One red deer equal to 100 brace of grouse.
One roe deer equal to 20 brace of grouse.
One salmon angled equal to 20 brace of grouse.
One mountain hare equal to one brace of grouse.
One brace of grouse equal to five shillings.
Thus a shooting supposed capable of producing on an average of seasons, with fair sportsmen, 500 brace of grouse, would let at £125. (Note.—This might today be quadrupled.) If the house accommodation is good, or the moor of high reputation, a larger sum may be obtained, and we have known 10s. a brace offered for a month's shooting." It was added that fifteen years' purchase was considered the value of the game on an estate.
The sport rapidly became fashionable; in 1844 there is a list of about ninety shooting tenants, and the number steadily rose year by year. Sport¬ ing rents increased very considerably in value, and since the price of wool and sheep began to fall, with increased importation from the colonies, it became advantageous to the proprietors in many cases to substitute deer for sheep. Another factor was a change in the public taste for prime mutton, which, about forty years ago, was two-year-old wedders. When the taste for old mutton disappeared, the growing of wedders became comparatively unprofitable, and the higher lands of north-west Scotland, which formerly carried a wedder, but are unsuitable for a ewe, stock became unlcltable for sheep.
In 1872 a Select Committee of the House of Commons was appointed to enquire into the laws for the protection of deer in Scotland, and, gener¬ ally, to ascertain whether this substitution was against the interests of the community. They reported in 1873 that the deer forests had not tended to the depopulation of the country, nor had the food supply of the nation been diminished by the displacement of sheep for deer, while they estimated the number of sheep actually displaced by deer as below 400,000- Nevertheless the idea that the homes of hundreds of crofters had been pulled down and burned and the people turned adrift in order to establish deer forests became a somewhat popular delusion. It was urged before the Napier Commission, and was indeed quite definitely stated by Mr. Lloyd George, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, at Swindon and Bedford, so recently as 1913. The Napier Commissioners found 011 investigation only one clearly established case of the removal of crofters for the purpose of increasing the area under deer, though other cases might be cited of the diminution of crofting area for the same purpose. "The existing deer forests, which have been created for the most part within the last thirty years, have been, as far as made known to us, formed out of large farms by simply removing the sheep and allowing deer, of which there was probably a greater or less number already there, to fill up the ground so vacated. Depopulation, therefore, cannot be directly attributed to deer forests/' for they do not employ fewer people than the sheep farms, The Commissioners, summarising the evidence brought before them, claim to have shown “ that crofters have rarely, at least in recent times, been removed to make or add to deer forests; that compara¬ tively little of the land so occupied could now be profitably cultivated
