Kingussie Attractions

Kingussie (12mi/19km southwest of Aviemore) was the birthplace of James Macpherson (1736-1796). This son of a Spey valley peasant claimed to have produced the first translation of a Gaelic manuscript ascribed to Ossian, the son of the Scottish king Fingal. Fifteen years after a disastrous defeat at Culloden, he provided the Scots with a heroic epic shrouded in mysticism, a monument of literature that soon won enthusiastic acclaim throughout the whole of Europe among artists and literati. Many of the latter including Herder, Brahms, Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Turner and others found inspiration in the writings of Ossian.