ROOKS. 125 



mentioned traditional attractions for various cohorts of that vast 

 agmen. The same of a smaller host which, I think, hailed from 

 the valley of the Fleet, northwards. But a third body of rooks 

 came from the west. Now, less than a mile west lies the sea 

 Wigtown Bay, several miles wide. My friend, the then head- 

 keeper, was a Wigtownshire man. In his boyhood, as he told me, 

 he used to watch the rooks going to sea from the Shire, as Wig- 

 townshire is called there in Galloway. Whither they went he 

 could not imagine. In after life he got his keepership in the 

 stewartry of Kirkcudbright, east of Wigtown Bay. There he saw 

 his old friends the Wigtownshire rooks, or their descendants, 

 arriving and going to their crowded roosts in one of his own 

 coverts. This over sea flight puts Jeffries' theories altogether out 

 of court as far as this special case is concerned. Let no one say 

 that the sea has encroached that Wigtown Bay in prehistoric 

 rook-aeons was dry land with rookery trees and feeding grounds, 

 which caused their still followed route. I am quite sure that any 

 geologist would say no to this on looking at the neighbouring 

 district. Nowhere in Scotland, I take it, can you see clearer 

 marks of the ice age. The great moraine, the pierres moutonnes, 

 the scratches on rocks, the millions of ice boulders, the boulder 

 clay locally called till, are all to be seen there as clearly as in 

 Switzerland. Ever since the break up of the ice age the features 

 of the country have been unchanged there, I take it. Only there, 

 as everywhere, slow rain denudation has gone on, and this, of 

 course, has silted up the sea. When the rooks began their mari- 

 time flight, Wigtown Bay must have flowed beneath their company 

 deeper than it does at this day. 



In the case in question I argue about no other in this case it 

 seems to me that nothing can have attracted them but simply what 

 follows. In remote times Wigtownshire was, as far as I could 

 judge, likely to be without timber woods. Those old beeches of 

 which I spoke, standing on a hill well seen from Wigtownshire, 

 would then constitute a wood, which, although small, was a con- 

 siderable one for those times, and very conspicuous. As the 



