entertained some little dread in our own days, — he got rid of them for the time by setting them off in a body to run a mound across the Moray Frith from Fortrose to Ardersier. Toiling hard in the evening of a moonlight night, they had proceeded greatly more than two-thirds. towards the completion of the undertaking, when a luckless Highlander passing by bade God-speed the work, and, by thus breaking the charm, arrested at once and forever the construction of the mound, and saved the navigation of Inverness.

I stood for a few seconds at the Burn of Rosemarkie undecided whether I should take the Scarfs-Craig road, a break-neck path which runs eastwards along the cliffs, and which, though the rougher, is the more direct Cromarty line of the two, or the considerably better though longer line of the White Bog, which strikes upwards along the burn in a westerly direction, and joins the Cromarty and Inverness highway on the moor of the Maolbuie. I had got into a part of the country where every little locality, and every more striking feature in the landscape, has its associated tradition; and the pause of a few moments at the two roads recalled to my memory the details of a ghost-story, long regarded in the district in which it was best known as one of the most authentic of its class, but which seems by no means inexplicable on natural principles.*

* The story here referred to is narrated in "Scenes and Legends of the North of Scotland," chap. xxv.

CHAPTER V.

Rosemarkic and its Scaurs Kaes' Craig A Jackdaw Settlement "Rosemarkie Kaes" and "Cromarty Cooties"-"The Danes," a Group of Excavations - At Home in Cromarty - The Boulder-clay of Cromarty "begins to tell its story" — One of its marked Scenic Peculiarities Hints to Landscape Painters -"Samuel's Well "— A Chain of Bogs geologically accounted for Another Scenic Peculiarity -"Ha-has of Nature's digging "— The Author's earliest Field of Hard Labor - Picturesque Cliff of Boulder-clay Scratchings on the Sandstone -- - Invariable Characteristic of true Boulder-clay - Scratchings on Pebbles in the line of the longer axis Illustration from the Boulder-clay of Banff.

ROSEMARKIE, with its long narrow valley and its red abrupt scaurs,* is chiefly interesting to the geologist for its vast beds of the boulder-clay. I am acquainted with no other locality in the kingdom where this deposit is hollowed into ravines so profound, or presents precipices so imposing and lofty. The clay lies thickly over most part of the Black Isle and the peninsula of Easter Ross;-both soft sandstone districts, - bearing everywhere an obvious relation, as a deposit, to both the form and the conditions of exposure of the existing land,-just as the accumulated snow of a long-lying snow-storm, exposed to the drifting wind,bears relation to the heights and hollows of the tracts which it covers. On the higher eminences the clay forms a comparatively thin stratum, and in not a few instances it has been wholly worn away; while on the lower grounds, immediately over the old coast line, and in the sides of hollow valleys, exactly such places as we might expect to see the

* Scaur, Scotice, a precipice of clay. There is no single English word that conveys exactly the same idea.

snow occupying most deeply after a night of drift, -we find it accumulated in vast beds of from eighty to an hundred feet in thickness. One of these occurs in the opening of the narrow valley along which my course this morning lay, and is known far and wide,—for it forms a marked feature in the landscape, and harbors in its recesses a countless multitude of jackdaws, as the "Kaes' Craig of Rosemarkie." It presents the appearance of a hill that had been cut sheer through the middle from top to base, and exhibits in its abrupt front a broad red perpendicular section of at least a hundred feet in height, barred transversely by thin layers of sand, and scored vertically by the slow action of the rains. Originally it must have stretched its vanished limb across the opening like some huge snow-wreath accumulated athwart a frozen rivulet; but the incessant sweep of the stream that runs through the valley has long since amputated and carried it away; and so only half the hill now remains. The Kaes' Craig resembles in form a lofty chalk cliff, square, massy, abrupt, with no sloping fillet of vegetation bound across its brow, but precipitous direct from the hill-top. The little ancient village of Rosemarkie stretches away from its base on the opposite side of the stream; and on its summit and along its sides, groups of chattering jackdaws, each one of them as reflective and philosophic as the individual immortalized by Cowper, look down high over the chimneys into the streets. The clay presents here, more than in almost any other locality with which I am acquainted, the character of a stratified deposit; and the numerous bands of sand by which the cliff is horizontally streaked from top to bottom we find hollowed, as we approach, into a multitude of circular openings, like shotholes in an old tower, which form breeding-places for the daw and the sand-martin. The biped inhabitants of the cliff are greatly more numerous than the biped inhabitants

of the quiet little hamlet below; and on Fortrose fair-days, when, in virtue of an old feud, the Rosemarkie boys were wont to engage in formidable bickers with the boys of Cromarty, I remember, as one of the invading belligerents, that, in bandying names with them in the fray, we delighted to bestow upon them, as their hereditary sobriquet, given, of course, in allusion to their feathered neighbors, the designation of the "Rosemarkie kaes." Cromarty, however, is two-thirds surrounded by the waters of a frith abounding in sea-fowl; and the little fellows of Rosemarkie, indignant at being classed with their kaes, used to designate us with hearty emphasis, in turn, as the "Cromarty cooties,” i. e.,

coots.

A little higher up the valley, on the western side, there occurs in the clay what may be termed a group of excavations, composing a piece of scenery ruinously broken and dreary, and that bears a specific character of its own which scarce any other deposit could have exhibited. The excavations are of considerable depth and extent, — hollows out of which the materials of pyramids might have been taken. The precipitous sides are fretted by jutting ridges and receding inflections, that present in abundance their diversified alternations of light and shadow. The steep descents form cycloid curves, that flatten at their bases, and over which the ferruginous stratum of mould atop projects like a cornice. Between neighboring excavations there stand up dividing walls, tall and thin as those of our city buildings, and in some cases broken at their upper edges into rows of sharp pinnacles or inaccessible turf-coped turrets; while at the bottom of the hollows, washed by the runnels which, in the slow lapse of years, have been the architects of the whole, we find cairn-like accumulations of water-rolled stones, the disengaged pebbles and boulders of the deposit. The boulders and pebbles project also from the steep sides, at all

heights and of all sizes, like the primary masses inclosed in our ancient conglomerates, when exhibited in wave-worn precipices, forcing upon the mind the conclusion that the boulder-clay is itself but an unconsolidated conglomerate of the later periods, which occupies nearly the same relative position to the existing vegetable mould, with all its recent productions, that the great conglomerate of the Old Red Sandstone occupies in relation to the lower ichthyolite beds of that system, with their numerous extinct organisms. But its buried stones are fretted with hieroglyphic inscriptions, in the form of strange scratchings and polishings, grooves, ridges, and furrows,—always associated with the boulder-clays, which those of the more ancient conglomerates want, and which, though difficult to read, seem at length to be yielding up the story which they record. Of this, however, more anon. Viewed by moonlight, when the pale red of the clay where the beam falls direct is relieved by the intense shadows, these excavations of the valley of Rosemarkie form scenes of strange and ghostly wildness: the projecting, buttress-like angles,-the broken walls,— the curved inflections, the pointed pinnacles, the turrets, with their masses of projecting coping, the utter lack of vegetation, save where the heath and the furze rustle far above, all combine to form assemblages of dreary ruins, amid which, in the solitude of night, one almost expects to see spirits walk. These excavations have been designated, from time immemorial, by the neighboring town's-people, as "the Danes;" but whether the name be, as is most probable, merely a corruption of an appropriate enough Saxon word, "the dens," or derived, as a vague tradition is said to testify, from the ages of Danish invasion, it is not quite the part of the geologist to determine. It may be worth mentioning, however, from its bearing on the point, that there are two excavations in the boulder-clay