108 ADDRESS BY THE PRESIDENT, NOVEMBER 6, 1877. 



Blairadam in its original unimproved state before the planting 

 -was begun, -was a wild, unsheltered moor, lying from 500 to 700 

 feet above the sea, with a certain amount of natural beauty and 

 "with fine views of the plain of Kinross, Loch Leven, the Lomond 

 Hills, and Benarty Hill : but it must have been cold and bare : 

 it was covered with heather and coarse grass, and had but few 

 enclosures and only one tree — an ash — which, though it still grows 

 vigorously, is far out-topped by the younger generation. It was 

 in such a country and with such unpromising ground to work 

 upon, where 



' ' Far as the eye could reach no tree was seen ; 

 Earth clad in russet scorned the lively green," 



and with this solitary instance of tree-like vegetation, that the 

 then possessor of the estate entered upon Ms meritorious and 

 arduous task with a spirit of enterprise and with forecast greatly 

 in advance of the age in which he lived. I know of no instance 

 in the improvement of waste land that more thoroughly illustrates 

 the value and advantage of judicious, continuous, and persistent 

 planting, than this estate ; and it was for this reason that my 

 friend Dr Cleghorn advised me in my address to-day, in spite of 

 the seeming egotism, to mention my own case. It would take 

 too long were I to go into the whole story of the planting and 

 improvements of five generations, but, as I said before, these are 

 recorded in a book which owes its origin to a suggestion coming 

 direct from Sir "Walter Scott. Any of you who have read 

 Lockhart's " Life of Scott," may remember the interest with 

 which he dwells on the formation and proceedings of a club called 

 the Blairadam Club, which used to meet at Blairadam every 

 summer, and was regularly attended by Sir Walter for many 

 years. It was during one of those visits, as he himself mentioned 

 to Lockhart, that the idea of ' ; The Abbot " first occurred to him, 

 and in that tale many of the localities in Blairadam are alluded 

 to in a manner which was intended to convey delicately to my 

 grandfather infonnation as to the real authorship of the Waverley 

 Novels, Lockhart, after quoting different passages from my grand- 

 father's book on Blairadam, tells the story of its origin in the 

 following woi'ds : 



" Since I have obtained permission to quote from this private 

 volume, I may as well mention that I was partly moved to ask 

 that favour by the author's own confession that his ' Blairadam 

 from 1733 to 1831' originated in a suggestion of Scott's. 'It 



