Читать книгу Our Western Hills: How to reach them; And the Views from their Summits. By a Glasgow Pedestrian онлайн

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The summit is reached in about an hour and a half, 1944 feet above the level of the sea, crowned with two immense piles of stones, and there is great need for some tradition to account for these, as in the case of the perhaps still larger cairn on the sister hill of Tinto. Would the members of the Antiquarian or Archæological Society please make a notice of this, and tell us if they were not meant to commemorate the defeat of some Annandale thieves who used to infest the district?

Before beginning to take in the surroundings we recall to our mind that at the end of the twelfth century all around us was a forest, as we learn from a charter granted to the monks of Melrose by the Grand Steward of Scotland; and that this was so is abundantly plain from the names of many of the farms, from the trees found in the moss (entire hazel nuts being also found in it), and from small clumps and detached trees of birch and mountain ash still to be seen on the braes and by the side of the ravines.

And looking over this wide and uneven surface, sometimes rising into considerable eminences, covered with dark heather, and presenting nothing either grand or striking except its bleakness and sterility, we cannot help thinking that this wholesale destruction of trees is a thing much to be regretted from every point of view. It sadly spoils the scenery, it deprives the district of their shelter, and their prostrate trunks, by obstructing the water and assisting in the formation of moss earth, prove injurious to the climate. From the general altitude of the district fogs are frequent, rain is abundant, and the climate cold, so that it might be said of it, as it is said of Greenock and Arrochar, which are also hydropathic, that “it doesn’t always rain, it sometimes snaws.” And yet it does not appear as if the evaporation from the moss were injurious to the health.