244 
NATURE NOTES. 
berry from the hollies, when they as suddenly flew away again. 
Poor things, they were evidently half-starved ; let us hope they 
found sufficient berries elsewhere to last them till the snow, the 
birds’ great enemy, was melted ! 
A. L. Stevenson. 
THE WHITE CATTLE OF CADZOW. 
EAR to Hamilton, the centre of the Lanarkshire coal- 
mining industry and the principal seat of Scotland’s 
premier Duke, is situated Cadzow Forest, one of the 
ducal parks. Of considerable extent, this forest — or at 
least a large part of it — represents all that has come down to 
us of the vast Caledonian Forest, which, more than a thousand 
years ago, extended from sea to sea over a large part of 
the south of Scotland. Here may still be seen old oaks — squat, 
misshapen, and of great girth — one of the largest with a bole 
of 30 feet high, having a circumference of 26 feet 7 inches at a 
yard from the ground. Some, indeed, are hollow, and in one of 
these eight persons can stand at a time. But though the trees 
still bear leaf and fruit, they are rapidly decaying, and in a 
generation or so, like that great wood to which they refer us, 
they will be but a memory. 
In carving its way through the forest, the river Avon has cut 
out a great gorge of from two hundred to three hundred feet deep, 
with its sides in some places densely wooded ; in other steeper 
parts festooned with ivy, honeysuckle, and kindred climbers. Of 
this gorge, John Burroughs, the American essayist, summing up 
his impressions of British scenery in that charming little book of 
his. Fresh Fields, has written : “ It was the wildest bit of forest 
scenery I saw anywhere. I almost imagined myself on the 
head-waters of the Hudson or the Penobscot.” 
The ruins of the ancient baronial residence of the Hamilton 
family crown a precipitous rock on the left-hand side of the 
stream. A royal residence in the times of Alexander II. and 
Alexander III., it was given by Robert the Bruce, shortly after 
Bannockburn, to Walter FitzGilbert, the founder of the Hamilton 
family. Thither ill-fated Mary fled after her escape from the 
lonely water-girt tower of Lochleven, and here she assembled 
that army which was so disastrously routed at Langside. To 
punish the Hamiltons for the part they played at that time, the 
castle was destroyed by order of the Regent, Murray. 
But, perhaps, the object of most interest to the casual sight- 
seer will be the white wild cattle, which still roam, as their 
ancestors did of yore, amid the great oaks. 
As to their origin, naturalists hold different opinions. By 
some they are regarded as directly descended from the native 
