gh the middle from
top to base, and exhibits in its abrupt front a broad red perpendicular
section of at least a hundred feet in height, barred transversely by
thin layers of sand, and scored vertically by the slow action of the
rains. Originally it must have stretched its vanished limb across the
opening like some huge snow-wreath accumulated athwart a frozen rivulet;
but the incessant sweep of the stream that runs through the valley has
long since amputated and carried it away; and so only half the hill now
remains. The Kaes' Craig resembles in form a lofty chalk cliff, square,
massy, abrupt, with no sloping fillet of vegetation bound across its
brow, but precipitous direct from the hill-top. The little ancient
village of Rosemarkie stretches away from its base on the opposite side
of the stream; and on its summit and along its sides, groups of
chattering jackdaws, each one of them as reflective and philosophic as
the individual immortalized by Cowper, look down high over the chimneys
into the streets. The clay presents here, more than in almost any other
locality with which I am acquainted, the character of a stratified
deposit; and the numerous bands of sand by which the cliff is
horizontally streaked from top to bottom we find hollowed, as we
approach, into a multitude of circular openings, like shot-holes in an
old tower, which form breeding-places for the daw and the sand-martin.
The biped inhabitants of the cliff are greatly more numerous than the
biped inhabitants of the quiet little hamlet below; and on Fortrose
fair-days, when, in virtue of an old feud, the Rosemarkie boys were wont
to engage in formidable bickers with the boys of Cromarty, I remember,
as one of the invading belligerents, that, in bandying names with them
in the fray, we delighted to bestow upon them, as their hereditary
sobriquet, given, of course, in allusion to their feathered neighbors,
the designation of the "_Rosemarkie kaes_." Cromarty, however, is
two-thirds surrounded by the waters of a frith abounding in sea-fowl;
and the little fellows of Rosemarkie, indignant at being classed with
their _kaes_, used to designate us with hearty emphasis, in turn, as the
"_Cromarty cooties_," _i.e._, coots.

A little higher up the valley, on the western side, there occurs in the
clay what may be termed a _group_ of excavations, composing a piece of
scenery ruinously broken and dreary, and that bears a specific character
of its own which scarce any o