CHAP. I. SCOTLAND AT THE MIDDLE OF LAST CENTURY. 99 



bloody fights as were ever known in Ireland, even in its 

 worst days. 



The country was as yet almost without roads, so that 

 communication between one town and another was ex- 

 ceedingly difficult, especially in winter. The old track 

 between Haddington and Edinburgh still exists as it 

 was left when the new system of turnpike roads was 

 introduced in Scotland. It is now used only by fox- 

 hunters riding to cover, but it continues to bear out the 

 description of a local writer : " Nothing," he says, " can 

 be a greater contrast with the roads of modern times. In 

 some places, where there was space for taking room, it 

 was not spared. There might be seen four or five or 

 more tracks, all collateral to one another, as each in its 

 turn had been abandoned and another chosen, and all 

 at last equally impassable. In wet weather they became 

 mere sloughs, in which the carts or carriages had to 

 plumper through in a half-swimming state, whilst in 

 time of drought it was a continued jolting out of one 

 hole into another." l 



Such being the state of the highways, it will be 

 evident that very little traffic could be conducted in 

 vehicles of any sort. Single horse traffickers, called 

 cadgers, plied between country towns and villages, sup- 

 plying the inhabitants with salt, fish, earthenware, and 

 articles of clothing, which they carried in sacks or creels 

 hung across the horse's back. Even the trade between 

 Edinburgh and Glasgow was carried on in the same 

 primitive way. So limited was the consumption of the 

 comparatively small population of Glasgow about the 

 middle of last century, that most of the butter, cheese, 

 and poultry raised within six miles of that city was 

 carried by cadgers to Edinburgh in panniers on horse- 

 back. On one occasion, a load of ducks, brought from 

 Campsie to Edinburgh for sale in the Grassmarket, 



1 George Robertson's ' Rural Recollections,' p. 38. 



H 2 



