families as it has proved to be in the Hebrides. Where the farms are distant from the coast, they usually have winter work in the woods cutting and hauling timber; where they are on the coast they make a much better use of the fish than the Highlanders ever did. The poverty of the small farmers and crofters and their cattle in the Highlands in the days of the shielings would not be endured by them today, as may be gathered from what was told me by an old gillie as we sat on the site of an old shieling which his own grandmother had once used. After a bad winter, when there was no milk, and the oatmeal from half-ripened oats was too poor to nourish the people without it, they used to bleed the cattle and mix the blood with the brose, and he said that there was a Gaelic name for this mixture, proving that the practice was a common one. Now, there is tea and sugar in the poorest crofters' houses, and when there is no milk the people buy tinned milk, and many other luxuries unknown to their fathers. With regard to sheep, it seems that two causes tend to make them less profitable than formerly. One is the practice of sending the lambs away to be wintered on East Coast or low country farms, at a cost as great as the lamb is worth when weaned, and as the value of blackfaced wool is now so low that it does not pay to keep two or three year-old wedders which can winter on the hills, it is usual to sell all the best of the wedder lambs fat to the butcher, or to low-country farmers if not fat enough to kill. Attempts are being made, in which Sir R. Greig, now Secretary to the Scottish Board of Agriculture, is much interested, to improve the wool of the blackfaced breed, which is now mainly used for carpet-making; and it seems to me that if more trouble were taken in improving the best patches of land by slag, lime or artificial manure, and converting the grass on it into hay or ensilage, a sufficient number of ewe lambs might, in the West at least, be wintered on or near the land they were bred on, and that by burning much of the old heather which is found in many of the deer forests, in the same way as is done on all well- managed grouse moors, the feed would be much improved both for deer, sheep and cattle.
On p. 21, the report calls attention to the great increase of bracken, usually where the best patches of soil occur. This, I am assured by ex¬ perienced old shepherds, was nothing like so prevalent fifty years ago, and they believe it can best be kept down by a number of cattle treading down and bruising the tender young shoots in the spring.* The great increase of rabbits in some parts of the Highlands, though not mentioned in the report, is another cause for the deterioration of the grazing in those places, and I know three places at least where the wintering was seriously affected by them.
Perhaps one of the most interesting as well as the most difficult part of the Commission's enquiries, though not specifically mentioned in their reference, is the economic possibility of timber-growing in deer forests, and this is rather briefly dealt with on pp. 17-18 of the report. No one has done more than Sir John Stirling Maxwell himself in his
I have seen in Wales farms which became derelict owing to the sheep haying
died of fluke rot, which in a few years became completely overgrown with bracken,
and worthless, except for rabbits.
