AYR TO DUMFRIES. 309 



Once sheep were preferred much blacker in the 

 face j but thirty years since the farmers thought that 

 the lighter-faced wedders had most "tops^^ among 

 them, and were quieter to boot, and held to rams of 

 that shade. New Galloway is a great stronghold of 

 the breed, and about Kells, where it is flanked by the 

 MinnigafF and the Carsphairn hills, it is as wild as 

 Westmoreland, all rocks and cairns, and with blacker 

 heath. 



Many blackfaced wedders and half-bred lambs 

 are turniped in Galloway. There is nice and 

 kindly dry land by the rivers Dee, Urr, and Ken 

 (which divides Balmaclellan from Kells), and half- 

 bred hoggs are not sent to Penrith now in such 

 numbers, but kept on during a part of the summer. 

 In fact, some of them are put on turnips a second 

 winter. The breeding of half-bred lambs and grazing 

 them as hoggs on arable ground is a practice of only 

 recent growth. Many Clydesdales are bred and sold 

 at three, after a year in the harrows. It does not 

 pay to breed any other kind of horse, and for a road- 

 ster farmers fall back on Rosley Hill. 



We struck rather more inland from Ballantrae to 

 reach Finnart, through what seemed in the gloom 

 to be a mountain glen, with natural oak, birch, and 

 hazel on its sides. We can well give this Glenapp 

 credit for all its summer beauty ; but it was a time 

 of rain and snow and mist, which half-shrouded the 

 grand deep-sea anchorage of Loch Ryan, at the foot 

 of the glen. Captain Kennedy, a distinguished 



