REPORT ON THE AGRICULTURE OF PERTHSHIRE. 165 



fashioned ideas, want of skill, and want of money, avail them- 

 selves to the utmost of the abstracting and selling off powers con- 

 tained in their leases, others who know that the direct profits 

 from stock sold, and the indirect profits from the improved con- 

 dition of their farms, by the feeding of such stock, are infinitely 

 greater than any that can be obtained by growing hay and pota- 

 toes, not for feeding but for sale, manage their farms accordingly, 

 and thrive upon them. The different degrees of good farming in 

 each class are marked by Che extent to which the tenants have 

 left the first mode of practice just indicated, and approached to 

 or entirely adopted the other. The farming in Perthshire, in 

 both classes of arable land, is at present in a transition state from 

 pure grain, potato, and hay growing, to a proper combination of 

 grain growing, with a due proportion of turnips, pasture, and 

 soiling grass for raising and keeping a stock of cattle and sheep ; 

 and while such transition has during the last ten years made 

 very great and marked progress in the lighter lands of the county, 

 it has not made the same advance in the Carse districts. 



To proceed, however, with the consideration of the three 

 classes of land in the order in which they have been put down, 

 we shall take up — 



1. Hill Pasture. 



It must not be supposed that this class of land in Perthshire 

 is at all equal to the grazings in the south of Scotland or in 

 Sutherland. The scenery in Perthshire is too fine, and the bags 

 of grouse made on the 12th of August too heavy, to expect such 

 to be the case. But while the rugged grandeur of the generality 

 of the mountains of Perthshire does not present to the shepherd's 

 eyes those green hirsels of less pretentious form so common in 

 the south of Scotland, there are, nevertheless, in various parts of 

 Perthshire large sheep grazings of a very superior description 

 for blackfaced sheep, which, from the system of breeding with 

 Leicester tups and growing cross-bred lambs, are paying the 

 occupants proportionally as well as grazings of a higher class. 

 Besides those Highland grazings in the Grampian range, are the 

 sheep farms of the Ochils in the south of the county, which re- 

 semble the hills in the south of Scotland more than those in the 

 north of Perthshire ; these contain, on both their northern and 

 southern slopes, and in the recesses and glens by which they are 

 intersected, many grazings of good quality. In these uplands 

 the land is in many parts too much subdivided, and too much 

 cropped ; small farms — each with all the paraphernalia of houses, 

 steading, &c, erected originally at no little cost to the proprietor, 

 and adapted to arable farming — are much too numerous in these 

 districts, where the altitude of the land and the quality of the 

 soil are most unsuitable for constant cropping ; and when we add 



