HIGHLAND MORAINES. 381 



' Friday evening, 6 o'clock. 



' Just returned after a pleasant, though rather fa- 

 tiguing walk, of twelve miles or so. In going I passed 

 along the elevated path that winds immediately above 

 Nigg at the base of the hill, just where the cultivated 

 ground borders on the moor. The day was one of 

 speckled sunshine, and everything fresh and green after 

 the recent rain. On one of the lower slopes, where the 

 hill of Nigg descends towards the east, there is a fine 

 tomhan roughened at its base with dwarf birch, and 

 bearing very distinctly atop the marks of a hill-fort. 

 Some six or eight other tomhans lie around it, according 

 to Burns, 



" Hillocks dropt in Nature's careless haste ; " 



according to Agassiz, hillocks not dropped in haste, 

 but ploughed up with vast deliberation and perse- 

 verance. The tomhans here are all moraines, the pro- 

 duction of a moderately-sized glacier that once occupied 

 the north-eastern slope of the hill of Nigg. The hill- 

 fort may not be more than two thousand years old, 

 not so much, perhaps ; two thousand years brings us 

 beyond the days of Csesar. And yet it gives a sort of 

 felt antiquity to these moraines to find one of them 

 occupied by an erection older than history. In my 

 descent on the shore I was struck with what I must 

 have often seen, but never so particularly remarked 

 before, the great beauty of the curve in which the lias 

 strata recline against the coast. It forms such a sweep 

 as Hogarth would have introduced into his dissertation. 

 Betweeen the harder strata and the land there occurred 

 beds of a softer quality which have yielded to the sea, 

 leaving a long hollow, into which the higher strata 

 descend, as if by steps of stairs, and the appearance 

 presented is that of a low, long, elliptical amphitheatre, 



