MAKCH 63 



' As I did stand my watch^upon the hill, 



I look'd toward Birnam, and anon, niethought, 



The wood began to move.' 



Birnam wood has long since been felled, and has either 

 come up again in the form of stool-grown oaks, never so 

 free as the original trees from seed, or has been replanted 

 with spruce and larch. But still there stands between 

 Birnam Hotel and the river a giant oak, reputed to be 

 the last survivor of Macbeth's ' moving grove.' It girths 

 22 feet at 4 feet from the ground, giving a diameter of 

 7 feet 4 inches. Hard by stands a formidable rival to the 

 native, in the shape of a huge sycamore, which is not a 

 tree indigenous to Britain. This monster has swelled to a 

 girth of 24 feet at 4 feet from the ground ; while, measured 

 round the exposed part of the trunk at the ground level, 

 it gives a dimension of upwards of 50 feet. Birnam Hill 

 itself is still clothed in part with forest, but the trees are 

 nearly all exotic larch and spruce save where the birch 

 has sprung up thickly in the glades rent by storms. 



This pass of Birnam, of old the main portal to the 

 Highlands of Breadalbane and Blair Athole, is the choicest 

 ground in all Scotland for the lover of trees. For many 

 centuries the forest wealth of North Britain received 

 ruthless, spendthrift handling. Generation after genera- 

 tion cut and came again for their hand-to-mouth wants, 

 without a thought, apparently, for those who should come 

 after them; until, at the beginning of the eighteenth 

 century, Scotland had assumed that dispiriting nakedness 

 which was to justify Dr. Johnson in his gibe that, in all 

 his Scottish travels he never saw but three trees big 

 enough to hang a man upon. Dunkeld and Birnam 

 got a good start in reafforestation through the rare 



