340 THE DESTRUCTION OF THE FOREST 



success, as is shown by its continued existence for many 

 thousands of years. 



Its distribution during the period of the formation of the 

 peat mosses, just prior to, or even contemporaneous with 

 the arrival of man in Scotland, shows no trace of the 

 limitation which one associates with a decaying race. It 

 still roamed over the length of the land, for antlers have 

 been recovered from the peat mosses of Shaws in Dum- 

 friesshire, from the neighbourhood of Tain in Ross r shire and 

 from Rousay in the Orkneys. Not very far from Edinburgh 

 its remains were found in a' rock fissure at Craig Green in 

 the Pentland Hills. 



Even in later times, bones in actual association with the 

 handiwork of the men of the New Stone Age, show that the 

 Reindeer still ranged widely in Scotland: witness the dis- 

 covery of antlers near the mouth of the Kelvin River in 

 Glasgow, in beds of laminated clay which have yielded many 

 dug-out canoes of prehistoric fishermen, and the more recent 

 find by Drs Peach and Home of Reindeer bones in the 

 Cave of Allt nan Uamh in Sutherland, where they lay in 

 layers containing hearth-stones burnt by the fires of Neo- 

 lithic man. The men of the New Stone Age interfered 

 little with the wild life of the country. They hunted, herded 

 and tilled, but for their own limited needs, and their inter- 

 ference with woodland was of little account, as indeed is that 

 of all primitive peoples. For so long, then, the Reindeer 

 appears to have held its own. 



The next series of records of the Reindeer, however, 

 shows a remarkable contraction in its range. True there is 

 a hesitating record of its presence in the south country at a 

 comparatively late date. In the descriptions of his excavations 

 at the lake dwelling of Lochlee in Ayrshire, which con- 

 tained Bronze Age and Roman articles, Dr Robert Munro 

 states that he found 



two more or less fragmentary portions of horns which after a good deal of 

 comparison with other reindeer horns, and with fragments of red-deer horns, 

 I incline to set down as indicating the presence of the former animal ; 



but the identification is so uncertain that the record, out of 

 keeping with the facies of the animal remains of Scottish 

 crannogs in general, may be ignored. 



To the days of the brochs, those great " Pictish Towers " 



