HIS BIRTHPLACE AND EARLY TRAINING. 9 



health, adventure, beauty, grandeur, poetry and deathless 

 memories to all who have had the advantage of roaming 

 in their youth along such wild and precipitous shores ; 

 a happy privilege which the author recalls with gratitude, 

 as spent on a similar coast in the neighbouring county of 

 Angus. This glorious education John Duncan enjoyed 

 and profited by to the utmost, and, to his dying day, he 

 never wearied of talking of the thymy braes and magnifi- 

 cent rocks, with their associations and stirring adventures, 

 around Stonehaven and Dunnottar. 



Geologically, the bay of Stonehaven is most interesting, 

 from this amongst other facts, that it occupies, and no doubt 

 greatly owes its existence to, a junction between the 

 Silurian and the Old Red Sandstone, not far from the 

 Kirk of Cowie. It thus exhibits two very diverse styles 

 of rock and scenery on its two sides the twisted gneiss 

 on its northern half, and the thick-bedded conglomerate 

 on its southern. It is this picturesque conglomerate that 

 forms the famous cliffs round the Castle of Dunnottar. 

 The scenery along the shore, with its high precipitous 

 crags, washed by the waves, and scooped into magnificent 

 headlands frowning over the deep, its isolated stacks, 

 gloomy caverns, and winding rock-bound bays, is unsur- 

 passed in its way for variety, wildness and grandeur. For 

 boys, these contain the very essence of romance. Even 

 the names they possess are irresistible to youthful imagina- 

 tion and promise endless adventure the Boar Stone, the 

 Diel's Kettle, the Fowls' Heugh, with its countless sea 

 birds, the Long Gallery, the rock of Dunnacair, the very 

 word enticing to fearlessness, the shelves of Dunnimail, 

 famous for dulse, and many more, equally picturesque in 



