Sutherland Reclamation. 
405 
tloors, and windows for new buildings prepared at home. A 
large engineer's shop is provided with turning and screw-cutting 
lathes, drilling and planing machines, and all other machinery 
required for building and repairing steam-engines. 
The earliest agricultural improvements undertaken by the 
Duke were carried out on a comparatively small scale, by 
draining and trenching bv hand at Tongue on the north coast, 
at Lochinver to the south-west, at Carrol near Loch Brora, and 
at Balone, not far from the railway station at Lairg. Fifty acres 
of bog and moorland, between Brora and Uppat, were next re- 
claimed. At Balone much of the land was broken up by means 
of a ponderous plough drawn by three or four oxen or horses. 
At Uppat a part of the land was deep bog, whence peat had been 
cut for many years, leaving the surface very irregular. These 
ten acres, after they were drained, proved to be too soft to carry 
either horses or oxen. Attempts were made to cultivate them 
by means of a common plough driven by a portable engine ; 
but during the trial a number of mechanical difficulties presented 
themselves. 
Questions in mechanics have always been attractive to the 
Duke. The land at Uppat was within a short distance of the 
castle at Dunrobin. His Grace spent many an hour watching the 
steam-driven plough battling with the various obstacles that soft 
bog, boulder-stones, and buried roots of fir successively opposed 
to its progress. There was here a power obviously well fitted 
for the work of reclamation, but needing to be developed and 
specially adapted to circumstances differing greatly from those of 
ordinary farm tillage. The more he watched, the stronger grew 
his interest in the work. He had been long convinced that the 
proper development of his vast Highland estate required a very 
large addition to its cultivated area ; but the steps for the attain- 
ment of that object had hitherto been of necessity slow, and far 
less interesting than the construction of the railway that he had 
recently completed. In 1871 a steam-plough was obtained from 
Messrs. J. Fowler and Co., consisting of two 14-horse-power 
engines, and a plough carrying a single huge turn-furrow in 
place of the four usually employed. By this set of tackle the 
surface was at length ploughed. A new era in the work of 
reclamation commenced with the trial of steam-power at Uppat. 
Lord Spencer, in the third volume of this Journal, well de- 
scribed the important effects that have resulted, first in West 
Norfolk, and afterwards throughout a great part of England, from 
the apparently trifling circumstance that, just one hundred years 
ago, a young man of princely fortune, devoted to field sports, 
had thrown upon his hands a farm close to his residence at 
Holkham. Had not his old tenant, Mr. Brett, in 1778, refused to 
