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No peats in Tyree. explained, that there are no peats in Tyree — the 

 mosses have long been exhausted, and if there is any 

 soil of a peaty nature, it has long been reclaimed, and 

 must now belong to the arable or to the meadow- 

 land. If the crofter who made this complaint really 

 meant that he should be allowed to cut up for burning 

 any of the turf on arable, or on meadow, or on pasture 

 land, — whether on his own or on his neighbours* crofts, 

 — he must be unreasonable indeed. The true explana- 

 tion I take to be that this poor man had learnt his 

 lesson imperfectly, and in repeating what he had 

 heard or read of the right sort of thing to say, he had 

 stumbled on this most inappropriate " grievance." 



The complaint, however, may have had another 

 ori£:in, and if it had, we have an excellent illustra- 

 tion of the desire to revert to old habits, however 

 barbarous, which inspires many of these complaints. 

 Some thirty years ago it used to be the custom of the 

 people of Tyree to spend many weeks of the year in 

 cutting, stacking, and drying peats in the Ross of 

 Mull — these peats being then boated across to Tyree 

 at another season. This custom has been abandoned 

 for many years, and for many reasons. In the first 

 place, it involved an enormous expenditure of time 

 and labour. In the second place, it damaged greatly 

 the common pasture of the crofters, who then, as now, 

 occupied the farm on the Ross of Mull on which the 

 mosses lay. In the third place, there was great 

 danorer, and not seldom a serious loss of life, in takinor 

 boats heavily laden with peats across twenty miles of 

 an open and stormy sea. For all these reasons, and 

 for others, this wasteful habit has been long abandoned 

 by general consent, whilst the improved agriculture 



