MAYBE all waterfalls have stories attached to them. This one involves love, death, art and Ayrshire.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti married Lizzie Siddal in 1860. He was a poet and painter, the founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the group of young artists who so dazzled Victorian culture. Siddal had ambitions to be a poet and painter but she was best known as an artist’s model, adored for her pale beauty and blazing red hair by the Pre-Raphaelites. Famously, she endured freezing cold water to pose as Ophelia for John Everett Millais.

Siddal was the daughter of an ironmonger. “Middle-class gentlemen like Rossetti didn’t marry girls from Lizzie’s station,” writes Deborah Lutz in Pleasure Bound, her 2011 book about the Pre-Raphaelites. When they married her health was failing. She was prescribed laudanum and soon developed an addiction (opium will do that).

In May 1861 Siddal gave birth to a stillborn child, and she struggled with grief and postpartum depression. On February 10 the following year Rossetti returned to their home in Blackfriars to find Siddal unconscious, an empty laudanum bottle beside her. All efforts to save her failed. Rossetti placed the only copy of the manuscript of his poems beside her in her coffin.

After her death Rossetti himself suffered from depression and insomnia and would dose himself with laudanum and chloral hydrate. He worked for years on a painting of Siddal as Dante’s Beatrice and attended seances where he believed his lost wife spoke to him. “For two years he saw her ghost every night,” his friend John Marshall reported.

In the summer of 1869 Rossetti was in Scotland, invited by the poet and painter William Bell Scott. They stayed in Penkill Castle in Ayrshire, home to fellow artist Alice Boyd. Bell Scott and Boyd were in a relationship, although Bell Scott was also married.

Rossetti’s hosts were alarmed by their guest’s obsession with the idea of suicide. One day they journeyed to Lambdoughty Glen, near Straiton. On the rocks above a drop named The Devil’s Punchbowl, Rossetti gazed into the depths below.

“Never shall I forget the expression of Gabriel’s face when he bent over the precipice, peering into the unfathomed water dark as ink, in which sundry waifs flew round and round like lost souls in hell ...” Bell Scott recorded later.

“One step forward, and I am free!” Rossetti told Bell Scott and Boyd.

He didn’t take that step thankfully (though he would try to kill himself three years later). Now the waterfall he stood on top of that day is known as Rossetti Linn, accessible via a path known as Lady Hunter Blair’s Walk.

The same year he stood on top of the waterfall gazing into the depths, Rossetti had his late wife’s coffin exhumed so he could reclaim his manuscript of poems.

As for Siddal, she is still with us in the paintings she posed for. “Today, as Lutz notes, “ her face is famous.”