The Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) spent some time in Scotland and obviously viewed Highland scenery, waterlogged or not, with approval and affection - as the last verse particularly proves.

He might have used "loch" instead of "lake" in the first!

INVERSNAID

This darksome burn, horseback

brown,

His rollrock highroad roaring down,

In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam

Flutes and low to the lake falls home.

A windpuff-bonnet of fawn-froth

Turns and twindles over the

broth

Of a pool so pitchblack, fell-frowning,

It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.

Degged with dew, dappled with dew

Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through,

Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern,

And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.

What would the world be, once bereft

Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,

O let them be left, wildness and wet;

Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.