25i A HUNDRED YEARS 



inside, when the lower doors are left open for their 

 benefit. 



The soil of this old sea-beach was a four-foot mixture 

 of about three-parts pebbles and one part of rather nice 

 blackish earth. The millions of pebbles had to be got 

 rid of. So in deep trenching it, digging forks were mostly- 

 used, every workman had a girl or boy opposite him, 

 and the process of hand-picking much resembled the 

 gathering of a very heavy crop of potatoes in a field. 

 The cost of the work was great, as thousands upon 

 thousands of barrow-loads of small stones had to be 

 wheeled into the sea, and the place of the pebbles made 

 up with endless cartloads of peaty stuff from old turf 

 dykes, red soil carted from long distances, and a kind of 

 blue clay marl from below the sea, full of decayed 

 oyster-shells and crabs and other good things, hauled up 

 at very low tides. There is also a terrace the whole 

 length of the garden cut out of the face of a steep brae, 

 which was just above the old beach. It had to be carved 

 out of the solid gravel and covered with soil brought 

 from afar. The cutting at the top was fully twelve feet 

 deep, and against it a retaining wall was built, which I 

 covered with fan and cordon trained fruit-trees. 



When the cutting was first made we found a number 

 of large holes or burrows going deep into the hillside. 

 These, we were convinced by the various signs we found, 

 must have been inhabited in prehistoric times by a 

 colony of badgers, and no sooner was the light let into 

 these galleries than up came a thick crop of raspberry 

 seedlings, as far in as the light could penetrate. It 

 appeared evident that the badgers, like bears, had been 



