Page:A Companion and Useful Guide to the Beauties of Scotland.djvu/280

262 produce of this up and down waste. The eight miles from High Bridge to Fort William, is the most dreary, though not the ugliest, space I had travelled in Scotland. It is very thinly inhabited; and notwithstanding its non-productive appearance, I never drunk finer milk than I did there, from cows I found milking on the road's side; and what was still more extraordinary, though I gave but a trifle more than the value of what was drunk, the honest creatures thought it too much, although they seemed the poorest of the poor in Scotland. The huts on this moor are very small and low, are soon erected, and must very soon fall down. They consist of four stakes of birch, forked at the top, driven into the ground; on these they lay four other birch poles, and then form a gavel at each end by putting up more birch sticks, and crossing them sufficiently to support the clods with which they plaster this skeleton of a hut all over, except a small hole in the side for a window, a small door to creep in and and out at, and a hole in the roof, stuck round with sticks, patched up with turf, for a vent, as they call a chimney. The covering of these huts is turf, cut about five or six inches thick, and put on as soon as taken from the