are claimed to have been where the last wolf in Scotland was slain. One such story is that of a deer stalker called MacQueen who shot one on Clan Mackintosh land in the Findhorn valley in 1743. In the wake of the 1745 Jacobite rebellion the French brigantine Le Bien Trouvé slipped past a British blockade in March 1746 into Findhorn Bay. The bay was too shallow for larger British frigates and sloops and although opened fire no damage was caused. On the night of 6 April the Frenchman slipped out again carrying Bonnie Prince Charlie's aide-de-camp Richard Warren and escaped safely to Dunkirk. The Findhorn valley was badly affected by the Highland Clearances "which had a tragic impact not only upon remote glens but also upon the Moray Firth as a whole. From it arose the lamentations of a whole people... They had been taught to see themselves as the descendants of 'conquerors' who had won an inalienable right to the land in which they were settled. To them the rebuke of the Canadian Boat Song was well merited". If the clearances were a man-made travail, the Muckle Spate of 1829 was a natural disaster unparalleled in the historic record of the Findhorn. On 3 August of that year heavy rain in the Cairngorms resulted in flooding in the catchment of several rivers in north-east Scotland and that of the Findhorn has been described as "the most severe catastrophic flood in modern UK history". Based on the eyewitness accounts recorded by Sir Thomas Dick Lauder (who was also the author of a romantic history about the life of the "Wolf of Badenoch") were able to determine peak flows down the main river of up to 1,484 m3/s and 451 m3/s on the Divie. Lauder describes numerous incidents including the daring rescues of those trapped by the floods on the plain of Forres by fishermen from Findhorn village. It is at Randolph's Leap that the Findhorn river is at its most spectacular in spate. Here there are two markers indicating the height the river reached in 1829 and it is said that the butler at nearby Relugas caught a salmon above the normal river level in his umbrella. Between 1919 and 1963 the Forestry Commission planted some of trees on the Culbin sands and created what is now an extensive conifer plantation. During the early 21st century Moray Council undertook