72 LANDSCAPE AND IMAGINATION 



such a presentation in the driest and baldest way can- 

 not conceal their inherent marvellous interest. 



Those grey bosses of rock that rise out of Loch 

 Maree and form the base and outworks of Slioch are 

 portions of the very oldest known land-surface of 

 Europe, as incalculably more ancient than the rest 

 of the Highlands, as the Highlands in turn are more 

 ancient than the Alps or the Apennines. Their heights 

 and hollows existed before the red sandstones were 

 laid down. To this day, you can walk along the 

 shore-line of the vanished lake or sea in which these 

 sandstones accumulated, and can mark how hill after 

 hill, and valley after valley, sank under its warers, and 

 were buried beneath its quietly gathering sand and 

 shingle. That primeval land-surface, slowly settling 

 down, came at last to lie under several thousand feet 

 of such sediment. Long subsequently, after the sand, 

 hardened into sandstone and the gravel, consolidated 

 into conglomerate, had been partially raised out of 

 water, came the time when the white rock of Ben Eay 

 and Craig Roy gathered as fine white sand on the 

 sea-bottom. Some beds of this compacted sand are 

 filled with millions of the burrows of sea-worms that 

 lived in it, and higher up come bands of shale and lime- 

 stone containing here and there trilobites, shells, corals, 

 sponges and other organisms belonging to an age 

 anterior to that of even the very oldest fossiliferous 

 rocks of most of the rest of Britain. These sheets of 

 marine sediment point to a period when there were 

 no hills in north-west Scotland, for the primeval 

 heights still lay deeply buried, and a shoreless sea 

 spread far and wide over the region. 



