CHAPTER IX. 



LIVE STOCK EARLY IMPROVERS ROB ROY AS A 

 CATTLE DEALER HIGHLAND REIVERS THE BLACK 

 WATCH VALUE OF CATTLE PLUNDERED. 



" THE places in this country which produce sheep and 

 black cattle have no provision for them in winter 

 during the snows, having neither hay nor straw, nor 

 any enclosure to shelter them on the grass from the 

 cold easterly winds in the spring ; so that the beasts 

 are in a dying condition, and the grass consumed by 

 those destructive winds, till the warm weather, about 

 the middle of June, come to the relief of both." 

 These words were written of date 1698, and they pre- 

 sent a vivid and graphic, as well as, in the main, a 

 truthful sketch of the conditions under which the 

 live stock of the country existed about the close of the 

 seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth century. 

 At that time the native breeds of both cattle and 

 sheep were poor in character and poorly kept. Im- 

 provement in the rearing of neat stock seems to have 

 begun in the south-western corner of the land. Sir 

 David D unbar of Baldoon, in Galloway, the very 

 tragic story of whose wooing and wedding furnished 

 Sir Walter Scott with the central incidents in "The 

 Bride of Lammermoor," and who was himself killed 

 in 1682, was "an active improver of the wretched 

 rural economy of his day." And amongst other things, 

 he formed a famous park, two and a-half miles in 

 length and one and a-half in breadth, which could 

 "keep in it summer and winter a thousand bestial." 

 Part of these, we are told, he bought from the country, 



