Baryte and fluorite from Loch Bruicheach, Beauly, Inverness-Shire

Abstract

Loch Bruicheach (One-inch Ordnance Survey of Scotland, popular edition, sheet 37; Six-inch Inverness-shire, sheet 18) is situated 7½ miles (about 9 miles by road) south-west of Beauly and is best reached by taking the road from that town to the keeper's house at Clunevackie and thence by a track to within about half a mile of the actual locality, a low cliff bordering the north-east shore of the loch. Attention was apparently first directed to the locality about the year 1884 by a Mr. John Ross, one of Lord Lovat's gamekeepers, and Mr. Thomas D. Wallace of Inverness, having received through him specimens from there of baryte and a mineral which he, Mr. Wallace, recognized as resembling fluorite, visited the spot with Mr. Ross in May 1885. In August of the same year Mr. Wallace gave a description of the occurrence in the pages of this Magazine, and in July 1886, also in this Magazine, there appeared a note and analysis of the fluorite by Professor W. Ivison Macadam of Edinburgh, who in collaboration with Mr. Wallace proposed for the mineral, without any sort of justification, the name bruiachite. Macadam's analysis of the fluorite was very inaccurate and showed only 10% of fluorine.