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 to the glens and straths under barley approximates that under oats. In the uplands, oats is the principal cereal. The breeding of live-stock is profitable, and some of the finest specimens of shorthorned and polled cattle and of crosses between the two are bred. On the larger farms in the Laigh Leicester sheep are kept all the year round, but in the uplands the Blackfaced take their place. Large numbers of horses and pigs are also raised.

Other Industries.—Whisky is the chief product, and the numerous distilleries are usually busy. There are woollen mills at Elgin and elsewhere and chemical works at Forres and Burghead. Owing to the absence of coal what little mineral wealth there is (iron and lead) cannot be remuneratively worked. The sandstone quarries, yielding a building-stone of superior quality, are practically inexhaustible. The plantations mainly consist of larch and fir and, to a smaller extent, of oak. Much timber was once floated down the Spey and other rivers, but, since the increased facilities of carriage afforded by the railways, trees have been felled on a wider scale. Boat-building is carried on at Burghead, Lossiemouth and Kingston—so-called from the fact that a firm from Kingston-on-Hull laid down a yard there in 1784—while at Garmouth the fishing fleet lies up during the winter and is also repaired there. The Firth fisheries are of considerable value. The boats go out from Findhorn, Burghead, Hopeman and Lossiemouth, which are all furnished with safe harbours. Findhorn has been twice visited by calamities. The first village was overwhelmed by the drifting sands of Culbin, and the second was buried beneath the waves in 1701. Kingston harbour is tidal, exposed, and liable to interruption from a shifting bar. The deep sea fisheries comprise haddock, cod, ling and herring, and the Spey, Findhorn and Lossie yield large quantities of salmon.

The Great North of Scotland railway enters the shire in the S.E. from Craigellachie, whence a branch runs up the Spey to Boat of Garten in Inverness-shire, and in the N.E. from Port Gordon, running in both cases to Elgin, from which a branch line extends to Lossiemouth. The Highland railway traverses the western limits of the shire running almost due north to Forres, whence it turns westward to Nairn and eastward to Elgin. From the county town it runs to Aberdeen via Orbliston and Keith, with a branch to Fochabers from Orbliston.

Population and Government.—The population was 43,471 in 1891 and 44,800 in 1901, when 1865 persons spoke both Gaelic and English, and 2 spoke Gaelic only. The chief towns are Elgin (pop. in 1901, 8460), Forres (4313) and Lossiemouth (3904), to which may be added Rothes (1621), Grantown (1568) and Burghead (1531). In conjunction with Nairnshire the county returns one member to parliament. Elgin and Forres are royal burghs; the municipal and police burghs include Burghead, Elgin, Forres, Grantown, Lossiemouth, and Rothes. Elginshire is included in one sheriffdom with Inverness and Nairn, and there is a resident sheriff-substitute at Elgin. The county is under school-board jurisdiction, several of the schools earning grants for higher education. There are academies at Elgin and Fochabers and science and art and technical schools at Elgin and Grantown. The bulk of the “residue” grant is spent in subsidizing the agricultural department of Aberdeen University and the science schools and art and technical classes in the county.

History.—Moray, in the wider sense, was first peopled by Picts of the Gaelic branch of Celts, of whom relics are found in the stone circle at Viewfield and at many places in Nairnshire. Christianity, introduced under the auspices of Columba (from whose time the site of Burghead church has probably been so occupied), flourished for a period until the Columban church was expelled in 717 by King Nectan. Thereafter the district was given over to internecine strife between the northern and southern Picts, which was ended by the crushing victory of Kenneth MacAlpine in 831, as one result of which the kingdom of Pictavia was superseded by the principality of Moravia. Still, settled order had not yet been secured, for the Norsemen raided the country first under Thorstein and then under two Sigurds. It was in the time of the second Sigurd that the Firth was fixed as the northern boundary of Moray. In spite of such interruptions as the battle of Torfness (Burghead) on the 14th of August 1040, in which Thorfinn, earl of Orkney and Shetland, overthrew a strong force of Scots under King Duncan, the consolidation of the kingdom was being gradually accomplished. After Macbeth ascended the throne the Scandinavians held their hands. Though Macbeth and his fainéant successor, “daft” Lulach, were the only kings whom Moray gave to Scotland, the province never lacked for able, if headstrong, men, and it continued to enjoy home rule under its own marmaer, or great steward (the equivalent of earl, the title that replaced it), until the dawn of the 12th century, when as an entity it ceased to exist. With a view to breaking up the power of the marmaers David I. and his successors colonized the seaboard with settlers from other parts of the kingdom. Nevertheless, from time to time the clansmen and their chiefs descended from their fastnesses and plundered the Laigh, keeping the people for generations in a state of panic. Meanwhile, the Church had become a civilizing force. In 1107 Alexander had founded the see of Moray and the churches of Birnie, Kinneddar and Spynie were in turn the cathedral of the early bishops, until in 1224 under the episcopate of Andrew of Moray (de Moravia), the church of the Holy Trinity in Elgin was chosen for the cathedral. Another factor that drew men together was the struggle for independence. In his effort to stamp out Scottish nationality Edward I. came as far north as Elgin, where he stayed for four days in July 1296, and whence he issued his writ for the parliament at Berwick. Wallace, however, had no doughtier supporter than Sir Andrew Moray of Bothwell, and Bruce recognized the assistance he had received from the men of the north by erecting Moray into an earldom on the morrow of Bannockburn and bestowing it upon Thomas Randolph (see ). Henceforward the history of the county resolved itself in the main into matters affecting the power of the Church and the ambitions of the Moray dynasties. The Church accepted the Reformation peacefully if not with gratitude. But there was strife between Covenanters and the adherents of Episcopacy until, prelacy itself being abolished in 1689, the bishopric of Moray came to an end after an existence of 581 years. (For the subsequent history of the earldom, which was successively held by the Randolphs, the Dunbars, the Douglases, the royal Stewarts and an illegitimate branch of the Stewarts, see .) Other celebrated Moray families who played a more or less strenuous part in local politics were the Gordons, the Grants and the Duffs. Still, national affairs occasionally evoked interest in Moray. In the civil war Montrose ravaged the villages which stood for the Covenanters, but most of the great lairds shifted in their allegiance, and the mass of the people were quite indifferent to the declining fortunes of the Stewarts. Charles II. landed at Garmouth on the 3rd of July 1650 on his return from his first exile in Holland, but hurried southwards to try the yoke of Presbytery. The fight at Cromdale (May day, 1690) shattered the Jacobite cause, for the efforts in 1715 and 1745 were too spasmodic and half-hearted to affect the loyalty of the district to Hanoverian rule. A few weeks before Culloden Prince Charles Edward stayed in Elgin for some days, and a month afterwards the duke of Cumberland passed through the town at the top of his speed and administered the coup de grâce to the Young Pretender on Drummossie Moor.

Twice Elginshire has been the scene of catastrophes without parallel in Scotland. In 1694 the barony of Culbin—a fine estate, with a rent roll in money and kind of £6000 a year, belonging to the Kinnairds, comprising 3600 acres of land, so fertile that it was called the Granary of Moray, a handsome mansion, a church and several houses—was buried under a mass of sand in a storm of extraordinary severity. The sandy waste measures 3 m. in length and 2 in breadth, and the sand, exceedingly fine and light, is constantly shifting and, at rare intervals, exposing traces of the vanished demesne. This wilderness of dome-shaped dunes divided by a loftier ridge lies to the north-west of Forres. The other calamity was the Moray floods of the 2nd and 3rd of