From the headstreams that flow from the hillsides of An Torc and Creagan Doire Dhonaich and run northwards through the Drumochter Pass and into Badenoch and Strathspey, the river Trium starts. It gathers the scriddens and torrents and streams and the invisible waters that this porous land leaks.  The Truim riffles and tumbles quietly, unobtrusively, along its namesake glen, running parallel, for the most part, to the railway line and the A9, each of them a north|south artery up and down this land. A scant few miles from its beginnings, and after a drop of over three hundred metres already, the river becomes, briefly, the falls of Truim, which some might quibble are more a series of rapids than a true linn. Perhaps, seeking a waterfall, some might feel they’ve been mis-sold, but bear with me. 

These falls are quite hidden, and your first encounter of them might be from peering over an old stone bridge originally built by General Wade’s men in the 18^th century. They’re not one of these places where you can go to a single viewpoint and see the whole of them. So go down through the birch woods to the water at the eastern side, and clamber along the banks, over where flat ferns spread, verdant green, and mosses, liverworts and lichens cling to the rocks and cover fallen branches and trees. In comparison to other waterfalls, these might seem quite modest, and they’re all the more intriguing for that. There’s not a single fall here, a single tumble, or indeed, any drop of spectacular size. Instead, it’s a series of trips down, and in-between them the water gathers, slows and swirls and, consequently, because of how you can view them, and what you know of where they come from and where they go, it’s hard to separate the falls from the before and the after of them. It’s a mixture of the hard and soft here, in rock and vegetation. Granite shelves lie sharp and rise quite high in places, sometimes bare, sometimes easing back into landscape with thin coatings of mosses, then heathers, ferns, birches, pines. Lower down, the rock is smoother, water-worn over millennia.

Where the water tumbles, the granite constricts the water into narrow channels, making it splash and gurls and froth in golds and straws and ambers as it falls and decompresses again in wider, deep, dark pools where it will marble and circle around, ever closer to the next narrowing channel and fall. There are pools here so deep that they will catch and hold you if you jump from the five metre ledges that overlook the water (I’ve seen it done), and these same pools that sometimes seem languid will quicken and rush directly on in spate, hurrying its waters towards the point where the Truim meets the Spey, the second longest river in Scotland, reaching the sea 100 miles north east from its own headwaters.   

I read that Glen Truim means ‘the glen of the elder tree river’, though at the falls, my memory is only of birch, Scots pine, and larch. Other surrounding place names hint at what else you might encounter. Drumochter means high ridge, Badenoch itself means the flooded place, and just a few miles downstream, beyond where the Truim and other tributaries join the Spey, you’ll come to Insh Marshes, a 1000 hectare flood plain, insh meaning, the low-lying land near a river, and at the moments when the Spey has burst its banks, you might wonder how the vast loch before you could ever be anything else. 

This is a place not just to encounter the falls and the water, but to take in and become part of its sounds, smells, colours, textures and everything else too. The birdsong you might catch above the rush of water. The sparks of larch at the turn of autumn and, at that same time, the green gold yellow rust of changing birch leaves and how they fall into the water, swirling around and revealing its currents and eddies; how a root of a Scots pine binds itself tightly to a vertical granite face, reminding you, perhaps, of the tendon of a climber’s finger, clinging to the most precarious of holds. How the shallower water is more of a Speyside amber that deepens to the colour of an island malt, and how the deep pools are the colour of a wet peat bank and even darker still.

And if you’re lucky, and there at the right time, you might just see a salmon leaping upstream, heading back to its spawning ground, and you might wonder and marvel at its journey from sea to the Spey to the Truim and up beyond these falls. Or you might glimpse an eagle high above heading south to the high peaks and ridges of Drumochter, towards the headstreams that start the river Truim’s journey, or northwards to the Spey.