236 Notes on Sport and Travel i 



invent a new one for yourselves ; but burnt down 

 the trees about here have been, plainly enough. 

 How a wood of growing trees could have been burnt 

 to the stumps is hard to understand : were the 

 woods old and dead, and hung about with what 

 the Tyrolese call baum-haar, long, hanging, gray 

 mosses ? Had they done their work, and got as 

 much out of the soil as they could, rendering it 

 incapable of supporting them any longer, and so 

 died as they stood, making it fit for new comers, 

 like the Pechts and the Feen ? I don't know ; 

 there are the burnt stumps, testifying, to this day, 

 of their burning, with three or four feet of turf 

 above them. 



Old Sir Robert's list of birds and beasts evidently 

 indicates a country far more wooded than Sutherland 

 is now, as late as the middle of the seventeenth 

 century. Probably the firs came to an end simul- 

 taneously, and soon buried themselves in the peat 

 produced by their decay ; the stumps, being full of 

 turpentine, resisted the process, and remained as they 

 are now. Peat grows fast, and the fathers of young 

 men tell me that they remember groves of pines on 

 the south side of Lairg bridge, where they now dig 

 their winter fuel. 



The old birch woods still linger here and there 

 in all their pristine beauty, though diminished in 

 size. On the lower Shin, about Scriberscross, and 

 fringing many a sparkling loch and wild hill-side, 

 may the sweet-scented gleaming- leaved birch be 



