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]
[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.