A watercolour depicting a group of people on horseback, including Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, their daughter Princess Alice and her fiancé Prince Louis of Hesse, crossing the river at the head of Glen Tilt, at the meeting of the Rivers Tilt and Tarf (Tarff), with two pipers leading the way and other figures following behind.

In 1860 and 1861 Queen Victoria and Prince Albert made four 'Great Expeditions' in the Highlands, where they would travel incognito with a small retinue, staying at inns. This watercolour shows an episode which took place on the way back from the third 'Great Expedition'  on 8-9 October 1861 (when the royal party travelled to Dalwhinnie and stayed at an inn there; see RCIN 919656). After breaking their return journey with a stop at Blair Castle, at which the Queen and Prince had stayed 17 years earlier and remembered fondly, the Duke of Atholl and twelve of his men escorted them along part of their route. Victoria recorded this moment as follows in her journal: 'A few minutes brought us to the celebrated Ford of the Tarff, (Poll Tarff, it is called) which is very deep & after heavy rain almost impassable. The Duke held the reins of the pony on one side, & [John] Brown the other, Sandy McAra the guide & the two pipers, playing the whole time, in front. The appearance of the ford was not deeper than others, but once in it, the men were above the knees in water & suddenly in the middle, where the current, from the fine high falls, is very strong, they got in nearly up to their waists. It was quite exciting.'

This watercolour was one of several commissioned by Victoria after Albert's death from Carl Haag, a Bavarian watercolour painter whose work was much prized by the Queen and her husband and who she wished to paint 'some pictures of dear Memories' (see also RCIN 450578, for example). Haag began making studies at Balmoral in May 1864; the Duke of Atholl's men sat to him at Blair Castle the following month, and Victoria recorded her own sittings for the watercolour during the February and March of 1865. She was keen that the artist finish the work in time for the spring annual exhibition of the Old Watercolour Society that year, which he did. Haag later had to carry out alterations to the watercolour suggested by Victoria and Albert's eldest daughter Victoria, Crown Princess of Prussia.

In Haag's depiction of this scene the falls are much more dramatic than in a smaller watercolour painted a couple of years earlier by Richard Principal Leitch (RCIN 919686; again part of a series of mementoes of the 'Great Expeditions') and mounted by the Queen in an album.