Macpherson knew nothing of this district, and his notes upon the topography of "Fingal" and "Temora" are extremely few and vague. Meagre as these notes are, he makes the mistake in one of them ("Temora," B. v.) of confounding the Lubar, which flows inland to Lough Neagh, with the stream already alluded to, descending through the glen of Glynnès to the sea.
Several of the episodes in the poems of Ossian were as impossible as the performances of the electric telegraph to the knowledge of Macpherson's day. Like the latter, they have only been rendered feasible by the discoveries of more recent years. Dr. Waddell points out in "Colna-dona," in "Calthon and Colmal" and in "Cathlin of Clutha," narratives of journeys which could only have been accomplished by means of a sea passage across Crinan moss in Argyle. Such a passage was undreamt of in Macpherson's time. Yet Dr. Waddell shows that it must have existed within the centuries of this era. Names like Cambuslang, the "bay of ships," and Langside, the "washing-place of vessels," high now at the foot of the Cathkin hills above Glasgow, with lagg-an-roan, the "seal's pool," in the glen above Lagg, in Arran, prove, without the mass of other evidence the author adduces, that the sea flowed much higher upon the land in Celtic times than it does now.
