few moments at the two
roads recalled to my memory the details of a ghost-story, long regarded
in the district in which it was best known as one of the most authentic
of its class, but which seems by no means inexplicable on natural
principles.[13]

CHAPTER V.

Rosemarkie and its Scaurs--Kaes' Craig--A Jackdaw
Settlement--"Rosemarkie Kaes" and "Cromarty Cooties"--"The Danes,"
a Group of Excavations--At Home in Cromarty--The Boulder-clay of
Cromarty "begins to tell its story"--One of its marked Scenic
Peculiarities--Hints to Landscape Painters--"Samuel's Well"--A
Chain of Bogs geologically accounted for--Another Scenic
Peculiarity--"_Ha-has_ of Nature's digging"--The Author's earliest
Field of Hard Labor--Picturesque Cliff of Boulder-clay--Scratchings
on the Sandstone--Invariable Characteristic of true
Boulder-clay--Scratchings on Pebbles in the line of the longer
axis--Illustration from the Boulder-clay of Banff.

Rosemarkie, with its long narrow valley and its red abrupt _scaurs_,[14]
is chiefly interesting to the geologist for its vast beds of the
boulder-clay. I am acquainted with no other locality in the kingdom
where this deposit is hollowed into ravines so profound, or presents
precipices so imposing and lofty. The clay lies thickly over most part
of the Black Isle and the peninsula of Easter Ross,--both soft sandstone
districts,--bearing everywhere an obvious relation, as a deposit, to
both the form and the conditions of exposure of the existing land,--just
as the accumulated snow of a long-lying snow-storm, exposed to the
drifting wind, bears relation to the heights and hollows of the tracts
which it covers. On the higher eminences the clay forms a comparatively
thin stratum, and in not a few instances it has been wholly worn away;
while on the lower grounds, immediately over the old coast line, and in
the sides of hollow valleys,--exactly such places as we might expect to
see the snow occupying most deeply after a night of drift,--we find it
accumulated in vast beds of from eighty to an hundred feet in thickness.
One of these occurs in the opening of the narrow valley along which my
course this morning lay, and is known far and wide,--for it forms a
marked feature in the landscape, and harbors in its recesses a countless
multitude of jackdaws,--as the "Kaes' Craig of Rosemarkie." It presents
the appearance of a hill that had been cut sheer throu