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After two months of rain in a wet Scottish summer, the Grey Mare’s Tail was in full flow. Swishing sinuously from side to side in a rising wind, the waterfall came hissing out of the hill mist and hurtled 200 feet down its shiny black rock funnel.

As a dramatic introduction to the remote Dumfriesshire hills, the Grey Mare’s Tail is hard to beat. Most visitors are content to climb a short path above the car park on the valley road from Moffat, to stand overawed by the crash and roar of such a weight of falling water. But Dave Richardson and I had something more strenuous in mind: a high and mighty circuit of the hills protected by the National Trust for Scotland above Loch Skeen, a secret lake tucked away out of sight in a hanging valley 300 feet above the road.

“Great colour,” murmured Dave, halting on the narrow path above the Grey Mare’s Tail. He swept a hand over the luminous purple of heathery braes that sloped precipitously into the dark cleft of the Tail Burn’s glen. “It’s good to get out of Edinburgh for a day.”

There’s not much in Auld Reekie for a hill walker, botanist and birdwatcher like Dave. My phone call had brought him down to the valley of the Moffat Water in hopes of a good walk, in spite of the mist now blanketing the hills. “The Moffat area has the best chance of a gleam of sunshine,” the Weathercall announcer had asserted in his cheery drawl down the telephone line early this morning. That looked a vain prophecy.

Near the mistline a flicker of movement in the uppermost section of waterfall caught our attention. Through field glasses we could see a solitary sheep standing mournfully on a slippery rock ledge right in the middle of the fall, imprisoned by solid walls of water.

God alone knew how the wretched animal had got into that perilous spot. There was nothing we could do to help it. We climbed guiltily on, vowing to ask the first descending walker we met to pass on news of the sheep’s plight to the NTS rangers in the car park now far below.

Up in the hanging valley, all was silent. This was a world of mist-pearled grass and sedge. The Tail Burn cascaded through a landscape strewn with mounds of flood-washed rubble left behind by glacial meltwaters, weathered over ten thousand years into rounded hillocks. Wind-stunted bushes of willow, hazel, birch and rowan hugged the heather.

The steel-grey wavelets of Loch Skeen lapped dark peaty banks. “Hmmm,” said Dave, fingering bushy green tufts by the water's edge, “viviparous fescue, I think.” I must have looked blank - not an uncommon state for me, when faced with Dave’s bottomless well of botanical information. “Viviparous means giving birth to live young - see these new seed heads, germinating on the parent plant?”

Sulphurous yellow sphagnum moss made a dayglo splash against the dull greens and browns of the sunless upland bog. We splashed and squelched our way from the loch across to the drystane dyke - a dyke is a wall, not a ditch, hereabouts - that would serve as our guide over the next few mist-obscured miles.

It was a stiff old haul from the boggy collar of land around the head of the loch up to the heights of the grassy hills beyond. Sheep scuttered away into the mist. Pipits cheeped on the lichened stones of the dyke. At the top we took on oxygen like the Flying Scotsman takes on water - wheezing and steaming - before striding away over the peat hags on a path that dipped and swooped rollercoaster style beside the wall.

These roadless hills have always been a refuge for rogues and reivers, a lawless area in times past where cattle-rustlers would hide their stolen beasts in secret clefts and hollows. When King James V came down on the hills with 12000 men in his ‘Great Hunting’ of 1528, he slew 18 score of harts. But the real purpose of the king’s visit became clear when he hanged several Scotts and Armstrongs and threw the Earl of Bothwell and Lord Maxwell into jail, along with dozens of other local lordlings who had overstepped the bounds of autonomy.

Wild men in a wild land. Feuding, raiding, backstabbing and thatch-burning were the natural order of things up here, until General Wade and his military roads rolled through after the Jacobite rebellions of the 18th century.

Dave and I forged on up and down the slopes, stopping to admire the olive-green frogs that leaped muscularly away from our descending boots to freeze like tiny carvings beneath tussocks of wet grass. Thick vapour rolled across as we reached the final kink in the dyke and turned east towards the Tail Burn once more.

Off to the south, smothered beyond sight in the mist, the Carrifran Glen fell away towards the valley road. When hill-walker Dan Jones found a 6,000 year-old hunting bow in a peat bog at the head of the glen in 1990, he fired academic imaginations. Pollen samples taken from the bog showed the richness of the post-glacial species that had colonised the now treeless valley: ash, elm, birch, cherry, oak, holly, willow, alder, hazel.

If the Carrifran Wildwood Project can raise £350,000 by the end of 1999 - currently they are two-thirds of the way there - they will buy up the whole 1500 acre glen and reforest it with its original species, a really splendid idea. Scotland has lost almost all its native wildwood to over-grazing by sheep and cattle, and here is the chance to recreate a sizeable slice of that leafy lost world. The saplings are already growing in the back gardens of volunteer enthusiasts; all they need now are the funds.

On the slopes above Loch Skeen we found a shaggy carpet of dark green leaves. “Now what the hell is this?” pondered Dave, bent double. “Dwarf cornel, I'm pretty sure. I've seen it further north in the mountains, but I didn't know it grew on these hills. It's really an arctic or subarctic species - must be right on its southern limit. Very scarce.” He straightened up, grinning with pleasure. “Well - that's made my day.”

A short sharp scramble down the rocky face of Rough Craigs, a bit of heather-bouncing and a boot-filling splash through the Tail Burn, and we were heading back down towards the Moffat Water. The waterfall sheep had somehow scrambled to a ledge, out of immediate danger. The Grey Mare’s Tail thundered below, a ghostly vibration as we picked our way down out of the mist into late afternoon light washed clear and luminous.

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