308 ANCIENT BOGS. 



where there is not now a native hazel bud for twenty 

 miles in any direction, although there is abundance 

 of room which has never been disturbed by cultiva- 

 tion. At one place, in the parish of Monikie, in 

 Forfarshire, there stands a lonely fortilage, the 

 Hynd Castle, upon a mound of its ruins, and sur- 

 rounded, or nearly so, by a peat-bog, which, from 

 the immense number of nutshells in it, must once 

 have been a hazel copse, or rather it has been a 

 wood with hazel underwood the demesne, or park 

 of the fortilage, perhaps, for there are the remains 

 of large forest trees in it; and from the remains of 

 vegetation, the form of the surface, the keenness of 

 the air, and the purity of the water, there is great 

 reason to believe that it has once been a very beau- 

 tiful place. Tradition carries the history no farther 

 back than the reign of the last ghost, and it had ab- 

 dicated before the beginning of the present century. 

 The eyes of the most prying antiquaries can trace 

 nothing but the marks of the chisel in the squared 

 stones with which the fragments of the walls are 

 cased ; but that is something, inasmuch as there is 

 not now in the neighbourhood, or even in the county, 

 a freestone of the same colour (old red sandstone) 

 that will show the marks of the chisel so perfect 

 after one century. The walls have been grouted in 

 the' central parts, but whether they are Roman or 

 not cannot be determined. There are camps of 

 many paces about, some square, with the usual 

 traces of the Romans, and others oval, or round - t 

 and there are (or used to be) abundance of flint 

 arrow-heads, which the old women sometimes de- 

 scribed as flying about in. the twilight and killing the 

 cows, but they have lain still for some years. 



The fields around are now mostly under tillage, and 

 yield a scanty and precarious crop to a most labori- 

 ous culture; but their natural productions were on 

 the humid places bent, and on the dry, brown heath 

 and white moss, or white moss and brown heath, 



