A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 107 



illustration sloping towards the hinges, or the uptilted ice- 

 table of the boulder sloping towards the centre of the pond ; 

 and the depression behind forms a flat mooiy valley, full 

 fifteen miles in length, occupied by a chain of dark bogs and 

 treeless loehans. A long line of trap-hills rises over it, in 

 one of which, considerably in advance of the others, I recog- 

 nised the Storr of Skye, famous among lovers of the pictu- 

 resque for its strange group of mingled pinnacles and towers ; 

 while directly crossing into the valley from the Sound, and 

 then running southwards for about two miles along its bot- 

 tom, is the noble sea-arm, Loch Portree, in which, as indicated 

 by the name (the King's Port) a Scottish king of the olden 

 time, in his voyage round his dominions, cast anchor. The 

 opening of the loch is singularly majestic; the clifls tower 

 high on either side in graceful magnificence : but from the 

 peculiar inward slope of the land, all within, as the loch 

 reaches the line of the valley, becomes tame and low, and a 

 black dreary moor stretches from the flat terminal basin into 

 the interior. The opening of Loch Portree is a palace gate- 

 way, erected in front of some homely suburb, that occupies 

 the place which the palace itself should have occupied. 



There was, however, no such mixture of the homely and 

 the magnificent in the route I had selected to explore. It 

 lay under the escarpment of the cliff ; and I purposed pur- 

 suing it from Portree to Holm, a distance of about six miles, 

 and then returning by the flat interior valley. On the one 

 hand rose a sloping rampart, fall seven hundred feet in height, 

 striped longitudinally with alternating bands of white sand- 

 stone and dark shale, and capped atop by a continuous cop- 

 ing of trap, that lacked not massy tower, and overhanging 

 turret, and projecting sentry-box ; while, on the other hand, 

 spreading outwards in the calm from the line of dark trap- 

 rocks below, like a mirror from its carved frame of black oak, 

 lay the Sound of Rasay, with its noble background of island 



