160 THE SHORT-EARED OWL. 



known of this interesting part of Fife. The steamers pass it by 

 on the north ; the railway shunts it by on the west ; the Eden 

 fences it on the south ; and the ripples or breakers of St 

 Andrews Bay (where lie the sunk ribs of the steamer "Dalhousie" 

 and other wrecks) guard it on the east ; and yet it is within four 

 miles of our old city by sea, near the submerged banks of Tay, 

 where at low water I have counted about fifty seals sporting at 

 one time on sand banks, w T hich, according to the old historian, 

 George Buchanan, were originally begun by a sunken Danish 

 fleet. This lonely moor, extensive sands, and booming sea 

 reminds one forcibly of Byron's "Address to the Ocean," in 

 which he says — 



" There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, 

 There is a rapture on the lonely shore, 

 There is society, where none intrudes, 

 By the deep sea, and music in its roar ; 

 I love not man the less, but Nature more, 

 From these our interviews, in which I steal 

 From all I may be, or have been before, 

 To mingle with the Universe, and feel 

 What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal." 



A local antiquarian — Mr David Harley, Builder, Tayport, 

 originally of Leuchars, who died in 1887, and as man and boy 

 had known Tentsmuir for seventy years — had " played beside 

 the Foremunt Loch and the Lang Loch when their waters 

 smiled in the sunshine or dashed in mimic wrath against the 

 clumps of reeds which formed their shores ; where now, as a con- 

 sequence of drainage, there are nothing but stretches of sandy 

 moorland, dotted by patches of heather and stunted marsh 

 grasses. On the shores of these lochs flourished dense masses 

 of whins, which grew to enormous size, their stems sometimes 

 eight or nine inches through, and in their branches the wood 

 pigeons built their nests." Many a time would he tell of his 

 having (when a boy) harried their nests three feet from the 

 ground. In after years Tentsmuir, with its wide range of 

 history, extending from the flint age and the shellmound builders 

 down through the stone and bronze ages (to what may be 

 termed recent antiquities), was to him an open book. He was 

 often consulted as to the past of Tentsmuir — he pointed out the 

 localities where the flint implements and other antiquities for 

 which the district is famed are to be found; the sites of old 

 villages; the hearths of fires — cold for centuries — lying deep 

 beneath the present surface of the moor; the strange circular 

 dwellings, whose origin lies hid in the mists of the past ; the 



