164 THE BIRDS OF IONA AND MULL. 



Deer Island, Jura has ever been more noted as a deer forest than 

 as a place for colonisation. It may seem a misnomer calling these 

 wild tracts forests, where no cover grows bigger than will harbour 

 woodcock and adders, both of which abound greatly, but it is the 

 term always used even in other equally treeless districts. It may 

 be defended by the undoubted fact that all these islands and western 

 shores once waved with giant trees that would rival the American 

 backwoods. The impenetrable forest of Calydon extended all 

 over Argyle, its terrible depths peopled by wild bulls, boars, and 

 bears, and wilder Britons, formed an impassable barrier even to 

 the invincible legions of Rome. In the peat mosses, which cover 

 so large an extent of the Western Isles, roots of forest trees in 

 great quantities are found in the position in which they grew, five 

 or six feet beneath the surface of the super-accumulated moss. 

 On a steep, rocky bank by the house 1 stands a most venerable 

 witness to this fact, in the presence of a hollow-hearted, old oak 

 tree, twenty-one feet in circumference, though very dwarfed in 

 height. A great part is dead, but some boughs yet had leaves, 

 proving there is life in this old relic, which has been an eye- 

 witness, and perhaps taken part for the oak was a sacred tree 

 in the mystic ceremonies of the Druids, " am fasga ra daraich " 

 under the shade of the oak. Edinburgh savants opine that 

 this tree is more than fifteen hundred years old. Another smaller 

 one, a mere boy, which has probably not yet seen a thousand 

 summers, stands near. Both are growing on a steep, rugged, 

 rocky bank, out of crevices scarcely fit for brushwood. The wood 

 of the massy trunk has grown over the rock, like the gouty ankles 

 1 Ardlussa House. ED. 



