Colonel Thornton, and he in 1786 seems to have fished, shot and hawked wherever he liked. In the old Statistical Account of Scotland (1791–1799) only nine deer forests are mentioned, five of which I know personally. In 1838 Scrope, the first to describe deer-stalking as a sport in Scotland, names about forty. In those days of muzzle-loaders deer-hounds were almost as important a part of a stalker’s outfit as setters or pointers were to the grouse-shooters; and even twenty years later, when St. John first told us what real deer-stalking was, in that delightful chapter of wild sports of the Highlands, The Muckle Hart of Benmore, a collie dog to track wounded deer was his regular companion. When, however, the railways opened up the country and it was possible, as the late Captain Henry Fraser told me himself in 1866, to dine one evening in London, and the next in his father’s (Lord Lovat’s) house on salmon, venison and grouse killed by himself on the same afternoon, rich Englishmen began to lease the existing forests, and to rent from the large sheep farmers, on whose farms many deer existed, the exclusive right of stalking. On such a farm, now the forest of Killilan in West Ross-shire, when occupied by the brothers Frederick and Joseph Godman in 1873, I remember having excellent sport with an old shepherd as stalker, a man very much after the type of St. John’s henchman, “Donald,” who had very little English, and was a very different man from the tip-hunting stalker now found in some forests, who treats you as if you had no eyes and no judg¬ ment of your own, and would rather take you up to an inferior stag than run the least risk of disturbing a good one near the march. On Killilan in that year thirty stags were killed for a rent of £ 300, which was about half the rent of the farm, so that a sheep farmer had a distinct interest in protecting the deer, and his shepherds acted as watchers. In those days there wore few pony-roads in the forest, and instead of motoring up to the foot of his beat as the modern stalker often docs, and having two or three ponies to meet him with the practical certainty of bringing home two or three stags if lie does not miss them, we had to walk many miles over the hill to our ground, and, what was far worse in the back-end of the season, many more over rough ground in the dark after a late stalk.
To my mind, the charm of the sport, which depends so much upon its uncertainty, is now largely gone, and the small subdivided forests, some¬ times partly fenced, and containing few if any stags that a man would really care to shoot, are not worth the rent, or anything like the rent, which up to 1914 was commanded. Since then we arc told that the area occupied by forests has been reduced by 152,000 acres, eleven have been restored to pastoral uses, and three acquired for forestry purposes by Government. But notwithstanding this reduction, there were many forests unlet during the season of 1921, though the demand for grouse shooting was never greater, and though the modem lodges in some forests arc of a costly and even luxurious character in comparison with the old- fashioned farmhouses, which satisfied most tenants fifty years ago, The causes of the decline in the demand for and rent of those forests which have not other attractions in the shape of grouse shooting and fishing are attributed in the report to financial stringency and general retrench¬ ment; but the excessive rents of pre-war times, often as much as £50
