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John Sinclair found it.
From Swanston to Fairmilehead, Fairmilehead to Comiston, this schoolmaster at the fish-begrutten village of Leith, erstwhile Professor of Philosophy and Mathematics in the distant, dear and green city of Glasgow had been making his way toward Morningside. He had chosen the day on account of the weather's being fair: someone book-softened and prone to colds, he did not walk far if he could avoid it. Summer, then, late spring. And whatever his purposes, they were pressing. He did not wear a cloak, but a hat seemed wise. No feathers, no brocading; this was a man of learning, after all, and short of style as well as breath. He carried nothing but a bag of bannocks and a slim book, bound in tough hare-skin, detailing the best methods of cooking fowl. In his belt, a swan's quill and a battered leather bottle full of milk ale. Before long, he had used it twice, wiping his mouth after with a hessian sleeve. Up by Colinton, he drank again whilst watching the sky, the steady approach of cloud that would, in a few hours, mean rain. A cuckoo, a houlet maybe, something out of sorts, out of season, crooned into the heavy afternoon and these signs together, it seemed to him, boded no good. For all that, the hills, when he turned in their direction, looked fine; broody and magnificent, as hills under dull skies do. He passed a burn swollen as a sow's belly, a field of rushes, an abandoned nest cluttered with cracked shell, pale brown specked dark. He saw a splay of chewed feathers, mud slatted with fox-pads and the cloven prints of pigs. And he kept walking. As he walked, he drank his bottle, he ate. Crumbs fell on his longshirt and burrowed in his beard. Between mouthfuls, he heard his own voice singing softly under its breath, a psalm-tune of which he was particularly fond. Alone in this place, the words didn't matter and the melody and ale together made him happy in the way a man is when no-one else is near. Wholly happy. Straying off-track, not noticing, at peace with his life, he kept walking. He kept singing. Only when he noticed the seep of something through his pattens, the ooze between his toes, did he stop. He looked down, checked the moss and sphagnum for movement, peered under a fur of dung. Somewhere behind the nearby gorse came the helpless sound of gurgling. John Sinclair, schoolmaster, set down his few belongings, and reached his pale hands to see. Hands white from too much study, too many hours by guttering oil light. Hands with nearly-clean nails. No sooner had he parted the greenery than a bird, a black and white theatre of feathers, rose from its cage of prickles and flared into the sun. Startled, the man stumbled, pushing his knees deep into the already parting earth. And there it was. Water. A spring-head melting the grass, building a rock-pool, a fountain. It bubbled and hissed, rose higher as he watched. Pure and grey as an oyster. The sky above. And water. Clear water.