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The track up the side of Cow Hill was cut for peat. Past the old peat banks it turns into the Burial Path, which distant clans used to carry their dead to the graveyard at Glen Nevis. The walk was long enough that many of the dead were buried where the party stopped.
Other names in the glen are just as literal. Soldiers' Pool is where the soldiers camped, Soldiers' Seat is the lookout from which redcoats watched for Jacobites, and Samuel's Cave, at the mouth of the gorge, is where children were hidden from them in winter.
Three owners hold the valley between them. The John Muir Trust has the top 1,761 hectares with the gorge and Steall waterfall, Forestry and Land Scotland has the plantations lower down, and the bottom slopes of Ben Nevis belong to Alvance British Aluminium. Who owns the middle, with the meadows and the fishing, we could not establish.
The forestry entrance is called the Braveheart car park, after the village Braveheart built beside the river and then took away.
Since 1973 people have raced two miles down the river on inflatable mattresses, with a long gap until it started up again in 2008. Depending on the water, the run takes between twenty minutes and two hours.