OCR Text |
Show 308 ANCIENT BOGS. where there is not now a native hazel bud for twenty miles in any directiOn althou<Yh there is abundance of room which has ne~er bee~ disturbed by cultivation. At one place, in the parish of M.onikie, in Forfarshire there stands a lonely fortllage, the Hynd Castle upon a mound of its ruins, and surrounded, or ~1early so, by a peat-b?g,. which, from the immense number of nutshells m 1t, must once have been a hazel copse:-or rather it has been a wood with hazel underwood-the demesne, or p~rk of the fortilage, perhaps, for there are the re~nams of large forest trees in it; and from the remams of vegetation, the form .of the surface, the keen?ess of the air and the punty of the water, there 1s great reason 'to believe that it has once b~en a very beautiful place. Tradition carries the history ~o farther back than the rei<Yn of the last ghost, and It had abdicated before th~ beginning of the present century. The eyes of the most prying antiquaries can trace nothin<Y but the marks of the chisel in the squared stones o with which the fragments of the walls a~e cased ; but that is something, inasmu~h as there IS not now in the neighbourhood, or even 111 the county, a freestone of the same colour (old red sandstone) that will show the marks of the chisel so perfe~t after one century. The walls have been grouted m the central parts, but whether they are Roman or not cannot be determined. There are camps of many paces about, some square, with the usual traces of the Romans, and others oval, or roun.d ; and there are (or used to be) abundance. of fhnt arrow-heads, which the old wo~en somet.m~es described as flying about in t~e twilight and killmg the cows, but they have lain still for some ye~rs. The fields around are now mostly under tillage, an.d vield a scanty and precarious crop to 3: most labonous culture ; but their natural productiOns were on the humid places bent, and on the dry, brown heath and white moss. or white moss and brown heath., HYND CASTLE. 309 according as the soil was less or more bad. These were symptoms miserable enough to have succeeded to forests and groves; and if we could fill up the chasm in the succession, we should have at least one satisfactory portion of the history of vegetation ; but we want the facts, and so conjecture would be useless. The mixture of lime in the fallen part of the castle had nursed the henbanes and hemlocks, and other lurid plants which love such places, and the decay of these had brought on a coat of soil. About fifty years ago, the little mound was enclosed and planted, chiefly with Scotch firs, but with a border of deciduous trees, and a few interspersed among the Scotch firs. For a time they all grew luxuriantly; the firs made shoots of a foot to two feet every year ; the laburnums hung out their racemes of golden yellow, the mountain-ash made the summer fragrant with its flowers, and the autumn gay with its berries. The thrush and the blackbird came with their mellow songs, the little birds with their more lively notes, and the wood-pigeon moaned from the deep covert of the pines. The magpie and the jay, too, came to take account of the spare eggs; and weasels, and even a polecat, made their appearance. In short, the place became a little oasis in the desert,-a thriving miniature world, both vegetable and animal; and the promise that it gave led to the planting of many square miles of the moors. Meantime, an impulse was given to agriculture, by the farmer being pulled on to activity by high prices, and spurred in the same direction by high rents, so that tho marshes were drained, the wastes improved, and a more kindly appearance, and certainly a more mild and uniform climate, obtained. Now it wa~ generally supposed, and anybody but a very attentive observer of nature would naturaily have supposed, that matters were in the fairest train for a well-wooded as well as agriculturally improved |