20 THE MOOR AND THE LOCH. 



are rather small. It also stands high, and is not so well 

 sheltered as might be desired on which account the deer, 

 when the winter storm sets in severely, although fed to the 

 full, cannot remain to eat their food, and are obliged to seek 

 the shelter of the woods for many miles round, far beyond 

 their bounds. At night they wander to the turnip-fields for 

 sustenance, where numbers are shot by poachers, who watch 

 the gates and openings into the fields. One man boasted to 

 me that he had in that manner killed six during one storm, 

 with a common fowling-piece loaded with ball. The turnip- 

 field where he performed this feat was more than twelve miles 

 from the forest. 



Perhaps as fine deer as any in the kingdom are those of 

 the Black Mount. The cup l on the top of the horns of 

 many, according to Highland phrase, would hold a gill of 

 whisky ; and yet there are heads now preserved in Taymouth 

 Castle which show that their forefathers, though fewer in 

 number, were even greater than they. The Black Mount is 

 twenty-one miles long by twelve broad ; and the Marquis of 

 Breadalbane, notwithstanding his numerous engagements in 

 public life, has not neglected this noble appanage of a High- 

 land proprietor. No expense or trouble is spared which can 

 contribute to the winter subsistence of the deer, or protect 

 them from poachers. Patches of different kinds of food are 

 sown in the valleys, and left uncut, to which they flock during 

 the severity of winter. The forest has plenty of green summer 

 food, and abundance of long heather, which affords shelter in 

 cold weather, and is greedily eaten in the snowstorm, when 

 hardly any other food can be reached. I shot the subject of the 

 woodcut there about the beginning of October 1840, when the 

 forest was in all its glory, and nothing but sounds of rivalry 

 and defiance were heard in every quarter. The head is not by 

 any means the largest size, but may be taken as a fair average 



1 The three top prongs of the horn, growing out together, form a cup. There 

 is no cup at all except in the finest and oldest stags. 



