86 A VERTEBRATE FAUNA OF THE MORAY BASIN. 



expression, unless with extreme good cause. Therefore we hold, 

 although all the results and consequences of the great Moray 

 floods upon animal life cannot, perhaps, be now easily arranged 

 or tabulated, still there can be scarcely any doubt these results 

 were of considerable and direct importance. We can only refer 

 our readers for details to the many accounts of both the Culbin 

 drift and the 1829 floods, which it would be needless for us to 

 repeat. 



Since these great floods nothing so disastrous has again occurred, 

 but floods in 1891-92, from a different cause, viz., the melting of 

 snow, made the nearest approach to such a calamity, bridges 

 and roads having been swept away over four or five counties, 

 as our County Councils have had good cause to remember. 

 Thus the late Lord Tweedmouth assured us : — * 'Not a bridge 

 was left in Strathglass, and all the arable land in the strath is 

 covered with large boulders or deep sand' (in lit. 30/3/92). 

 Not a doubt, these snow-floods made the nearest approach to 

 the great 1829 floods within the memory of man. The whole 

 Findhorn Haughs, so famed by Sir Thomas Dick Lauder in his 

 volume, were again submerged for a very considerable distance 

 right and left of the county road. The order of the seasons also, 

 as usually experienced in Moray, appears to have been reversed. 

 Snow lay, and persistently lay, west of the Spey, but little com- 

 paratively on the east bank. Usually the light, porous, 

 sandy, and gravelly soil of Moray drinks in rapidly all moisture, 

 rain, or snowfall, but the colder, damper, stiffer clay-lands 

 and old sandstone conglomerate of the east side retains it 

 longer. 



Of severe winters we may instance many, but perhaps that of 

 1878-79 ^ is a good or extreme example. In that winter the Spey 

 was frozen over for several weeks in many places, and at the 

 higher levels trains on the Highland Eailway were severely 

 blocked — as at Dalwhinnie, and at Dava, and many other points. 



1 Since the above note in the text was written, an even more severe winter 

 has been experienced throughout the whole of Scotland, and has been especially 

 phenomenal in the north-east of the country, and within the area of the Moray 

 Basin— viz., that of 1894-95. 



