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This extraordinarily flat area west of Stirling is now amongst some of the finest farmland in Scotland. But once it was an area of bog, in some places as much as 18 feet deep; frequently described as ‘impassable’, it was used as a refuge by Rob Roy MacGregor. In 1766 the estate of Blair Drummond, which included much of the bog, was inherited by the wife of Lord Kames, a leading figure in Scotland’s legal establishment. Kames was an enthusiastic amateur farmer, and he instituted a programme of clearance and drainage that eventually removed the bogs on his estate altogether. Doing so required the construction of a waterwheel and a drainage channel that took water from the River Teith to float the unwanted peat away. The project was the work of several generations – it was not complete until 1840.

Lord Kames himself had died in 1782.