DARNAWAY FOREST. 5 



taste, but the observations in volume ii. on Nature, the habits 

 of wild animals and birds, the interesting details of their sporting 

 experiences in the forest, and especially the accounts of various 

 kinds of game taken and the sportsmen engaged on the grand 

 battues of Prince Esterhazy in Hungary in 1823 and other 

 years, are of the highest interest. (For a detailed account of 

 this hut, see Bain's River Findhorn, page 160.) 



Darnaway Forest Afforestation. — Such briefly was the character 

 of the district on a portion of which the afforestation to be 

 described was carried out in the latter half of the eighteenth 

 century.i Francis, ninth Earl of Moray, succeeded his father in 

 1767. He commenced planting immediately on his succession. 

 In 1768 the first larch was planted; by 1772, 1500 had been 

 planted; in 40 years, from 1767 to 1807, 11,300,000 odd trees 

 had been planted in the county of Elgin, and 1,800,000 had 

 been planted on other family estates, of which 1,000,000 were 

 oaks planted in Elgin. To his friends and contemporaries he 

 was known as " The Tree Planter." His grandson, the Honour- 

 able John Stuart, in his family history which he left in manu- 

 script, records about the year i860 that "Francis, ninth Earl of 

 Moray, was the greatest planter of trees in his day. The oaks 

 are getting to be large trees. The fir woods have been almost 

 all cut and the ground has been replanted with larch and fir." 

 Doubtless other neighbouring proprietors were tree planters on 

 a larger scale — for instance, the Duke of Richmond and Gordon, 

 the Earl of Seafield, Lord Lovat, and Grant of Rothiemurchis, 

 and, south of the water-shed, the Duke of Atholl — but this was 

 a new and, as far as it went, a complete venture of afforesting a 

 definite area of some 4500 acres, and of outlying plantations in 

 addition, in the county of Elgin. 



The forest rises from an elevation of some 100 feet above 

 the sea on its northern margin to 700 feet southwards. 

 Geologically it rests on beds of Upper Old Red Sandstone 

 and Crystalline Schists covered by Boulder clay, with here and 

 there peat and vegetable humus. The rainfall taken over an 

 average of five years is about 26 inches. Oaks were highly 

 estimated and widely planted during the period we are con- 

 sidering, but doubts were often expressed in letters of the 



^ See Abstract View of T?'ees Planted, published in the Transactions, 

 vol. xxxiv. (1920), p. 91. 



