296 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 



marked feature in the landscape, and harbours in its recesses 

 a countless multitude of jackdaws, as the " Kaes' Craig of 

 Rosemarkie." It presents the appearance of a hill that had 

 been cut sheer through the middle from top to base, and ex- 

 hibits in its abrupt front a broad red perpendicular section of 

 at least a hundred feet in height, barred transversely by thin 

 layers of sand, and scored vertically by the slow action of the 

 rains. Originally it must have stretched its vanished limb 

 across the opening, like some huge snow-wreath accumu- 

 lated athwart a frozen rivulet ; but the incessant sweep of the 

 stream that runs through the valley has long since amputated 

 and carried it away ; and so only half the hill now remains. 

 The Keas' Craig resembles in form a lofty chalk cliff, square, 

 massy, abrupt, with no sloping fillet of vegetation bound 

 across its brow, but precipitous direct from the hill-top. The 

 little ancient village of Rbsemarkie stretches away from its 

 base on the opposite side of the stream ; and on its summit, 

 and along its sides, groupes of chattering jackdaws, each one 

 of them as reflective and philosophic as the individual im- 

 mortalized by Cowper, look down high over the chimneys into 

 the streets. The clay presents here, more than in almost any 

 other locality with which I am acquainted, the character of 

 a stratified deposit j and the numerous bands of sand by which 

 the cliff is horizontally streaked from top to bottom we find 

 hollowed, as we approach, into a multitude of circular open- 

 ings, like shot-holes in an old tower, which form breeding 

 places for the daw and the sand-martin. The biped inhabi- 

 tants of the cliff are greatly more numerous than the biped 

 inhabitants of the quiet little hamlet below ; and on Fortrose 

 fair-days, when, in virtue of an old feud, the Rosemarkie boys 

 were wont to engage in formidable bickers with the boys of 

 Cromarty, I remember, as one of the invading belligerents, 

 that, in bandying names with them in the fray, we delighted 

 to bestow upon them, as their hereditary sobriquet, given, of 



