76 A VERTEBRATE FAUNA OF THE MORAY BASIN. 



VIII. LOCH SPYNIK 



The old Loch of Spynie extended for miles through a long 

 shallow valley, and was undoubtedly, and within historic times, 

 connected with the sea.^ Even at a much more recent date, within 

 our century. Captain Dunbar Brander can remember — as he him- 

 self told us — when wild-fowl crowded the loch almost in as vast 

 numbers as the Black-Headed Gulls occupy it now in summer.^ 

 Long after the Lossiemouth Eailway was laid, this was the 

 case,^ and a party of guns used to ' lie up ' on the embankment and 

 have miles of this marshy, shallow loch driven for duck, the birds 

 coming over like driven grouse back and fore. Now, reduced 

 as it is to an extent of about 100 acres, and only to the east of the 

 railway embankment, many wild-fowl still frequent it. The land 

 reclaimed, alas ! is not of great value, but it benefited higher-lying 

 farms by affording better levels for draining operations, and those 

 especially towards the north-west end of the previously water- 

 occupied area. What now remains, thanks to Captain Dunbar 

 Brander, is about, as we have said, 100 acres in extent. It is 



1 See Font's Map. 



2 For some further accounts of the changes upon the contours and lie of the 

 coast-lines see also Notes from Burghead: Ancient and Modern, etc. ('for private 

 circulation'), Elgin, 1868, in which an ancient loch — the loch of Rosyll (Roseisle) 

 — a little to the south-west of Burghead, is mentioned. It is marked in Robert 

 Gordon's (of Straloch) map of Moray (1640). See also Ehind's Sketches of the 

 Past and Present State of Moray, Edin. 1839, pp. 4, 5, and indeed many of the 

 books we mention in our previous and future notes and foot-notes — under Loch of 

 Spynie and the Culbin Sands [Survey of Moray, 1878, p. 174). 



^ A very lucid and full account of the past and present conditions of Loch of 

 Spynie was published in the Elgin Courant in December 1865, and will be found re- 

 produced in Morayshire Described, in a long foot-note on pp. 337-341, which, while 

 too long to reproduce here again, is deserving of the attention of all who desire 

 to obtain a more thorough idea of what this famous haunt of wild-fowl was, and 

 now is. Morayshire Described, etc. , was published in Elgin by Messrs. Russell 

 and Watson in 1868, or, if one desires to go still further back, past our century, 

 minute items will be found in a volume entitled A Survey of the Province oj 

 Moray, etc., published in Aberdeen in 1798. Or, again, if any one desires to 

 save himself the trouble of looking up these musty old records, a very full account 

 has been given at the much later date of 1871, in the monographical volume 

 entitled The Parish of Spynie, by Robert Young (Elgin, 1871), pp. 5 to 120. 



