The Blairgowrie "Pyramid of Fire", River Isla and River Ericht, Perthshire, 1767

In 1767 a London monthly carried a short item under "Domestic Intelligence". It began plainly. "We hear from Perthsire." The report appeared in The British Magazine, volume 8, page 500.

No witness was named. No time of day was given. Yet the account is precise about the route, from the River Isla near Coupar Angus to the River Ericht and the town of Blairgowrie.

It started on the water. A thick dark smoke hung over the Isla. Then the smoke "soon dispelled, and discovered a large luminous body, like a house on fire."

It did not keep that shape for long. It "presently after took a form something pyramidal." Then it moved. It "rolled forwards with impetuosity till it came to the water of Erick." There it turned upstream, "with great rapidity," heading for Blairgowrie.

"The effects were as extraordinary as the appearance," the report said. A large cart was carried many yards over a field of grass. A man riding along the high road was carried from his horse. He was so stunned by the fall that he lay senseless for a considerable time. It destroyed one half of a house and left the other behind.

At Blairgowrie, a new bridge was being built. The thing undermined and destroyed one of its arches. Immediately after, it disappeared, a little above the town.

The paper trail is thin. The full text survives today through a transcription of The British Magazine on a Stanford personal web page. Later writers cite the Annual Register of 1767 and the Scots Magazine, but those pages remain unchecked. Even the day is uncertain. Accounts give 8, 9 or 30 September. A letter from Edinburgh dated 8 September points to the earlier dates.

The bridge raises its own question. Local historians date the Brig o' Blair to 1777. The 1767 report speaks of a bridge still under construction. Perhaps work began a decade earlier. Perhaps the 1767 works were an earlier attempt.

Tornado researchers offer another reading. TORRO lists the event as Scotland's most intense recorded tornado, with a tentative T6 rating. They point to the dark smoke, the pyramidal form, the route along the river valleys, the cart, the rider and the damaged house. The glow is harder to place. Chris Thornton of LiveBreatheScotland wrote that it was said to be illuminated, "perhaps through some electrical phenomenon or just from water being pulled up into the funnel," while another catalogue suggested that lifted spray may have been mistaken for luminosity.

The Blairgowrie report now leads a double life. UFO and anomaly lists, from Samir Patel's timeline to BEAMS Investigations and a newspaper roundup by Susan Swarbrick, treat it as an early aerial phenomenon. Tornado researchers treat it as a landmark storm. The report of 1767 offers no theory. Only smoke, then fire, then a pyramid rolling up the river. And the damage it left behind.