422 
ORIGINAL ARTICLES. 
Finally I visited, but had not time to examine thoroughly, another 
shell-mound on the north side of the Moray Frith, near Invergordon, 
in a wood belonging to Mr. M’Leod, of Invergorden Castle. 
That the shell-mounds of Scotland did not altogether escape the 
notice of Hugh Miller will be seen from the following extract, with 
which I have been favoured by Hr. Gordon, from the Sketch-Book 
of Popular Geology:— 
“ The sand dunes of the country—accumulations of sand heaped over the soil 
by the winds, and in some cases, as in the neighbourhood of Stromness in Orkney, 
and near New Quay on the Coast of Cornwall, consolidated into a kind of open- 
grained sandstone—contain, like the mosses of the country, ancient human remains 
and works of art. There have been detected among the older sand dunes of Moray, 
broken and partially finished arrow-heads of flint, with splintered masses of the 
material out of which they had been fashioned—the debris , apparently, of the 
workshop of some weapon maker of the stone period. Among a tract of sand dunes 
on the shores of the Cromarty Frith, immediately under the Northern Sutor, in a 
hillock of blown sand, which was laid open about eighty years ago, by the winds of 
a stormy winter, there was found a pile of the bones of various animals of the chase, 
and the horns of deer, mixed with the shells of molluscs of the edible species; and, 
judging from the remains of an ancient hill-fort in the neighbourhood, and from 
the circumstance that under an adjacent dune, rude sepulchral urns were disinterred 
many years after, I have concluded that the hunters, by whom they had been accu¬ 
mulated, could not have flourished later than at least the age of Bronze.”* 
The above extract is interesting as showing that these shell-mounds 
had not escaped the notice of the author of the “ Testimony of the 
Hocks,” but the minute researches of the Danish and Swiss Archaeo¬ 
logists have invested them with a new and unexpected interest, and 
we may fairly hope that when they shall have been thoroughly 
examined, they will throw much light on the early history of our 
country. 
To do for Scotland, however, what Steenstrup has done for 
Denmark, will require Steenstrup’s perseverance and abilities. It 
may be said that it would have been better to wait until the subject 
could be more thoroughly discussed, but my hope in publishing 
these few notes is to direct attention to these ancient shell-mounds, 
which will in all probability be found scattered along our western 
and northern shores. Those who may be disposed to assist in this 
line of research, will probably find that the shell-heaps are in many 
cases well known to the fishermen and peasants; on the Moray 
Firth, I was struck to find one of them actually going by the name 
of the “ Shelly middin g.” 
* The discovery of the Bronze Pin at Brigzes seems at first sight a remark¬ 
able confirmation of the suggestion thus thrown out by the author of the 
“ Testimony of the Rocks,” but we must remember that bronze seems to have 
been used for articles of this 'description, long after the discovery of iron. 
