Glen Tilt (
Scottish Gaelic: Gleann Teilt) is a
glen in the extreme north of
Perthshire,
Scotland. Beginning at the confines of
Aberdeenshire, it follows a South-westerly direction excepting for the last 4 miles, when it runs due south to
Blair Atholl. It is watered throughout by the
Tilt, which enters the Garry after a course of 14 miles, and receives on its right the
Tarf, which forms some falls just above the confluence, and on the left the Fender, which has some falls also. The attempt of
George Murray, 6th Duke of Atholl to close the glen to the public was successfully contested by the
Scottish Rights of Way Society in 1847.[1][2] The massive mountain of
Beinn a' Ghlò and its three
Munros Càrn nan Gabhar (1129 m), Bràigh Coire Chruinn-bhalgain (1070 m) and Càrn Liath (975) dominate the glen's eastern lower half.
Marble of good quality is occasionally quarried in the glen, and the rock formation has long attracted the attention of
geologists.[1]
Royal banquet for James V, 1532
A chronicle written by
Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie in the 1570s describes a banquet prepared by the
Earl of Atholl for
James V to impress a Papal ambassador. This event seems to have taken place in 1532 in a temporary wooden lodge built like a castle in Glen Tilt. The lodging was burnt at the end of the event.[3]Mary, Queen of Scots visited Glen Tilt in August 1564, and wrote a letter from the "Lunkartis in Glentilth" to her ally
Colin Campbell of Glenorchy.[4]
History of Geology
James Hutton, the pioneer geologist, visited the glen in 1785 and found boulders with
granite penetrating
metamorphicschists in a way which indicated that the granite had been
molten at the time. This showed to him that granite formed from cooling of molten rock, contradicting the ideas of
Neptunism of that time that theorised that rocks were formed by
precipitation out of water. Hutton concluded that the granite must be younger than the schists.[5][6][7] This was one of the findings that led him to develop his theory of
Plutonism and the concept of an immensely long
geologic time scale with "no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end."[8]
Sir
John Clerk of Eldin visited the site and produced geological drawings of the area, immediately upstream of the old Dail-An-Eas Bridge which has since collapsed but the abutments remain as a
listed building.[9]
Watercolour image by John Clerk of Eldin of the key exposure at Glen Tilt. The flow direction of the river is towards the top of the image, in a southwesterly direction. The rectangular areas at the top of the image are the foundations of the collapsed bridge.[7]
^Robert Macfarlane (13 September 2003).
"Glimpses into the abyss of time". The Spectator. Review of Repcheck's 'The Man Who Found Time'. Hutton possessed an instinctive ability to reverse physical processes - to read landscapes backwards, as it were. Fingering the white quartz which seamed the grey granite boulders in a Scottish glen, for instance, he understood the confrontation that had once occurred between the two types of rock, and he perceived how, under fantastic pressure, the molten quartz had forced its way into the weaknesses in the mother granite.