Geological Physiognomy.--Scenery of the Primary Formations; Gneiss,
Mica Schist, Quartz Rock.--Of the Secondary; the Chalk Formations,
the Oolite, the New Red Sandstone, the Coal Measures.--Scenery in the
Neighborhood of Edinburgh.--Aspect of the Trap Rocks.--The Disturbing
and Denuding Agencies.--Distinctive Features of the Old Red
Sandstone.--Of the Great Conglomerate.--Of the Ichthyolite Beds.--The
Burn of Eathie.--The Upper Old Red Sandstones.--Scene in Moray.
Physiognomy is no idle or doubtful science in connection with
Geology. The physiognomy of a country indicates, almost invariably,
its geological character. There is scarce a rock among the more
ancient groups that does not affect its peculiar form of hill and
valley. Each has its style of landscape; and as the vegetation of
a district depends often on the nature of the underlying deposits,
not only are the main outlines regulated by the mineralogy of the
formations which they define, but also in many cases the manner in
which these outlines are filled up. The coloring of the landscape is
well nigh as intimately connected with its Geology as the drawing.
The traveller passes through a mountainous region of gneiss. The
hills, which, though bulky, are shapeless, raise their huge backs
so high over the brown, dreary moors, which, unvaried by precipice
or ravine, stretch away for miles from their feet, that even amid
the heats of midsummer the snow gleams in streaks and patches
from their summits. And yet so vast is their extent of base, and
their tops so truncated, that they seem but half-finished hills
notwithstanding--hills interdicted somehow in the forming, and the
work stopped ere the upper stories had been added. He pursues his
journey, and enters a district of micaceous schist. The hills are no
longer truncated, or the t moors unbroken; the heavy ground-swell
of the former landscape has become a tempestuous sea, agitated by
powerful winds and conflicting tides. The picturesque and somewhat
fantastic outline is composed of high, sharp peaks, bold, craggy
domes, steep, broken acclivities, and deeply serrated ridges; and
the higher hills seem as if set round with a framework of props and
buttresses, that stretch out on every side like the roots of an
ancient oak. He passes on, and the landscape varies; the surrounding
hills, though lofty, pyramidal, and abrupt, are less rugged than
before; and the ravines, though still deep and narrow, are walled by
ridges no longer serrated and angular, but comparatively rectilinear
and smooth. But the vegetation is even more scanty than formerly; the
steeper slopes are covered with streams of debris, on which scarce a
moss or lichen finds root; and the conoidal hills, bare of soil from
their summits half way down, seem so many naked skeletons, that speak
of the decay and death of nature. All is solitude and sterility.
The territory is one of Quartz rock. Still the traveller passes on:
the mountains sink into low swellings; long rectilinear ridges run
out towards the distant sea, and terminate in bluff, precipitous
headlands. The valleys, soft and pastoral, widen into plains, or
incline in long-drawn slopes of gentlest declivity. The streams,
hitherto so headlong and broken, linger beside their banks, and then
widen into friths and estuaries. The deep soil is covered by a thick
mantle of vegetation--by forest trees of largest growth, and rich
fields of corn; and the solitude of the mountains has given place to
a busy population. He has left behind him the primary regions, and
entered on one of the secondary districts.
And these less rugged formations have also their respective
styles--marred and obliterated often by the Plutonic agency, which
imparts to them in some instances its own character, and in some
an intermediate one, but in general distinctly marked, and easily
recognized. The Chalk presents its long inland lines of apparent
coast, that send out their rounded headlands, cape beyond cape,
into the wooded or corn-covered plains below. Here and there, there
juts up at the base of the escarpement a white, obelisk-like stack;
here and there, there opens into the interior a narrow, grassy bay,
in which noble beeches have cast anchor. There are valleys without
streams; and the landscape a-top is a scene of arid and uneven
downs, that seem to rise and fall like the sea after a storm. We
pass on to the Oolite: the slopes are more gentle, the lines of
rising ground less continuous, and less coast-like; the valleys have
their rivulets, and the undulating surface is covered by a richer
vegetation. We enter on a district of New Red Sandstone. Deep,
narrow ravines intersect elevated platforms. There are lines of
low precipices, so perpendicular and so red, that they seem as if
walled over with new brick; and here and there, amid the speckled
and mouldering sandstones, that gather no covering of lichen, there
stands up a huge, altar-like mass of lime, mossy and gray, as if it
represented a remoter antiquity than the rocks around it. The Coal
Measures present often the appearance of vast lakes frozen over
during a high wind, partially broken afterwards by a sudden thaw,
and then frozen again. Their shores stand up around them in the form
of ridges and mountain chains of the older rocks; and their surfaces
are grooved into flat valleys and long lines of elevation. Take, as
an instance, the scenery about Edinburgh. The Ochil Hills and the
Grampians form the distant shores of the seeming lake or basin on
the one side, the range of the Lammermuirs and the Pentland group on
the other; the space between is ridged and furrowed in long lines,
that run in nearly the same direction from north-east to south-west,
as if, when the binding frost w r as first setting in, the wind had
blown from off the northern or southern shore.
But whence these abrupt, precipitous hills that stud the landscape,
and form, in the immediate neighborhood of the city, its more
striking features? They belong--to return to the illustration of the
twice-frozen lake--to the middle period of thaw, when the ice broke
up; and, as they are composed chiefly of matter ejected from the
abyss, might have characterized equally any of the other formations.
Their very striking forms, however, illustrate happily the operations
of the great agencies on which, in the secondary and transition
deposits, all the peculiarities of scenery depend. The molten matter
from beneath seems to have been injected, in the first instance,
through rents and fissures among the carboniferous shales and
sandstones of the district, where it lay cooling in its subterranean
matrices, in beds and dikes, like metal in the moulds of the founder;
and the places which if occupied must have been indicated on the
surface but by curves and swellings of the strata. The denuding
power then came into operation in the form of tides and currents,
and ground down the superincumbent rocks. The injected masses, now
cooled and hardened, were laid bare; and the softer framework of the
moulds in which they had been cast was washed from their summits and
sides, except where long ridges remained attached to them in the
lines of the current, as if to indicate the direction in which they
had broken its force. Every larger stone in a water-course, after the
torrent fed by a thunder shower has just subsided, shows, on the
same principle, its trail of sand and shingle piled up behind it. The
outlines of the landscape were modified yet further by the yielding
character of the basement of sandstone or shale on which the Plutonic
beds so often rest. The basement crumbled away as the tides and waves
broke against it. The injected beds above, undermined in the process,
and with a vertical cleavage, induced by their columnar tendency,
fell down in masses that left a front perpendicular as a wall. Each
bed came thus to present its own upright line of precipice; and
hence--when they rise bed above bed, as often occurs--the stair-like
outline of hill to which the trap rocks owe their name; hence the
outline of the Dalmahoy Crags, for instance, and of the southern and
western front of Salisbury Crags.
In all the sedimentary formations the peculiarities of scenery depend
on three circumstances--on the Plutonic agencies, the denuding
agencies, and the manner and proportions in which the harder and
softer beds of the deposits on which these operated alternate with
one another. There is an union of the active and the passive in the
formation of landscape; that which disturbs and grinds down, and that
which, according to its texture and composition, affects, if I may
so speak, a peculiar style of being ground down and disturbed; and
it is in the passive circumstances that the peculiarities chiefly
originate, Hence it is that the scenery of the Chalk differs from
the scenery of the Oolite, and both from that of the Coal Measures.
The Old Red Sandstone has also its peculiarities of prospect, which
vary according to its formations, and the amount and character of the
disturbing and denuding agencies to which these have been exposed.
Instead, however, of crowding its various, and, in some instances,
dissimilar features into one landscape, I shall introduce to the
reader a few of its more striking and characteristic scenes, as
exhibited in various localities, and by different deposits, beginning
first with its conglomerate base.
The great antiquity of this deposit is unequivocally indicated
by the manner in which we find it capping, far in the interior,
in insulated beds and patches, some of our loftier hills, or, in
some instances, wrapping them round, as with a caul, from base
to summit. It mixes largely, in our northern districts, with the
mountain scenery of the country, and imparts strength and boldness
of outline to every landscape in which it occurs. Its island-like
patches affect generally a bluff parabolic or conical outline; its
loftier hills present rounded, dome-like summits, which sink to
the plain on the one hand in steep, slightly concave lines, and on
the other in lines decidedly convex, and a little less steep. The
mountain of boldest outline in 'the line of the Caledonian Valley
(Mealforvony) is composed externally of this rock. Except where
covered by the diluvium, it seems little friendly to vegetation.
Its higher summits are well nigh as bare as those of the primary
rocks; and when a public road crosses its lower ridges, the traveller
generally finds that there is no paving process necessary to procure
a hardened surface, for his wheels rattle over the pebbles embedded
in the rock. On the sea-coast, in several localities, the deposit
presents striking peculiarities of outline. The bluff and rounded
precipices stand out in vast masses, that affect the mural form, and
present few of the minuter angularities of the primary rocks. Here
and there a square buttress of huge proportions leans against the
front of some low-browed crag, that seems little to need any such
support, and casts a length of shadow athwart its face. There opens
along the base of the rock a line of rounded, shallow caves, or what
seem rather the openings of caves not yet dug, and which testify of
a period when the sea stood about thirty feet higher on our coasts
than at present. A multitude of stacks and tabular masses lie grouped
in front, perforated often by squat, heavy arches; and stacks,
caverns, buttresses, crags, and arches, are all alike mottled over
by the thickly-set and variously colored pebbles. There is a tract
of scenery of this strangely marked character in the neighborhood of
Dunottar, and two other similar tracts in the far north, where the
hill of Nigg, in Ross-shire, declines towards the Lias deposit in the
Bay of Shandwick, and where, in the vicinity of Inverness, a line of
bold, precipitous coast runs between the pyramidal wooded eminence
which occupies the south-eastern corner of Ross, and the tower-like
headlands that guard the entrance of the Bay of Munlochy. In the
latter tract, however, the conglomerate is much less cavernous than
in the other two.
The sea-coast of St. Vigeans, in Forfarshire, has been long
celebrated for its romantic scenery and its caves; and though it
belongs rather to the conglomerate base of the upper formation than
to the great conglomerate base of the lower, it is marked, from
the nature of the materials--materials common to both--by features
indistinguishable from those which characterize the sea-coasts of
the older deposit. Its wall of precipices averages from a hundred to
a hundred and eighty feet in height--no very great matter compared
with some of our northern lines, but the cliffs make up for their
want of altitude by their bold and picturesque combinations of form;
and I scarce know where a long summer's day could well be passed more
agreeably than among their wild and solitary recesses. The incessant
lashings of the sea have ground them down into shapes the most
fantastic. Huge stacks, that stand up from amid the breakers, are
here and there perforated by round, heavy-browed arches, and cast
the morning shadows inland athwart the cavern-hollowed precipices
behind. The never-ceasing echoes reply, in long and gloomy caves, to
the wild tones of the sea. Here a bluff promontory projects into the
deep, green water, and the white foam, in times of tempest, dashes up
a hundred feet against its face. There a narrow strip of vegetation,
spangled with wild flowers, intervenes between the beach and the foot
of the cliffs that sweep along the bottom of some semicircular bay;
but we see, from the rounded caves by which they are studded, and
the polish which has blunted their lower angularities, that at some
early period the breakers must have dashed for ages against their
bases. The _Gaylet Pot_, a place of interest, from its very striking
appearance, to more than geologists, is connected with one of the
deep-sea promontories. We see an oblong hollow in the centre of a
corn-field, that borders on the cliffs. It deepens as we approach it,
and on reaching the edge we find ourselves standing on the verge of a
precipice about a hundred and fifty feet in depth, and see the waves
dashing along the bottom. On descending by a somewhat precarious
path, we find that a long, tunnel-like cavern communicates with the
sea, and mark, through the deep gloom of the passage, the sunlight
playing beyond; and now and then a white sail passing the opening, as
if flitting across the field of a telescope. The _Gaylet Pot_ seems
originally to have been merely a deep, straight cave, hollowed in
the line of a fault by the waves; and it owes evidently its present
appearance to the falling in of the roof for about a hundred yards,
at its inner extremity.
We pass from the conglomerate to the middle and upper beds of the
lower formation, and find scenery of a different character in the
districts in which they prevail. The aspect is less bold and
rugged, and affects often long horizontal lines, that stretch away
without rise or depression, amid the surrounding inequalities of the
landscape for miles and leagues, and that decline to either side,
like roofs of what the architect would term a low pitch. The ridge
of the Leys in the eastern opening of the Caledonian Valley, so
rectilinear in its outline, and so sloping in its sides, presents a
good illustration of this peculiarity. The rectilinear ridge which
runs from the Southern Sutor of Cromarty far into the interior of
the country, and which has been compared in a former chapter to the
shaft of a spear, furnishes another illustration equally apt.[AX]
Where the sloping sides of these roof-like ridges decline, as in the
latter instance, towards an exposed sea-coast, we find the slope
terminating often in an abrupt line of rock dug out by the waves.
It is thus a roof set on walls, and furnished with eaves. A ditch
just finished by the laborer presents regularly sloping sides; but
the little stream that comes running through gradually widens its
bed by digging furrows into the slopes, the undermined masses fall
in and are swept away, and, in the course of a few months, the sides
are no longer sloping, but abrupt. And such, on a great scale, has
been the process through which coast-lines that were originally paved
slopes have become walls of precipices. The waves cut first through
the outer strata; and every stratum thus divided comes to present two
faces--a perpendicular face in the newly-formed line of precipice,
and another horizontal face lying parallel to it, along the shore.
One half the severed stratum seems as if rising out of the sea, the
other half as if descending from the hill: the geologist who walks
along the beach finds the various beds presented in duplicate--a
hill-bed on the one side, and a sea-bed on the other. There occurs
a very interesting instance of this arrangement in the bold line of
coast on the northern shore of the Moray Frith, so often alluded to
in a previous chapter, as extending between the Southern Sutor and
the Hill of Eathie; and which forms the wall of a portion of the
roof-like ridge last described. The sea first broke in a long line
through strata of red and gray shale, next through a thick bed of
pale-yellow stone, then through a continuous bed of stratified clays
and nodular limestone, and, last of all, through a bed, thicker than
any of the others, of indurated red sandstone. The line of cliffs
formed in this way rises abruptly for about a hundred yards on the
one hand; the shore stretches out for more than double the same space
on the other; on both sides the beds exactly correspond; and to
ascend in the line of the strata from the foot of the cliffs, we have
either to climb the hill, or to pass downwards at low ebb to the edge
of the sea. The section is of interest, not only from the numerous
organisms, animal and vegetable, which its ichthyolite beds contain,
but from the illustration which it also furnishes of denudation
to a vast extent from causes still in active operation. A line of
precipices a hundred yards in height, and more than two miles in
length, has been dug out of the slope by the slow wear of the waves,
in the unreckoned course of that period during which the present sea
was bounded in this locality by the existing line of coast. (See
Frontispiece, sect. 3.)
[Footnote AX: The valleys which separate these ridges form often
spacious friths and bays, the frequent occurrence of which in
the Old lied Sandstone constitutes, in some localities, one of
the characteristics of the system. Mark in a map of the north of
Scotland, how closely friths and estuaries lie crowded together
between the counties of Sutherland and Inverness. In a line of coast
little more than forty miles in extent, there occur four arms of
the sea--the Friths of Cromarty, Beauly, and Dornoch, and the Bay
of Munlochy. The Frith of Tay and the Basin of Montrose are also
semi-marine valleys of the Old Red Sandstone. Two of the finest
harbors in Britain, or the world, belong to it--Milford Haven, in
South Wales, and the Bay of Cromarty.]
I know not a more instructive walk for the young geologist than
that furnished by the two miles of shore along which this section
extends. Years of examination and inquiry would fail to exhaust it.
It presents us, I have said, with the numerous organisms of the
Lower Old Red Sandstone; it presents us also, towards its western
extremity, with the still more numerous organisms of the Lower and
Upper Lias; nor are the inflections and faults which its strata
exhibit less instructive than its fossils or its vast denuded hollow.
I have climbed along its wall of cliffs during the height of a
tempestuous winter tide, when waves of huge volume, that had begun to
gather strength under the night of the Northern Ocean, were bursting
and foaming below; and as the harder pebbles, uplifted by the surge,
rolled by thousands and tens of thousands along the rocky bottom, and
the work of denudation went on, I have thought of the remote past,
when the same agents had first begun to grind down the upper strata,
whose broken edges now projected high over my head on the one hand,
and lay buried far under the waves at my feet on the other. Almost
all mountain chains present their abrupter escarpements to the sea,
though separated from it in many instances by hundreds of miles--a
consequence, it is probable, of a similar course of denudation, ere
they had attained their present altitude, or the plains at their
feet had been elevated over the level of the ocean. Had a rise of a
hundred feet taken place in this northern district in the days of
Cæsar, the whole upper part of the Moray Frith would have been laid
dry, and it would now have seemed as inexplicable that this roof-like
ridge should present so rugged a line of wall to the distant sea,
as that the Western Ghauts of India should invariably turn their
steepest declivities to the basin of the Indian Ocean, or that, from
the Arctic Circle to the southern extremity of Patagonia, the huge
mountain-chain of America should elevate its dizzy precipices in the
line of the Pacific.
Let us take another view of this section. It stretches between two
of the granitic knobs or wedges to which I have had such frequent
occasion to refer--the Southern Sutor of Cromarty, and the Hill
of Eathie; and the edges of the strata somewhat remind one of the
edges of a bundle of deals laid flatways on two stones, and bent
towards the middle by their own weight. But their more brittle
character is shown by the manner in which their ends are broken and
uptilted against the granitic knobs on which they seem to rest; and
towards the western knob the whole bundle has been broken across
from below, and the opening occasioned by the fracture forms a
deep, savage ravine, skirted by precipices, that runs far into the
interior, and exhibits the lower portion of the system to well nigh
its base. Will the reader spend a very few minutes in exploring
the solitary recesses of this rocky trench--it matters not whether
as a scene-hunter or a geologist? We pass onwards along the beach
through the middle line of the denuded hollow. The natural rampart
that rises on the right ascends towards the uplands in steep slopes,
lined horizontally by sheep-walks, and fretted by mossy knolls,
and churchyard-like ridges--or juts out into abrupt and weathered
crags, crusted with lichens and festooned with ivy--or recedes into
bosky hollows, roughened by the sloe-thorn, the wild-rose, and the
juniper; on the left the wide extent of the Moray Frith stretches out
to the dim horizon, with its vein-like currents, and its undulating
lines of coast; while before us we see, far in the distance, the
blue vista of the Great Valley, with its double wall of jagged and
serrated hills, and directly in the opening, the gray, diminished
spires of Inverness. We reach a brown, mossy stream, of just volume
enough to sweep away the pebbles and shells that have been strewed
in its course by the last tide; and see, on turning a sudden angle,
the precipices cleft to their base by the ravine that has yielded its
waters a passage from the interior.
We enter along the bed of the stream. A line of mural precipices
rises on either hand--here advancing in ponderous overhanging
buttresses, there receding into deep, damp recesses, tapestried with
ivy, and darkened with birch and hazel. A powerful spring, charged
with lime, comes pouring by a hundred different threads over the
rounded brow of a beetling crag, and the decaying vegetation around
it is hardening into stone. The cliffs vary their outline at every
step, as if assuming in succession, all the various combinations
of form that constitute the wild and the picturesque; and the pale
hues of the stone seem, when brightened by the sun, the very tints
a painter would choose to heighten the effect of his shades, or to
contrast most delicately with the luxuriant profusion of bushes and
flowers that wave over the higher shelves and crannies. A colony of
swallows have built from time immemorial under the overhanging strata
of one of the loftier precipices; the fox and badger harbor in the
clefts of the steeper and more inaccessible banks. As we proceed,
the deli becomes wilder and more deeply wooded; the stream frets
and toils at our feet--here leaping over an opposing ridge;--there
struggling in a pool--yonder escaping to the light from under some
broken fragment of cliff. There is a richer profusion of flowers,
a thicker mantling of ivy and honeysuckle; and after passing a
semicircular inflection of the bank, that waves from base to summit
with birch, hazel, and hawthorn, we find the passage shut up by a
perpendicular wall of rock about thirty feet in height, over which
the stream precipitates itself, in a slender column of foam, into a
dark, mossy basin. The long arms of an intermingled clump of birches
and hazels stretch half way across, tripling with their shade the
apparent depth of the pool, and heightening in an equal ratio the
white flicker of the cascade, and the effect of the bright patches of
foam which, flung from the rock, incessantly revolve on the eddy.
Mark now the geology of the ravine. For about half way from where
it opens to the shore, to where the path is obstructed by the deep
mossy pool and the cascade, its precipitous sides consist of three
bars or stories. There is first, reckoning from the stream upwards,
a broad bar of pale red; then a broad bar of pale lead color; last
and highest, a broad bar of pale yellow; and above all, there rises
a steep green slope, that continues its ascent till it gains the top
of the ridge. The middle, lead-colored bar is an ichthyolite bed, a
place of sepulture among the rocks, where the dead lie by myriads.
The yellow bar above is a thick bed of saliferous sandstone. We
may see the projections on which the sun has beat most powerfully
covered with a white crust of salt; and it may be deemed worthy of
remark, in connection with the circumstance, that its shelves and
crannies are richer in vegetation than those of the other bars. The
pale red bar below is composed of a coarser and harder sandstone,
which forms an upper moiety of the arenaceous portion of the great
conglomerate. Now mark, further, that on reaching a midway point
between the beach and the cascade, this triple-barred line of
precipices abruptly terminates, and a line of precipices of coarse
conglomerate as abruptly begins. I occasionally pass a continuous
wall, built at two different periods, and composed of two different
kinds of materials: the one half of it is formed of white sandstone,
the other half of a dark-colored basalt; and the place where the
sandstone ends and the basalt begins is marked by a vertical line, on
the one side of which all is dark colored, while all is of a light
color on the other. Equally marked and abrupt is the vertical line
which separates the triple-barred from the conglomerate cliffs of
the ravine of Eathie. The ravine itself may be described as a fault
in the strata; but here is a fault, lying at right angles with it,
on a much larger scale: the great conglomerate on which the triple
bars rest has been cast up at least two hundred feet, and placed
side by side with them. And yet the surface above bears no trace of
the catastrophe. Denuding agencies of even greater power than those
which have hollowed out the cliffs of the neighboring coast, or whose
operations have been prolonged through periods of even more extended
duration, have ground down the projected line of the upheaved mass
to the level of the undisturbed masses beside it. Now, mark further,
as we ascend the ravine, that the grand cause of the disturbance
appears to illustrate, as it were, and that very happily, the manner
in which the fault was originally produced. The precipice, over which
the stream leaps at one bound into the mossy hollow, is composed of
granitic gneiss, and seems evidently to have intruded itself, with
much disturbance, among the surrounding conglomerate and sandstones.
A few hundred yards higher up the dell, there is another much loftier
precipice of gneiss, round which we find the traces of still greater
disturbance; and, higher still, yet a third abrupt precipice of the
same rock. The gneiss rose, trap-like, in steps, and carried up the
sandstone before it in detached squares. Each step has its answering
fault immediately over it; and the fault where the triple bars and
the conglomerate meet is merely a fault whose step of granitic gneiss
stopped short ere it reached the surface. But the accompanying
section (see Frontispiece, sect. 4) will better illustrate the
geology of this interesting ravine, than it can be illustrated by any
written description. I may remark, ere taking leave of it, however,
that its conglomerates exhibit a singularly large amount of false
stratification at an acute angle with the planes of the real strata,
and that a bed of mouldering sandstone near the base of the system
may be described, from its fissile character, as a tilestone.[AY]
[Footnote AY: There is a natural connection, it is said, between
wild scenes and wild legends; and some of the traditions connected
with this romantic and solitary dell illustrate the remark. Till a
comparatively late period, it was known at many a winter fireside as
a favorite haunt of the fairies--the most poetical of all our old
tribes of spectres, and at one time one of the most popular. I have
conversed with an old woman, who, when a very little girl, had seen
myriads of them dancing, as the sun was setting, on the further edge
of the dell; and with a still older man, who had the temerity to
offer one of them a pinch of snuff at the foot of the cascade. Nearly
a mile from where the ravine opens to the sea, it assumes a gentler
and more pastoral character; the sides, no longer precipitous,
descend towards the stream in green, sloping banks; and a beaten
path, which runs between Cromarty and Rosemarkie, winds down the one
side and ascends the other. More than sixty years ago, one Donald
Calder, a Cromarty shop-keeper, was journeying by this path shortly
after nightfall. The moon, at full, had just risen; but there was a
silvery mist sleeping on the lower grounds, that obscured her light;
and the dell, in all its extent, was so overcharged by the vapor,
that it seemed an immense, overflooded river winding through the
landscape. Donald had reached its farther edge, and could hear the
rush of the stream from the deep obscurity of the abyss below, when
there rose from the opposite side a strain of the most delightful
music he had ever heard. He staid and listened. The words of a song,
of such simple beauty that they seemed without effort to stamp
themselves on his memory, came wafted in the music; and the chorus,
in which a thousand tiny voices seemed to join, was a familiar
address to himself--"Hey, Donald Calder; ho, Donald Calder." "There
are nane of my Navity acquaintance," thought Donald, "who sing like
that. Wha can it be?" He descended into the cloud; but in passing the
little stream the music ceased; and on reaching the spot on which
the singer had seemed stationed, he saw only a bare bank sinking
into a solitary moor, unvaried by either bush or hollow in which the
musician might have lain concealed. He had hardly time, however, to
estimate the marvels of the case, when the music again struck up,
but on the opposite side of the dell, and apparently from the very
knoll on which he had so recently listened to it. The conviction
that it could not be other than supernatural overpowered him; and he
hurried homewards under the influence of a terror so extreme, that,
unfortunately for our knowledge of fairy literature, it had the
effect of obliterating from his memory every part of the song except
the chorus. The sun rose as he reached Cromarty; and he found that,
instead of having lingered at the edge of the dell for only a few
minutes--and the time had seemed no longer--he had spent beside it
the greater part of the night.
The fairies have deserted the Burn of Eathie; but we have proof,
quite as conclusive as the nature of the case admits, that when
they ceased to be seen there it would have been vain to have looked
for them any where else. There is a cluster of turf-built cottages
grouped on the southern side of the ravine; a few scattered knolls,
and a long, partially wooded hollow, that seems a sort of covered way
leading to the recesses of the dell, interpose between them and the
nearer edge, and the hill rises behind. On a Sabbath morning, nearly
sixty years ago, the inmates of this little hamlet had all gone to
church, all except a herd-boy and a little girl, his sister, who
were lounging beside one of the cottages; when, just as the shadow
of the garden dial had fallen on the line of noon, they saw a long
cavalcade ascending out of the ravine through the wooded hollow. It
winded among the knolls and bushes; and, turning round the northern
gable of the cottage beside which the sole spectators of the scene
were stationed, began to ascend the eminence towards the south. The
horses were shaggy, diminutive things, speckled dun and gray; the
riders, stunted, misgrown, ugly creatures, attired in antique jerkins
of plaid, long gray cloaks, and little red caps, from under which
their wild, uncombed locks shot out over their cheeks and foreheads.
The boy and his sister stood gazing in utter dismay and astonishment,
as rider after rider, each one more uncouth and dwarfish than the one
that had preceded it, passed the cottage and disappeared among the
brushwood, which at that period covered the hill, until at length the
entire rout, except the last rider, who lingered a few yards behind
the others, had gone by. "What are ye, little mannie? and where are
ye going?" inquired the boy, his curiosity getting the better of his
fears and his prudence. "Not of the race of Adam," said the creature,
turning for a moment in his saddle; "the People of Peace shall never
more be seen in Scotland."]
I know comparatively little of the scenery of the middle, or
Cornstone formation. Its features in England are bold and striking;
in Scotland, of a tamer and more various character. The Den of
Balruddery is a sweet, wooded dell, marked by no characteristic
peculiarities. Many of the seeming peculiarities of the formation in
Forfarshire, as in Fife, may be traced to the disturbing trap. The
appearance exhibited is that of uneven plains, that rise and fall in
long, undulating ridges--an appearance which any other member of the
system might have presented. We find the upper formation associated
with scenery of great, though often wild beauty; and nowhere is this
more strikingly the case than in the province of Moray, where it
leans against the granitic gneiss of the uplands, and slopes towards
the sea in long plains of various fertility, deep and rich, as in the
neighborhood of Elgin, or singularly bleak and unproductive, as in
the far-famed "heath near Forres." Let us select the scene where the
Findhorn, after hurrying over ridge and shallow, amid combinations
of rock and wood, wildly picturesque as any the kingdom affords,
enters on the lower country, with a course less headlong, through a
vast trench scooped in the pale red sandstone of the upper formation.
For miles above the junction of the newer and older rocks the river
has been toiling in a narrow and uneven channel, between two upright
walls of hard gray gneiss, thickly traversed, in every complexity of
pattern, by veins of a light red, large grained granite. The gneiss
abruptly terminates, but not so the wall of precipices. A lofty front
of gneiss is joined to a lofty front of sandstone, like the front
walls of two adjoining houses; and the broken and uptilted strata
of the softer stone show that the older and harder rocks must have
invaded it from below. A little farther down the stream, the strata
assume what seems, in a short extent of frontage, a horizontal
position, like courses of ashlar in a building, but which, when
viewed in the range, is found to incline at a low angle towards the
distant sea. Here, as in many other localities, the young geologist
must guard against the conclusion, that the rock is necessarily low
in the geological scale which he finds resting against the gneiss.
The gneiss, occupying a very different place from that on which
it was originally formed, has been thrust into close neighborhood
with widely separated formations. The great conglomerate base of
the system rests over it in Orkney, Caithness, Ross, Cromarty, and
Inverness; and there is no trace of what should be the intervening
grauwacke. The upper formation of the system leans upon it here. We
find the Lower Lias uptilted against it at the Hill of Eathie--the
great Oolite on the eastern coast of Sutherland; and as the flints
and chalk fossils of Banff and Aberdeen are found lying immediately
over it in these counties, it is probable that the denuded members
of the Cretaceous group once rested upon it there. The fact that a
deposit should be found lying in contact with the gneiss, furnishes
no argument for the great antiquity or the fundamental character of
that deposit; and it were well that the geologist who sets himself to
estimate the depth of the Old Red Sandstone, or the succession of its
various formations, should keep the circumstance in view. That may be
in reality but a small and upper portion of the system which he finds
bounded by the gneiss on its under side, and by the diluvium on its
upper.
We stand on a wooded eminence, that sinks perpendicularly into the
river on the left, in a mural precipice, and descends with a billowy
swell into the broad, fertile plain in front, as if the uplands were
breaking in one vast wave upon the low country. There is a patch
of meadow on the opposite side of the stream, shaded by a group
of ancient trees, gnarled and mossy, and with half their topmost
branches dead and white as the bones of a skeleton. We look down upon
them from an elevation so commanding, that their uppermost twigs
seem on well nigh the same level with their interlaced and twisted
roots, washed bare on the bank edge by the winter floods. A colony of
herons has built from time immemorial among the branches. There are
trees so laden with nests that the boughs bend earthwards on every
side, like the boughs of orchard trees in autumn; and the bleached
and feathered masses which they bear--the cradles of succeeding
generations--glitter gray through the foliage in continuous groups,
as if each tree bore on its single head all the wigs of the Court of
Session. The solitude is busy with the occupations and enjoyments
of instinct. The birds, tall and stately, stand by troops in the
shallows, or wade warily, as the fish glance by, to the edge of the
current, or rising, with the slow flap of wing and sharp creak
peculiar to the tribe, drop suddenly into their nests. The great
forest of Darnaway stretches beyond, feathering a thousand knolls,
that reflect a colder and grayer tint as they recede, and lessen,
and present on the horizon a billowy line of blue. The river brawls
along under pale red cliffs, wooded a-top. It is through a vast
burial-yard that it has cut its way--a field of the dead so ancient,
that the sepulchres of Thebes and Luxor are but of the present day in
comparison--resting-places for the recently departed, whose funerals
are but just over. These mouldering strata are charged with remains,
scattered and detached as those of a churchyard, but not less entire
in their parts--occipital bones, jaws, teeth, spines, scales--the
dust and rubbish of a departed creation. The cliffs sink as the
plain flattens, and green, sloping banks of diluvium take their
place; but they again rise in the middle distance into an abrupt and
lofty promontory, that, stretching like an immense rib athwart the
level country, projects far into the stream, and gives an angular
inflection to its course. There ascends from the apex a thin, blue
column of smoke--that of a lime-kiln. That ridge and promontory are
composed of the thick limestone band, which, in Moray as in Fife,
separates the pale red from the pale yellow beds of the Upper Old
Red Sandstone; and the flattened tracts on both sides show how much
better it has resisted the denuding agencies than either the yellow
strata that rests over it, or the pale red strata which it overlies.