IN ASSYNT. 143 



guest is involuntarily reminded of the apocryphal story of maid- 

 servants and apprentices, who used, in the good old times in 

 England, to covenant specially with their masters that they were 

 not to be fed on this fish more than three days in the week. 

 Sooth to say, of all dishes, salmon is the one which soonest 

 palls on the appetite, whereas, when sharpened by exercise, 

 hungry fishermen can always eat trout. This is fortunate, as 

 the parish of Assynt possesses some three hundred lochs in its 

 97,000 acres, and many of them abound with trout. 



The eastern side of Sutherlandshire is the scene of the 

 Duke's experiments in clearing the moor and establishing farms. 

 Assynt, on the opposite shore, is as great a contrast to these 

 trim square fields as can be imagined. Rough moor and 

 heather-tufted rock alternate with lochs, which lie under some 

 of the wildest and most imposing mountains of Scotland. 

 Everywhere in Assynt four of these, Suilven, Canisp, Quinaig, 

 and Ben More, are conspicuous; that is to say, when not 

 hidden in mists. These are the oldest mountains in the British 

 Isles ; the three former being composed of Cambrian conglo- 

 merate and sandstone, Quinaig being capped with silurian 

 quartzose, while Ben More is made up of silurian quartzite and 

 traps.* The strip of the Laurentian system on the coast is 

 overlaid by silurian beds as the traveller advances inland, and 

 the two result in a bare, bleak country, treeless, almost devoid of 

 bushes, intersected by a streak of limestone, which runs up into 

 gigantic terraces and buttresses at Stromechrubie by the back 

 of the little hotel of Inchnadamph. These bony processes, as 

 it were, of the country are clothed with a scanty covering of 

 appropriate vegetation heath and bog plants, with a few rare 

 ferns in the sheltered recesses, down which burns flow to the 

 lochs. It is a country which must be very much loved or very 

 much detested. The ordinary tourist, away from the comforts 

 of hotels and railroads, falls under the latter category. We 

 * Lyell's Elements of Gejlogy, 2nd ed. p. 89. 



