300 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 



and to the more distant protuberances on the mountain-sides, 

 those well-defined accompaniments of shadow that serve, by 

 throwing the minor features of a landscape upon the eye in 

 bold relief, to impart to it an air of higher finish and more 

 careful filling up than it ever bears under a more vertical 

 light. I took the road which, leading westward from the 

 town towards Invergordon Ferry, skirts the Frith on the 

 one hand, and runs immediately under the noble escarpment 

 of green bank formed by the old coast line on the other. 

 Fully two-thirds of the entire height of the rampart here, 

 which rises in all about a hundred feet over the sea-level, is 

 formed of the boulder-clay; and I am acquainted with no 

 locality in which the deposit presents more strongly, for at 

 least the first half mile, one of its marked scenic peculiarities. 

 It is furrowed vertically on the slope, as if by enormous flut- 

 ings in the more antique Doric style ; and the ridges by which 

 these are separated, each from a hundred to a hundred and 

 fifty feet in length, and from five-and-twenty to thirty feet in 

 average height, resemble those burial mounds with which 

 the sexton frets the churchyard turf j with this difference, 

 however, that they seern the burial mounds of giants, tall and 

 bulky as those that of old warred against the gods. They 

 are striking enough to have caught the eye of the children of 

 the place, and are known among them as the Giants' Graves. 

 I could fain have taken their portrait in a calotype this morn- 

 ing, as they lay against the green bank, -their feet to the 

 shore, and their heads on the top of the escarpment, like 

 patients on a reclining bed, and strongly marked, each by 

 its broad bar of yellow light and of dark shadow, like the 

 ebon and ivory buttresses of the poet. This little vignette, 

 I would have said to the landscape-painter, represents the 

 boulder-clay, after its precipitous banks worn down, by the 

 frosts and rains of centuries, into parallel runnels, that gra- 

 dually widened into these hollow grooves had sunk into 



