168 EXTINCT BRITISH ANIMALS. 



Towards the end of the sixteenth and beginning of 

 the seventeenth centuries large tracts of forests in the 

 Highlands were purposely cut down or burned, as 

 the only means of expelling the Wolves which there 

 abounded. 



" These hills and glens and wooded wilds can tell 

 How many wolves and boars and deer then fell." 



Campbell's Grampians Desolate, p. 102. 



" On the south side of Beann Nevis, a large pine 

 forest, which extended from the western braes of 

 Lochaber to the Black Water and the mosses of 

 Rannach, was burned to expel the Wolves. In the 

 neighbourhood of Loch Sloi, a tract of woods nearly 

 twenty miles in extent was consumed for the same 

 purpose."* 



John Taylor, the Water Poet, who made his 

 " Pennyles Pilgrimage" into Scotland in 161 8, saw 

 Wolves in Braemar. He writes : " My good Lord of 

 Mar having put me into shape, I rode with him from 

 his house, where I saw the ruins of an old castle, 

 called the castle of Kindroghit. It was built by 

 King Malcolm Canmore (for a hunting-house), who 

 reigned in Scotland when Edward the Confessor, 

 Harold, and Norman William reigned in England. 

 I speak of it because it was the last house that I saw 

 in those parts ; for I was the space of twelve days 

 after before I saw either house, cornfield, or habita- 

 tion of any creature, but deer, wild horses, Wolves, 



* Notes to Sobieski Stuart's "Last Deer of Beann Doran." See his 

 "Poems" published in 1822 under the assumed name of James Hay 



Allan. 



