Sutherland Reclamation. 
409 
Murray. Several English contractors visited Sutherland, and 
were invited to tender to do the work by contract. The super- 
ficial inspection of the proposed site was not in itself discourag- 
ing ; but when they went to Uppat, and saw the difficulties that 
had been met with there, their courage failed, and no satisfactory 
offer could be obtained. The Duke was therefore obliged to 
take the work in hand himself. Implements specially adapted 
to the work have been invented and purchased, together with 
necessary steam-power, as they have been required, from Messrs. 
J. Fowler and Co., of Leeds ; and it may be mentioned to the 
credit of this firm that, in addition to other facilities which they 
have always been ready to afford, they have borne no incon- 
siderable share of the heavy expenses that have been incurred 
in a great number of experiments made to discover the best 
form and construction for each of the appliances used. 
Shinness Reclamations. 
A traveller, passing in 1872 along the high road from Lairg 
to Tongue, and emerging from the coppice of stunted birch that 
skirts the north-eastern extremity of Loch Shin, as his road 
turned northwards three miles from Lairg, would have seen 
upon his left hand a broad undulating basin of moor and bog, 
rising gradually from the shore of the Loch to a low ridge of 
hill, chiefly conspicuous from two small belts of wood of stunted 
mountain-ash and birch upon it, then extending northwards to 
the foot of the hills in a broad valley traversed by the river 
Terry ; a scene of beauty and yet of desolation, with no human 
habitation on it, and showing no signs of cultivation except a 
few small spots upon some of the mounds hardly distinguishable 
by the eye, and chosen because they needed little or no drainage. 
If he had returned five years later he would have found the 
whole area between the Loch and river completely transformed, 
and the space occupied by four large and well-cultivated farms, 
each with a well-built and ample steading, surrounded by large 
and rectangular fields, well fenced, and covered with luxuriant 
crops of oats, turnips, and grass. He might notice that good roads 
gave access to each field, and that here and there, amid grazing 
sheep and cattle and the ordinary features of farm-tillage, smoke 
was rising from engines employed for traction on the roads or 
in cultivating the land. Scattered over the plain he would see 
numerous labourers' cottages, a smithy, workshops, a school- 
church, and a post-office — a scene of fruitfulness and rural 
activity instead of a dark lifeless expanse of moorland. The 
steps by which this transformation was effected it will now be 
my business to trace. 
