66 Transactions. 



worn, and ancient-looking — and yet hundreds of years might not 

 express the wide gulf of time separating them. For instance, on 

 Glenquicken Moor a great cairn when opened was found to con- 

 tain the skeleton of a man whose left shoulder was cleft by a 

 greenstone axe. That probably places the battle in which this 

 warrior fell far back into what we call the Stone Age. Now, on 

 the summit of one of the highest hills of the Kells range is a 

 cairn fully as romantically ancient and hoary, you would say, and 

 tradition has always assigned its erection to the efforts of the wife 

 of the miller of Pohnaddy, who raised this cairn as a monument 

 to the memory of the Bruce. Again, away out on Dranarndow 

 Moor, there is a cairn not a whit less deserving, to all appearance, 

 of an historic or pre-historic past ; and yet we are informed on 

 highly probable grounds that a freebooter of the name of Rorie 

 Gill and his accomplices were buried here, after being executed 

 by the Regent Moray, let us say about the year 1330. It seems 

 absolutely futile, therefore, to judge of a cairn by its mere look 

 and dimensions. At the risk of redundancy, I repeat that it is 

 only by the most careful and deliberate examination of their struc- 

 ture, by abandoning our senseless method of cutting trenches into 

 them from the level of their base and by adopting the only 

 rational method of removing every stone by hand, that we shall 

 add to our scanty knowledge of the fashion in which the different 

 builders of cairns raised these trophies to the dead. And, in con- 

 clusion, I think it should be one of the duties of a society such as 

 this rather to discourage indiscriminate excavation, unless the 

 work can be carried out under the watchful eye and control of 

 a specialist. 



4. — Scotlmid in the i8th Century. —By Mr Peter Gray. 



This was the sequel to a former paper on the same subject. 

 After a brief reference to it as having been necessarily confined, 

 almost wholly, to the more important division of the country — the 

 Lowlands — the author continued : — But however wretched the 

 condition of the Lowlands during the early part of that period, 

 that of the Highlands was very much worse, and it remained so 

 much longer. There were, as everyone knows, additional reasons 

 for the fearful depression of Celtic Scotland then. The last 

 Jacobite rebellion had been suppressed, and its embers trodden 

 out with great and, as it now appears to us, unnecessary severity. 



