340 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 



and the Black Isle generally; though for the last century they 

 have been gradually disappearing from the more cultivated 

 tracts on which there were fences or farm-steadings to be built, 

 or where they obstructed the course of the plough. We find 

 them occurring in every conceivable situation, high on hill- 

 sides, where the shepherd crouches beside them for shelter in 

 a shower, deep in the open sea, where they entangle the nets 

 of the fisherman, on inland moors, where in some remote 

 age they were painfully rolled together, to form the Druidical 

 circle or Picts' -house, or on the margin of the coast, where 

 they had been piled over one another at a later time, as pro- 

 tecting bulwarks against the encroachments of the waves. 

 They lie strewed more sparingly over extended plains, or on 

 exposed heights, than in hollows sheltered from the west by 

 high land, where the current, when it dashed high on the 

 hill-sides, must have been diverted from its easterly course, 

 and revolved in whirling eddies. On the top of the fine 

 bluff hill of Fyrish, which I so admired to-day, each time I 

 caught a glimpse of its purple front through the woods, and 

 which shows how noble a mountain the Old Bed Sandstone 

 may produce, the boulders lie but sparsely. I especially 

 marked, however, when last on its summit, a ponderous tra- 

 veller of a vividly green hornblende, resting on a bed of pale- 

 yellow sandstone, fully a thousand feet over the present high- 

 water level. But towards the east, in what a seaman would 

 term the bight of the hill, the boulders have accumulated in 

 vast numbers. They lie so closely piled along the course of 

 the river Alness, about half a mile above the village, that it 

 is with difficulty the waters, when in flood, can force their 

 passage through. For here, apparently, when the tide swept 

 high along the hill-side, many an ice-floe, detained in the shel- 

 ter by the revolving eddy, dashed together in rude collision, 

 and shook their stony burdens to the bottom. Immediately 

 to the east of the low promontory on which the town of Cro- 



