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 a series commissioned by Victoria shortly after Albert's death (14 December 1861) as mementoes of the 'Great Expeditions' they went on (see also RCINs 919681-919685, 919655, 919656 and 919674). Richard Principal Leitch was the son of the royal watercolour tutor William Leighton Leitch, who taught Queen Victoria, her daughters and her daughter-in-law Princess (later Queen) Alexandra for almost twenty years.

Another, much larger, watercolour of the same subject was commissioned from the Bavarian watercolour painter Carl Haag by Queen Victoria in the spring of 1864 (see RCIN 451256), and shown at the annual exhibition of the Old Watercolour Society the following year. In Haag's depiction of the scene the falls are much more dramatic.

This watercolour was originally mounted in View Album IX. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert compiled nine View Albums during their marriage. These albums contained watercolours and drawings documenting their life together and were arranged in chronological order. The albums were dismantled in the early twentieth century and rebound in new volumes both in a different arrangement and with additional items, but a written record of their original contents and arrangement still exists.