188 CARPINUS, PINUS. 



26. Carpinus betulus. Hornbeam. In plantations. 



27. Pinus sylvestris. Ci;c ^cotc!) Jfir. In plantations. — I have 

 not been able to ascertain that the Fir has ever been found buried in 

 our mosses. Yet, I presume, that it was a denizen of our primeval 

 woods. That it is a native of the north of England admits of no 

 doubt. See Whitaker's Manchester, ii. p. 45-48. But our present 

 Fir, Sir Walter Scott says, writing in 1827, "is an inferior variety, 

 brought from Canada not more than half a century ago." Quart. 

 Rev. xxxvi. p. 580. It is a very old opinion that there were two 

 kinds of fir-trees in Scotland. See Appendix, No. 1, to Pennant's 

 Tour, 1769. — The handsomest specimen of the Fir in our district is 

 one that stands at the foot of the garden at Ilderton. I can re- 

 member it as it was fifty years ago ; and it was a deed of hardihood 

 to reach the top and harry the nest of the raven that annually built 

 thereon. So far as I remember, the nest was rarely reached by fair 

 and honest means. The tree is still thriving ; and it has a trunk 

 8 feet 6 inches in circumference. 



The Fir influences the appearance of our district considerably, 

 from the extent to which it has been used in making plantations. 

 It must have been little short of a century since it was wont to be 

 planted, almost solely, in large square or oblong platoons " on the 

 cold and wintry-shaded side " of many of our hills ; on low grounds, 

 in less regular masses, in odd-cornered fields ; and in belts so run as 

 to give shelter on the farm. Few things could be more ugly ; and 

 schoolboys, when bird-nesting, penetrated their gloomy interior with 

 some degree of awe. I have a very fresh remembrance of those on 

 the farm of Ilderton, — and one, within whose ample bounds there 

 was a decoy, was to me for ever the representative of the pathless 

 wood in which stood concealed the Castles of Romance, and wherein 

 knights lost their way, and were lured to adventure or wicked thral- 

 dom. Deeds of darkness were in reality enacted in and near these 

 woods. Ill my boyhood — it must have been about 1811 — a car- 

 penter was murdered at about mid-day hard by, and his unavenged 

 blood still cries from the ground ; and at a very short distance there 

 is a place which was called the Murder-Allers. We have in the 

 Merse near AUanton the " Pistol-Plantings," so called from a tra- 

 ditionary story of a murderous attack on a farmer just where the 

 Firs cast a dark gloom over the road even at noon. And a few miles 

 from Belford may yet be seen a clump of Fir-trees, standing by the 

 road-side, which is called "Grizzy's Clump,"— in commemoration of the 

 feat of Grizel Cochrane of Ochiltree, who concealed herself within the 

 clump disguised, attacked the post-messenger, and robbed him of the 

 warrant he carried for the execution of her father, who had meddled too 

 much in politics in the difficult times of James II.* These dull 



* See Sheklou's Border Minstrelsy, p. 251. My friend, the Rev. J. 

 Dixon Clark, laughs at the story, and believes it to be a story, for " the 

 old road," he writes, " went considerably to the west of Fenwick Steads, 

 and these trees stand in a field (called Hamburgh Hill, I am told) close to 

 the new turnpike road." I hold criticism of this kind, on such a matter, 



