C H A P T E II. 



TOPOGRAPHICAL AND SOCIAL ABERDEENSHIEE POLL 



BOOK A PICTURE FROM IT HEATHER AND DUB 



BUILDINGS AN OLD FASHIONED HAMLET. 



FOR the purpose of arriving at a reasonably distinct 

 notion of our country districts in their general features 

 a century or a century and a-half ago, we shall do 

 well to bear in mind that, along with the prevailing 

 paucity of passable roads and absence of bridges on 

 the larger streams, much of the surface of the land 

 remained in its natural state. Cultivation was more 

 picturesque than systematic in its developments ; bogs, 

 " mosses," and marshes continued undrained, covering 

 in the aggregate a greater extent of the superficies of 

 the country than it is easy now to realise. Natural 

 forest grew in some places now bare enough of trees, 

 but thousands of acres of the most valuable timber-land 

 planted in the latter half of the eighteenth century 

 had, prior to that date, produced little but stunted 

 heather and clumps of broom. 



If we go on to inquire how the rural population were 

 distributed and how they were occupied, the contrast 

 between the life of the people then, and what it has 

 become since, is found to very marked. There is 

 perhaps no county in Scotland in which materials fitted 

 to illustrate this point are more abundant than in Aber- 

 deenshire. By the aid of the Poll Boole* alone, and a 



* The " List of Polable Persons within the shire of Aberdeen," 

 printed by the gentlemen of the county in 1842, with the sanction 

 of the Spalding Club, and under the editorial care of Dr. John 

 Stuart, from MS. in the possession of General Gordon of Cairness, 

 is almost unique in its way. In the year 1693, and again in 1695, 

 a poll-tax was imposed by the Government of the time on all adults, 

 for the purpose of paying off arrears due to the army, &c. The 

 tax consisted of 6s. Scots per head, on each grown-up person, male 



