NATURE 
205 
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 1916. 
NORTHERN COUNTIES LORE. 
(1) Highways and Byways in Galloway and Car- 
rick. By the Rev. C. H. Dick. Pp. xxix +536. 
(London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1916.) 
Price 6s. net. : 
(2) Cleator and Cleator Moor: Past and Present. 
By the Rev. Cesar Caine. Pp. xviii+475. 
(Kendal: Titus Wilson, 1916.) Price 21s, net. 
(1) ae AY, comprising the county of 
Wigtown and the Stewartry of Kirkcud- 
bright, is probably less pervaded by tourists than 
any other attractive part of Scotland. Messrs. 
Macmillan have done well to commit to. the Rev. 
C. H. Dick and Mr. Hugh Thomson the task of 
dealing with this district in their admirable 
“Highways and. Byways” series, for these two 
gentlemen between them, one with his pen, the 
other with his pencil, have produced an_ ideal 
volume—not a guide-book in the ordinary sense 
so much as a vade mecum for the traveller. Mr. 
Dick, while not neglecting the highways, finds 
his chief delight in the byways and in those great 
tracts of moorland and mountain which constitute 
the southern upland of Scotland. Here he pursues 
his leisurely way, dropping off his bicycle at little 
wayside inns and lonely shepherds’ cottages, at 
solitary pele-towers and immemorial kirkyards, 
wherever he may glean armfuls of legendary and 
historic lore, Galloway was the chief stronghold 
of the westland Whigs; memorials of the heroes 
and martyrs of the Covenant are as holy in his 
eyes as the sculptured crosses of the primitive 
‘Celtic church or the ruins of such noble fanes as 
‘Sweetheart and Dundrennan. 
Grey recumbent tombs of the dead in vacant places, 
Standing stones on the vacant wine-red moor, 
Hills of sheep, and the homes of silent vanished races, 
_ And winds austere and pure. 
The killing, however, was not all done by 
Claverhouse and Lagg. The Covenanters did 
not shrink from shedding blood on occasions. 
“Carsphairn abounds in hills of sheep and has 
its circle of standing stones, but is the only parish 
in the Glenkens where there is no martyr’s grave. 
The village, however, has its story of the killing 
time. Pierson, the Episcopal minister, main- 
tained a persecuting policy towards the Covenan- 
ters in the parish, and kept Lagg informed of 
those who absented themselves from church. The 
people were not cowed, but merely exasperated, 
and, led by James MacMichael, proposed to make 
some sort of treaty with the minister to secure 
peace in the parish. Pierson received a deputa- 
tion in the manse, but on learning their errand 
was enraged, would listen to none of their remon- 
strances, barred the door, and drew out his pistol. 
Companions of the deputies, who had remained 
outside, hearing cries from within, broke down 
the door with MacMichael at their head. He, 
seeing the pistol outstretched and conceiving his 
NO. 2455, VOL. 98] 
friends to be in imminent danger, shot Pierson 
dead.” 
In treating of the scenery of Galloway Mr. 
Dick deals only with its external beauties and 
its association with legend and history. In a 
single volume so full of interesting matter it 
would be too much to expect detailed notice of 
fauna and flora. The geology of the district has 
been admirably explained in Sir Archibald Geikie’s 
“Scenery of Scotland.’’ There is, however, one 
feature which has long occupied the attention of 
geologists and deserves notice in any traveller’s 
handbook. The prevailing formation in this 
region is Lower Silurian, the beds of which are 
tossed to a height of 2764 ft. in the Merrick, the 
loftiest summit in southern Scotland. Twelve 
miles S.S.W. of Merrick stands Cairnsmore-of- 
Fleet, 2331 ft., an intrusive mass of granite, 
altering the Silurian beds around it. On the very 
summit of Merrick lie many huge blocks of 
Cairnsmore granite, some of them as big as a 
small cottage. Ice-borne, no doubt, but how 
have they been carried to an elevation 400 ft. 
greater than that of the hill whence they came? 
The easiest explanation is that Cairnsmore has 
lost much of its original height by sub-aerial 
denudation. t 
We have but a single fault to find with Mr. 
Thomson’s masterly pencil sketches, namely, that 
in his otherwise accurate drawing of the Peter 
Stone at Whithorn (p. 239) he has left out the 
Chi-Rho loop on the right of the upper limb of 
the cross. This is a serious omission, seeing that 
this feature, derived from the Emperor Constan- 
tine’s labarum, occurs only on two other sculp- 
tured stones in Scotland, both in Galloway. 
_ (2) Very different in scope and purpose from 
Mr. Dick’s rambling notebook is the Rev. Cesar 
Caine’s “Cleator and Cleator Moor,” which is a 
record, historical, industrial, geological, and 
biographical, of this famous ironfield. The 
earliest documentary evidence of iron-mining in 
West Cumberland is a deed of gift by William 
Earl of Albemarle, who died in 1179, of a mine 
at Egremont and a forge at Wynefell to the 
Abbey ot Holm Cultram; but relics of the industry 
in prehistoric and Roman times have been found 
at Cleator and Furness. Mr. Caine discusses the 
various theories about the formation of hematite 
ore, such as aqueous deposition in solution, 
igneous injection, and chemical displacement. or 
substitution, and agrees with J. D. Kendall in 
regarding the metasomatic replacement of lime- 
stone by ferrous carbonate as the prevailing 
cause, while less frequently hematite has probably 
been deposited in fissures by filtration. 
’ The output from the Cleator mines shows so 
serious a falling off, namely, from 4,505,951 tons 
in the decade 1871-80 to 1,266,208 tons in the 
decade 1901-10, as to indicate the approaching 
close of the industry at no very distant date. 
Mr. Caine, however, looks forward to a day. when 
“a man with large means and ‘equal courage to 
carry out his ideas: may. bore-through the coal 
measures which are known to overlie the car- 
M 
