48 BURIED CANOES IN THE YALLEY OF THE CLYDE. CHAP. in. 



In those districts where large rivers, such as the Clyde, 

 Forth, and Tay, enter the sea, the lower of the two deposits, 

 or that of twenty-five feet, expands into a terrace fringing 

 the estuaries, and varying in breadth from a few yards to 

 several miles. Of this nature are the flat lands which occur 

 along the margin of the Clyde at Glasgow, which consist of 

 finely laminated sand, silt, and clay. Mr. John Buchanan, 

 a zealous antiquary, writing in 1855, informs us, that in the 

 course of the eighty years preceding that date, no less than 

 seventeen canoes had been dug out of this estuarine silt, and 

 that he had personally inspected a large number of them 

 before they were exhumed. Five of them lay buried in silt 

 under the streets of Grlasgow, one in a vertical position with 

 the prow uppermost as if it had sunk in a storm. In the 

 inside of it were a number of marine shells. Twelve other 

 canoes were found about a hundred yards back from the 

 river, at the average depth of about nineteen feet from the 

 surface of the soil, or seven feet above high-water mark ; but 

 a few of them were only four or five feet deep, and conse 

 quently more than twenty feet above the sea-level. One was 

 sticking in the sand at an angle of 45, another had been 

 capsized, and lay bottom uppermost ; all the rest were in a 

 horizontal position, as if they had sunk in smooth water.* 



Nearly all of these ancient boats were formed out of a single 

 oak-stem, hollowed out by blunt tools, probably stone axes, 

 aided by the action of fire ; a few were cut beautifully smooth, 

 evidently with metallic tools. Hence a gradation could be 

 traced from a pattern of extreme rudeness to one showing 

 no small mechanical ingenuity. Two of them were built of 

 planks, one of which, dug up on the property of Bankton 

 in 1853, was eighteen feet in length, and very elaborately 

 constructed. Its prow was not unlike the beak of an antique 



* GK Buchanan, Brit. Ass. Eep. 1855, p. 80 ; also Glasgow, Past and Present, 

 1856. 



