THE PINE. 



401 



forest was purchased of the Duke of Gordon in the year 

 1783, by William Osborne, Esq,, a merchant of Hull, for 

 the sum, according to Sir T. D. Lauder, of 10,000£. Out 

 of its produce no less than forty-one sail of ships were 

 built at the mouth of the Spey, of upwards of nineteen 

 thousand tons burthen, and amongst them a frigate called 

 the Glenmore, of one thousand and fifty tons. The cost 

 alone in labour of converting the produce of this forest, 

 is stated by the purchaser to have amounted to seventy 

 thousand pounds. Of the size attained by some of these 

 trees an idea may be formed from the inspection of a 

 plank deposited in the entrance hall of Gordon Castle, 

 presented to the late Duke of Gordon by the purchaser 

 of the forest as a specimen of the growth of one of its 

 trees ; it is six feet two inches long, and five feet five 

 inches broad, with the texture of the finest Red-wood 

 Pine, and showing annual growths to the number of two 

 hundred and thirty-five. Some eighteen years ago, when 

 we passed through Glenmore on a walking excursion from 

 the banks of the Dee to those of the Spey, the tract previ- 

 ously occupied by this once magnificent forest exhibited a 

 scene of savage wildness and desolation. Scattered trees, 

 some of which were in a scathed or dying state, of huge 

 dimensions, picturesque in appearance from their knotty 

 trunks, tortuous branches, and wide-spreading heads were 

 seen in different directions, at unequal and frequently at con- 

 siderable distances from each other ; the solitary and mourn- 

 ful-looking relicts of the departed glories of this once well- 

 clad woodland scene, and which had only escaped the axe 

 from their previous decay, or the comparative worthless- 

 ness of their knotty trunks, while the surface of the ground 

 in almost every direction was littered and bristling with 

 the decaying tops and loppings of the felled trees, among 



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