246 Mr. J. Hardy on the Wild Cat in the Border Districts. 



again light the fire to Baal, or any other substitute, after 

 demonstrating that this hill-top was a British fortress, 

 having nothing sacred about it ; for such it would be, if 

 selected as a funeral pyre, not less than if it had witnessed 

 Druidical sacrifices. With all deference to our learned 

 co-member, I enter my protest thus far ; having witnessed 

 all that the Club's excavations revealed. 



On the Occurrence of the Wild Cat in the Border Districts. 

 By James Haedy. 



In the " History of the Club," vol. ii., pp. 357-359 (1849), I 

 presented a notice of the Wild Cat being known as a native 

 animal all along the Berwickshire coasts, and also in the 

 neighbouring parts of East Lothian. There were several 

 then, as now, who doubted that there were Wild Cats at all 

 in the lowlands, but the fact is incontrovertible. In a 

 correspondence which recently appeared in the " Kelso 

 Chronicle," I adduced other instances of its being familiar to 

 the country-people, and some other information worthy of 

 preservation was then elicited from two other contributors. 

 In my article for the Club I had adverted to the practice of 

 this animal harrying the hen-roosts at Dunglass, in East 

 Lothian ; but I had not then met with Alexander Somer- 

 ville's encounter with it in that vicinity, when he was a 

 herd boy, as he has related it in his " Autobiography of a 

 Working Man." When I was at school I remember Somer- 

 ville very well. His information does not go nearly so far 

 back, as that which I produced from the statements of some 

 very old people, in my former notice. Ogle Burn, in the 

 parish of Innerwick, the scene of his adventure, is a deep 

 dark ravine, wooded with oaks, which runs up the base of 

 and partly encircles Blackcastle Hill ; and higher up, 

 although parallel in its course to Billsdean and Dunglass 

 Burns. " The Ogle Burn," he says, " had the reputation of 

 being the home of a colony of Wild Cats. I had never seen 

 them, but had heard much of them, and was often cautioned, 

 partly in joke to frighten me and partly in earnest, by those 



