64 PERIODICAL VISITS OF THE HERRING. 



Cromarty. — From 1690 to 1709 a very extensive fishery 

 was carried on at Cromarty, whither the herrings annu- 

 ally resorted in considerable abundance. Shortly after 

 the Union (1707), an immense shoal was thrown, or 

 rather ran themselves, on shore, in a little bay to the east 

 of the town. The beach was covered with them to the 

 depth of several feet, and salt and casks failed the packers. 

 The residue was carried away for manure by farmers 

 in the neighbourhood. Strange to say, however, they left 

 the Firth in a single night, and no shoals again made 

 their appearance for more than half a century. In 1780 

 a body of herrings was seen swimming up the Firth with 

 all the accompaniments of a large shoal — whales, por- 

 poises, and gulls ; they passed through the roadstead 

 and the strait opposite Invergorden, beating the water for 

 several miles into a foam, and giving it the appearance it 

 presents when ruffled by those sudden land-squalls which 

 blacken the surface. The shoal took up its spawning- 

 ground opposite Ardilly, a villa within three miles of 

 Dingwall, and was fished in immense quantities within 

 400 yards of the shore. The following year a similar 

 body returned and rested for some time in the bays of 

 Fortrose and Campbeltown, and then turned down the 

 Firth after affording an abundant fishing. Shoals of her- 

 rings have since occasionally returned to the upper part 

 of the Firth. One season, in the beginning of autumn, 

 the Bay of Cromarty appeared as if its countless waves 

 were embodied into fish and birds. No fewer than seven 

 whales, some of them apparently sixty feet in length, 

 were seen within the short space of half a mile. When 

 they spouted, the jets seemed, in the rays of the noonday 

 sun, as if speckled with silver, occasioned by the small 

 fishes which they drew in with the water and thus ejected. 



