A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 191 



edge of an extensive moor, about three miles from the public 

 road, where the province of Moray sweeps upwards from the 

 broad fertile belt of corn-land that borders on the sea, to the 

 brown and shaggy interior. There is an old-fashioned bare- 

 looking farm-house on the one side, surrounded by a few un- 

 inclosed patches of corn ; and the moorland, here dark with 

 heath, there gray with lichens, stretches away on the other. 

 The quarry itself is merely a piece of moor that has been 

 trenched to the depth of some five or six feet from the sur- 

 face, and that presents, at the line where the broken ground 

 leans against the ground still unbroken, a low uneven front- 

 age, somewhat resembling that of a ruinous stone-fence. It 

 has been opened in the outcrop of an ichthyolite bed of the 

 Lower Old Red Sandstone, on which in this locality the thin 

 moory soil immediately rests, without the intervention of the 

 common boulder clay of the country ; and the fish-envelop- 

 ing nodules, which are composed in this bed of a rich lime- 

 stone, have been burnt, for a considerable number of years, 

 for the purposes of the agriculturist and builder. There was 

 a kiln smoking this evening beside the quarry ; and a few 

 labourers were engaged with shovel and pickaxe in cutting 

 into the stratified clay of the unbroken ground, and throw- 

 ing up its spindle-shaped nodules on the bank, as materials 

 for their next burning. Antiquaries have often regretted 

 that the sculptured marble of Greece and Egypt, classic 

 urns, to whose keeping the ashes of the dead had been con- 

 signed, and antique sarcophagi, roughened with hieroglyphics, 

 should have been so often condemned to the lime-kiln by 

 the illiterate Copt or tasteless Mohammedan ; and I could 

 not help experiencing a somewhat similar feeling here. The 

 urns and sarcophagi, many times more ancient than those of 

 Greece and Egypt, and that told still more wondrous stories, 

 lay thickly ranged in this strange catacomb, so thickly, that 

 there were quite enough for the lime-kiln and the geologists 



