In late summer 1787 Robert Burns was touring the Highlands and came through Aberfeldy. He walked up the wooded gorge of the Moness burn, sat down partway, and wrote a song about it.
The song is The Birks of Aberfeldy. The rock he is said to have rested on is still there, still called Burns’ Seat, and still occupied on most fine afternoons by somebody eating a sandwich.
“Birks” is birch. The gorge is full of them, along with oak and ash and a great deal of moss, and the burn falls through the middle of it in a series of drops that get better the higher you go.
The walk
Two and a quarter miles. A hundred and ninety-five metres of ascent. An hour and a half at an unhurried pace, and it is worth being unhurried.
The path is waymarked and well made — stone steps and a timber walkway on the way up, then a descent through birch woodland on the far side of the ravine, so you are not retracing your steps. There are handrails on most of the exposed sections, and there are exposed sections: the path runs above some genuine drops.
The Upper Falls of Moness are the reason to keep going. A footbridge crosses directly above them, which produces a view straight down into the water that some people enjoy more than others. At the time of writing, a viewpoint at the middle falls was closed after a landslip. Worth checking locally before you set out.
It is not a difficult walk. It is steeper than people expect from the word “gorge walk”, and the steps are wet more often than not. Proper footwear, then. Not because anything dreadful will happen otherwise, but because you will enjoy it more, which is generally the honest argument for proper footwear.
Why it survives
Burns visited a great many places and wrote about a reasonable number of them. Most of those poems are read now by people studying Burns. This one has done better, and the reason is probably that the place has not changed enough to make the song wrong.
The birches are still there. The falls still fall. You can stand in the gorge with the poem in your hand and the description holds — which is unusual after two hundred and forty years, and is worth something.
Aberfeldy has grown up around it and the town is worth an hour of anyone’s time. But the gorge itself is much as he found it.
The Birks is one of the more accessible walks in this part of Perthshire and suits an afternoon rather than a full day. There is more on the walking nearby on our walking trails page, and on the lodge itself on our lodge.