or pastured by small tenants; that no appreciable loss is occasioned to the nation, either in mutton or wool; and that the charge of inducing idle and intemperate habits among the populations is not consistent with experience. There remains the class of sheep farmers, of whom it may be said that if they are affected at all it is only in connection with the cost of wintering their hill sheep, and that in this respect deer forests have undoubtedly benefited those who remain by diminishing competi¬ tion.” They add, however, that these views did not imply an approval of the then present appropriation of land in all cases to unproductive uses, far less an undiscriminating application of additional tracts to a similar purpose in future; but they considered that the interests of the crofters would be effectually secured if the crofters were protected against any diminution, for the purpose of afforestment, of arable or pasture area then in their possession, and if the areas which might thereafter form the most appropriate scene for expanding cultivation and small holdings should be preserved from curtailment. The Valuation Act, 1854, had specially exempted deer forests shootings from assessment when they were unlet; this exemption was withdrawn in 1886.”
Among the numerous owners, factors, farmers, crofters and professional stalkers who were examined in person or by letter, of whom a list is given on pp. 33-42, I do not find the name of a single Englishman or any representative of the lessees, without whom very few deer forests would exist as such, and without whose rent some parishes in the High¬ lands would become as nearly bankrupt as large parts of the Hebrides actually are. As I have had, from 1866 down to 1920, considerable op¬ portunities of seeing many of these forests, and stalking in several of them. I may be able to compare their condition with those of lands let for sport in other countries in Europe; I think that I can bring out some points of interest which, do not seem to have been considered by the Commission The report states that until the middle of the last century deer forests in the modem sense hardly existed; the old Highland chiefs seem to have cared little or nothing for sport, and though they occasionally had great deer drives, in which hundreds of deer were more or less mobbed to death by great numbers of drivers assisted by deer-hounds, there is no evidence known to me that any of them were keen deer stalkers.
It is a very curious fact that no stags’ heads are preserved in any Highland castles to show us whether the deer of the Middle Ages were as much larger than those of the present time as is generally supposed, and as the horns which have been dug up in peat bogs prove that they were in still earlier times. In Germany in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a rage existed among the nobles and crowned heads for big stags’ horns, as is well described by Baillie-Grohman in his Sport in the Alps) and the wonderful specimens which have been preserved in the castle of Moritzburg and elsewhere are very much larger than any that exist today, even in the Carpathian and Hungarian forests. But neither in Millais' British Deer and Their Horns or Rowland Ward’s Records of Big Game can I find any mention of Scottish stags 5 heads of an earlier date than the end of the eighteenth century. The first English sportsman who is recorded to have visited the Highlands especially for sport was
