40 RENFREWSHIRE EXCURSIONS. 



now apparent without explanation. Behind the house and situ- 

 ated one at each corner, stand a pair of vigorous yew trees, 

 planted to commemorate a marriage in the Porterfield family 

 (formerly proprietors of Duchall). The trees, appropriately 

 enough, are male and female, and they show, to be contemporaries, 

 an interesting discrepancy in the rate of growth, favouring the male 

 tree, which at the narrowest part of the trunk accessible measured 

 on 8th June, 1889, 7 feet 8f inches, its companion, the female, 

 measuring 6 feet f inch. Readers may recall that Gilbert White, 

 in writing of the old yew in the churchyard at Selborne, declared 

 that "as far as we have been able to observe, the males of this 

 species become much larger than the females." By the roadsides 

 here bald-money {Meum athamanticum) is a characteristic plant, 

 and a clump of Carex ovalis and many fine patches of the English 

 stonecrop (Sedii/n anglicum) were noted between Craigbet and 

 Kilmalcolm. The estate of Duchall, which lies between Craigbet 

 and the village of Kilmalcolm, has much fine timber, the trees in 

 the avenues of beech and lime being of large proportions. 

 Against one of the gables of the mansion is a yew tree, probably 

 of great age. From measurements taken in 1888, its branches 

 extend in one direction 53 feet, the girth of the trunk being 13 

 feet 10 inches; but as the principal stem is very short and many 

 of the branches almost prone, measurement of girth becomes an 

 unreliable test. In the grounds, bistort {Polygonum Bistortd) and 

 Dorouicum platitagineum were noted. 



Kilmalcolm was the rendezvous of an excursion early in 1891. 

 The parish church and a portion of its predecessor, which had 

 been quite recently renovated and was to form a vestry, were 

 inspected with much interest. The building stone is the hard 

 trap of the district. The church is declared by competent author- 

 ities to be the best example of its style in the West of Scotland. 

 In the ruinous quier (the burial place of the Porterfields) are some 

 interesting tablets, one showing in its design the conjunction of 

 the national emblems of the rose and thistle, which a gentleman 

 present declared a not infrequent combination in stones of the 

 period about the Union of the Parliaments. Mr. J. Thomson, a 

 local botanist, who was acting as conductor, said that a quarter of 

 a century since the walls of the quier were literally covered with 

 the wall-rue {Aspkniian Ruta-muraria), but since they had been 



