about this topic: Falls Of Clyde (waterfalls)
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“No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
“History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.”
—Henry Ford (1863–1947)
“A great proportion of the inhabitants of the Cape are always thus abroad about their teaming on some ocean highway or other, and the history of one of their ordinary trips would cast the Argonautic expedition into the shade.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)